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Jesus didn’t just claim to be God—he backed it up with amazing feats of healing, with astounding demonstrations of power over nature, with transcendent and unprecedented teaching, with divine insights into people, and ultimately with his own resurrection from the dead, which absolutely nobody else has been able to duplicate. So when Jesus claimed to be God, it wasn’t crazy. It was the truth.”
it would have been simply a contradiction of terms for an early Jew to say that someone was raised from the dead but his body still was left in the tomb. So when this early Christian creed says Jesus was buried and then raised on the third day, it’s saying implicitly but quite clearly: an empty tomb was left behind.
“As long as the existence of God is even possible, it’s possible that he acted in history by raising Jesus from the dead.”
“Now, if you were a Martian looking down on the first century, would you think Christianity or the Roman Empire would survive? You probably wouldn’t put money on a ragtag group of people whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village had triumphed over the grave. Yet it was so successful that today we name our children Peter and Paul and our dogs Caesar and Nero!
If Jesus is the Son of God, his teachings are more than just good ideas from a wise teacher; they are divine insights on which I can confidently build my life.
If Jesus did rise from the dead, he’s still alive today and available for me to encounter on a personal basis.
If Jesus has divine power, he has the supernatural ability to guide me and help me and transform me as I follow him.
If Jesus personally knows the pain of loss and suffering, he can comfort and encourage me in the midst of the turbulence that he himself warned is inevitable in a world corrupted by sin.
If Jesus loves me as he says, he has my best interests at heart. That means I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by commi...
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A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic . . . 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.
