Is Jesus the only way of salvation? We addressed this question in the last podcast, and you established from Scripture that the answer is yes, that there's no salvation without embracing Christ as the one who died for our sins and rose again. So the logical follow-up question then is this, Pastor John, how do we know if Jesus was for real?

Right. I will give you three ways to approach this, and I choose these three because they are all relevant for me, and I know that there are more paths into a warranted, justified confidence in the Bible and in Christ as a true Savior and the Bible as a true witness than these three, but these are the three that have had the greatest impact on me.

First, the Apostle Paul treated the resurrection of Jesus as a compelling warrant for believing what Jesus said. In Acts 17, he says, "God commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he appointed.

Of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead." So Paul treated the resurrection as the means by which God gave the world assurance. My son incarnate was speaking the truth. My son in dying for sins was vindicated by his resurrection. And then, you add to that, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul argues to his readers, and that's us included, that they could actually, these first readers, could actually confirm this claim of the resurrection, because there were people alive as he wrote.

He said, first Jesus appeared to Cephas, and then he appeared to the to the eleven, and then he appeared to me, he said, as it were born out of time, and he said, and he appeared to 500 brothers at once, and then he adds this little phrase, "Most of whom are still alive." Now, why would he say that?

He says that because he's writing about 20 years later, and he's saying to all those folks incarnate, "Look, if you want to get in a boat and go over to Antioch, or go down to Caesarea, and walk up to Jerusalem, you can find lots of people who saw Jesus alive from the dead.

You can compare their testimonies." This is what's called historical control in the study of history, where there's some control. Paul is not speaking in Narnia. He's not speaking in some mythological Mount Olympus, where nobody can check out anything that he says. He's speaking right there in the midst of history, where the people who were involved in the incidents themselves were still alive.

And so the first way that Paul credits his testimony and the testimony of Jesus is by saying, "He rose from the dead. I saw him. I know him." And therefore he vindicated his work and his word. The second approach is one that C.S. Lewis helped me so much with, and he's helped thousands.

Liar, lunatic, or lord. In other words, he points out that if you read the Gospels, you find Jesus saying the absolutely most outlandish things. "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father, God. I will come in my Father's glory with holy angels. If you don't love me more than you love your mother or father, you're not worthy of me." You've heard that the Old Testament said, "But I say," claiming equal and greater authority to the Old Testament.

"No one takes my life from me. I lay it down, and if I lay it down, I can take it up again. The Son of Man must suffer, and three days I'm going to rise again. Before Abraham was, I am." Those are things that he said, "This man is either crazy, or he's a liar, or he's lord." And as you get to know Jesus, this is the way it works for me, Tony, as you get to know Jesus, you just can't with any integrity say, "He's a liar," or "He's a charlatan.

He's trying to pull the wool over people's eyes." And so people are confronted when they read the Gospels, "Is this man true? Is he a liar? Is he a lunatic?" And if the Holy Spirit is at work, people cannot bring themselves to say, "I think Jesus is just a plain old liar.

He's just a plain crazy man." And so to me, it works that way for Jesus, and it works that way for the Apostle Paul. I read 13 letters of the Apostle Paul, and he makes these outlandish claims for Jesus, and I say, "Well, either Paul's a liar, or he's crazy, or he's true." And I got to know Paul over the years, and I cannot bring myself to reject the Apostle Paul as a faithful testimony.

Isn't this the way, Tony, we all live? How do you decide whom to trust? Well, you get to know somebody, you listen to them long enough, you watch them act long enough, and you say, "That person's reliable." And I think it basically works that way for Jesus and for Paul.

And the last thing I would say, the third thing, is simply to point out that Jesus said in John 7, 17, "If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God, or whether I'm speaking on my own authority." Which means that for most people, the obstacle to recognizing truth in the words of Jesus is not intellectual.

It's they don't want their will to be jeopardized. They don't want to stop being master of their own souls. They don't want to have to change their wills, and they can smell that in this Jesus is such an authority that if they were to yield to the truth of what he says, it's going to mean a deep transformation in their own souls.

Jesus said in John 5, 44, "How can you believe who seek glory from one another, and do not seek the glory that comes from God?" Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper.

I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.