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After six years given to the impartial investigation of Christianity as to its truth or falsity, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that Jesus Christ is the Messiah of the Jews, the Savior of the world, and my personal Savior.”

These were the words of Lew Wallace, Governor of New Mexico, over a century ago. 1880 He had started out to write a book against Jesus Christ and in the process was converted to Christianity. He told a friend how it happened:

I had always been an agnostic and denied Christianity. Robert C. Ingersoll, a famous agnostic, was one of my most intimate friends. He once suggested, “See here, Wallace, you are a learned man and a thinker. Why don’t you gather material and write a book to prove the falsity concerning Jesus Christ, that no such man has ever lived, much less the author of the teachings found in the New Testament. Such a book would make you famous. It would be a masterpiece, and a way of putting an end to the foolishness about the so-called Christ.”

The thought made a deep impression on me, and we discussed the possibility of such a book. I went to Indianapolis, my home, and told my wife what I intended. She was a member of the Methodist Church and naturally did not like my plan. But I decided to do it and began to collect material in libraries here and in the Old World. I gathered everything over that period in which Jesus Christ, according to legend, should have lived.

Several years were spent in this work. I had written nearly four chapters when it became clear to me that Jesus Christ was just as real a personality as Socrates, Plato, or Caesar. The conviction became a certainty. I knew that Jesus Christ had lived because of the facts connected with the period in which he lived.

I was in an uncomfortable position. I had begun to write a book to prove that Jesus Christ had never lived on earth. Now I was face-to-face with the fact that he was just as historic a personage as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Virgil, Dante, and a host of other men who had lived in olden days. I asked myself candidly, “If he was a real person (and there was no doubt), was he not then also the Son of God and the Savior of the world?” Gradually the consciousness grew that, since Jesus Christ was a real person, he probably was the one he claimed to be.

I fell on my knees to pray for the first time in my life, and I asked God to reveal himself to me, forgive my sins, and help me to become a follower of Christ. Towards morning the light broke into my soul. I went into my bedroom, woke my wife, and told her that I had received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

“O Lew,” she said, “I have prayed for this ever since you told me of your purpose to write this book, that you would find him while you wrote it!”

Lew Wallace did write a very famous book. It was a masterpiece and the crowning glory of his life’s work. He changed the book he was originally writing and used all his research to write another book.

Now every time I watch the epic film made from that book and see Charlton Heston racing those four magnificent white horses in that amazing chariot race, I wonder how many who have seen Ben Hur, with its moving references to Jesus, know it was written by a man who wanted to disprove that Jesus ever existed, and instead became convinced that he was the greatest man who ever lived!

“What are we to make of Christ?”

“There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.

The things He says are very different from what any other teachers has said. Others say, “This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,” but He says, “I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.” He says, “No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined.

The things He says are very different from what any other teachers has said. Others say, “This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,” but He says, “I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.” He says, “No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined.

On the one side clear, definite moral teaching. On the other, claims which, if not true, are those of a megalomaniac, compared with whom Hitler was the most sane and humble of men. There is no half-way house and there is no parallel in other religions.

If you had gone to Buddha and asked him “Are you the son of Bramah?” he would have said, “My son, you are still in the vale of illusion.” If you had gone to Socrates and asked, “Are you Zeus?” he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, “Are you Allah?” he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, “Are you Heaven?” I think he would have probably replied, “Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste.”

The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man.

If you think you are a poached egg, when you are looking for a piece of toast to suit you, you may be sane, but if you think you are God, there is no chance for you. We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects—Hatred—Terror—Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.” C. S. Lewis

Was the primitive first NT church correct to view Jesus as God?

The best answer to this question, I believe, lies in the recognition that the NT documents are not only a record of the church’s thought about Christ, but also and primarily revelation from God.

The main reason that most Christians have for believing in the incarnation is, of course, that they believe that it has been revealed to them by God”

Jesus grows up as a carpenter in Galilee. Then, when he is thirty or so years old, he begins to teach as a Jewish rabbi. His disciples are all Jews, and they have been taught from childhood that there is only one God and they should worship God alone. They should never worship idols, certainly never worship a mere man. Somehow, during the next three years or so, all these Jewish disciples, and many more people besides, are convinced that Jesus is God and deserves to be worshiped as God. They have known him intimately as a man, have walked and talked and eaten with him; yet, they have come to worship him. That is quite an amazing thing.

Perhaps most amazing of all is that Jesus’ disciples who wrote the New Testament rarely argue the deity of Christ. They didn’t need to, because the whole Christian community agreed that Jesus was God.

The early Christians were often a contentious bunch. They fought and battled over a number of things, some of them central to the gospel. But, so far as we can tell from the New Testament, they never argued with one another about the deity of Christ.

The apostle Paul, defending his apostolic calling, says that he is called to be an apostle not by man but by God and by Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:1, 10, 12). The deity of Christ was itself, evidently, not controversial in the church.

Whose Son Is Christ?

Matthew 22:41–46

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Him, “The Son of David.” He said to them, “Then how does David in the Spirit call him ‘Lord,’ saying, ‘The Lord said to my lord, “Sit at My right hand, until I put Thine enemies beneath Thy feet’? If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” And no one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question.

Jesus’ point was that the title “Son of David” alone was not sufficient for the Messiah, that He is also the Son of God. David would not have addressed a merely human descendent as “Lord.” Jesus was saying, “I am not giving you any new teaching or revelation. You should have been able to figure it out for yourselves, and would have done so if you truly believed Scripture.”

The religious elite of Judaism had never seen that obvious truth, because, like many people today, they did not look to Scripture for truth. When they looked to it at all, it was for the
purpose of trying to shore up their humanly devised religious traditions and personal preferences.

Jesus did not mention the most important conclusion the Pharisees should have made from what He had just said: that He Himself was the divine Messiah, the Son of David and Son of God.

It was unnecessary for Him to do that, because He had been presenting His divine messianic credentials for three years. He had done so many things to prove He was the Son of God that unbelievers had to deny the obvious to conclude anything else.

The signs and miracles recorded in the gospels are but a part of the countless others than He performed. “Many other signs therefore Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book,” John says; “but these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:30–31; 21:25).

Although Jesus was correcting the Pharisees’ incomplete concept of who He was, He also seems to have been giving them still another invitation to believe in Him.

He was even “tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). He was the Son of Man in every way. That He was specifically the Son of David was obvious and provable by the Temple records. And that He was the divine Son of God was obvious from the miracles that He performed without number for everyone to see.

The most important question in the world is, “Who is Jesus Christ?”

In his classic apologetics work Protestant Christian Evidences, Bernard Ramm gives a series of incisive answers to the question he himself propounds:

“If God became incarnate, what kind of man would He be?”

We would expect Him to be sinless; we would expect him to be holy; we would expect His words to be the greatest words ever spoken; we would expect Him to exert a profound power over human personality; we would expect Him to perform supernatural doings; and we would expect Him to manifest the love of God. Of all human beings who have ever lived, Jesus Christ alone met all of those criteria.

The Pharisees and other religious leaders there that day were dumbfounded but not convinced, silenced but not convicted, humiliated but not humbled, reluctantly impressed but still unbelieving. Doubtlessly they were thinking that they had been intimidated and embarrassed
for the last time by the uneducated, nonordained, and in their minds unorthodox rabbi from Nazareth.

Self-righteous religion has always been and will always be the greatest enemy of the gospel. Secularism generally is indifferent, whereas human religion invariably is hostile.

The son of David

After silencing the Jewish leaders, Jesus in turn asks them a question. His purpose is not to win a debate but to elicit from them what the Scriptures themselves teach about the Messiah, thus helping people to recognize who he really is.

The historical setting is the temple courts, where crowds and leaders mingled together and alternately listened to the teacher from Nazareth and fired questions at him (21:23–23:36).

Jesus’ question (v. 41) focuses on the real issue, Christology, not resurrection or taxes, that turned the authorities into his enemies. The Messiah’s identity according to the Scriptures must be determined. One way to do that is to ask whose son he is. The Pharisees gave the accepted reply: “The son of David” based on passages like 2 Samuel 7:13–14; Isaiah 11:1, 10; Jeremiah 23:5

Their view, though not wrong, is too simple because, as Jesus points out, David called the Messiah his Lord (v. 43). How then could Messiah be David’s son? The force of Jesus’ argument depends on his use of Psalm 110, the most frequently quoted OT chapter in the NT.

The Davidic authorship of the psalm, affirmed by the psalm’s superscription, is not only assumed by Jesus but is essential to his argument. If the psalm was written by anyone else, then David did not call Messiah his Lord. The phrase “speaking by the Spirit” not only assumes that all Scripture is Spirit-inspired but here reinforces the truth of what David said so it may be integrated into the beliefs of the hearers (“and the Scripture cannot be broken,” John 10:35).

Jesus question (Mt 22:45) is not a denial of Messiah’s Davidic sonship but a demand for recognizing how Scripture itself teaches that Messiah is more than David’s son.

Many who were silenced were not saved; so Jesus’ enemies went underground for a short time before the Crucifixion. Yet even their silence was a tribute. The teacher who never attended the right schools (John 7:15–18) confounds the greatest theologians in the land. And if his question (Mt 22:45) was unanswerable at this time, a young Pharisee, who may have been in Jerusalem at the time, was to answer it in due course (Rom 1:1–4; 9:5).

Romans 1:1 Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, 2which he promised afore through his prophets in the holy scriptures, 3concerning his Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, 4who was declared to be the Son of
God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead; even Jesus Christ our Lord

The world has never lacked for ideas and opinions about who was Jesus?

Certain Pharisees in Jesus’ own day accused Him of casting “out demons only by Beelzebul the ruler of the demons” (Matt. 12:24). A second-century A.D. comment in the Talmud said Jesus practiced magic and led Israel astray.

Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome from A.D. 361–363, declared, “Jesus has now been celebrated about three hundred years; having done nothing in his lifetime worthy of fame, unless anyone thinks it a very great work to heal lame and blind people and exorcise demoniacs in villages of Bethsaida and Bethany” (quoted by Cyril, a fifth-century bishop of Alexandria, in Contra Julian, lib. vi., p. 191).

The radical French philosopher Rousseau wrote, “When Plato describes his imaginary righteous man loaded with all the punishments of guilt, yet meriting the highest rewards of virtue, he describes exactly the character of Jesus Christ.… Napoleon said, “I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ was not a man.”

The English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill said Jesus was “the pattern of perfection for humanity,”

English novelist H. G. Wells wrote, “When I was asked which single individual has left the most permanent impression on the world, the manner of the questioner almost carried the implication that it was Jesus of Nazareth. I agreed.… Jesus stands first.”

As those testimonies give evidence, many people who do not trust in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior still rank Him as the highest model of humanity. But beneath most such compliments is the incipient, if not specific, denial that He was anything more than a man.

Christianity has always found its most violent detractors and enemies in those who deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. Many of those detractors presume to go under the name of Christian.

The battle lines of biblical Christianity are inevitably drawn at the issue of Jesus’ divinity.

That is the one doctrine apart from which all others are meaningless, because if He were not divine He could not be the Savior of the world, and men would have no way of becoming reconciled to God.

Does God have a Son?

In many, many religions, sonship language means different things. Hindus will say, “I believe Jesus is the Son of God. On the other hand, we’re all sons of God. We all belong to the same
sort of relationship with the divine.” At the street level, many Muslims think what Christians think by the Trinity is God had an affair with Mary and produced Jesus.

Jesus the Son of God.

In John 5. Jesus has just healed somebody. He overcomes the myths connected with the pool of water and so on, and he actually heals a paralytic. It’s a pretty spectacular miracle, but he does it on a Sabbath. This generates a certain kind of controversy. In the exchange, we are then told four things of what it means to confess that Jesus is the Son of God.

The Son insists he has the right to do whatever the Father does.

John5:16: “So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.’

They say, “You’re breaking the Sabbath rule. you were healing on the Sabbath day.

Jesus said, You’re twisting the Sabbath rules. I mean, the Sabbath rules are given to prohibit work that earns money and makes a living. I’m not a medical doctor earning a few pesos on the side. That’s not what I’m doing. I did a miracle. This is the outbreaking of God’s work to change somebody’s life. It’s not as if I’m breaking a whole lot of Sabbath laws.”

He could have answered just in terms of what is legitimate and what is illegitimate from the Old Testament Scriptures that talk about the Sabbath. Instead of saying their interpretation of the law is wrong, he says, “My Father works. He works to this very day, and I’m working too.”

It might help to understand that there was actually a debate going on in Jewish circles in the first century. The question was this. Does God obey the law he gave?

“Yes, but God upholds all things by his powerful Word. He is in control of the whole universe. If he sort of takes a day off, then who is in charge of the universe? Doesn’t the whole thing collapse?

They had broken down the Sabbath law into 39 categories of prohibited work.

“What’s the relationship between God and his law?”

Jesus cuts through it, because what he is saying in effect is, “Whatever God has the right to do, so do I.” That’s no longer a question of dos and don’ts about law. He is now claiming to have whatever the prerogatives are that God has.

The whole thing now turns on his identity.

After all, Jews could sometimes refer to God as their Father. They did. They never did so in a personal way where an individual Jew, said, “God is my Father.” But collectively, they regularly
referred to God as their Father. God s aid it Exodus 4:22 Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the LORD: “Israel is My son, My firstborn.

Collectively, they saw God as their Father, but none of them would have said, “Therefore, because God is our Father, whatever God does, we can do too.” But here’s Jesus coming along and saying exactly that.

John 5:18, “For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath ,a nasty offense, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”

It sounded blasphemous to them, because now it sounded as if somehow Jesus was making himself equal with God.

John 8:58 Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, who had died 2,000 years earlier, I am, He was taking the very name God uses on his own lips. “Do you want to know who I am? I define myself. I am what I am.”

Then when he is talking to his disciples just before he is going to crucifixion, he says to one of them, John 14:9 “Have I been with you such a long time, Philip, and yet you haven’t known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

John 20:28 “My Lord and my God.”

It is a mystery to us, but, Jesus is God.