What Do We Do About the Claims of Jesus?

This meme was shared on Facebook by Youth With a Mission, an organization of young people looking to tell the world about salvation and the gift of eternal life available to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I shared it, not only because I like the quote, although I’ve never heard of Timothy Keeler before, but also because it reminded me of something called the trilemma, a concept first proposed by British author C.S. Lewis.

Lewis was an atheist who, when faced with the facts, realized that intellectual integrity caused him to convert to Christianity. He was a friend of JRR Tolkien of “Lord of the Rings” fame and a member of an Oxford University-based group of authors known as the Inklings.

Like a dilemma, a trilemma is a problem. It differs from a dilemma in that, instead of there being two options form which to choose, there are three. More on that later.

The trilemma deals with who Jesus Christ is. Lewis believed that there were three options:

Jesus was insane like anyone else who claims to be God.
Jesus was evil liar who gave false hope to many.
Jesus was who He said He was, the Son of God and the second member of the Holy Trinity.

Those who doubt that Jesus was true God and true man often claim that He was a good man, a great teacher. However, Jesus claimed to be God. Sane people do not claim to be God unless they truly are. If Jesus was insane, the claim that He was a good teacher disappears.

Likewise, if Jesus knew He really wasn’t God but said that He was and that He could free His followers from the eternal death which is the result of their sins, He was truly evil and not the good man the skeptics claimed Him to be.

Having eliminated the two impossible options, as Sherlock Holmes liked to say, means that the remaining option, regardless of how unlikely it may seem to us, to be the truth. Jesus Christ is truly God who took on human form so that He might be tempted as we are, be crucified to pay the debt for our sins and rise again.

Lewis did miss a fourth option. Might it not be that Jesus never actually made the claim to be God but the idea was a fabrication of His followers. It seems unlikely that a small band of Galilean peasants could fabricate this mythology. Even more unlikely is that eleven of the twelve would willingly be painfully martyred for a hoax. (John died a natural death but was also boiled alive in oil and divinely protected.)

In addition, if Jesus had not risen from the dead, it would have been very easy to produce the body. Everyone knew where He had been buried. All they had to do was go to the grave. The movement would have disintegrated.

Jesus Christ is exactly who He said He was. He offers us escape from eternal damnation in Hell to all who will repent and be baptized (Acts 2:38). He is our only hope and His gift is free. (That’s what they call grace.)

This is not just buying fire insurance, however. You can’t just pray a prayer and then return to a worldly, sinful lifestyle. The Christian life is a continual process of focusing on Jesus and confessing your sin when you fall away (1 John 1:9). If you sin, don’t lose hope. Confess. That means being truly sorry for your sin and honestly seek to stop doing it, even if it’s the 10,000th time you’ve committed it.

It may seem like a lot but the joy that accompanies it is unlimited.

The image is in the public domain.

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