Eyewitness, Part1

Who is Jesus Christ? Was he a great teacher? A prophet?

Is he God? The way a person answers that question is critically important. The question about the character and the nature and the identity of Jesus Christ and the gospel of Jesus Christ is as critical today as it was back then when the Sanhedrin and the high Jewish court said that Jesus we command you tell us who you are.

That's the question. And it has eternal consequences. What a person thinks about Jesus Christ is critically important. Each person's eternal destiny hinges on his or her response to Jesus Christ, even more significantly a response to the claims he made about himself in scripture. In today's lesson we're going to hear from an eyewitness to Jesus life and ministry. The Apostle John knew Jesus personally. He spent time with him, heard him teach and watched how he lived. Because of that John is able to give us a trustworthy account of Jesus Christ.

This is Wisdom for the Heart and here's Stephen Davie with a message he called Eyewitness. We happen to live in a world in a culture of amazing variety, personal tastes, personal options, abound. One of our global staff members home on furlough mentioned how hard it was getting used to just making decisions at a grocery store here in the States. So many choices and you're just on the cereal aisle.

One author originally from the Soviet Union made a funny comment where he wrote, I wasn't personally prepared for my first trip to an American grocery store and all the variety and everything I saw. It was amazing. Well on my first shopping trip I saw powdered milk, you just add water and you get milk. That was amazing. Then I saw powdered eggs.

You just add water and you get eggs and then I saw baby powder. He said, man what a country this is. All is the idea of variety and personal tastes and options have now become in our culture the standard impression of spiritual matters as well. One recent survey I read not too long ago said that 85% of households in America own at least one copy of the Bible. 85% of households own a Bible. The tragedy is the survey went on to show that half of them believe now that the Bible, the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon are simply different varieties of the same thing.

Obviously not having read much of any of them. You can sort of pick and choose now without any consequence spiritually. Whether or not Jesus was just a prophet, one in line and one yet to come, or if Jesus was just an exalted man because of his lifestyle to glory, or if he was indeed God incarnate, you know it doesn't really matter.

It's just a different kind of cereal. You are on the breakfast aisle after all, which is why this kind of statement could be made in a documentary on the historical Jesus produced by the BBC where the host said and I quote, the important thing is not what Jesus was or what he wasn't. The important thing is what people believe him to have been. A massive worldwide religion now numbering more than 2 billion people are following his memory and that's pretty remarkable, end quote.

Listen, if 2 billion people are following the memory of a delusional carpenter that isn't remarkable, that's tragic. The question about the character and the nature and the identity of Jesus Christ and the gospel of Jesus Christ is as critical today as it was back then when the Sanhedrin, the high Jewish court said that Jesus, we command you, tell us who you are. That's the question and it has eternal consequences because if what Jesus said about himself was true then what he said about heaven was true because he was the one who introduced us to the concept and what he said about hell is equally true and he said more about hell than he did about heaven. What he said about being the only way to God the Father would also be true.

The idea of a culture inundated with options is not new. You go back in time to the days of an old apostle named John who lived in a town where the temple to its goddess was one of the seven wonders of the world where Buddhism and Hinduism had made inroads into that Mediterranean world where the church was barely 50, 60 years old and Gnosticism was already tugging at the edges with the heresy that God really didn't take on flesh. God would never touch flesh. Then you had this new and rising heresy that was gaining popularity during a John's day called docetism which believed that Jesus was just an ordinary man upon whom the spirit of the Christ descended. Liberals talk about the Christ. This mystical and personal force and it descended on Jesus and then when he was crucified it left him because the Christ won't die as Jesus did merely a man. These views would hold then that Jesus was just simply a man. He certainly couldn't provide forgiveness or eternal life and he certainly wasn't God. There was ever a time when someone was needed who actually knew Jesus to step up and speak.

It would have been this day in this generation. If there was ever a time when the gospel of Jesus Christ needs clarifying all over again and the nature and personal identity of Christ and how we relate to him and then we relate to one another is needed, it would be today. So enter these three little letters. You can read all three of them in about 20 minutes if you want to. Enter them and you discover this clarification and so much more written by a man in his early 80s by the name of John. I want to have you turn to first John, the first letter of John.

If you're not sure where it is, head to Revelation and you'll run into it. While you're turning, John and his older brother James, not the James who wrote the letter of James, but the James who would become one of the twelve apostles who would be the first martyr, James and John, two Jewish boys who grew up in the home of their fisherman father named Zebedee, they inherited his business. John's mother, Salome, was actually the younger sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, which would make John and Jesus and cousins, which kind of gives you a little insight into the family dynamic because James and John will be among the first called by Jesus to follow him as his disciples.

So you've got cousins in that pack of twelve. John was the youngest of the apostles, the only one to survive, all the others, in fact the only one not martyred, he would die of natural causes as an old man. Earlier in his life he had written the gospel, we call the gospel of John, and then he kind of disappeared for 35, 40 years, wasn't really heard from. He reappears as the threat of heresies attack the church and as an old man he writes, first, second and third John. He's then exiled to the island of Patmos where he receives the revelation of God, he wrote the book of Revelation. Following his exile he moves back to Ephesus where he lives out his few remaining years, defending the faith, encouraging the body, in fact his favorite phrase for the believers that he worshiped with was the phrase, these are my little children.

You'll hear that over and over again in his letter. Can you imagine for just a moment what the New Testament would be like without the writing of John? Can you imagine the New Testament without John 3.16 or 1 John 5.13?

So many more. The book of Revelation, which we studied for a few weeks together, John wrote a gospel, he wrote three epistles and he wrote a prophecy. The gospels of John present the life of Christ, the epistles proclaim the deity of Christ and how to live for him and the book of Revelation unveils the prophecies of the glory of Christ. Now as is my custom and I'm grateful that you allow me time to study, typically by just about everything I can on whatever book of the Bible we're studying and I begin to go through it and when we begin to study it's the hardest of all because I have to read everything and I've got about 50 different commentaries and books on 1 John.

It is a thrill though to bring to you the results of that study. It isn't long, in fact by the end of my first study of reading all of these books as it relates to the introduction of the letter, I find my favorite 15 or 20 and I found a man that I'll probably quote periodically from, a guy who's been with the Lord for some time now by the name of Roy Lauren and he, I love the way he writes, he put it this way. He said, the gospel of John takes you back to yesterday. The epistles of John deal with today and the revelation of John unveils tomorrow.

Good, isn't it? And get this, since John was given a personal tour in the book of Revelation of heaven and our future, he saw the father's house, he described the heavenly city, he described the wars preceding that. Since John also was one of the disciples that walked through the ministry and life of Jesus Christ, the Lord watching him die, seeing him resurrected and ascending, I can't think of a better eyewitness to the past and present and future realities of Jesus Christ than John. In fact, this son of thunder, he's nicknamed that by Jesus when he first calls him to walk with him as a disciple. He's so passionate and so ready that he dives in without even an introduction, he just dives in to content and so you have these opening lines and you'll notice that as he begins, at least in these early letters or these early lines of this letter to defend Jesus Christ, you'll see him repeating this idea that he is an eyewitness. You'll notice he makes three claims as an eyewitness or three evidences. The first evidence is given to us in verse 1, what was from the beginning. Now stop there.

We'll get further than that, trust me. In fact, we're going to cover all four verses, but I want you to write into the margin of your Bibles, if you care to, right after the word beginning because it will clarify for you, right in the words of his birth, what was from the beginning of his birth. That's what John is talking about here. He's talking about the beginning of Christ's life on earth, not the eternality of his divine being, he'll get there and so will we in verse 2. But here John is referring to that momentous event when God the son incarnated through the spirit conceived virgin was born and I, he'll say, saw him.

I knew him. He's fully God and fully man. Having bypassed the semen of a male father through which comes the fallen nature, Jesus then would have received from Mary a human nature though not fallen. And having been conceived by the miracle and the superintending work of the Holy Spirit, he would have a divine nature. So in the body of Jesus Christ is both a human nature and a divine nature. He, humanity, is the embodiment of deity for within him dwells the fullness of God. Paul would write it that way in Colossians chapter 1. So watch him as John did and maybe you've noticed there were times throughout his life that he was so much like God that he couldn't be a man. And then there were times you've noticed that he was so much like a man that he couldn't be God.

Many of the cults have simply focused on one text, one verse at the expense of the balance of all of them to reach the conclusions of their heresies that he is both God and man. Now let me tell you three things I can attest to as an eyewitness, John would say. First verse 1 continues, we, that is the apostolic community, we heard him. In other words, I'm not going to repeat to you what others said he said, I'm going to repeat to you what he said and I heard him say it with my own ears.

That's important. I heard him, he could say, teach on the hillsides and in the synagogues. I was there in John 746 when the amazed audience said, never have we heard a man speak like this man.

I heard that sermon he delivered. John could say, I heard him deliver that astounding claim before Abraham was I am John 858. And there wasn't any confusion, by the way, in his statement because the Jewish leaders immediately tried to kill him. They knew what he was saying.

He was eternal. John could say, I heard him in the garden of Gethsemane. When the crowd arrived with all the torches and their swords, coming to arrest Jesus, John was there and would have heard Jesus ask them, whom do you seek? And they said, we're looking for Jesus, the Nazarene. And Jesus said, I go with me, I am.

And everybody fell down. Just one word pulling back the curtain that he was in fact eternal God in the flesh and everybody faints and he waits until they pick themselves up and he allows them to arrest him. John could say, I was in the boat when Jesus stood and said to that storm, be hushed. And when we heard that we were amazed and wondered, who is he? I heard Jesus, John could say, stand before the grave of Lazarus and cry out, Lazarus, come forth. And to our amazement, Lazarus came out alive. I was there.

I heard all of it with my own ears. I can testify as an eyewitness to the words of Jesus Christ. Secondly, John adds, not only have we heard him, notice this, we've seen him with our eyes and we've looked at him.

In other words, he isn't a phantom, he isn't a ghost, he isn't a figment of our imagination. We saw the God man with our very own eyes. Now John uses two different verbs for looking here or seeing here in this phrase. The second verb translated looked at is from the word theomai which gives us our word theater. It's where you study a character on a stage. If you've been to a play, you study them as they develop that character. John is saying we watched the character of Jesus Christ as he acted out who he was, the God man.

We studied him on the stage of human history. The first verb in this phrase is even more instructive and I want to spend a little more time on it. John writes, what we have seen with our own eyes.

Different verb, harao, means to see with comprehension, understanding. John used this word as a part of his own personal testimony where God opened his eyes to the truth of the gospel and that crystallized in cement faith. It happened when he and the other apostles were told that the body of Jesus was missing. And you may remember the account John delivers it where he and Peter run. They race to that tomb.

John's younger, probably healthier. He outruns Peter which irritated Peter I'm sure to no end. He gets there first. He looks inside, the verb for look is blupo, just simply casual observation. About that time Peter arrives huffing and puffing pushes him aside, goes in and he looks at the linen. The word for look there or saw is theoreo which gives us our word to theorize. He's standing there going, this is really amazing.

I've got to figure this thing out and he's just standing there. But think about what they're both seeing. The linen wrappings were not disheveled and they weren't thrown all over the tomb as if somebody came to steal the body or somebody from within came back to, you know, was resuscitated and had to get out of them and so they could breathe, no. They're lying there on that stone ledge in their, literally in their folds. After three days, nights, the spices that had been layered into each fold as they wrapped it around the body of Jesus, mummy-like, had begun to harden. When the disciples entered that tomb, they were both struck, the text tells us, immediately by the linen, the grave clothes.

Why? Because they're in the form of a body, there's his feet, and there's his body. Only it's slightly caved in and empty and the napkin that was over his face is rolled up neatly off to the side. It's like an empty cocoon where the butterfly has flown away. The clothes haven't been unwrapped.

They weren't torn apart. The body that was in there has disappeared from within. At that moment, John comes back in and carefully looks and believes, it's a different verb. He sees with comprehension and he believes. He put the puzzle together. See, just as Jesus in his glorified body was able to move through a closed and locked door as he did in the upper room, and yet not be a ghost, not be a phantom, a real body that could stand there and eat fish. In fact, they gave him fish.

I think they wanted to see if they could see it go down and they couldn't. It's a real body. So you have on that stone ledge the linen cloths in the form of a body slightly caved in and there's no body inside. John sees. This is the same verb he uses in 1 John 1. Not only have we seen him, but we've seen with comprehension.

We understand that he's the living eternal Lord. In verse 1, we not only heard him, we not only saw him with our eyes, notice, we touched him with our hands. Now John, are you sure you didn't see things?

Are you sure you weren't just seeing what you wanted to see? Well, it could be possible if all you did was see, but if you could say, I also heard, okay, that's something, but when you say, oh, and by the way, I touched him, literally I handled him with my hands, you could paraphrase it, I hugged him, I embraced him. What's interesting is that John changes the verb tense here to speak of one moment in time. Seeing and hearing is the tense that's just continual.

This here of handling him, the tense of the verb means it's referring back to a past moment. John doesn't tell us what that moment is, but all you have to do is study his gospel account and you know when it was. It was in that room, they were all hiding out, they were behind a locked door, Jesus the resurrected Christ materializes through that door and yet that's strange, he's a real body and eats fish and whatever, but when he arrives and they notice he's there, his very first words to them are, peace to you. Now if I'd been Jesus, those would not have been my first words, my first words would have been, what are you guys doing in here, hiding?

Or why did you all abandon me? Or something, you know, more spiritual like that. Jesus said, peace.

How upon what can there be the establishment of peace? The very next phrase says, Jesus then showed them his hands and his side, pulled his gown up. Here's where the spear went. See I've retained these scars, the only person in heaven will have any by the way, so that you could see, so that you could identify me as Jesus Christ, the anointed Messiah.

And so they did what Thomas will do at that next meeting, they handled him, they ran their fingers and hands over his scars, his side, no doubt embracing him, they'd be hugging his feet as they wept with joy and recognition. He's real, he's real, tangible, glorified, resurrected. He's not a phantom, he's not a ghost, he's not a mystical spirit. God now has a glorified body. He is not an abstraction from God. He is the revelation from God and in him his body dwells the fullness of deity. One day when you see God you're going to be looking in the face of Jesus.

And who is Jesus? God ends verse 1 by writing, oh he is the word of life. He's the word of life.

Do you notice that? I love that phrase. The logos of life, one of his favorite words. To the Greek world the word logos meant meaning, reason, purpose, explanation.

Plato had once lamented of only a logos would come from God. If only an explanation would appear from God. John says he is the explanation of life. He's the word of life. He's the reason for life. He's the purpose for life.

God the son is the logos of life. You abandon him, you reject him, you also reject meaning in life. You also reject purpose in life. Discard him and you discard the explanation of life which leads many people that you know to say things that would only be logically true based upon their rejection of Christ. Like Carl Sagan one of the most prolific evolutionists, a man who died not too long ago discovered unfortunately tragically the truth of his creator too late.

He was interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline after they found out he was dying. Koppel asked him, Dr. Sagan, do you have any pearls of wisdom that you would like to give to the human race? Sagan responded and I quote, we live on a hunk of rock that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy. This is worth pondering, end quote.

Well that's thrilling, but it is logical when you rule out God. I hope that you're counted among those who believe that Jesus Christ is God and that he's the only way of salvation. You're listening to Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davie.

Stephen is working his way through a series entitled After Darkness, Light. The title of this message is Eyewitness. We're going to stop right here for today and bring you the conclusion to this message next time. In the meantime, why not take a few minutes and interact with our ministry. We'd love to hear from you. You can write to us at Wisdom International, P.O.

Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina 27627. Our email address is info at wisdomonline.org. If you prefer to correspond electronically, we'd love to hear from you that way. And of course, we're always happy to speak with you over the phone. Our number is 866-48-Bible. My name is Scott Wiley, and I thank you for taking the time to listen today. We'll have another broadcast at this same time tomorrow, and I hope you'll join us for more Wisdom for the Heart.