The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus

by Lee Strobel

people considered most holy have also been the most conscious of their own failures and sins. They are people who are aware of their shortcomings and lusts and resentments, and they’re fighting them honestly by the grace of God. In fact, they’re fighting them so...

“But along comes Jesus, who can say with a straight face, ‘Which of you c...

Although moral perfection and the forgiveness of sin are undoubtedly characteristics of deity, there are several additional attributes that Jesus must fulfill if he is to match the sketch of God.

how in the world could Jesus be omnipresent if he couldn’t be in two places at once?”

“How could he be omniscient when he says, ‘Not even the Son of Man knows the hour of his return’?

How could he be omnipotent when the gospels plainly tell us that he was unable to do many...

“Let’s admit it: the Bible itself seems to argue against Jesus being God.”

Carson

did concede that these questions have no simple answers. After all, they strike at the very heart of the Incarnation—God becoming man, spirit taking on flesh, the infinite becoming finite, the eternal becoming time-bound. I...

“Historically, there have been two or three approaches to this,”

When Jesus does something that’s a reflection of him being God, that’s ascribed to Christ’s deity.

When there’s something reflecting his limitations or finiteness or his humanness—for example, his tears; does God cry?—that’s ascribed to his humanity.”

“All the confessional statements have insisted that both Jesus’ humanity and his deity remained distinct, yet they combined in one person. So you want to avoid a solution in which there are essentially two minds—sort of a Jesus human mind and a Christ heavenly mind. However, this is one kind of solution, and there may be something to it.

“The other kind of solution is some form of kenosis, which means ‘emptying.’

Paul tells us that Jesus, ‘being in the form of God, did not think equality with God was ...

‘but emptied h...

“Strictly speaking,” he said, “Philippians 2 does not tell us precisely what the eternal Son emptied himself of. He emptied himself; he became a nobody. Some kind of emptying is at issue, but let’s be frank—you’re talking about the Incarnation, one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith.

“So part of Christian theology has been concerned not with ‘explaining it all away’ but with trying to take the biblical evidence and, retaining all of it fairly, find ways of synthesis that are rationally coherent, even if they’re not exhaustively explanatory.”

If the Incarnation is true, it’s not surprising that finite minds couldn’t totally comprehend it.

Part of the sketch that Jesus must match is that God is an uncreated being who has existed from eternity past. Isaiah 57:15 describes God as “he who lives forever.” But, I said to Carson, there are some verses that seem to strongly suggest that Jesus was a created being.

“John 3:16 calls Jesus the ‘begotten’ Son of God, and Colossians 1:15 says he was the ‘firstborn over all creation.’ Don’t they clearly imply that Jesus was created, as opposed to being the Creator?”

“Let’s take John 3:16,” he said. “It’s the King James Version that translates the Greek with the words ‘his only begotten Son.’

“It really means ‘unique one.’ The way it was usually used in the first century is ‘unique and beloved.’

the New International Version translates it, ‘the one and only Son’—rather than saying that he’s ontologically begotten in time.”

in the Old Testament the firstborn, because of the laws of succession, normally received the lion’s share of the estate, or the firstborn would become king in the case of a royal family. The firstborn therefore was the one ultimately with all the rights of the father.

“By the second century before Christ, there are places where the word no longer has any notion of actual begetting or of being born first but carries the idea of the authority that comes with the position of being the rightful heir. That’s the way it applies to Jesus, as virtually all scholars admit.

“If you’re going to quote Colossians 1:15, you have to keep it in context by going on to Colossians 2:9, where the very same author stresses, ‘For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.’ The author wouldn’t contradict himself. So the term ‘firstborn’ cannot exclude Jesus’ eternality, since that is part of what it means to possess the fullness of the divine.”

in Mark 10 someone addresses Jesus as “good teacher,” promoting him to reply, “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” “Wasn’t he denying his divinity by saying this?” I asked.

“In a fundamental sense there’s only one who is good, and that’s God. But Jesus is not implicitly saying, ‘So don’t call me that.’ He’s saying, ‘Do you really understand what you’re saying when you say that? Are you really ascribing to me what should only be ascribed to God?’

If Jesus was God, what kind of God was he? Was he equal to the Father, or some sort of junior God, possessing the attributes of deity and yet somehow failing to match the total sketch that the Old Testament provides of the divine?

“Jesus said in John 14:28, ‘The Father is greater than I.’ Some people look at this and conclude that Jesus must have been a lesser God. Are they right?” I asked.

‘A text without a context becomes a pretext for a prooftext.’ It’s very important to see this passage in its context.

Jesus says in John 17:5, ‘Glorify me with the glory that I had with the Father before the world began’—that is, ‘the Father is greater than I.’

“When you use a category like ‘greater,’ it doesn’t have to mean ontologically greater.

when Jesus says, ‘The Father is greater than I,’ one must look at the context and ask if Jesus is saying, ‘The Father is greater than I because he’s God and I’m not.’

“The comparison is only meaningful if they’re already on the same plane and there’s some delimitation going on. Jesus is in the limitations of the Incarnation—he’s going to the cross; he’s going to die—but he’s about to return to the Father and to the glory he had with the Father before the world began.

how could Jesus be a compassionate God yet endorse the idea of eternal suffering for those who reject him?

The Bible says that the Father is loving. The New Testament affirms the same about Jesus. But can they really be loving while at the same time sending people to hell? After all, Jesus teaches more about hell than anyone in the entire Bible. Doesn’t that contradict his supposed gentle and compassionate character?

“I’m not sure that God simply casts people into hell because they don’t accept certain beliefs.”

a subject that many modern people consider a quaint anachronism: sin.

with the entrance of sin and rebellion into the world, these image bearers begin to think that they are at the center of the universe.

And that’s the way we think. All the things we call ‘social pathologies’—war, rape, bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes—are bound up in the first instance with the fact that we’re not rightly related with God. The consequence is that people get hurt.

So what should God do about it?

if he’s the sort of God who has moral judgments on those matters, he’s got to have moral judgments on this huge matter of all these divine image bearers shaking their puny fists at his face and singing with Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ That’s the real nature of sin.

hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes but just didn’t believe the right stuff. They’re consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their Maker and want to be at the center of the universe. Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out. It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion.

“What is God to do? If he says it doesn’t matter to him, God is no longer a God to be admired. He’s either amoral or positively creepy. For him to act in any other way in the face of suc...

what seems to bother people the most is the idea that God will torment people for eternity. That...

if God took his hands off this fallen world so that there were no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell. Thus if you allow a whole lot of sinners to live somewhere in a confined place where they’re not doing damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but hell? There’s a sense in which they’re doing it to themselves, and it’s what they want because they still don’t repent.”

“One of the things that the Bible does insist is that in the end not only will justice be done, but justice will be seen to be done, so that every mouth will be stopped.”

“at the time of judgment there is nobody in the world who will walk away from that experience saying that they have been treated unfairly by God. Everyone will recognize the fundamental justice in the way God judges them and the world.”