Jesus Christ

I am FOR Jesus Christ. The whole “Conspiracy against,” thing is to get you here. Not that there isn’t a plot against Jesus and His teachings. There are plans and attacks on Jesus, both premeditated and random.

When I say, “Jesus Christ,” I mean, Jesus, the Messiah. It’s not just Jesus. “Yeshua,” the Hebrew word for Jesus, means, "Yahweh is salvation." Yet, many people may be named, Jesus, or Yeshua. Moses’ successor had the same name, Joshua, or Yeshua. If you speak Spanish you well know that there are a lot of latins named after the Savior.

So the Jesus that John Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar are talking about is not Jesus Christ. Some, conscious of this distinction, will refer to Him as “Jesus of Nazareth,” not wanting to ascribe to Him either divinity or the ability to redeem and save mankind. I find it curious that this is just what the Pharisees and Sadducees did, calling him “Nazarene,” or “Galilean,” and denying His messianic claim. Today’s skeptics miss the point of Jesus’ visit to our planet in the same way. "Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?" I John 2:22.

When Brian McLaren and many of the Emergent Church folks talk about a Jesus who wants us to live for this world, focusing on making God’s kingdom here, they are making Jesus not the Christ, but demeaning Him to a mere teacher/philosopher/example. The “Christness” or Messianic about Jesus is the centrality of His substitution for us in His death on the cross. The central fact of Him dying for our sins and then raising to life in both body and spirit makes Him the Christ, the Son of God, God Himself.

When Elaine Pagels elevates the Gnostic Gospels to a status parallel to that of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, she is casting doubt on who Jesus really is. She is trying to call into question the testimony of those who touched, handled and walked with Jesus the Messiah.

When critics mock those who believe in a literal six day creation of the world by a personal God, they undermine the foundation of the truth of a Creator God. By denying a Creator, they think to absolve themselves from any moral responsibility to their Maker, while at the same time relegating Jesus to being the descendant of monkeys, which themselves evolved from a mysterious primordial mix of chemicals. I am a man of faith, but I don’t have great enough faith to believe that life spontaneously generated from non-life at random. Louis Pasteur might back me up on that.