JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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The great poets, the great painters, the great orators, and the great architects
also did homage to the supremacy of Christ. It was confessed that He stood
alone, and in Him man found God. . . ."6
The French physicist Pascal commented:
"Jesus Christ said great things simply as though He had not thought them great;
yet so clearly that we see easily what He thought of them. This clearness,
joined to this simplicity, is wonderful."7
The amazing simplicity and charm, and yet the depth, the surgical directness, the
universality, and the ring of truth that was so evident in all His teachings, made a deep mark on
His hearers and elicited the conviction that they were in the presence of a Teacher such as man
had never known before.
No one ever spoke as Jesus spoke!
Jesus' use of the expression, "But I say" (ego de lego) shows that He claimed to set
Himself over against the law of Moses, distinguishing Himself from the rabbis, whose only
authority derived from their exposition of Moses. Jesus was claiming to know the will of God
which underlay the law, and thus spoke authoritatively to give its true meaning or
interpretation. He did not cite any prophetic inspiration. He appeared to be speaking on His
own authority. As British New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall puts it:
"He thus spoke as if he were God."8
No one ever taught like Jesus! To those skeptics who claim that Jesus of Nazareth really
did not say the things attributed to Him I would respond: just as it would take a Shakespeare
(or Francis Bacon whom many believe wrote Shakespeare) to produce the writings of a
Shakespeare, so it would take a Jesus to invent the magisterial words, the authoritative teaching
of Jesus.
John Stuart Mill asks:
"But who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing
the saying ascribed to Jesus, or imagining the life and character revealed in the
Gospels?"9
Only Jesus could speak and live as Jesus did!
All through history philosophers have searched for the truth and speculated about it.
Jesus never did. He possessed the truth; He was the Truth.