III. Did Jesus Think He was God and Why Should You Care?

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, welcome back again to this third week of The Case for Christ: The Trial of a Lifetime” in which we are considering the evidence for the truth about what we know about Jesus.

If you’ve been with us for the past two weeks, you know that we’ve been breaking from our usual pattern of first reading Scripture and then reflecting on it, and instead referring to Scripture all throughout our consideration of this evidence. And you will also probably recall if you’ve been here the last two weeks, the ground that we’ve covered so far, the evidence that we’ve considered. We’ve considered the evidence for the reliability of the Gospels as faithful portrayals of Jesus. We’ve distinguished between Gospel literature and propaganda, something that is made up to make people believe something that is not true. We have found the Gospels to be faithful accounts of Jesus’ life. We also considered the process whereby we’ve come to have the Bible in our hands. How did it get to us? It was written 2000 years ago, written down faithfully, and we learned about the process by which we got the Bible and about our access to very ancient sources and learned that it has been handed down in a very faithful way.

This week we turn our attention more directly to the person of Jesus, and we consider his claims to be Lord and God and why that matters.

I would like to invite the bailiff to come forward again this week and get us started by reading the charge:

The Bailiff: “The people charge that Jesus was a great teacher and example and nothing more. Insisting that he is Christ and God just causes divisions. If people lived more like Jesus and talked about him less, the world would be a better place.”

There is a lot at stake in that charge, isn’t there? The basic Christian confession that Jesus is Lord is probably the first thing that Christians ever said to distinguish themselves and what they believed from anybody else. And so this charge goes right to the heart of who we are and what we are about as Christians. But even more is at stake than “Are we right or wrong about this?” I’ve been right and wrong about a lot of things, and even some very important things. But what’s at stake in this is not even just that. What’s in play here, what’s on the table with this charge is the very hope of the whole world. Let me tell you why that’s true: If Jesus was just a teacher, if Jesus is the very best example that ever was, then the hope of the whole world is looking at you in the mirror in the morning. The hope of the whole world is nothing more than you and me. Because in this case, the power of Jesus the teacher depends on how well you learned the lesson and followed the example. And if the salvation of the whole world depended on me learning a lesson and me following an example, well, friends, we’d be in a lot of trouble.

Think about the things that plague the world and what we need a solution to. If it were all up to you, if Jesus were not Lord, what answer would we have for death itself? When you look death in the eyes, who’s lord over that? You? If Jesus were not Lord, what would happen to the hate that resides in the human heart, and has for millennia, that breeds the violence in our streets, the violence in our homes, the violence among nations and peoples, and always has? Who’s going to conquer that? You? If Jesus is not Lord, who is going to accomplish the conversion of the human heart and change the character of the human community? Who’s finally going to bring a new heaven and a new earth and a new creation? You and me? Just because we learned a lesson? Because we followed an example? Please. That’s depressing. It’ll never happen.

If Jesus is not Lord, there is a lot at stake, so we’d better build a good answer to this question. It may be occurring to some of you that an easy answer lies readily at hand. We’ve talked the last few weeks about the Gospels being faithful portrayals of Jesus, about us having them faithfully handed down from the original documents so that what we have looks like the originals. And so you might say, “Jesus said in those Gospels, ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life’ and ‘I and the Father are one.’ If the Gospels are true, and they've been handed down well and Jesus said that, then we can believe it. Case closed.” True as that may be, that’s building a tall, narrow argument with steps all building on top of one another. And although it’s true, I’m just natively suspicious of tall shaky buildings and I want to build a wide, strong argument on many legs. And a very strong benefit to doing this is that we’ll build a case this morning that even a skeptic, one who didn’t believe what we’ve already said and shown about the reliability of the Gospels, would still accept, specifically, that Jesus claimed to be God and then by his resurrection was validated as such.

So, let’s build this strong case on many legs. What we’ll find out by building this case that even a skeptic could accept is that those of us who are believers will have a fuller and more effective answer in the end as well. We’re going to build this strong answer on both the deeds and the words of Jesus and we’re going to start with his deeds. Let’s consider two things that Jesus did that you would believe even if you were suspicious of the Gospels in general, two things that are historically verifiable, virtually undeniable, that show his claim to be God.

The first one is this: Jesus called twelve disciples. That may not sound very impressive at first, but think about this with me. First of all, why should we believe it? Why should you be sure that Jesus called exactly twelve disciples and referred to this group as “the twelve” around him? Even if you didn’t trust the Gospels, why would that be true? For one thing, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, one of the twelve, was very embarrassing to the early church. These are Jesus’ most trusted confidants, and one of them goes and betrays him, leading his to death. That doesn’t fill everyone with confidence; it was a bit of a scandal, and yet the Gospels preserve Jesus saying to the twelve, “you will sit on the 12 thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.” Imagine if you were a Christian a few years after Jesus had been killed and raised from the dead and taken up into heaven. And of those 12, only 11 were left. They had replaced Judas, but the replacement obviously wasn’t one of the original 11. Of those 12 that Jesus had been talking to, only 11 were left. Would you make something up about there having been 12 or would you report that there were 12 only if you had to…because there were. It is much more likely that the 12 are just a bedrock fact about Jesus’ life.

And here is another reason to believe, even if you didn’t want to trust the Gospels. If we took the time to open up our Bibles right now and if we would read down the lists of the 12 disciples in each of the Gospels right next to one another, you would see that they agree with each other very well through the first 10 or 11 names. And then the last one or two names don’t always agree from one Gospel to another. There is no reason to be afraid of this. This doesn’t mean that the Bible is contradicting itself and proving itself to be false. Remember in the first week of considering the truth of the Gospels in this Case for Christ, we showed that the Gospels were faithful retellings of Jesus’ life, not tape recordings of every detail. That would make them suspicious-looking copies of one another anyway. We’ve got reliable evidence here. But what this means, is that the church, all those Christians, everybody who knew Jesus from the beginning, was absolutely unanimous that Jesus called the twelve and had a group around Him that He referred to as “the twelve”. They were just perfectly unanimous about that. They were sure about that even before they were unanimous about who the first twelve were. Undisputed, inarguable, there were twelve.

Now, why does that matter? Think about the importance of the number 12 in Jesus’ day. There were lots of important religious numbers in Jesus’ day. There were the 10 commandments; 40 was a big one with days in the wilderness and 40 days and 40 nights; 1,000 symbolizes a big, long, complete time in the Bible, but 12 stands for one thing in the religious faith and the whole consciousness of the people that Jesus would live and talk among…there were 12 tribes of Israel. Like they knew that they had 10 fingers, 10 toes, and 2 eyes, they knew that there were 12 tribes of Israel. There were 12 sons of Jacob that became the fathers of these 12 tribes. And so when the people of Israel lived in their glory days with God under the reigns of King David & King Solomon, there were 12 tribes, but those 12 tribes, by the time of Jesus’ life, had been scattered and exiled and captured. Ten of those twelve tribes had been gone for over 700 years. But still in the Jewish religious literature of Jesus’ day, there was widespread hope for the restoration of the twelve, hope that God would come and do this, somehow, some way, who knows how-- that God would re-gather these lost, scattered people and reconstitute the people of God. And that would be an act of salvation, that God would act this way to save his people to put them back together and rescue them from what had befallen them.

Now imagine, with that kind of popular hope of what God’s going to do in restoring Israel’s former kingdom glory, Jesus comes on the scene declaring to everybody, “Repent and believe the good news. The kingdom of God has come near.” That’s what Jesus says. In all the Gospels, that is his basic message. Here is Jesus declaring that the kingdom of God has come near, and he gathers around himself…the twelve. That is audacity, claiming in a powerful, unmistakable religious symbol, that he is gathering the people of God around himself. He is taking the authority of God to reconstitute these people. What everybody hoped God would do, Jesus is doing, and in a different way. His twelve disciples weren’t one from every one of the twelve tribes. He was saying that what matters now for being a part of the people of God is not some tribal identity but being a follower of Him (Jesus). Jesus is putting himself into God’s place in a powerful, undeniable action that everyone would have understood perfectly clearly. And not only is he taking God’s authority by taking this action and defining on what terms it will happen, but he’s centering the people of God around himself. The people of God are being constituted around Jesus; Jesus’ followers are the people of God: those twelve, and all those whom those same twelve have eventually reached, like you and me. Jesus takes a bold action to constitute all of those people of God around himself.

Jesus takes a second really bold action, and it’s his attack on the temple. In the famous Palm Sunday story when Jesus is riding in on a donkey and everyone is shouting, “Hosanna,” and then he goes into the temple and starts overturning tables and throwing people out and saying, “My house shall be a house of prayer.” Now, when you read in your Bibles you will see that the editors of most Bibles have inserted some titles in there very helpfully so that we can follow along. Right there, in Matthew 21 and Mark 11, it says, “Jesus Cleanses the Temple” or some title very much like that. They put that in there so you can find where he did that. Or they’ll put in “Parable of the Good Samaritan” above the parable of the Good Samaritan to help you find that. But when you see that title in this case, it’s a bit of an understatement for what Jesus was actually doing there, “cleansing the temple.” And the reason this is important is because any old teacher or reformer could have cleansed something. You don’t have to be Lord to do such a thing. Anybody could have come in and said, “You know, this practice is kind of corrupt; these priests have been chosen incorrectly; you all are money hungry; you’re doing this wrong.” But Jesus is doing something much more than that; he is attacking the very nature of what the temple was there to do.

Think about this with me, any temple in ancient religion, it doesn’t matter if it is the temple to God in Jerusalem or the temple to Zeus in Athens-- what temples were there to do in ancient religion was to be the place where sacrifices were offered in the worship of somebody’s god. That is what temples were supposed to do. So when Jesus comes in and starts overturning the tables of the moneychangers and the people selling sacrificial animals, he’s attacking what the temple is supposed to do. Imagine that you’re a Jew who lives in Athens and you want to come to the temple for Passover, which is what you’re supposed to do if you can make it. So you have to go 1000 miles, pay your annual temple tax when you get there, which every Jew everywhere in the empire did to show their loyalty to the temple of God, (they’d support the temple service that way) and you’d want to buy a sheep or a lamb to sacrifice when you got there. You’re coming all the way from Athens; you’re not going to schlep your own sheep all the way from Athens to Jerusalem. It might die along the way or the priests might say it was unfit somehow after you’ve brought it all that way. No, instead you have to get there and buy yourself a sheep with the money that you brought that you had saved up so that it would be your own animal so that you can sacrifice it to God. If there aren’t moneychangers in the temple changing your Athens money to Jerusalem money and there aren’t people selling pigeons and doves and sheep and lambs in the temple, the temple can’t function. It can’t do what it’s there to do. So Jesus comes in and starts throwing over tables and throwing out the moneychangers, and he’s attacking the very function of the temple itself. This is much more than a teacher’s lesson or a reform movement.

To understand the offense of what Jesus is doing, you have to understand the importance of the temple to the Jews of his day. This is the very center of God’s presence. People all the way down from Egypt to Greece to Rome, they’re all sending their money back every year to support the temple service because they were devoted to it, because it was precious to them, because God is present in the Holy of Holies, because this is where the priests would come to offer sacrifice for atonement for sins, where the Passover would be celebrated, the center of these people and their faith in God.

Think about this: When the exiles came back from Babylon hundreds of years earlier, if these were strategic thinking people, what would they have done first? They would have built themselves a city wall. And then inside the security of that wall, when they could focus their efforts on the temple, they would get around to building the altar in the middle so they could worship. But not these people, because they weren’t thinking strategically, but faithfully and devotionally. They went home and it was unthinkable to them that they could be the people of God without a temple. So the first thing they do is build a temple in spite of all the opposition that is going on around them, and then they get around to building a wall, because it’s that important to them. Even today, in the year 2006, when there has been no Jewish temple to God in Jerusalem for 1,936 years, since the Roman general Titus rode in and knocked it over with his troops and destroyed the whole city, still there are a remnant of faithful Othodox Jews looking forward to and hoping for the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem. It’s that important.

So now, Jesus comes striding into this temple overturning what is essential to its function and threatening its destruction: “no stone will be left on another,” “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” And he didn’t say this because he had an army, he wasn’t saying that he was going to conquer it militarily, but because he was taking God’s own authority to define the center of the faith of the people of God. Now He would be the center of God’s presence to his people. Now He would be the locus of the worship of God. Now He would be the sacrifice for the atonement of sins. Now He would be the Passover Lamb. Jesus has an awful lot of audacity! What a claim to divine power he makes when he restores the people of God around himself and when he attacks a temple that is the center of the faith in which he grew up.

Now these are symbolic actions that Jesus took that speak louder than words because they deal in powerful cultural symbols. Think about how this would work today. If you need to persuade yourself of how clear this would be, imagine if a bunch of people came walking through the doors of our sanctuary wearing swastikas on their armbands. You would be repulsed and you would know what they stand for before they said a word. They’d be standing for something horrible and they wouldn’t have to tell you. You know exactly what they mean. Or a little bit less-charged an example, and one that I’ve used before: Imagine you went home to your yard and you decided today was the day that you were going to bulldoze your house and build a new one. And in the place of your old house, you build a replica of the White House, to whatever scale would fit in your yard. I mean pillars in front, East wing, West wing, and you build yourself a home office in the shape of an oval with an oak desk. Maybe you put a red phone in there or something. And you tell all of your children and your spouse that they should now start calling you, “Commander in Chief.” Everybody knows what you mean! You don’t have to tell them that you’re a crazy megalomaniac who thinks you’re the ruler of the free world. You already told them by what you did; it’s obvious to them.

So, Jesus reconstitutes the twelve around Himself, attacks the temple and makes Himself the center of God’s presence to the people. Nobody missed the point; you know what I’m saying? So now we know what Jesus did and we come back around to hear what Jesus said.

He said things like, “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father, but by me.” And “I and the Father are one.” And if you’re a skeptic you begin to realize that somebody who did the things that Jesus indisputably did is likely to be the kind of person who could say things like this as well. And now we can put some meat on the bones of those statements. We know, on the one hand, that those statements mean what we always thought they meant. That those of us who believe in Jesus will spend eternity in heaven with God. It means also, that now we know something about the character of God. We know not just about eternity, but about what God is up to, what he’s doing in the here and now. What we have now is not just a theological principal that Jesus is God, but the shocking revelation that God is Jesus. Want to know what God would do? Well, what did Jesus do? God has come and walked around in flesh. Jesus is the incarnation of God and so now we know the character and the purposes of God by what Jesus did. So now we know what God is up to in bringing about the kingdom of God: God restoring his fallen creation, God making right what we have made wrong, and doing it “Jesus style.”

This is how God acts and lives and loves. God comes with open arms, welcoming strangers, forgiving sinners, healing the sick, restoring estranged community, replacing hate with love, teaching mercy and truth. This is what God is doing among the people of God and in the world. Making right the creation that we have made wrong. And he’s now making the image of the world and the image of humanity over again in the image of God in the image of Christ; God is conforming us to the image of Christ.

And now for the second question we’re asking today, not “did Jesus think he was God?” because he did, but “why should you care?” What do you do with somebody whose actions are the actions of Jesus and whose words are the words of Jesus? What do you do with somebody like that? It depends, first of all, on who they are. Because if they’re just making it up, if they’re just lying and they have no evidence to back up this claim to power, nothing to validate it, and nothing that gives them the authority to say this, then you ought to say NO! That’s not Lord! That’s not God! It has no power over you. It claims your allegiance, but illegitimately. Whatever addictions push you down and push you back, whatever fear locks up our lives, Jesus has come to set us free from those overlords! Whatever bitterness or anger takes hold of our heart and transforms it into being a follower of some other lord & god, to make us hateful people, Jesus has set us free from that. That’s not God! That’s not Lord! Hopelessness, despair, darkness, or fear of death do not push us down and push us back because they are not God. They are pretenders to the throne. Guilt, shame, lust, temptation - not God, merely pretenders to the throne. Jesus is Lord! Jesus has come in mercy and grace to redeem us, to forgive us and to set us free!

What do you do with somebody who comes and says the things that Jesus said and does the things the Jesus did, and has been raised from the dead to validate the authority to make those claims and to say those things? Then we pay attention. We take those claims seriously. We sit up and listen, and recognize that there is no neutral ground here. There is no middle ground. When you look at somebody like Jesus who does those things and makes those claims, you can’t pat that guy on the head and say, “oh what a nice teacher, good example.” C. S. Lewis, the popular author of Narnia fame, had a famous line about this that is dead on: The kind of person who said the things that Jesus said and did the kind of things that Jesus did simply could not be merely a good teacher. He is either a maniacal liar or the Son of God on Earth. You pick. One or the other, but you can’t be in the middle on that. He is either a deceiver or the Lord of heaven and Earth. And that he has been raised from the dead by the power of the living God means Lord and not liar.

What do you do with that person who comes and says those things and does those things and they look like Jesus, that is they have the character of Jesus? Then get on board! Follow that Lord! Be a subject of that King! Get on board with that Lord for your own salvation, for the forgiveness of our own sins, when we have failed to be the kind of people that he has called us and constituted us to be. For hope, for redemption, for life eternal beginning now, get on board with that Lord, and not some pretender to the throne.

But get on board also for the saving of the world! There is hope for this fallen creation, what God had made right and we have made wrong, and God is making right again, by the power of the Spirit of Christ. Get on board for the saving of the whole world. You may remember what we said at the beginning: there is no hope if Jesus is just a teacher and an example and it’s up to you and me learning and following. That is not going to save the world and convert the heart of humanity. Get on board with Jesus who is cosmic Lord of heaven and Earth, who can change the heart of humanity, who can restore our community and our selves, who can finally defeat evil. There is hope now. Hope, because Jesus is Lord. Because God is making a new creation in Him and because that new creation arrived on the scene early on Easter when God brought a whole new world order. In the old world order, dead people stay dead, and evil really does win. But in God’s new creation, life triumphs over death and we have it on Easter. Jesus guarantees that on Easter. We have it ahead of time. So now everywhere you go and you see the cross and you see dying, suffering and death, you know that there is hope. And tell people that there is hope! There is hope because that dying can be joined to the dying of Christ, and you know where the dying of Christ is going…resurrection! It’s going to Easter. Now death is on the road to resurrection. There is hope when that death is joined to Jesus’ death because we know where it’s going. There is a future now! I have a future! You have a future! The world has a future for no other reason than that Jesus is Lord of heaven and Earth who secures that future for us. And now we get to be a part of that future, here and now, ahead of time.

Now, you can tell that everything I’ve said so far depends on the truth of Jesus being raised from the dead. That is what validates his own prediction of his death and resurrection, his own claim to be God. If Jesus has not been raised from the dead, then, as the Bible says, we have believed in vain. But Christ is risen, and you and I have the confidence that belongs to resurrected people. Hallelujah!

Stephan K. Turnbull
First Lutheran Church
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
sturnbull@firstlutheranwbl.org