📖 Apologetics — Unit 6: The Person and Claims of Christ

Text: Matthew 16:15

The Question He Forces

Sooner or later every road in apologetics arrives at one Person and one question. Jesus turned to His own disciples and asked it plainly: "Who do you say that I am?" It is the question He still asks every man, and He has arranged matters so that we cannot dodge it with a polite half-answer. The world would love to file Jesus away as a great moral teacher, a kind rabbi, one wise voice among many. But He will not fit in that drawer, for a great moral teacher does not say the things this Man said. He forgave sins that were not committed against Him. He accepted worship that no prophet ever dared accept. He said, "Before Abraham was, I AM," taking on His own lips the holy name of God. He told men that He and the Father were one, and that to see Him was to see the Father. A teacher of morals does not talk this way. Either these are the ravings of a deluded man, or the lies of a wicked one, or they are simply true.

Liar, Lunatic, or Lord

This is the famous fork in the road. A man who said about himself what Jesus said is not left to us as a good teacher and nothing more; that one option, the comfortable one, He has closed with His own words. If His claims to deity were false and He knew they were false, then He was a liar of the blackest kind, deceiving the very people He told to trust Him. If His claims were false and He did not know it, if He sincerely believed He was God when He was not, then He was a lunatic on the level of a man who believes he is a poached egg, and no wise sayings could redeem such madness. But if His claims were true, then He is exactly who He said He is — the Lord. Liar, lunatic, or Lord: those are the doors, and the door marked "merely a fine teacher" was bricked up by Jesus Himself. The apologist's task is to press the honest man up against this fork and not let him slip past it.

The Fingerprint of Prophecy

How shall we know which door is the true one? One great evidence is what we may call the pre-written biography. Centuries before this Man was born, the prophets sketched His portrait in advance. Micah named the village of His birth, Bethlehem, seven hundred years early. The twenty-second Psalm described a death by the piercing of hands and feet and the casting of lots for the sufferer's clothing — written a thousand years before the Romans had even invented crucifixion as a way to kill a man. Isaiah, in his fifty-third chapter, drew the suffering servant so exactly that men have called it the fifth Gospel. These are not vague horoscopes that fit anyone; they are specific, and they all converge on one life.

The Silver Dollars of Texas

The mathematician Peter Stoner, writing in a book reviewed by the American Scientific Affiliation, estimated the odds of a single man fulfilling just eight of these prophecies by chance at one in ten to the seventeenth power. That number is too large for the mind to feel, so let me give it a shape. Imagine covering the whole state of Texas with silver dollars two feet deep. Mark just one of them with red paint and stir them all together. Now blindfold a man, set him loose anywhere in the state, and tell him he may stoop just once and must come up with the marked coin on the first try. His chance is roughly the chance that one man should fulfill eight prophecies by accident. This calculation rests on assigning a probability to each prophecy individually, a method some statisticians have questioned, so it is best taken as a vivid illustration of just how improbable coincidence would be rather than an exact, uncontested figure. And Jesus is traditionally reckoned to have fulfilled not eight but several hundred more.

God With Us

Run the thread back to its beginning. Long before Bethlehem, Isaiah told a faithless king that God Himself would give a sign: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:14). And when the angel came to Joseph, Matthew tells us this was its fulfillment: the child would be called Immanuel, "which is translated, God with us" (Matthew 1:23). That is the heart of the whole matter. The name is not "God above us," watching from a distance, nor "God against us," armed and angry, but God with us — the Almighty come near enough to be held by a peasant girl and laid in a feeding trough. The claims and the prophecies point to the same astonishing thing: that in this Man, God Himself came down to be with His people.

The Lamb and the Lion

Here the Jewish objector raises a fair question: if Jesus is the promised Messiah, where is the world peace the prophets foretold? Why is there still war? The answer is that the prophets foretold not one coming but two, and they testified of a Messiah with a twofold mission. He comes first as the Lamb — the one of whom Isaiah said He was "wounded for our transgressions" and "crushed for our iniquities," who must first deal with the deepest problem of all, which is human sin. He comes again as the Lion, the conquering King who brings the peace of the whole earth at His second coming. To reject the Lamb because He is not yet the Lion is to refuse the very sacrifice that makes a man fit to live under the King. The cradle and the cross had to come before the crown. He has been here once as the Lamb who was slain; He is coming again as the Lion who reigns.

The Character That Fits the Claim

A reliable witness must have a character that matches his words, and here too Jesus stands alone. He preached a love that reaches even to enemies, and then He loved His enemies from the cross. He taught the last to be first, and then He knelt with a towel and washed the feet of men who would soon abandon Him. He held the highest ethical standard ever uttered, and unlike every other founder, He kept it perfectly to the end, even while being tortured to death. His life was a sermon in motion; there is no gap between His walk and His talk. And His character was certified not only by men but by the Father, whose voice broke the silence at the Jordan, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," and again on the mountain of transfiguration, "This is My Son; listen to Him." Even Napoleon, it is said, reflecting in his exile on Saint Helena, confessed that he knew men, and that Jesus Christ was no mere man — that between Christ and every other figure of history there was no possible comparison.

The God-Man

So we are left with the deepest mystery and the surest comfort of the faith: that Jesus is fully God and fully man, the two natures meeting in one Person. As a man He grew tired by the well, but as God He was the living water. As a man He slept in the boat, but as God He rose and stilled the storm. As a man He wept at the grave of His friend, but as God He called the dead man out. As a man He hungered in the wilderness, but as God He is the bread of life. As a man He died upon the cross, but as God He came forth on the third day with the keys of death in His hand. Two full natures, never confused and never divided, dwell forever in the one Lord Jesus Christ. This is the One the prophets foretold, the One whose claims divide the liar from the Lord, the One whose name is God with us. The question He asked His disciples He now asks you. Having seen the claims, the prophecies, and the character all converge on this single Person, who do you say that He is?

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