“Our teacher, guide, and Savior” by Peter J. Williams

“The beginning of the Jewish Bible, together with the finale offered by Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection recorded in the New Testament, tell the greater story of a Creator God, whose commands we humans have disobeyed, making us subject to the death penalty.

To have that penalty lifted, we need a substitute more valuable than a Passover lamb to take our place.

What if the great storyteller also lived a perfect life?

What if he came from God?

What if he was the long-anticipated Jewish Messiah?

What if he was God’s Son? All these things are claimed of Jesus in the Gospels, the very books that we have seen reliably reporting Jesus’s words.

If Jesus came from God, it would also explain how he could be such a genius.

The single best explanation for Jesus’s genius is found at the beginning of John’s Gospel, where the Word, later identified as Jesus Christ (John 1:14, 17), is described both as alongside God and as God himself:

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, – and the Word was God.’ (John 1:1)

If the storyteller Jesus Christ is God himself, who made the world, invented language, oversaw history, and then became human to tell us about God and to rescue us from our alienation to him, then his wisdom and genius make sense.

And if he is that smart and if he also loved us enough to die to save us, the only sensible thing to do is to accept him unreservedly as our teacher, guide, and Savior.”

-Peter J. Williams, The Surprising Genius of Jesus: What the Gospels Reveal about the Greatest Teacher (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 112-113.