Sunday, May 4, 2008

Jesus Christ and His Claim to be God

Jesus Christ is actually not an unfamiliar Person for many people around the world who live today. In fact, Jesus is so popular that we cannot imagine of someone yelling “Clinton!” or “Bush!” whenever he hit his thumb with a hammer mistakenly. Instead, they will shout “Jesus! That’s hurt!!”

But pretty sadly to know that most of people who say His name don’t actually know who He is. Most of people around the world may have heard about His claim as being God the Almighty but only a few parts of people will believe or pay attention on His unique claim.

Martin R De Haan II, a dedicated author from RBC Ministries, once declared: “No one would argue the identity of people like Lincoln, Michelangelo or Aristotle. They wear history-book labels that are indisputable. But the man called Jesus is different. If you were to run a man on the street survey about Him, you would likely get as many different responses as you would get odd looks. Jesus isn’t known for the things that usually make people famous. He wasn’t into politics, business, or publishing. His expertise was in what normally call religion – He knew a lot about God. In fact, He claimed to be God. But who is He?”

Martin has given an accurate observation upon the issue regarding Jesus. Jesus is well known but only a few seem really knows Him. In other words, people like to know Jesus according to what they think about Him, not according to what Jesus has claimed about Himself. They don’t care on what He’s been saying. They only care about what their mind is telling them.

Some people would say that Jesus is a man who achieved great things. With this paradigm they argue that we too may achieve things just like Jesus did. People in this group will focus their life on moral teaching. The hope if they are good enough while living in this world or if they are doing exactly what their religion has told them to do they will in the end achieve an enlightenment.

The others would say “Jesus is god, but not the Almighty God. Jesus is only a created individual” People from this group acknowledge God as a Person but they refuse Jesus as God who has become Man.

The other groups of people believe that Jesus is a man no better than we are. Sun Myung Moon from Unification Church once stated: “It is plain that Jesus is not God Himself.” The followers of Moon’s teaching say that Jesus’ work was a failure.

Those who believe in atheism have a very low point of view of Jesus. Bertrand Russell, a famous apologist of the atheistic viewpoint, said, “I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stand quite as high as some other people known to history.”

Some other groups of people will agree that Jesus is a great moral teacher. Moslem people recognize Jesus as a messenger of Allah. Even though they believe that Jesus was sinless prophet, they also declared that Jesus never achieved the greatness of the prophet Muhammad.

Among these many different argumentations about who Jesus is, we can sure of one thing: they cannot be right all together. Someone must be wrong with their point of view.

The one who say Jesus is God is substantially different with those who say Jesus is not God. Those who believe that Jesus is just an ordinary human just like we are; is substantially different with those who think that Jesus is a sinless messenger from Allah.