Saturday, November 03, 2007

Is HE? or is he not?

Something I just read, and it echoes what I'm mentioned a couple of posts much earlier.

Among the Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time… One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic… He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This make sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is "humble and meek" and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

(Lunatic, Liar Or Lord)

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

- C.S Lewis

Something else I came across that struck a chord with what was discussed earlier about the cure for cancer and was used as a analogy to the Gospel - The Good News of God's Salvation:

Paul owed the gospel to every member of the human race. At one point in his life Paul (Saul of Tarsus) felt an obligation to persecute every Christian; but now Paul felt an obligation to preach to every creature (Paul was probably familiar with Mark 16:15). What obligation or gospel duty do you have (see 2 Cor. 5:17-21)? Those who are recipients of God’s good news feel burdened and obligated to pass it on to others! If you were a medical researcher and you discovered a cure for cancer, would you keep it a secret? Life is short; death is sure; sin the cause, CHRIST THE CURE!

Interesting..


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