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JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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296<br />

"This is my Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased."<br />

(Mt 3:17; 17:12; Mk 9:2)<br />

--God the Father<br />

Is it any wonder that Jesus challenged His enemies with the statement,<br />

"Can any of you prove Me guilty of sin?" (Jn 8:46)<br />

Then He adds,<br />

"If I am telling the truth, why don't you believe Me?" (Jn 8:46)<br />

TRUTH<br />

The only other alternative left open is that Jesus spoke the truth—that He is who He<br />

claimed to be--God in the flesh—the God-Man—the Savior and Lord of sinners.<br />

When Thomas, the doubting disciple, asked Jesus how they could know the way since<br />

they didn't know where He was going, Jesus assured him:<br />

"I am the way and the truth and the life" (Jn 14:6).<br />

Then He went on and told him:<br />

"No one comes to the Father except through Me" (v. 6).<br />

Your response to the question of Jesus Christ's identity must not be put aside as an idle<br />

intellectual exercise. You simply cannot put Him on a shelf as a good man or a great moral<br />

teacher. He has not left that option open to you. Either He is who He claimed to be or He isn't.<br />

The evidence, however, is clearly in favor of Jesus as Lord.<br />

Prophetic Anticipation<br />

No person in history has been so universally anticipated as Jesus Christ. Scholars and<br />

leaders throughout the centuries plus the Jewish prophets spoke longingly of a god-Man who<br />

would soon appear.<br />

Socrates urged his disciples to seek for one who would deliver them from fear of death.<br />

Plato, four hundred years before Christ, in one of the most moving paragraphs in Pagan literature<br />

affirmed that when the “perfect man" came, the world would first scourge, then crucify him.<br />

Aeschylus, the greatest of the Greek poets, announced that he knew of one who would one day<br />

dethrone Jupiter.15<br />

Taeitus and Suetonius claimed that it was an ancient tradition that universal sovereignty<br />

would one day rise out of Judea.16

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