Was Jesus for Real?
00:00:00.000 | Is Jesus the only way of salvation? We addressed this question in the last
00:00:08.640 | podcast, and you established from Scripture that the answer is yes, that
00:00:11.240 | there's no salvation without embracing Christ as the one who died for our sins
00:00:14.720 | and rose again. So the logical follow-up question then is this, Pastor John, how do
00:00:19.120 | we know if Jesus was for real? Right. I will give you three ways to approach
00:00:28.480 | this, and I choose these three because they are all relevant for me, and I
00:00:34.120 | know that there are more paths into a warranted, justified confidence in the
00:00:43.480 | Bible and in Christ as a true Savior and the Bible as a true witness than these
00:00:50.080 | three, but these are the three that have had the greatest impact on me. First,
00:00:57.560 | the Apostle Paul treated the resurrection of Jesus as a compelling
00:01:05.600 | warrant for believing what Jesus said. In Acts 17, he says, "God commands all people
00:01:15.600 | everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the
00:01:20.760 | world in righteousness by a man whom he appointed. Of this he has given assurance
00:01:28.240 | to all by raising him from the dead." So Paul treated the resurrection as the
00:01:35.600 | means by which God gave the world assurance. My son incarnate was speaking
00:01:43.040 | the truth. My son in dying for sins was vindicated by his resurrection. And then,
00:01:50.440 | you add to that, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul argues to his readers, and that's us
00:01:58.720 | included, that they could actually, these first readers, could actually confirm
00:02:04.640 | this claim of the resurrection, because there were people alive as he wrote. He
00:02:10.760 | said, first Jesus appeared to Cephas, and then he appeared to the to the eleven,
00:02:17.160 | and then he appeared to me, he said, as it were born out of time, and he
00:02:23.640 | said, and he appeared to 500 brothers at once, and then he adds this little phrase,
00:02:29.840 | "Most of whom are still alive." Now, why would he say that? He says that because
00:02:36.040 | he's writing about 20 years later, and he's saying to all those folks incarnate,
00:02:41.520 | "Look, if you want to get in a boat and go over to Antioch, or go down to Caesarea,
00:02:47.720 | and walk up to Jerusalem, you can find lots of people who saw Jesus alive from
00:02:55.000 | the dead. You can compare their testimonies." This is what's called
00:02:58.560 | historical control in the study of history, where there's some control. Paul
00:03:04.680 | is not speaking in Narnia. He's not speaking in some mythological Mount
00:03:10.120 | Olympus, where nobody can check out anything that he says. He's speaking
00:03:14.080 | right there in the midst of history, where the people who were involved in
00:03:18.400 | the incidents themselves were still alive. And so the first way that Paul
00:03:23.360 | credits his testimony and the testimony of Jesus is by saying, "He rose from the
00:03:29.840 | dead. I saw him. I know him." And therefore he vindicated his work and his word.
00:03:36.440 | The second approach is one that C.S. Lewis helped me so much with, and he's
00:03:42.680 | helped thousands. Liar, lunatic, or lord. In other words, he points out that if you
00:03:50.400 | read the Gospels, you find Jesus saying the absolutely most outlandish things. "If
00:03:58.480 | you've seen me, you've seen the Father, God. I will come in my Father's glory
00:04:04.200 | with holy angels. If you don't love me more than you love your mother or father,
00:04:09.800 | you're not worthy of me." You've heard that the Old Testament said, "But I say,"
00:04:15.480 | claiming equal and greater authority to the Old Testament. "No one takes my life
00:04:20.840 | from me. I lay it down, and if I lay it down, I can take it up again. The Son of
00:04:26.640 | Man must suffer, and three days I'm going to rise again. Before Abraham was, I am."
00:04:34.280 | Those are things that he said, "This man is either crazy, or he's a liar, or
00:04:42.280 | he's lord." And as you get to know Jesus, this is the way it works for me, Tony, as you
00:04:47.280 | get to know Jesus, you just can't with any integrity say, "He's a liar," or "He's a
00:04:53.960 | charlatan. He's trying to pull the wool over people's eyes." And so people are
00:04:57.920 | confronted when they read the Gospels, "Is this man true? Is he a liar? Is he a
00:05:05.680 | lunatic?" And if the Holy Spirit is at work, people cannot bring themselves to say, "I
00:05:12.640 | think Jesus is just a plain old liar. He's just a plain crazy man." And so to me, it
00:05:18.920 | works that way for Jesus, and it works that way for the Apostle Paul. I read 13
00:05:23.600 | letters of the Apostle Paul, and he makes these outlandish claims for Jesus, and I
00:05:27.800 | say, "Well, either Paul's a liar, or he's crazy, or he's true." And I got to know
00:05:33.120 | Paul over the years, and I cannot bring myself to reject the Apostle Paul as a
00:05:38.720 | faithful testimony. Isn't this the way, Tony, we all live? How do you
00:05:47.160 | decide whom to trust? Well, you get to know somebody, you listen to them long
00:05:52.820 | enough, you watch them act long enough, and you say, "That person's reliable." And I
00:05:57.760 | think it basically works that way for Jesus and for Paul. And the last
00:06:02.960 | thing I would say, the third thing, is simply to point out that Jesus said in
00:06:08.240 | John 7, 17, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the
00:06:17.880 | teaching is from God, or whether I'm speaking on my own authority." Which
00:06:21.560 | means that for most people, the obstacle to recognizing truth in the words of
00:06:30.600 | Jesus is not intellectual. It's they don't want their will to be jeopardized.
00:06:40.480 | They don't want to stop being master of their own souls. They don't want to have
00:06:45.360 | to change their wills, and they can smell that in this Jesus is such an authority
00:06:51.360 | that if they were to yield to the truth of what he says, it's going to mean a
00:06:56.200 | deep transformation in their own souls. Jesus said in John 5, 44, "How can you
00:07:01.760 | believe who seek glory from one another, and do not seek the glory that comes
00:07:07.480 | from God?" Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:07:11.440 | Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.
00:07:15.680 | At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper.
00:07:19.200 | I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
00:07:23.120 | [BLANK_AUDIO]