1.The Central Question

Of all the questions a person may ever be asked, one stands above all the rest in importance, and everything else finally turns upon the answer we give to it. The Lord Jesus Himself put it to His disciples one day near Caesarea Philippi. First He asked them what the crowds were saying — and the answers were varied and respectful and quite wrong. Then He turned the question directly upon them: "But who do you say that I am?" That is the question that every human being must, in the end, answer. Who is this Jesus of Nazareth? Was He merely a great teacher, one wise voice among many? Was He a prophet, a reformer, a good and holy man? Or was He something far more — something, indeed, that no mere man could ever be? The whole Christian faith stands or falls right here, for Christianity is not first of all a set of teachings or rules; it is, before anything else, a Person. And so, as we begin our study of the life of Christ, we must begin exactly where we should — not with what He taught, or what He did, but with who He is. For unless we understand who Jesus is, we will understand nothing else about Him rightly.

2.Truly God: The Eternal Son

The witness of the whole New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth is truly and fully God — the eternal Son, who was with the Father before the world began. The apostle John opens his Gospel with words of astonishing weight: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." He does not say the Word was like God, or was a god, but that the Word simply was God; and this Word, he goes on to say, was the one through whom all things were made. Jesus is not a creature, however exalted; He is the eternal Son, of one being with the Father, without beginning and without end. And this is not a claim read back into Him by the later church; it runs through the whole record. He forgives sins, which God alone can do. He receives worship, which no true prophet or angel would ever allow. He claims to have existed before Abraham, and to be one with the Father. He commands the wind and the waves, and they obey Him; He speaks of a glory He shared with the Father before the world existed; and again and again He takes upon His own lips the great divine name by which God had revealed Himself to Moses, "I AM." He accepts, without correction, the confession of Thomas, who fell before Him crying, "My Lord and my God!" The great scholar B. B. Warfield showed, in careful detail, how deeply and how consistently the Scriptures teach the full deity of Christ. To meet Jesus is to meet God Himself, come among us. Any account of Him that makes Him less than fully God has already lost the Jesus of the Bible.

3.Truly Man: The Word Made Flesh

And yet the very same Scriptures teach, with equal clearness, that this eternal Son became truly and fully man. John, having told us that the Word was God, goes on to say the most staggering thing of all: "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." The eternal Son took to Himself a real and complete human nature — a true human body and a true human soul. He was conceived and carried in the womb of Mary, and born as a helpless infant in Bethlehem. He grew, the Gospels tell us, "in wisdom and stature." He grew tired and sat down by a well; He grew hungry and thirsty; He slept in a boat; He wept real tears at the grave of His friend; He felt the full weight of temptation, "in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin"; and at the last He truly bled and truly died. He was no phantom, no mere appearance of a man. He was, and is, as truly human as you or I — sin alone excepted. This too we must hold with all our strength. For a Jesus who only seemed to be human, who did not really share our flesh and our life, could not truly be our brother, could not truly represent us, and could not truly die in our place. The wonder of the gospel is that the Son of God became, in the fullest sense, the Son of Man.

4.One Person, Two Natures

Here, then, we arrive at the great mystery of the person of Christ, which the church has always confessed and adored: in Jesus Christ, the one eternal Son of God took to Himself a full human nature, so that He is now one Person in two natures, truly God and truly man at once. We must be careful here, for the truth is easily distorted. Jesus is not two persons living side by side in one body; He is one single Person — the eternal Son — who now possesses, alongside His divine nature, a complete human nature as well. Nor are the two natures blended together into some third thing that is neither God nor man; each nature remains whole and unconfused, the divine forever divine and the human truly human, yet joined in the unity of His one Person. This is far beyond our full understanding, and we should not be surprised that it is; how could the joining of the infinite God and finite man in one Person be a small or simple thing? But though we cannot fully explain it, we can see why it must be so. As we shall see, our salvation required a Savior who was at once fully God and fully man — and in Jesus Christ, wonderfully, that is exactly who we have.

5.Why the God-Man?

Why did the eternal Son take our nature and become man? The answer, in a word, is: for us, and for our salvation. Our deepest problem is our sin, which has cut us off from a holy God and left us helpless to save ourselves. And our rescue required someone who could stand in a place that no ordinary person could ever fill. On the one hand, our Savior had to be truly man — for it was man who had sinned, and man who must obey where we had failed, and man who must bear the penalty of sin in his own body. A Savior who was not truly one of us could not truly stand in our place. But on the other hand, our Savior had to be truly God — for no mere creature, however good, could bear the infinite weight of the world's sin, or conquer death, or reconcile us to God, or save a single soul. Only God can save; yet salvation had to be worked out as a man. And so the eternal Son became man, uniting God and man in His own person, that He might be the one and only bridge between a holy God and sinful humanity. He is able to lay one hand upon God, for He is God, and the other hand upon us, for He is man — and so to bring the two together. The incarnation is not an abstract puzzle; it is the very heart of the rescue of the human race.

6.Immanuel: God With Us

There is a tenderness in all of this that we must not miss beneath the weight of the doctrine. When the angel foretold the birth of Jesus, he gave Him a name laden with comfort: "they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, God with us." The infinite God, whom the heavens cannot contain, drew near — not by sending a message from a safe distance, but by taking our very nature, entering our world, and sharing our life from the inside. He was born in a poor place, laid in a manger, raised in an ordinary town, and made His home among ordinary people. The apostle Paul marvels that One who was "in the form of God" did not cling to the honors of His glory, but "emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and coming in the likeness of men" — stooping down from the throne of heaven to the dust and poverty of our world, all the way down at last to a cross. He knew hunger and weariness and grief; He knew what it is to be poor, to be misunderstood, to be tempted, to be alone. And this means that our Savior is no stranger to our sorrows. Because He truly became one of us, He is able to sympathize with us in our weakness, having been tested in every way that we are. When you come to Him in your trouble, you come to One who understands from the inside, who has walked where you walk, who has felt what you feel. This is the wonder of the incarnation: that God has come so near, in such love and such humility, that He is now, forever, God with us.

7.Who Do You Say He Is?

So we return, at the end, to the question with which we began: "Who do you say that I am?" We have seen the answer the Scriptures give. Jesus of Nazareth is truly God, the eternal Son, of one being with the Father; and He is truly man, the Word made flesh, who shared our nature and our life; and He is one Person, in whom God and man are forever joined, come among us for our salvation. This is the foundation of everything else we shall study about His life — His ministry, His teaching, His cross, His resurrection. All of it is the life of the God-man, the one Mediator between God and men. And this truth is not given to us merely to be understood; it is given to be answered. When Peter confessed, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus called him blessed. When Thomas fell before Him and cried, "My Lord and my God," he was not rebuked but received. The right response to the person of Christ is not cool admiration from a distance, but wholehearted confession, trust, and worship. So let each of us answer, for ourselves, the greatest question of all. Who is Jesus to you? May you come to know Him, and confess Him, and trust Him, as your Lord and your God.

8.Taking It to Heart

1.The Kingdom Has Come Near

When Jesus stepped out of the quiet of Nazareth and began His public ministry, He came with a single great announcement upon His lips. Mark sums it up in one ringing sentence: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel." This was the heart and center of everything He preached — the kingdom of God. But what did He mean by it? He did not mean a patch of land, or an earthly government, or a political movement. The kingdom of God is the reign of God — God's saving rule breaking into a world long spoiled by sin, and doing so now in the person and work of Jesus Himself. In Him, the long-promised reign of God had drawn near; God was at last acting to put things right, to forgive, to heal, to rescue, and to reclaim His world. That is why the coming of Jesus was such good news, and why the only fitting response was, and is, to repent — to turn from our old way — and to believe the good news that God's reign of grace has come near in His Son. To repent is not merely to feel sorry, but to turn around completely — to leave behind the old life of self and sin, and to turn toward God. And to believe is to entrust ourselves wholly to Jesus and to the good news He brings. This turning and this trusting are the doorway into the kingdom. Everything Jesus said and did, from that day forward, was the unfolding of this one great theme.

2.Teaching with Authority

Jesus was, first of all, a teacher — but a teacher such as the world had never seen before, and has never seen since. When He finished the Sermon on the Mount, we are told, "the people were astonished at His teaching, for He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." The scribes of His day taught by quoting other teachers, leaning always on the authorities that had gone before them. But Jesus spoke straight from Himself, with a calm and absolute authority that belonged to Him alone: "You have heard that it was said… but I say to you." He needed to quote no one, for He spoke as the very Truth of God in person. The officers sent to arrest Him came back empty-handed and could only stammer, "No one ever spoke like this Man!" His words carried a weight, a beauty, and a piercing power that reached the depths of the heart, laying bare its secrets and offering it life. "The words that I speak to you," He said, "are spirit, and they are life." To listen to Jesus teach was to hear God Himself speaking; and His teaching still comes to us, in the Gospels, with that same living authority today.

3.The Parables and the Sermon on the Mount

Two features of His teaching deserve our special attention. The first is His parables — those simple, unforgettable stories drawn from the ordinary life of field and home and marketplace: a sower scattering seed, a woman searching for a lost coin, a father running to welcome home a wayward son. Through these homely pictures, Jesus opened the deep secrets of the kingdom of God, making the highest truths plain enough for a child to grasp, yet deep enough to reward a lifetime of thought. Jesus taught in this way, He said, so that the humble and hungry heart would find and treasure the truth, while the proud and careless would hear only a pleasant story and pass on unchanged; His parables both reveal and test, giving their light to those who truly seek it. The second is the great Sermon on the Mount, in which He set out the character and the way of life of those who belong to His kingdom. There He pronounced His blessings upon the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, and the pure in heart; there He called His people to be salt and light, to love even their enemies, to trust their heavenly Father, and to seek first the kingdom of God. In it we see what the reign of God looks like when it takes hold of a human life. Together, the parables and the Sermon show us a Teacher who could make the truth both wonderfully clear and infinitely deep — and who taught us not merely to know the kingdom, but to live in it.

4.The Mighty Works: Signs of the Kingdom

But Jesus did not only speak; He also acted, with a power that matched His words. The Gospels are full of His mighty works: He healed the sick and opened the eyes of the blind; He cleansed the lepers whom no one else would touch; He cast out evil spirits with a word; He stilled a raging storm with a command; He fed thousands from a few loaves; and, more than once, He called the dead back to life. These works also bore witness to who He was, confirming that the One who spoke with such authority had truly come from God; even His enemies could not deny that a great sign had been done among them. Now these miracles were never mere displays of power, done to amaze the crowds. They were signs — signs that the kingdom of God had truly come near, and that in Jesus, God's saving reign was breaking in upon the ruin that sin had brought into the world. Every sickness He healed, every storm He calmed, every demon He drove out, and every dead child He raised was a small preview of the great restoration that His kingdom would bring: a world where disease and death and evil would be undone at last. When His works are seen rightly, they proclaim the same message as His words: God is here, God is reigning, and God is putting His broken world back together in His Son. They are the kingdom made visible.

5.Moved with Compassion

And beneath all these mighty works there beat a heart of tender compassion, which we must never overlook. The Gospels tell us plainly what moved Him: "When He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd." Jesus did not heal at a cold distance; He was stirred to the depths by the suffering of the people before Him. He reached out and touched the leper — a thing no one did — before He healed him. He welcomed the outcasts whom respectable society despised, and sat and ate with sinners. He took little children up into His arms and blessed them. He stood at the grave of His friend Lazarus and wept real tears with the grieving sisters. Nor was His compassion only for bodily need; He grieved most of all over people who were lost in sin and far from God, and He came seeking them, for He said He had come "to seek and to save that which was lost." In every one of these acts, Jesus was revealing the very heart of God toward broken and hurting people. This is a truth of the deepest comfort. The God we meet in Jesus is not distant or indifferent to human pain; He is moved with compassion, He draws near to the weary, and He welcomes the very people the world casts aside. Whatever your trouble, you may bring it to a Savior whose heart is full of mercy toward you.

6.The Training of the Twelve

There is one more strand of His ministry that is easy to miss beneath the crowds and the miracles, yet it was among the most important things He did. From among His many followers, Jesus deliberately chose twelve men, "that they might be with Him, and that He might send them out to preach." And into these twelve ordinary men — fishermen, a tax collector, and others of no special standing — He poured Himself. He called them, and lived among them day by day; He taught them privately what the crowds could not yet receive; He let them watch Him work; He sent them out on their own to preach and heal; and He patiently corrected their many failures, their pride and their slowness and their fear, shaping them all the while into the men they would become. As the old writer A. B. Bruce showed so well, this quiet, patient training of the twelve was one of the great works of Christ's ministry. For Jesus did not build His cause upon vast crowds or grand schemes, but upon a handful of men whom He formed, and who would in time carry His gospel to the ends of the earth. He invested Himself in people — and through those few, changed the world.

7.The Ministry That Reveals God

Draw all of this together, and the public ministry of Jesus stands before us as a single, shining whole. In His preaching, He announced that the reign of God had come near. In His teaching, He opened the truth of that kingdom with an authority all His own. In His mighty works, He made the kingdom visible, overcoming sickness, evil, and death as signs of the great restoration to come. In His compassion, He revealed the very heart of God toward the weary and the lost. And in His training of the Twelve, He planted the seed of the mission that would carry all of this to the world. Through it all, one thing shines out above the rest: in the ministry of Jesus we are shown who God is, and what His reign is like — a reign of truth, and mercy, and healing, and grace, breaking gently but surely into our broken world. And His ministry also sets the enduring pattern for all who would serve Him after Him: to teach the truth faithfully, to show compassion tenderly, and to pour our lives into people. But above all, His ministry points us back to Himself — for the kingdom came, and comes still, in the person of the King. To welcome His reign is simply to welcome Him.

8.Taking It to Heart

1.He Set His Face Toward Jerusalem

As His ministry drew on, a shadow began to fall across the path of Jesus, and He walked toward it with open eyes. Again and again He told His disciples plainly what lay ahead: that He must go up to Jerusalem, and there be rejected, and suffer, and be killed, and on the third day rise again. Luke tells us that when the time came, "He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem." This is a truth we must grasp at the very outset, for it changes everything about how we read the cross. The death of Jesus was not an accident that befell Him, nor a tragic defeat that overtook a good man against His will, nor the mere triumph of His enemies. He went to the cross deliberately, with full knowledge, and of His own free choice. "No one takes it from Me," He said of His life, "but I lay it down of Myself." He went in perfect obedience to His Father, and in perfect love for us. The cross, then, was not the failure of His mission; it was its very purpose and its crown. He had come, He said, "to give His life a ransom for many" — and now, with unwavering resolve, He went to do exactly that.

2.The Road to the Cross

The Gospels lead us slowly and reverently through the events of that final week and that terrible night. We see Him gathered with His disciples in the upper room, sharing the Last Supper, giving them the bread and the cup as tokens of His body soon to be broken and His blood soon to be shed. We follow Him out to the garden of Gethsemane, where, in an agony of soul, He prayed until His sweat fell like drops of blood, and yet surrendered Himself entirely: "not My will, but Yours, be done." We watch as one of His own betrays Him with a kiss, and the rest forsake Him and flee. We see Him dragged through a series of hurried and unjust trials, before the high priest and before Pilate and before Herod, though no real fault could be found in Him. We see Him mocked, spat upon, crowned with thorns, and torn by the scourge. And at last we see Him led out to a hill called Golgotha, and nailed to a Roman cross to die between two criminals. James Stalker, in his careful account of the trial and death of Jesus, traces each of these steps with tender seriousness. We do not hurry past them. We walk them slowly, for here the Son of God is going to His death for us.

3.The Center of the Gospel

It is striking to notice how much room the Gospel writers give to this single week. Though the ministry of Jesus lasted some three years, each of the four Gospels devotes a great portion of its length to the last few days — to the cross and what surrounds it. This is no accident of arrangement; it tells us where the very heart of the matter lies. The cross is not merely the sad ending of the story of Jesus; it is the reason He came, the goal toward which His whole life was moving. And so, when the apostles went out to preach, the cross stood at the center of their message. "We preach Christ crucified," Paul declared. "I determined not to know anything among you," he told the Corinthians, "except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." The earliest and simplest summary of the gospel that Paul passed on begins with these words: "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures." Take away the cross, and there is no gospel left to preach. It is the burning center of the whole Christian faith. And this raises, with great force, the question we must now answer: why? Why did Jesus die? What did that death accomplish? The Scriptures give us a clear and glorious answer.

4.He Died for Our Sins

The first and central truth is this: Jesus did not die for any sin of His own, for He had none. He was the spotless, sinless Lamb of God. He died, rather, for our sins — and He died in our place, bearing what we deserved. Centuries before, the prophet Isaiah had foreseen it with astonishing clearness: "He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities… and by His stripes we are healed." And then that great word that gathers it all up: "the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Our sins were laid upon Him; He carried them in His own body to the tree. The apostle Peter states it just as plainly: "Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God." There is the whole matter in a sentence — the just One suffering in the place of the unjust. We were the guilty; He was the innocent. We deserved the judgment; He bore it. This is what the old writers called substitution: the Savior standing in the sinner's place, taking upon Himself the penalty that was ours, so that we might go free. He was treated as we deserved, that we might be treated as He deserved. This is the deepest meaning of the cross.

5.To Bring Us to God

But why was such a substitution needed at all? Because our sin had raised a terrible barrier between us and a holy God. Sin separates; it cuts us off from the God who is the source of all life and joy, and it leaves us under His righteous judgment, unable to save ourselves. And this is precisely what the cross was meant to deal with. By bearing our sin and its penalty in Himself, Christ took away the barrier that stood between us and God. Peter's phrase says it exactly: Christ suffered for sins "to bring us to God." The whole purpose of the cross is reconciliation — the bringing back together of a holy God and sinful people who had been estranged. "God was in Christ," Paul writes, "reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them." And Scripture adds another rich picture: redemption. We were slaves to sin, held captive, and the cross was the price of our freedom. We were "redeemed," Peter says, "not with corruptible things, like silver or gold… but with the precious blood of Christ." At the cross, then, our sin is dealt with, the barrier is removed, our debt is paid, our chains are broken, and the way home to God is thrown wide open. The cross does not merely teach us something about God; it actually reconciles us to Him.

6.The Love That Held Him There

And behind the whole of it, from first to last, stands the love of God. The cross is, above everything else, the supreme and unanswerable display of how much God loves us. We might have feared that God was distant, or stern, or indifferent to us in our sin; but the cross settles the question forever. "God demonstrates His own love toward us," Paul writes, "in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Notice when it was that Christ died for us — not after we had cleaned ourselves up and become worthy, but "while we were still sinners," still turned away from Him, still His enemies. That is the measure of the love. Jesus Himself had said, "Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends" — and then He went and did it, not only for friends, but for those who had made themselves His foes. It has often and truly been said that it was not the nails that held Jesus to the cross, but His love. He could have come down; He stayed, and died, because He loved us and was determined to save us. Whenever you doubt the love of God, look to the cross. There, in the wounds of His Son, God has shown you His heart.

7.The Cost and the Cry

We must not pass over how great the cost of our salvation was. The physical sufferings of the cross were dreadful enough — the scourging, the thorns, the nails, the slow agony of crucifixion. But there was a deeper darkness in it than the body's pain. For upon that cross, Jesus was bearing the full weight of the world's sin, and drinking to its dregs the cup of judgment that sin deserved. In the awful hours of darkness that covered the land, He cried out the most piercing words ever spoken: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" In some way we cannot fully fathom, the sinless Son, who had known unbroken fellowship with the Father from all eternity, entered into the God-forsakenness that our sin had earned — that we might never be forsaken. He was cast into that darkness so that we might be brought into the light. And then, when the whole work of atonement was accomplished, He spoke one last great word of triumph: "It is finished." It was not the cry of a victim whose life was slipping away, but the shout of a victor whose work was complete. The price was paid in full; nothing remained to be added; the debt of our sin was settled forever. And so He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.

8.Come to the Cross

What, then, shall we do with such a cross? It is not given to us merely to admire from afar, but to come to, and to rest upon. The cross meets us exactly where we are — as sinners who cannot save ourselves, who owe a debt we can never pay, who stand in need of a mercy we can never earn. And it offers us, freely and fully, everything we need: forgiveness for all our sins, reconciliation with the God we had offended, and a welcome home into His family. All of this was purchased at the cross, and all of it is offered to us as a free gift, to be received simply by turning from our sin and trusting in the crucified Savior. Come, then, to the cross. Bring your sin and your guilt, and lay them down where Jesus bore them. Trust the One who loved you and gave Himself for you. Let the sight of His wounds break your heart and win your love. And know that the cross also calls you onward: for the Savior who bore His cross for us now says to each of us, "take up your cross, and follow Me." We shall return to that call. But it begins here, at the foot of the cross, where a crucified Savior gave everything to bring us home to God.

9.Taking It to Heart

1.The Third Day

The story of Jesus does not end at the tomb. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, some women came to the grave where His body had been laid, bringing spices to anoint Him — and they found the great stone rolled away, and the tomb empty. Angels told them the astonishing news: "He is not here, for He is risen, as He said." And that same day, and in the days that followed, the risen Jesus appeared, alive and in the body, to His own. He appeared to Mary in the garden, to Peter, to the two on the road to Emmaus, to the gathered disciples in the locked room, and later to more than five hundred at once. He showed them His hands and His side; He ate with them; He walked and talked with them over the space of forty days. The crucified One was alive again. This is the great turning point of all history, and the very heart of the Christian faith: Jesus Christ, who was dead, is risen. Everything that Christians believe and hope flows from this one shining fact. And because so much depends upon it, we do well to ask, soberly, whether it is really true.

2.A Real Event in History

It is important to see, first of all, that the resurrection is not offered to us as a beautiful story, or a comforting symbol, or a vague spiritual feeling that Jesus somehow "lives on" in the hearts of His followers. It is proclaimed as an event — something that actually happened, in real space and real time, in a known place, on a known day, and witnessed by known people. The New Testament does not say merely that the disciples felt Jesus was still with them in spirit; it says flatly that His tomb was empty and that He appeared to them alive, in a body they could see and touch. This means that the claim can be examined, weighed, and tested, as any claim about history can be. And when it is honestly examined, the evidence is remarkably strong. The Scottish scholar James Orr, in his careful study of the resurrection, showed how well the event stands up to serious historical inquiry, and how poorly every attempt to explain it away has fared. Let us consider a few of the great lines of evidence, for our faith in the risen Christ is not a leap in the dark, but a reasonable trust grounded in solid fact.

3.The Empty Tomb and the Witnesses

Two great pillars of evidence stand at the foundation. The first is the empty tomb. That the grave of Jesus was found empty on the third day was not seriously denied even by His enemies; instead, they were reduced to inventing a story that the disciples had stolen the body. But if the authorities could have produced the body of Jesus, they would have done so at once, and crushed the new faith in its cradle. They never did, for they could not; the tomb was empty. The second pillar is the eyewitness appearances. The risen Jesus was not seen by one lone person in a fleeting vision that might be explained as a dream or a hallucination. He was seen many times, by many different people, individually and in large groups, indoors and outdoors, over a period of forty days. They spoke with Him, touched Him, and ate meals with Him. Crowds of people do not all share the same detailed hallucination over and over for weeks on end. The plain and consistent testimony of the first witnesses was simple and unshakable: we have seen the Lord. He was truly, bodily, undeniably alive; and they had met Him.

4.The Transformed and the Converted

There is further evidence, no less powerful, in what happened to people afterward. Consider the disciples themselves. On the night Jesus was arrested, they had scattered in fear; one denied Him, and the rest hid behind locked doors, their hopes crushed and their courage gone. Yet within a matter of weeks these same broken men were standing boldly in the streets of Jerusalem, before the very authorities they had feared, proclaiming that Jesus was risen — and they went on proclaiming it, under fierce persecution, to the end of their lives, most of them dying as martyrs for that testimony. Men do not suffer and die, gladly and for a lifetime, for something they know to be a lie. Something had utterly transformed them; and they told us plainly what it was. Consider, too, the skeptics who were won over: James, the Lord's own brother, who had not believed in Him, became a leader of the church after the risen Jesus appeared to him; and Saul of Tarsus, the fiercest persecutor of the Christians, was turned in an instant into the apostle Paul when he met the risen Lord on the Damascus road. Add to all this the sudden birth and explosive growth of the church, and the change of the day of worship to Sunday, the day He rose — and the weight of evidence becomes very great indeed.

5.God's Vindication of His Son

Having seen that the resurrection is true, we may now ask what it means — for its meaning is as glorious as its reality is certain. It means, first, that God the Father has vindicated His Son. At the cross, to all outward appearance, Jesus had been condemned, rejected, and put to shame as a criminal. But by raising Him from the dead, God publicly overturned that verdict and declared, for all to see, that Jesus was exactly who He had claimed to be. Paul writes that Jesus "was declared to be the Son of God with power… by the resurrection from the dead." The resurrection is the Father's great "Amen" to everything the Son had said and done. It sets God's own seal of approval upon all His teaching, all His claims, and all His work. Had Jesus stayed in the grave, we might have concluded that He was, after all, only a well-meaning man whose cause had failed. But God raised Him — and in so doing, declared to the whole world that this crucified Jesus is indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God, and Lord of all. The empty tomb is heaven's own endorsement of the One who lay there.

6.The Sacrifice Accepted

The resurrection means, second, that the sacrifice of the cross was fully accepted, and its work truly done. This is a truth of the deepest comfort for every troubled conscience. On the cross, Jesus had borne our sins and paid the debt we owed; but how could we be sure that His offering was enough, that it had truly been received, that our sin was actually dealt with and God's justice truly satisfied? The resurrection is the answer. Paul writes that Jesus "was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification." Had our sin not been fully paid for, Jesus would have remained under the power of death; but because the price was paid in full and accepted, death could not hold Him, and God raised Him up. His resurrection is God's public receipt, His proof that the debt is settled and the work is finished. And so the believer may rest in perfect assurance. The One who died for our sins is risen; therefore our sins are truly forgiven, our record is truly cleared, and we truly stand accepted before God. We are not left to wonder whether the cross worked. The empty tomb tells us that it did.

7.Death Conquered, Hope Secured

The resurrection means, third, that death itself has been conquered — and here is hope for every one of us. Death is the last and greatest enemy of the human race; it comes for all, and no one can escape it or undo it. But Jesus went down into death and rose again on the other side, breaking its power forever. "Death is swallowed up in victory," Paul cries. "O death, where is your sting?" For Jesus is risen, and He dies no more; death no longer has dominion over Him. And His resurrection is not His alone; it is the promise and the pattern of ours. Paul calls the risen Christ "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" — the first sheaf of a great harvest that is sure to follow. Because He rose, all who belong to Him shall rise too. For those who are in Christ, death is no longer a wall but a doorway; not the end, but the passage into everlasting life. This is the sure and steady hope that has carried Christians through every sorrow, every persecution, and every grave. Whatever we face, and even when we come to die, we do so in the certain hope that the risen Lord will raise us also, to live with Him forever.

8.He Is Alive: Live in His Light

Above all, the resurrection means that Jesus is alive — not a dead teacher whose memory we honor, but a living Lord whom we may know. He is, in His own words, "alive forevermore." He is present with His people by His Spirit, He reigns over all things, and He ever lives to pray for those who come to God through Him. We do not serve the memory of a good man who died long ago; we serve a living Savior who rose and who reigns. Paul once set out, with startling honesty, all that would be lost if it were not so: "If Christ is not risen," he wrote, "then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty… you are still in your sins… and we are of all men the most to be pitied." Everything hangs upon it. But then comes his ringing shout of triumph: "But now Christ is risen from the dead!" And because He is risen, all is changed. So live in the light of the risen Lord. Believe in Him, and be forgiven. Rejoice in Him, and take heart. Face even death itself without fear, for the grave could not hold your Savior, and it will not hold you. And go and tell the good news that has turned the world upside down: Jesus is risen; He is risen indeed, and He is alive forevermore.

9.Taking It to Heart

1.Savior and Lord

Throughout this course we have looked upon the Lord Jesus as our Savior — the eternal Son who became man, who ministered among us, who died for our sins and rose again for our salvation. And this is, and must always remain, the foundation of everything: we come to Jesus first of all as needy sinners, to receive from Him a salvation we could never earn. But the New Testament will not let us stop there, as though we might take Christ as our Savior and yet never take Him as our Lord. The two belong together and cannot be separated. The very same Jesus who died to save us also calls us, with all authority, to follow Him — to leave our old way of life and to walk after Him as His disciples. To trust Him truly as Savior is, at the same time, to receive Him as the Lord of our lives. And so this final reading turns from what Christ has done for us to what it now means to follow Him. Having received His grace, we are called to walk in His steps; having been saved by Him, we are called to become like Him. This is the natural and joyful completion of all that has gone before.

2.“Follow Me”

Two simple words rang out again and again on the lips of Jesus, as He moved among the people of Galilee: "Follow Me." He spoke them to fishermen mending their nets, and they left their boats to go after Him. He spoke them to a tax collector at his table, and the man rose and followed. And He speaks them still, to every one of us. For to be a Christian is, at its very heart, to be a follower of Jesus — a disciple, one who walks behind his Master and learns from Him and patterns his life upon Him. But Jesus never hid the cost of this following. "If anyone desires to come after Me," He said plainly, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me." To follow Christ means to say no to the rule of self, and to take His way rather than our own, whatever it may cost us — even, if He asks it, the way of suffering. This is not a grim or crushing demand, but the doorway into true life; for Jesus went on to promise that whoever loses his life for His sake will truly find it. To follow Him is to lose a lesser life and gain a far greater one.

3.Christ Our Example

What does it mean, in practice, to follow Jesus? At its heart it means to take Him as our great example, and to seek to become like Him. The apostle Peter says it directly: Christ suffered for us, "leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps." And John writes that "he who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked." The Christian life, then, is nothing less than the lifelong project of being made like Jesus Christ — of coming to think as He thought, to love as He loved, to live as He lived. He is the one perfect human life that has ever been lived, the true pattern of what a person was always meant to be; and God's great purpose for every one of His children is that we should be conformed to the image of His Son. This does not mean a wooden copying of the outward details of first-century life. It means the taking of Christ's own character, His own spirit, His own way of being, and letting it be formed in us. To follow Jesus is to keep His life ever before us, saying, in each thing, "How would my Master act here? What would please Him? What is His way?" — and then, by His help, to walk that way.

4.The Character We Follow: Humility and Love

When we look closely at the character of Christ that we are called to imitate, two features shine out above all the rest. The first is His humility. Though He was God, He did not grasp at honor or glory; He took the lowest place, the form of a servant. On the last night, He knelt down and washed the dirty feet of His own disciples — a task fit for the humblest slave — and told them He had given them an example to follow. "Learn from Me," He said, "for I am gentle and lowly in heart." The follower of Jesus is called to that same lowliness: to serve rather than to be served, to seek the lowest place rather than the highest. The second feature is His love. Jesus loved to the very end, and gave Himself entirely for others. And He made this the mark of His true disciples: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you." To follow Christ is, above all, to love — to love God with our whole hearts, and to love our neighbors, and even our enemies, with the same self-giving love that He poured out upon us. Humility and love: these, more than anything, are the shape of a life that is following Jesus.

5.His Prayer, Obedience, and Grace Under Suffering

There is more of His example to follow. Jesus was a man of prayer. Again and again the Gospels show Him slipping away from the crowds, rising long before dawn, spending whole nights alone with His Father; He lived in constant, dependent communion with God, and He teaches us to do the same. Jesus was also perfectly obedient. He came, He said, not to do His own will, but the will of the One who sent Him; and in the garden, facing the horror of the cross, He surrendered Himself with the words, "not My will, but Yours, be done." He was obedient all the way to death, even the death of the cross. And Jesus showed us how to bear suffering and wrong. When He was reviled, He did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but entrusted Himself to God; and from the cross itself, He prayed for the very men who were killing Him: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do." Here is a pattern of endurance and forgiveness that speaks with special power to all who must suffer for His name. To follow Christ is to learn from Him this life of prayer, of glad obedience to the Father, and of patient, forgiving grace under every trial.

6.Not Talk but Life

But we must guard against a subtle danger here: the danger of admiring Christ's example, and even discussing it learnedly, without ever actually following it. Long ago, Thomas à Kempis, in his beloved little book on the imitation of Christ, put his finger on exactly this. What good does it do, he asked, to be able to discourse profoundly on deep doctrines, if we lack the humility that would make us pleasing to God? He would rather feel true sorrow for sin, he said, than be able to define it. It is a searching word. It is possible to study the life of Christ, to admire His character, and to speak beautifully about Him — and yet never to follow Him in the one place that matters, which is our own daily life. The imitation of Christ is not first a matter of the tongue or even of the head, but of the heart and the will and the feet. It is lived, not merely learned. And so the true question that this whole course must finally leave with us is not, "How much do I know about Jesus?" but rather, "Am I actually following Him?" — in my humility, in my love, in my obedience, in the ordinary conduct of my life. May we be those who not only speak of Christ, but walk after Him.

7.How We Follow: By Grace and the Spirit

Now we come to a truth without which everything else would crush us. When we set the perfect life of Christ before us and are told to follow it, we may well feel it is hopelessly beyond us — and in our own strength, it is. So we must be very clear about how we follow. We do not follow Christ by gritting our teeth and trying, in our own power, to copy Him. Nor do we follow Him in order to earn God's favor or to win our salvation — for that was already won for us at the cross, and is received as a free gift. Rather, we follow Him out of a salvation we have already been given: as those who are already forgiven, already loved, already accepted in Christ, we now follow Him out of sheer gratitude and love, and never to earn what is already ours. And — this is the heart of it — we follow by His own power at work within us. The risen Christ lives in His people by His Spirit, and it is He who enables us to walk in His steps. "It is no longer I who live," Paul could say, "but Christ lives in me." We do not follow Christ alone, or by our own strength; we follow Him by His grace, and by the Spirit He puts within us. This is a great relief, and the secret of the whole thing.

8.Growing Into His Likeness

And we must be gentle and patient with ourselves as we follow, for growth into the likeness of Christ is the slow work of a lifetime, not the achievement of a day. We are, the Scripture says, "being transformed into the same image from glory to glory" — a gradual change, step by step, degree by degree, as the Spirit works in us. We shall not reach perfection in this life, and we shall stumble along the way, often and painfully. But when we fall, we are not to sink into despair or bitter self-reproach, as though all were lost; we are simply to turn again to Christ, receive afresh His forgiveness, and rise up and go on. God is deeply patient with His children, and He is not finished with any of us yet. Little by little, the follower of Jesus really is changed — growing in humility, in love, in likeness to the Master. And there is a glorious end in view. "We know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." One day, every true follower of Christ will be made perfectly and forever like Him. Until then, we press on, by grace, growing slowly into the likeness of the One we love.

9.Follow Him

So we come to the end of our study of the life of Christ. We have seen who He is — truly God and truly man, the eternal Son come among us. We have seen what He did — the kingdom He proclaimed, the works He performed, the cross on which He died for our sins, the tomb from which He rose in triumph. And now we hear His call, as fresh and as personal as when it first rang out beside the Sea of Galilee: "Follow Me." Do not let this study end merely as knowledge stored in the mind. Let it end where it was always meant to end — in a life laid down at His feet. Take Him as your Savior, resting wholly on His finished work; and take Him, at the same time, as your Lord, resolving, by His grace, to follow Him all your days. Deny yourself; take up your cross; walk in His steps of humility and love and obedience; lean not on your own strength but on His Spirit within you; and return quickly to His grace whenever you fall. He Himself will walk with you, and He Himself will change you, until at last you see His face and are made wholly like Him. There is no better life than this, and no better Master. So hear Him, and answer Him, and follow Him — today, and to the end.

10.Taking It to Heart