The Truth

No. 9 - 09th October 2016

These last couple of weeks I’ve been talking about truth. Now I want to talk about a man who called himself “The Truth”. The embodiment of truth. He was born about 40 years after the death of Julius Caesar and lived in a small Mediterranean province of the Roman Empire. His name was Jesus. The fact that he lived is beyond dispute. He was written about by both Roman and Jewish historians who lived within 20 years of his death. And there is of course a mass of other material written about him, in fact, so much that the early Church very quickly had to decide which documents were authentic and reliable and which were not. Those documents were then gathered together in what we now call the New Testament, and added onto the original Jewish Bible.

The documents describe Jesus as a teacher, a healer and a miracle worker. In fact his fame and popularity were such that the ordinary people decided he was their long awaited Messiah who was going to lead them out from under the tyranny of the Romans. They wanted to make him their King and Jesus would have none of it. He had come to do a specific job and political power was not a part of it. He wanted to show people what God is like.

I’m telling you all of this because I want you to understand what sort of person he was. He had a passionate love for the people, especially the poor. He was deeply concerned about their physical, emotional and spiritual needs and met those needs at every opportunity.

Anyone who has given the matter any thought, agrees that he was a great teacher. But here’s the rub. In the course of his teaching he implied and indeed claimed to have come from God. He claimed to be the Son of God and equal with God. He even called God his Father and said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father”. Now if anyone made those claims today, they would be completely written off as deluded and a charlatan. Yet, everything about him; his attitude, his character, and the miracles he performed, all point to a man who was totally in his right mind and speaking the truth. For my part, I believe him. I find him utterly convincing.