You'll know me in the fullness of my I AM when I have delivered you from Egypt. I AM is not just the eternal God, I AM is not just the ever-present help, I AM is the Savior, Deliverer, Redeemer. That is the nature of His ever-present help. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. From the academic world to the talking heads on TV to pulpits the world over, there is a lot of differing information about Jesus Christ. If a man who lived over 2,000 years ago still commands all that attention, he's obviously important. But not everything said about Christ can be right.
How do you sort out the fact from the fiction? Well, today John MacArthur begins a series designed to help you clear the clutter and get down to what the Bible says about Jesus. John calls his study, Who is Jesus Anyway?
Well John, for starters, let me ask, where did this series come from and what prompted you to teach it? Well, I'm always concerned in the ministry of preaching at Grace Community Church that we have so many nonbelievers that come to the church and that our congregation of Christians know and love nonbelievers and want them to be exposed to the gospel. So from time to time there is an emphasis in our church on a special evangelism effort, encouraging the folks who maybe are just kind of looking into Christianity to come for some special messages, encouraging our people to bring their friends and relatives who need to know and understand the gospel to come. And so we focus on a special emphasis on evangelism.
We did that over four consecutive Sundays. The idea was to lay out the foundational truth about Jesus Christ so that unbelievers could grasp it. And that led us to the little series called Who is Jesus Anyway? because that is the beginning and compelling question. Becoming a Christian starts with recognizing who Jesus is. If you're a skeptic and you don't know or aren't sure, the next few broadcasts are going to be the most important you'll ever hear.
That's right, friend. How you answer the question, Who is Jesus Anyway? has consequences for your eternity. So to help you answer it correctly, here's John to begin his study. Well, the question is, Who is this Jesus Christ?
He is, history will record, the most captivating, the most influential person who ever lived, the most studied, the most examined, the most written about, sung about, discussed person ever. And even after two thousand years of interest in Jesus Christ, there is no waning in the curiosity of people about Him. There is, however, confusion and a lot of deception and doubt. Now confusion or deception or doubt about Jesus might be just a slight inconvenience to human curiosity.
It just might leave a little gap in our understanding of important people in history, except for one very important matter. Jesus claimed that the whole human race is dead in sin and headed for eternal hell. And He is the only Savior...the only Savior. He is the only one who can produce forgiveness, who can bring true peace, joy in this life, eternal blessing in the life to come. He is the only one who can take you to heaven. That takes this individual out of the realm of curiosity and puts him in the critical category, critical in the sense that it's absolutely essential to deal with his claims. These are astonishing claims that he made and they demand an honest look at him because he says our eternal souls are at stake.
Where you spend forever is at issue here and you will live somewhere forever either in heaven or hell. He said, I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to God but by Me. That is either the illusion of a mad man, the powerful deception of a clever liar, or the truth and no other options exist. And when our influential media and our elite educators search for the true Jesus, as they often do, and it shows up in books and it shows up on television, inevitably they fail to find Him. And the Jesus they come up with, the Jesus of Newsweek and the Jesus of Time Magazine and the Jesus of all of the popular television media, the Jesus is some Jesus of their own invention, or the invention of men, or even worse, the invention of demons. And the reason they can look and never find the real Jesus is they never look in the place where He's revealed. They fail to look at the Bible and take the Bible as absolutely unequivocally true.
But it is. The Bible is true. There are many ways that you can validate its truthfulness. You could look at experience and you could see that when people do what God tells them to do in the Scripture, when they embrace Christ, when they come to Him for forgiveness of sin, when He promises peace and joy and blessing and hope and answered prayer, etc., you can look at the lives of people who have done that and their experience will verify the truthfulness of Scripture. Experience is one way to validate the Bible.
Oh, it's not the best way, but it is one way. And the experiences are legitimate and real. Or you could look at science and you could look at the Scripture and view it from a scientific viewpoint and you would find that it's absolutely accurate scientifically even though it was written long before most of the modern scientific discoveries. The Bible teaches clear in the Old Testament that the earth is a sphere, that it's suspended in space, that it rotates on its axis, that long before men had come to the conclusion that the earth was standing in a static state and was a flat disk. The Bible is an amazing book scientifically and it will stand the test of scientific scrutiny.
Its account of creation is the only one that makes real sense. Or you could look at miracles. Here is a book that gives you the record of miracles. And we would expect if God wrote a book, it would contain miracles because God is outside His creation and God is the Creator of His creation and therefore God can act upon it in a supernatural way even as He did initially, any time He wants. I guess in a sense you could look at the world like somebody who likes little railroad trains.
You hook them up, you put them on the track, you turn on a little transformer and you watch them go. But every once in a while you reach down and pick up the engine and put it over here. You can invade the world of your own creation and so can God and that's a miracle. And if the Bible were written by God, you would expect it to be miraculous and yet the curiosity of curiosities is that there are all kinds of people who want to approach the Bible and do everything they can to divest it of its miracles. So you could look at it scientifically, you could look at it experientially, you could look at it miraculously, and you could look at the Bible prophetically and you would find that the Bible makes predictions that come true to the very letter...hundreds of them. And I'm not talking about things that are going to come in the future, I'm talking about things that have already happened. There are at least a hundred prophecies concerning Jesus that are already fulfilled in His life.
There are prophecies, you know, on men and nations, clearly revealed in Scripture. But I think the greatest proof of the supernatural character of the Bible is Christ Himself. When He spoke, people said, we never heard anybody speak like this.
What He did, nobody ever expected Him to do, no other person ever had done it. There is no human explanation for Jesus. He is not a character of human invention.
The best of men's attempts to invent superheroes don't even come close. And the Bible presents Jesus in unambiguous and unmistakable terms and the only way you can go look for Jesus and not find Him is if you don't believe what the Bible says. And if you take it upon yourself not to believe what the Bible says, you have ordained for yourself a pretty significant position in the world. You are a greater authority than Scripture. It always kind of makes me chuckle, and I guess it's part of human nature, but it always makes me chuckle when somebody says, I don't believe the Bible is true.
Really? All these thousands of years, all these millions of people, all these lives, all these prophecies, all these miracles, the glory and the wonder, the staggering reality of Jesus Christ, what He did, who He was, what He said, how He acted, all of that which has been affirmed by millions of people and you're not telling us it's all bogus? By what means did you rise to such a position where you could make yourself the final word on the veracity of Scripture? That's a monumental step to take. And the only thing I could imagine is that you studied it carefully from front to back, analyzed it thoroughly all the way through and come to this conclusion.
Inevitably if I say that to somebody, so I back off a little. Have you ever read it? Well, there's a good starting point. If you're going to stand as the authority on the veracity of Scripture, maybe reading it would be a start. And then having read it, you could do what those Bereans did in the book of Acts, they searched the Scripture to find out what was true, or do what Jesus said. He said, search the Scriptures, there they would speak of Me.
Look, the Lord's not afraid for you to read the Bible. If you do it with an open heart and an open mind, you're going to find the truth there because it's the purpose of the Bible to reveal the truth. Now if we want to know about Jesus Christ, we go to the Scripture and particularly to the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, four accounts of His life that record for us His birth and life and death and resurrection and ascension into heaven and even anticipate His return. Four different looks at Christ, beautifully harmonious. And, you know, there's so much material, you know, Matthew's long and Mark is fairly long and Luke is very long and John is fairly long, a lot of material on Christ.
And if I'm going to kind of give you a portrait of Christ, where in the world am I going to go? I just want to go to two verses. In John 8, John was one of Jesus' Apostles, one of His disciples. And John records this amazing history of Jesus and he tells us why he wrote it. He says, these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and believing you may have life in His name. John says, I'm writing this so you can know that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Savior, the Son of God and believing have life in His name. If you want to know the truth about Jesus, read the record. It's written so that you may know. God isn't hiding anything.
There isn't any secret knowledge. This is about revelation, not hidden knowledge. But I want to just take you to two verses, John 8. And Jesus was in constant dialogue, of course, with the Jewish leaders because He was a Jew and He came into the world born into a Jewish family, raised in Israel to very devout Jewish parents. But He was always in conflict with the religious leaders because they believed that you could know God through your own works, your own self-effort, your own religious achievement. And they believed that their own self-righteousness achieved for them a right standing with God and Jesus continually attacked that and said to them, you aren't righteous before God, you're sinful before God, you need to acknowledge your sin.
You may be religious but you're still sinful, you still need to repent of your sin and embrace Me as your Savior. They didn't want to do that, so there was conflict. The conflict, I think, is at its high point at the end of chapter 8. They're having a little bit of a conversation about Abraham because Abraham is their father. You know, all the Jews came out of the loins of Abraham, the great Abraham, they all go back to him. And of course, Abraham lived long before Jesus. Jesus is two thousand years after Abraham. And in verse 58, Jesus says to these Jews, listen to this, truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham came into being...that's the Greek verb there...before Abraham came into being, I am.
That is a staggering statement. I mean, you could not have said anything more disturbing to those Jews than that. Before Abraham came into existence, I am. He doesn't say I was.
He says I am. That designates a mode of existence that has no beginning and it has no end and it has no transitions. There was a historical event, Abraham came into being.
Before that, I am. By saying that, Jesus attributed to Himself eternal existence in the absolute divine sense. And the Jews got it. Look at verse 59, they picked up stones to throw at Him. That was their reaction.
Why? They were stoning Him because of what? Blasphemy. Now there was one thing the Jews understood. God was God and there's no other God.
I mean, that's built into the fabric of Judaism. The Lord is one. The Lord is one.
There's only one God. And for Jesus to come along and claim to be God by saying that He before Abraham was in existence is stepping over the line into blasphemy. With the I AM, there is no before and with the I AM, there is no after.
Psalm 90 verse 2 uses the same language. Before the mountains were formed, before the earth was created and the world even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. The Jews understood that God is eternal, no beginning, no ending, massive incomprehensible idea but true.
And no man can say I AM in the sense that He is eternal without causing people to think He's saying He's God. Jesus made a lot of claims...a lot. None was more elevated than this.
None was more solemn than this. This statement, I AM harbors within it the most authentic, the most audacious, the most profound claim that Jesus ever made and they only had one choice. He was claiming to be the God who is the Creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the eternal God Himself and for that madness, for that insanity, for that blasphemy, stoning was required.
By the way, they were in the temple area and it was still under construction so there were plenty of stones handy. You know, there are cults that are confused about whether Jesus claimed to be God. There are people who say, well He never claimed to be God.
Oh yes He did. People today might not get it. The Jews got it.
It was very clear what He was saying. And there never would have been a cross if they had had their way. They would have crushed Him under the stones right on that spot. But verse 59 says, He hid Himself and went out of the temple.
He had to do that a few times. Once in His own hometown of Nazareth, they tried to throw Him off a cliff and He disappeared the same way. They had no doubt what He was claiming.
They knew exactly what He was claiming. To say I AM, they were very familiar with that because I AM is the Old Testament name for God, Yahweh. And it goes back to Exodus and the third chapter of Exodus in verse 13, Moses said to God, Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel and I'll say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you. Now Moses has the job of going to Israel, representing God, and now they're going to say to me, he says, What's His name? What God? What's His name?
What do I say? And God said to Moses, I AM who I AM. And He said, Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, I AM has sent Me to you, I AM, Yahweh, the eternal one. Now a closer look at this name I AM reveals not only the obvious idea of being eternal, but there's even more there.
There's the idea of being present. Verse 11, Who am I, Moses says to God, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt? You're going to tell me I've got to go in there and rescue the people of Israel that have been in captivity for 400 years and let Pharaoh let go of them all and march them out to the Promised Land?
Who am I that I can do that? And verse 12, God says, Certainly I will be with you. I AM not only expresses eternality, but it expresses constant presence. I AM.
And then down in verse 17, it even adds another element. So I said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanite. I AM is the eternal one.
I AM is the ever-present help. I AM is the deliverer. I AM is the Savior. This term I AM, Yahweh, is used 6800 times in the Old Testament to identify God. Jesus knew exactly what He was saying when He called Himself I AM and so did the Jews. It is the name by which God represents Himself as eternal, as permanently present, as acting on behalf of His people to rescue them, to deliver them.
In the sixth chapter of Exodus, this name is again enhanced. God spoke to Moses, verse 2 and said, I AM the Lord and I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty. But by My name, Lord, Yahweh, I AM, I did not make Myself known to them. That's such an interesting statement. He says, I AM the Lord, I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty, as El Shaddai, but not as I AM.
What does He mean by that? God did reveal Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the eternal God. He revealed Himself to them as the supernatural sovereign God over nature and history, people and events.
He did show Himself as El Shaddai, the Almighty One. And He did use the name I AM about a hundred times in Genesis. But Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never really knew Him in the fullness of His I AM. They knew He was eternal.
They knew He was ever-present. But the one thing they really didn't know, which is the ultimate aspect of I AM, is they didn't know Him as a deliverer. It wasn't until He brought Israel out of Egypt after the patriarchal period. Verse 6, Exodus 6, say to the sons of Israel, I AM the Lord, I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. Then I will take you for My people and I will be your God and you shall know that I AM the Lord, your God.
Verse 8, you will know that I AM the Lord. You'll know Me in the fullness of My I AM when I have delivered you from Egypt. I AM is not just the eternal God. I AM is not just the ever-present help. I AM is the Savior, deliverer, redeemer.
That is the nature of His ever-present help. They had early experienced Him as El Shaddai. Only out of Egypt did they experience Him as the I AM who delivers His people. Now with that in mind, you can go back to John 8.
The Jews understood all of that. They understood that I AM was the eternal God, that I AM was the ever-present help, that I AM is the great sovereign supernatural deliverer, that He brought salvation, that He identified a people, that He established a relationship with that people. It is as if to say I am eternal and I am present for the purpose of saving you.
I am near in order to save you. Along comes Jesus and says, all that you know about God as the I AM is true of Me. I AM the eternal transcendent God. I AM the ever-present help who has come to rescue His people from the bondage of sin and to bring them into an eternal relationship with God in which they will enjoy the unimaginable bliss and blessings prepared for them in a place called heaven. To understand this is to understand the I AM. He cannot fully be understood apart from His redemptive purpose to rescue people from sin and death and hell and make them His own and take them to heaven.
I AM is an awesome name, embracing all of this. And the Jews understood it, that this is God the eternal one, this is God the ever-present help, this is God the Redeemer, the Savior. And when Jesus said, before Abraham came into existence, I AM, He could only be understood one way, only one way. And either He was to be worshiped or stoned and there was no middle ground. Don't come to Jesus with some patronizing nonsense that He's a good man, a nice man, a wise man, a loving man, a peacemaking man. He never gave you that option. Either fall at His feet or call Him a blasphemer.
C. S. Lewis once said, you must make your choice. Either Jesus was and is the Son of God or else He's a madman or something worse. Well, John MacArthur is equipping you to make your choice, challenging you with the claims Scripture makes about Jesus in his study here on Grace to You called, Who is Jesus Anyway? Now, John originally preached this series to give his congregation an opportunity to hear and to bring their unbelieving friends and family to hear a clear biblical presentation of the gospel.
So let me encourage you to use this study in a similar way. Download John's study, Who is Jesus Anyway?, when you contact us today. You can download all four sermons from Who is Jesus Anyway? at our website, gty.org. It's a great series to review at your own pace and to recommend to a new believer.
And if it's better for you, you can also purchase a four CD album at a reasonable price and shipping is free. To order, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. Now whether you want to dig deep into the person and work of Jesus Christ or you want to know what the Bible says about resolving conflict or choosing a church to attend or sharing your faith with others, be sure you take advantage of the thousands of free resources available at our website, gty.org. Check out the Grace to You blog and look for the series of articles titled, The Lordship of Christ. It's a great supplement to John's current radio series. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Join us tomorrow when John looks at the facts on who Jesus Himself claimed to be in a lesson that can transform the way you understand and communicate the Gospel. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.
