| | Last night, on our way down to spend Christmas Eve with our dad, my sister Bekah and I listened to Tim Keller talk about the truly unique and powerful way that Jesus impacted history. A lot of people have made a deep mark on history, he said, and a lot of people have claimed to be God. But the only person who fits in both of those categories is Jesus.
Today on the website of the Arab language news service, Al Jazeera, they had these photos of "Christmas Worldwide." As I was looking through the photos, I couldn't help thinking back to that talk. What other person in all of history has had this kind of influence? 2000 years later, we celebrate this man who was a nobody for thirty years, preached and taught for three years, and then died. Why? Contrary to what we would have expected, we have more evidence for Jesus' existence than we have for Nero's, or Julias Caesar's, or Plato's. Their positions and status seemed to indicate that they were the ones who would leave a bigger mark on history, but no one anywhere celebrates their birth. What's the explanation?
Christians say he was God. Either Jesus was God--God in human form, living among men--or he wasn't. We know (from sources outside of the Bible, even from sources antagonistic to Christianity) that most of the people who were closest to him, who lived with him, saw him every day died because they said he was God. If anyone knows our worst sides, it's our families, our roommates, our best friends--the people closest to us. The people closest to Jesus died calling him God. Today, people all over the world say the same thing. The fact that they say anything about someone who should, by all human reasoning, be completely forgotten by now, means something. Jesus' life in first-century Palestine and his legacy all over the world today mean something.
Everyone who knows what Jesus said should have strong opinions about him. There's no way to know what he said, to really understand it, and be ambivalent about him.
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| | Posted 12/26/2007 4:24 AM - 63 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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