| CFGC Newsletter November 2006 |
DEALING WITH JESUS (1 of 3)
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People worldwide are dealing with Jesus.
They have to. He’s too big to miss.
Those who won’t bow to His lordship often try to deal with Him in one of two ways. The first is to somehow shove Him into the back lots of their lives. Hence the phobic, frantic attempts to remove Jesus – or even any mention of Him – from public discourse. Many are scared spitless of that name. And well they should be.
The second way people are dealing with Jesus is more interesting: they hope to discard His deity so they will only have to deal with His humanity. Some try to come to grips with Him through the pages of The Da Vinci Code. Others suddenly discover a “forgotten Gospel” that was rightly discarded as spurious in the very century it was written. Others work to recast Jesus as just a “regular guy,” as a recent network sitcom tried to do. Still others ponder the “conclusions” from the widely touted Jesus Seminar that maybe He wasn’t the Son of God after all. These are all contorted attempts to give Jesus an extreme makeover more in keeping with our tolerant times. The recent Jesus makeovers are long on conjecture and short on historical fact. Tragically, however, millions who are spiritually thirsty yet scripturally uninformed don’t know where reality ends and baseless claims begin.
These fabrications breed confusion. (What else could be the result when there is no plumb line of absolute truth?) The Jesus of the Bible who requires repentance and demands our allegiance is just too tough for many in our “enlightened” age.
Jesus looms as such a towering presence over history and the present that He is just too colossal to evade. Whether or not people believe in Him, they are compelled to deal with Him. Even those who diss Him can’t fully dismiss Him. He dominates history. So they try to bring Him down to a merely human level. This is an easier playing field from which to deal with Him. The reasoning behind these non-biblical caricatures of Jesus seems to have one thing in common. If skeptics can just bring Jesus down to their level,
• Maybe they don’t have to embrace Him as their Savior, and
• Maybe they don’t have to follow Him as their Lord, and
• Maybe, just maybe, they won’t have to face Him as their Judge.
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