Alistair McGrath made the comment that Christianity doesn’t assert that Christ has authority on account of the excellence or acceptability of His teaching. Rather, the teaching of Christ has authority and validity on account of who He is: God incarnate. In this article, we are going to be talking about the issue of just who He is; and I resist the idea of putting Jesus among a number of ‘ism’s’—like Buddhism, Freudianism, or Marxism—because those are systems that have become abstract and detached, while with Christianity you cannot detach the vision of it from the person of Christ.
The amazing thing about His teachings is that they were always very, very much directed to who He is; you cannot separate the two. The attempts by some to somehow find only a historical Jesus has been to pull out the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith. In trying to do that, trying to answer who was this historical Jesus, it has always been a failure. You simply cannot separate His claims from His person. The basic question that people had to answer was, ‘Who do you say that I am’? That is the fundamental question that all people will ultimately have to answer: ‘Who do you say that I am’?
There is a lot of speculation about who Jesus was, as you well know; some said He was John the Baptist, some that He was Elijah; but He said, ‘Who do you say’? Ultimately, everyone will have to confess the name of Jesus. If I read Philippians chapter two correctly, every knee will bow to that name—“…and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
Now, it is quite popular, in the Oprahization of our culture, to promote the idea that there are many, many ways to heaven and many, many ways to God. It now sounds bigoted, narrow-minded, or intolerant for a person to make any other claim. We find ourselves, then, increasingly in the minority and what is interesting is that while 75% of the population would agree with that notion, about 50% of evangelicals will claim the same thing. This only illustrates the rapid loss of discernment among people who profess to be followers of Christ.
The question you will have to ask yourself is ‘why the God-man’? Why was it necessary for Him to come and why was it necessary for Him to die? As Galatians puts it, if salvation were possible by keeping the works of the law, then Jesus died for nothing. That is a very radical claim because if it were possible for human beings to somehow bridge the gap between themselves and God, then the death of Christ was simply a tragic waste. Yet, it was for that very purpose that He said He had come.
So, what I want us to do in the weeks ahead is to explore what the Scriptures say about Christ—not what people say—but what do the Scriptures claim about Him; what do the Gospels say, the book of Acts say, and the epistles say? What does the Old Testament anticipate about the Messiah?