All right, well, it's good to be with you again, lesson 28. This lesson is entitled, Who Is Jesus Christ? And it is a very important lesson to follow up. The last lesson, which was, what are the gospels?
Is how we titled it, are the gospels credible? Are they historical? Are they reliable? And I think we did a good job following Dr.
Brant Petrie's lead on that wonderful book that he wrote, the case for Jesus, establishing that the gospels are credible, they are historical. And they are depicting Jesus, or at least they're writing the gospels according to the ancient methods of ancient historical biography. So they are historical biographies of this man Jesus. And now in this lesson, lesson 28, we want to understand who is Jesus Christ.
That is the whole question. And it's fundamentally important. I was talking with a dear family member recently, and the whole question came straight to this point. Interestingly enough, as I'm preparing this lesson for you, it came up in my impersonal conversation with families.
Everything revolves around the question of who Jesus Christ is. We absolutely must make a decision about his identity, his life, his words, his deeds compel us to look at him and say, who is he? And in fact, Jesus, very famously, I mean, many pastors, priests, homily, sermons come to Matthew chapter 16, very famously, applying it to ourselves, so that we can say, OK, well, Jesus is speaking to us. And I have here in your notes, Matthew 16, 13 through 16, what Jesus says to his disciples, to his apostles.
And he said, well, Matthew goes on. He says, when Jesus came to the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the Son of Man is? And they say, some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, others Jeremiah, are one of the prophets. And he said to them, but who do you say that I am?
And Simon Peter answered, you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Now this is a really good question. It's applicable to every person, of every generation, of every continent, everywhere. Jesus says, who do people say that the Son of Man is?
And so we've got, of course, social media, and magazines, and books, and pundits, and all kinds of people saying, oh, he's a good teacher, he's a moral guy, he's a religious leader, whoever they think he is, there are a lot of opinions out there about who Jesus is. But then the question comes, and it's directed at us. So when Jesus says, but you, who do you say that I am? Is it if Jesus is speaking directly to me, directly to you, and directly to every single living person?
Who do you say that I am? And if we have the grace of God, like all the grace is given to every person to accept Jesus, that's another topic for another time. If we cooperate with that grace, we can say, as Peter says, you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. And the church following Peter has always made that profession of faith, that Jesus is divine.
He is the divine Messiah, the Son of the living God, through the incarnation, the second person of the Trinity becoming man. And there's this great quote from the Catechism that makes this statement, of course, the Creed, as the greatest profession of faith, obviously. But I like this paragraph number, Catechism 423, here in your notes, it says, we believe in confessed that Jesus of Nazareth, born a Jew of a daughter of Israel at Bethlehem, at the time of King Herod the Great and the Emperor Caesar Augustus, a carpenter by trade, who died crucified in Jerusalem under the Prokary Pontus Pilate during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, is the eternal Son of God made man. He came from God, descended from heaven, and came in the flesh.
Now why I really like this is because, in continuity with the last lecture, Christianity is a historical religion. It's not like Jesus just is some character invented out of thin air, like, I don't know, Hermes and Zeus and some of the Greek and Roman myths, and he's from Mount Olympus somewhere, and we have no context, historical context at all. That's not true. Jesus was born in a specific time, in a specific place.
Under specific rulers during the time, okay, he had a trade, a profession, he was a carpenter. He is a historical person. He's not fantasy. And so the incarnation burst through history in order to change all of our lives.
And that's what we believe. And Saint Paul makes a profession of faith to a certain extent as well. He makes many of them throughout his epistles, but Galatians 4-4 is very famous. He says, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.
So as I was saying, Christianity is historical. And Paul is saying on that point, when the fullness of time had come, throughout all salvation history, we've been leading towards this point, and you know, we've been together UNI this whole time, for many, many hours now, talking about salvation history, well, now the fullness of time has come. Jesus is born of a woman, born under the law, why? So that we might receive adoption as children, so that we would be saved, so that our spiritual exile that Adam brought about through his disobedience, that would be reversed.
And we can have that divine affiliation, that sonship once again, that's why Jesus came. So it's very, very exciting. The church has always made this proclamation, to Creed, as I mentioned a moment ago. And so now our lives can be transformed.
So in fact, in your notes here, following Peter Creif, I mentioned his book before in the last lecture, a handbook of Catholic apologetics. In his chapter, discussing the divinity of Jesus Christ, he gives five reasons why this question is so fundamentally important, the question of who is Jesus Christ. Is he truly the divine son of God? As Peter says, as the church says.
So five reasons, number one, there's no other religion that claims that God became incarnate in this particular way. Yes, there are some stories amongst the Romans and the Greeks of maybe Zeus coming down to take a human form, but not the incarnation that God took on our humanity to redeem our humanity. That is unique, no other religion claims that. And so therefore, two, number two, it's the capstone and guarantee of all of our Christian beliefs.
If you deny that Jesus is divine, well, then guess what flies out the window? The virgin birth, all of his miracles, the resurrection from the dead, and everything else from the virgin birth, the resurrection, everything in between, it all flies out the window. And that my friends is exactly why the modernist, biblical scholars, unbelieving biblical scholars, and not just them, but they want to undermine the divinity of Jesus. They want to, as I spent tons of time in the last lecture, sharing some of their arguments of how they tried to undermine the credibility of the gospels, I don't want to get into that again.
But this is why, because if you just hack and be claimed that he is divine, everything else falls to pieces. However, if it is true, number three, if it is true, the incarnation is the most important event in all of human history. It absolutely is. Think about it.
God comes and becomes a man. Think comes and takes our humanity to redeem us. It's insane. It's absolutely mind-blowing.
It is the most important event of all history. And that's why we do have history divided before Christ and in the year of our Lord, BC, even in the 80s, on the gominy. But even the secularists, they want to change that to the common era and before the common era, which is totally ridiculous and arbitrary, because what makes the era common? It's still Jesus Christ for goodness sakes, right?
So anyways, the point is even time as we know it's 2021, as I'm recording this right now, in the year of our Lord, right? Since our Lord's incarnations. It is the most important event, the central event in all of human history. If the number four, if true, then our lives can be redeemed and transformed forever.
And that's a powerful thing. If you're willing to accept the fact that your life does need to be transformed, if you're willing to accept the fact that you are created for more, if you want to accept a piece that surpasses all understanding of profound happiness and blessedness, we'll talk about the Beatitudes a couple lectures from now. But if you do want your life to be transformed and elevated beyond just kind of the humdrum of daily life, the good, the bad, and the ugly of daily life, your life can be transformed forever and redeemed for eternity, okay? Not just here and now, like not just today in this hour, but for eternity.
And then finally, number five, if the divinity of Christ is true, then we owe him our complete obedience and love. And here's where the problems ensue. If you're not willing to accept his claims and submit to him in loving obedience, this is not Islam. I mean, a lot is a master, but God, the Christian, the Judeo-Christian God is father, right?
So if Jesus is the son of God, we do owe him our obedience and love. That's the virtue of religion. We must worship him, okay? And I'm gonna show you a little bit later on how we accept worship from human beings because he is of course God.
But we owe him that. We must repent of our sins. It requires a total life change and a commitment to Jesus. And this is the problem because unbelieving modernist secularists, I mean, you fill in the blank, you're rejecting Christ, that's the difficulty.
You don't wanna repent. They say, I don't wanna repent. I don't wanna give up my favorite little sin. And the fact of the matter is, we all have our little sins, right?
St. Augustine famously said, and this is a safe example because it's a saint, St. Augustine, one of the greatest saints in the church. He famously said, Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.
Make me chaste, I want that chastity, but not yet because he loved that sexual immorality. He was a slave to it. And that's so true for all of us. Whether it's a big sin, it's something that is a mortal sin that actually cuts the life of the Trinity away from our souls.
God forbid, hopefully, God, you know, we cooperate with grace and we get beyond that. But even some of the smaller sins, those small little addictions that we might have, maybe here's a safe example, screens. More and more people today are addicted to their screens. So as the iPhone, the iPad, the computer, whatever it might be, it's like, I don't wanna give this up, you know, TV show through the screen.
You fill in the blank, you fill in the blank, whatever it might be. The problem is we must repent of those things. We must give them up for love of God. Okay?
And if Jesus is truly divine, then he can free us from those addictions. And it allow us to lovingly obey him and serve him. And then of course receive eternal blessedness as a result. So many reasons why this is important.
We do need to spend some time working now in this lecture. We spent some time working on the question of the gospel's last lecture. Now it's who is Jesus Christ. Then once we determine, like, okay, yeah, Jesus is clearly claimed to be the son of God.
Awesome, we're good to go. Now let's dive in, starting next lecture with the infancy narratives and introduction of course, and begin to meditate on the mysteries of our Lord's life. Okay? So that's the tactic, the strategy of what we're doing here.
So the question now is, okay, but did Jesus really God, that is the question here. So Jesus Christ, is he really God? Now, C.S. Lewis, very, very famous Christian apologist, Christian writer in Britain in the 20th century, most people know about him.
He famously introduced the trilimma, or he introduced the famous, I should say trilimma, in his classic book, Muir Christianity. Everybody should read that book. It's a great little introduction defending the, well, the perennial value and truthfulness, the veracity of Christianity and of Jesus. So introduced as trilimma, God or Jesus is either Lord, he's a liar or he's a lunatic.
Okay? Famously introduced by C.S. Lewis. However, others have noted that there are other options than just those three.
Grant Petrie spent a lot of time focusing on a fourth option in his book, The Case for Jesus, that I want every single person to go by and read. And that was, he is a legend. So he wanted to keep the L pattern right. So Lord, liar, lunatic and legend.
But then also Peter Creef introduces a fifth one, which is hilarious, I'll share it with you in this lecture, Guru. So really there are five possibilities to Jesus' identity. He's either Lord, or he's a liar, or he's a lunatic, or a Guru, or just a myth, or as Peter calls it, legend, middle legend. Okay, so let's look at these.