Gooding, David: 2 - Who is This Man?

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. In my first lecture last week, I attempted to sketch out the claims made by our Lord Jesus Christ, to sketch them in as absolute terms as I could use, in order that we might see clearly what that question is that we, each one of us, must decide. I offered you no evidence. In fact, I did not invite you last week to decide over those claims. Merely to let our minds dwell upon the claims that our Lord made, to see how extreme they were, and to observe once more that we really have no alternative between either accepting them in toto or rejecting them in toto. This week and in the coming lectures, I propose to put before you evidence that these claims are in fact true. If from time to time, instead of speaking of evidence, I slip into speaking of proof, I ask you to bear with me, particularly any mathematicians present. If I use the word proof in this kind of context, I'm quite aware that in your science, or perhaps you prefer to call it an art, you use the proof, word proof in a somewhat restricted sense, and in your restricted sense, I can in fact offer no proof of the truth of Christianity. But if I should use that word proof, I use it in the sense that we lesser mortals use it, of evidence that is overwhelming, the kind of evidence a man would receive as proving to him that his mother loved him. You cannot prove a mother's love by mathematical proof. In fact, all the things that are most valuable in life are quite incapable of being proved by another, by mathematical proof. In all those higher things, there must come in the element of faith. When evidence is beyond reasonable doubt, there still remains the place where you must exercise faith. That is true in human relationships. That is necessarily true in the relationship between man and God. But before I proceed to put before you some, at least, of the evidence, I want to deal with one more basic objection that some of you may feel. I made the point last week that when we read the Gospels and the Epistles, written by the authorized apostles and disciples of our Lord Jesus, we have every reason to believe that he himself would have approved heartily of all that they wrote, for he himself appointed them for that task among others. But there is, of course, and I am not unaware of it, a more basic difficulty. The difficulty might be put thus. Someone will say, but were not these apostles and the writers of our gospels themselves followers of Jesus Christ? And if they were followers and believed in him, then surely they must have been biased in his favor, so that when they came to write his life and character, the likelihood is, so the objection will run, that willingly or perhaps even unwillingly and unwittingly, they have weighted the scales in his favor and have not given us an altogether unbiased account of him. Somebody will say, therefore, would it not be fairer if we had a record of his life and character from somebody who did not believe him, or somebody who could have been relied upon to have recorded all his faults, if there were any, and all his failings, and so given us an opportunity to judge from what would be an unbiased description of Jesus Christ. Now I want to deal with that difficulty as honestly as I can. I say as honestly as I can because I want to confess to you straight away that I am biased. You have perceived that already. I want, however, to make the point that so are you biased. And the further point that there has never been anybody that has faced Jesus Christ in his claims, but what they have all been biased. And if we were to ask for an unbiased account of Christ, we could not possibly get such a thing. I hope to show you what I mean by that a little later. But the claims of Christ are such that they cannot be faced with that same kind of attitude as a man faces a mathematical problem, kindly disinterested, whether it comes out this way or that. No human being can possibly face the claims of Christ like that. Those claims are so personal, they come home so nearly to the human heart, it is impossible for any of us not to be biased. Now, I'm not going to ask you to grant me that these New Testament writers were inspired. I believe they were inspired. I believe that with all my heart. But in putting before you the evidence that they give for the deity of Christ, I cannot honestly ask you to give me as a starting point that they were inspired. Otherwise, of course, I'm asking you to give me what I want to prove. I'm going to admit to you, if you like, that these men were biased. But then I'm going to point out to you that they realized their bias and prejudice and had a very keen eye for the bias that besieges every heart when dealing with this subject. And I put them before you as just ordinary writers, and I ask you to judge as fairly as you can, remembering that we too necessarily have our prejudice. For instance, if you ask for the verdict on Christ of his contemporaries who were not Christians, who did not believe him, the verdict of those people who rejected him, then, to take one gospel writer, Luke gives us at the end of his gospel the verdict of quite a number of people. Let me quote you six verdicts that Luke himself, eh, uh, selects as samples of the doubt. He gives us the verdict of the high priests in their priestly court. He gives us the verdict of Pilate, the political governor. He gives us the verdict of Herod. And all those three verdicts are against Christ. Verdicts for Christ that Luke selects. The verdict of the benefactor who was crucified next to him. The verdict of the centurion who is in charge of the execution squad. The verdict of Joseph of Arimathea, who was an honorable counselor. I ask you to consider that selection for a moment. To ask yourself whether, as a matter of history, that proportion was true. Here is a Christian writer, and you may call him biased if you please. But when he comes to tell us how many people rejected Christ and how many people received him, he gives us as a, what we must take to be a fair selection, a true cross-section. And he says against him were the leading ecclesiastics, the leading politicians, the Roman politician and governor and military man Pilate, and the Edomite Herod. All those that Luke here lists against him are eminent people. And who are they for him? An otherwise unknown benefactor being executed as a common criminal. A centurion, a sort of an equivalent of a sergeant, an uncommissioned officer in the Roman army. A man of very little account. And in this context, Luke just lists one man of honorable position, member of the Jewish Parliament, Joseph of Arimathea. There are, says Luke, the big people were against him. While there was the occasional man of some eminence that, uh, stood on Christ's side, the majority of those who believed him when he was here on earth were nobodies. Does it look to you, I ask you, if Luke is cooking the facts, what would you make out of that as a piece of Christian propaganda? And that's not only true of Luke, but that was true of all the apostles. They never once anywhere where they went to preach tried to make it out that Jesus Christ had been popular with the leading thinkers of the day. They everywhere told the fact that the leading thought was against him. In fact, they who were responsible for his crucifixion were the princes of this world. They do not try to hide it that the majority of people who trusted Christ were ordinary people, though there was a sprinkling of others. I submit to you that a man that will tell us the facts so honestly has resisted all temptation to overstate the popularity of Christ. But again, Luke tells us the behavior of these courts in which Christ was condemned. For instance, he tells us that at the priest's court, our Lord was straightly challenged, art thou the Christ? And the moment he said yes, they condemned him out of hand. He represents them as not being honestly open to consider evidence, but rather as being so prejudiced that all that they were wishing to have was the prisoner's own, uh, claim that he was the Christ, and upon that they condemned him. And somebody says, but surely they are Luke as being prejudiced. No thinking man faced with such a big claim would be so prejudiced as that, as to demis- dismiss it without really considering the evidence, wouldn't he? Let me ask you to think what were the prejudices behind the men who sat that day on the bench. These were religious men. They, for they were Jews, believed that one day Messiah would come. The question before them, was this Jesus that Messiah? They had decided he wasn't. They were prepared to have no evidence that he was. Why prejudice like that? Well, let us think of the implications. If this Jesus was Messiah, Caiaphas got down from his leadership of that nation and must hand it over to Jesus of Nazareth. If this Jesus was Messiah, Caiaphas must follow him, and presently this Messiah must establish his claim and overthrow the Roman Empire, which at that moment held Judea in its bondage. He must believe that this Jesus Na- Jesus of Nazareth is the born king not merely of the Jews, but of all mankind. And it frankly seemed utterly impossible to Caiaphas, a man of great learning and education, that an artisan from the north who never had a day's university education in his life, could possibly be not only the king of the Jews, but the world ruler. And then there was that personal element. A few days before that trial, Jesus had entered into Jerusalem. He had sent before two disciples and told them that they would find an ass tethered at the crossroads. They were to bring him for the use of our Lord. They were instructed to say, if the owners of the coat protested, they were instructed to say that the owner, the Lord, the owner, literally translated, the owner has need of him. Entering that city, he had, in this sample case, laid down his claims to absolute proprietorship of all that was in that city. And men were keen enough to see that if he started taking their asses today, tomorrow he would take their bank balance, and the next day themselves. It was not without a very great bias that they assembled on the bench that morning. But my point is to ask you whether you think that that is a likely story that Luke tells. You see, in judging Christ, we must perforce see him through the eyes of his contemporaries. And we have to sort out as far as we can how far those contemporaries were just in their opinion. What other evidence have we got? I ask you to think whether it were likely that the leading thinkers in the religious circles were thus biased. And of course, our only means of settling that one is to ask ourselves, is it a likely thing that people would be biased? Are people biased like that now? And I submit to you that this rings true to the test of experience. Are not men and women still biased on that score? Suppose you go out at the end of this lecture, and you go to get your Bentley, and you find somebody unlocking the door and getting in, and you say, what are you doing with my Bentley? Oh, he says, the owner has need of it. You say, I'm the owner. Oh no, but my dear good sir, there's an owner above you who now requires his Bentley. Would you not object? Not merely with Bentleys, but with all we have, and all we are. That is precisely the claim that Christ make, Christ makes. And if he be God, it is a reasonable claim. But who could face that question even now unbiased? For tonight, if we come to the decision that Jesus Christ is God's son, the only reasonable response in our hearts is that we hand over all to his supreme lordship. Can we face the question unbiasedly? I submit that Luke has touched a very real thing. It was real then, it is real now. And this Christian writer, for all that he is a Christian, has a very keen perception of the real circumstances. Pilate, a le- the leading political figure, saw, so we are told, that Christ was innocent of the political charges leveled against him. But Pilate was unwilling to come definitely to a decision on the matter. The leaders of the day, other than he, were against Christ. It would have been to his serious embarrassment in the political circles at Rome, if he had been represented by Christ's enemies of having, as having let go a man who claimed to be king. And in that predicament, we read, though Pilate in his heart believed Christ was innocent, he seized the opportunity to send him to Herod. He heard that he came from Herod's jurisdiction, and very gladly he tried to get out of making the decision himself and sent him to Herod. I ask you again, does that sound a very likely story to you? That Pilate should say, ah, you know, strictly speaking, this isn't a matter for me to decide. Herod is the man to whom he belongs. I submit that that is an exceedingly likely story, at least if we can judge by what people do nowadays. How many a scientist have I heard arguing like this? Well, you know, I don't know what to think of Jesus Christ, but then you see, it's not for a man like me to decide. I haven't got the know-how. You see, I'm a scientist. I wouldn't know where to begin. I leave that to the theologians to tell us. You see, that's not my province. How many a businessman has argued to himself like that too? Oh, well, I haven't the time that you have to decide such things. You see, it's not my province to decide. Again, I submit to you that this ancient record rings true. It was a foolish thing, of course. If Jesus Christ were God, then it was Pilate's province to decide. We cannot show that issue to somebody else. When it comes to asking about our health, we may consult a doctor, or on a point of law, we may consult a lawyer. But when somebody stands in front of us and claims to be our creator, it is foolish to try and dismiss the decision and put it onto somebody else's shoulders. The only body that can decide for you whether Jesus is your creator or not is you. There's no escaping the decision. And so I might go on, but I haven't the time. I might speak of Herod, who gave his verdict against Christ, but then we shall not trouble long with Herod's verdict, for the man couldn't afford to have Christ's claim be true. Herod had murdered John Baptist, Christ's forerunner. Herod had murdered John Baptist to try and cover up his conscience, laden with the guilt of immorality. And now for long years, Herod had had a very ugly skeleton in his cupboard. And if Jesus Christ proved to be true, that skeleton had got to come out and be faced. And Herod couldn't afford to have the thing true. And Herod did what, all he could do. He made a mock of the whole thing. Made a fool of the thing. It is really the only thing you can do, if you have a skeleton in the cupboard like Herod had. I submit to you, Luke has not colored the information. I believe those men came to those decisions as Luke says they came, and for those reasons, for those reasons ring true to life. On the other side? Let me just take one of the witnesses for Christ, for I want to show you that I'm not unaware that he was biased too. Biased for Christ. And what was his bias? Well, he judged of Christ, not as one who was sitting on the judge's bench, judging a prisoner at the bar. He came to his conclusion about Christ as he was hanging up on a cross beside him, a condemned and self-admitted criminal, going to a death he deserved, and facing the beyond nearly and squarely. And you know, if you judge of Christ from that aspect, it makes a world of difference. This man was in his last few hours on earth, and going out into eternity. A self-admitted criminal. And he began to think, apparently. For turning to his fellow criminal, he said, dost thou not fear God? Well, why should they? They lived a life many years as though God didn't exist. Why should they now fear God? What reason had they to think that there was a God to fear? Said the one criminal to the other, do you not see that this day innocent and guilty are suffering the same fate? This man here has done nothing amiss. We are condemned, rightly condemned. Here today, guilty and innocent suffer alike. That is a sad travesty, if there is such a thing as right and r- and wrong. But anyway, where did we get our sense of right and wrong from? Everywhere that man has ever been, of whatever state and however depraved, you will always find that man has some sense of right and wrong. It is so uncomfortable that we cannot think that he put it there himself. Then if there is a creator who put within us this sense of right and wrong, then that creator cares for the difference between right and wrong. Look, old fellow, says thief number one, you and I are soon going to leave this life, and is this a God? Certain it is. We'll meet him there, and we shall meet a God there who cares for the difference between right and wrong. The unfairnesses of earth cannot permanently be left if there's a God who cares between right and wrong, then certainly there will come a day when that God must perforce deal with Earth's injustices and put things right. And if there's a coming a day like that, said this thief, then, as he turned to this man, he said, but he's dying. But he's not dying like me. That man has done nothing amiss. Oh yes, he has. If he claimed to be the Son of God and wasn't. For that was the most hideous blasphemy and sin that ever a man committed. This thief was biased. If this man on the middle cross was holy, if it was the fact that he'd done nothing amiss, here was a chance that this man could be dying for his sin. Here was a chance that he was the true king. Here was a chance that death didn't end everything and that this man would come again in his kingdom. Here was the chance that this king, this coming king, would forgive even him and give him an eternity of bliss. Of course the thief was biased. For this man spelt forgiveness and eternal life, if he were true, and the thief sorely felt his need for such forgiveness and such eternal life. I'm not ashamed to confess that I share that bias, and you will detect it in my remarks. But I point out that none of us can decide except that we are from one bias or the other. We cannot come at an impartial judgment. If you are as that convicted thief, that convicted benefactor, so to speak, spending your last days on earth as a self-admitted sinner, and you believe that there is a God of justice to be faced, you will be biased towards the hope that Jesus Christ is indeed God's son, come to bring us deliverance and forgiveness. And if perhaps you feel no sense of sin or personal inadequacy, and you're quite happy to face eternity, and you don't believe there is a God at all, and you don't think there is such a thing as sin, or if there is, it doesn't matter, well, you'll probably be biased in the other direction. It will be our wisdom to recognize what our particular bias is, to make all allowances, therefore, if we can. What kind of evidence, then, can I submit? I wish to submit evidence under three heads. The evidence of our Lord's miracles, the evidence of his personal character, and the evidence of his death. I must, of course, deal with them very briefly. My hope is that in these lectures, I shall renew in you, or maybe even provoke for the first time for a few of you, the desire to go back to the evidence and read it for yourselves again. It is surprising how few people have really read and studied the evidence since they have been of adult years. Talking with many friends, many of whom are agnostics, I have found the pattern of conversation not seldom to run like this. Have you ever considered, old fellow, have you ever considered the evidence for the deity of our Lord? Well, of course I have. Oh, but I mean, have you read the New Testament? Well, of course I have, old fellow. I've been to church many times. Yes, I know. But in church, of course, um, necessarily the amount that we can read of scripture is very short. Have you really read it for yourself in full? Why, yes. Uh, recently? For instance, the Gospel of John is written that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. It is a piece of Christian propaganda, if you like, directed to this very end. Here is the evidence that he is the Son of God. Have you read it recently, seriously, and studied the evidence? Well, no, we did Mark at school. I see. Who did Mark at school? Yeah. That's not really an adequate way of dealing with such a profound thing. My hope is, as I say, that I shall provoke you again to read the evidence as adults. But now, the evidence of his miracles. It is impossible, however critically we scan through the records, to escape the fact that when our Lord was here on earth, he was accredited with doing the miraculous. Now we have to be very careful in estimating the claims of the miraculous. It doesn't follow because somebody does something that appears to us to be miraculous, that he is divine. If you took an pygmy from the forests, and you took him to Cape Canaveral, and you had him watching for the first time a rocket going off into space, and then the Americans, this being a time when they can do such things, um, bringing the rocket back again without any wires or any ropes or any hooks, but making it come back just by switching a few knobs. The pygmy, if he was seeing this for the first time, might well think that this was a miracle. But to be sure, it wouldn't prove that the even the Americans are divine. And somebody says yes. The East is full of men that work kind of miracles. Even to this present, if you go out East, you will see men that put themselves in such states of hypnotism, or is it some more sinister power, that they can cut their knives, uh, their bodies with knives and no blood comes out. They can stick great skewers through their cheeks and no blood comes out. Somebody says, now, perhaps were not the miracles that our Lord did. Something like that, some psychological trick that got exaggerated thereafter, that seemed miraculous. But certainly there were many people that did that kind of thing in our Lord's day. When we come to face our Lord's miracles, we shall find that between them and those other kind of things, there is a whole world of difference in the quality of those miracles. Different even from those miracles that we can sometimes read of in the so-called lives of the saints, mere exhibitions of the supernatural, to no point or purpose. The thing that must strike one about the miracles of our Lord, I say, is their quality. Some were admittedly done to call attention, the majority of them to relieve physical suffering, and yet even there we find that while our Lord had powers to relieve physical suffering, very often he refused to go further. He abandoned the crowds when they pressed for physical suffering, and he abandoned them because he taught them that they had need of a greater healing than the physical. And many of his miracles were nothing short of sermons preached by dint of that miraculous element. They were sermons that went right down to man's true and fundamental need. Therein, I submit, is tremen- a tremendous piece of evidence. Would you really be impressed if God the Almighty came down here on earth and did a whole array of pointless exhibitions of power? Wouldn't we find his exhibitionism rather vulgar? What use would it do us anyway? We know God is almighty if we care to look at his creation. What use would it be for us men and women if God Almighty came down here and did some exhibitions of power? Would get us nowhere. We have bigger needs than that. The remarkable things about the miracles that Christ did was, while they were miraculous, they met that deepest of all human needs. Let me give you just one example. I suppose his miracle of turning the water into wine is one of the most widely known miracles. But yet who can fail to see that while it was a miracle, it was a wedding. The wine had run out. We may picture, if we care, the confusion on that great day, when the wine that was there to promote the merriment and happiness of the guests unaccountably failed. But then, it's been, that was not the only wedding of which the wine ran out, surely. Not if our papers give us any idea of the unhappy marriages that exist. It's a patent p- parable, surely. Those relationships in life from which the joy runs out, to our confusion. When our Lord healed that state of affairs by a miracle, I want you to notice that he didn't take just any water. He deliberately took some water jars that were there for the cleansing, after the Jewish religious rite. They were there for purifying. These people at this wedding were decent enough people. Like most moderns, when it came to their wedding day, they thought of God. They made a bow in the direction of social custom, of religious etiquette. They were decent people. Somehow or other, when it comes to a thing like a wedding, it does stir our sense of decency, and we like to guard them round, those sacred things in life, with, uh, uh, ceremonies that are decent. They too had had their ceremony. There were the water pots now left over. But they were on the fringe. They hadn't been brought to the wedding breakfast. Am I too hard? How many a wedding is divided like that? There's the religious side in which we pay our respects to God. When that's over, well, that's enough of that. The wedding breakfast is a different atmosphere. How many a man or woman would blush to hear the question of personal salvation raised around the table at a wedding breakfast? We have that sort of inner sense that this is not the place to speak of those kind of things. And yet our Lord did just that. Right into the middle of this wedding breakfast, he dragged that religious something. And then he did a miracle, turned that water into wine. You say, do you believe that? I do indeed. For what he did in physical, the physical realm, that he has done in the spiritual realm countless times. It is the fact that you may observe, whether you believe it rightly founded or not, that for multitudes of people, Christ has done that very thing. But whereas before, religious things were on the fringe of their life, he has taken this matter of cleansing, of forgiveness, of being purified and clean in God's sight, and he's brought it central to people's lives. With what result? That he's poured cold water on all things natural? Indeed, not the very reverse. He has taken with countless people this matter of their personal cleanliness, their righteousness and holiness before God, and he has made it the chief font of their highest joy. He did that for John Newton, the slave dealer. He did it for John Bunyan. He did it for John Wesley. He did it for Bishop Moul. That is precisely what Christ does. And here his miracle, as they preached a sermon, in that he says, and says still, that the reason why the joy runs out even of relationships like marriage is precisely because we tend to leave those kind of things on the outside. We treat God with respect, but no more. God is not a passionate love in our hearts. The question of our being forgiven, of our being, dare I use that word that some people call lurid, the question of our being what the Bible would call saved, we think is a thing, well, only to be talked of in rather restricted circumstances. There, said Christ as he did his miracle, there is where the human heart goes wrong. For if you don't love the Lord your God right center to your life, the joy is bound to run out. And what is more, I say Christ does that miracle still, in that he takes this matter of personal cleanliness and purification, and what we think might be a chilly subject and dampen our joy, he turns it into the chief joy that a Christian has. I believe that original miracle, for I see the spiritual miracle taking place even yet in many a life. And I'm impressed with a miracle of that kind because it's not just an exhibition of power, but it is a diagnosis of the basic need of the human heart. There is, I submit to you, a rightness in that diagnosis that our hearts inwardly recognize, even if we find the diagnosis on top rather unpalatable. And so I submit it goes for the rest of the miracles. But I want to come to something far deeper and far stronger. Miracles are, so to speak, but outward evidence. Let me come to the evidence of his personal character. I've already put before you his claims in such fashion as we must all by now see, that there is practically only, uh, there are practically only two possibilities. Either he was, as he claimed to be, God, or else he was a lunatic. It is possible that you may argue that he wasn't a lunatic, but if you argue that and you still hold that he wasn't God incarnate, then you must dismiss him as worse than a lunatic, a deliberate deceiver, and a deceiver in the very most sacred things of life. It were kinder to dismiss him as a lunatic, if he be not the Son of God. All I want to do now, therefore, is to ask you to think briefly, and perhaps, as I say, provoke you to think more deeply later on, of the general character of Christ as it has come down to us. He claimed to be God incarnate. What kind of a character was he? Naturally, we should be very suspicious of anybody that made such an extreme claim. More inclined, perhaps naturally, to say with the Jews, but man, you're mad, you're off your head, you have a demon. And it is, it is the fact that some of the great men in history were mentally disturbed. There is increasing evidence, for instance, that Alexander the Great, who himself claimed divine honors, was at the end of his days, worn out as he was with military campaigning and burdened by tremendous stresses, there is increasing evidence of incipient megalomania in that otherwise brilliant young man. Was it so with Christ? Not of his general character. If he's a megalomaniac, he will be pompous, swirled-headed, demanding great things to no sane purpose. But the Christ that comes to us in the records is a Christ who talked like this: I am meek and lowly of heart. Or again, a Christ who at the Last Supper girded himself with a towel and washed his disciples' feet that he might give them an example of how we should love one another. A Christ who, when his disciples were quarrelling as to who should be the greatest in the kingdom, said, gentlemen, I came not to be served, but to serve and to give my life a ransom. From showing any trace of megalomania, mania, our Lord has permanently set the example of humble, loving service of our fellows. And when we judge him, not by the Christian atmosphere in which we have all been brought up, not in a, in a civilization that has been flooded with Christianity for centuries, but when we judge him against the background of his own times, when the rulers of the Gentiles did in fact grind down their subject, subjects, it is certainly remarkable. Christ it was who blazed this trail of self-sacrificing, loving, sensible service. People have accused him, and more than him, his followers, of being mentally immature. And certainly psychology has taught us to recognize in some forms of religion emotional immaturity. But yet when we come to examine Christ and his character from the point of view of psychology, we must admit that he is startlingly before his time. He it was who taught us the value of the little child and said, you beware lest you stumble that child. He has done more to get rid of anxiety neuroses in people than any man I've heard of, who taught men that there was a heavenly father who had numbered even the hairs of their head, who knew even the sparrows fall, who bade us not be distraught in the race for goods and food and clothes. He was the man who, by his teaching, cut at the root of neurotic perfectionism. It is the fact that you will see neurotics driving themselves to the last inch in supposedly religious service, when to their friends it is only too patent that this is not true Christianity, but a neurosis. Christ cut at the very root of guilt complexes when he told of a God who loves us even while we are yet sinners and is prepared to accept us on the ground not of what we have done, and in spite of all our guilt, and is prepared to receive the truly repentant and love them while they are yet sinners. Yet at that same time, there never was a character more than Christ who penetrated those rationalizings with which we commonly, conveniently forget our shortcomings. The zeal with which he tore the screen of hypocrisy from Pharisees and from religious people, and made them face reality instead of concocting an idea that was so unreal about their personal holiness, was nothing but healthy psychologically. The question before us is whether Jesus Christ was insane. Insane. Or whether he was not, in fact, just what we would expect God to be. Absolute in his claims to loyalty, demanding that we follow him even before our love to mother, father, or wife or child, demanding all we have. And yet at the same time showing us that God incarnate is a God that would get down at our own feet and wash them in his lowly and intense love for us. Insane? Or is not this just what you would expect God to be? And finally, as I bring the lecture to an end, the evidence of his death. Here I need say but a very little. For once more, it must be evident to us all, surely, that Jesus Christ is certainly unique. There has been nobody else in history that anybody has begun to take seriously, who claimed that he came to die for the sins of his fellow men. And there's a very good reason why nobody else has made that claim. If one of your friends made that claim, though hitherto he had been the holiest man you had ever met, if anybody, however much you revered him, made the claim that he was come to die for your sins, you would urge him to see a psychiatrist as soon as possible, wouldn't you? Yet that is precisely what Jesus Christ claimed. The issue again before us is nothing less than this. Was the man insane? Or was he true? Judge him by this. You say if God really came down to this earth to offer a sacrifice for human sin, how could it possibly be that he came so unawares that people didn't know? But he didn't come unawares. It is the fact that God sent- spent centuries preparing for this coming. Those who care to read their Old Testament, and notably the Old Testament part that we call Isaiah, will find that God took the pains centuries before Christ's coming to announce to humankind that there would come such an one who would be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. No other man came into life with such prophecies behind him. You say, that's an easy one. He was a Jew, wasn't he? The Jews wrote the prophecies, then they provided the man who fulfilled them. Anybody can do that. No, anybody can't. Because the Jews who were entrusted with those books disagreed and said he wasn't the Christ. And the last thing they ought to have done was to have crucified him as they did, and so fulfill the scriptures that had prophesied his crucifixion. So blind and terrible was their prejudice that, as Peter observed, they fulfilled those scriptures in condemning our Lord. But there was no collusion between them. And finally, I ask you to judge the question by the criterion of our own human need, and I come back to where I started. I submit to you that if Jesus Christ came to us as the best preacher that ever was, you would have very little room for him. We've had enough of preachers and lecturers, for that matter. As one colleague of mine put it grimly to me, why should I pay a person a thousand pounds a year, said he, to tell me to be good? Don't I know I ought to be good? We do. Our real need is not for someone to come and tell us again that we need to be good. Our need is more fundamental than that. If we believe in absolute values at all, what we need is somebody to come and first of all deal with our guilty past. Bring us forgiveness. Bring us power to live differently. Next week I shall have to say, have to say something about the power that Christ claims to give. But this week I put to you that our Lord's claim to be the Son of God, and his claim that he came to die for human sin and in some sense offer a sacrifice for it, appeals to us deeply. It is the thing, if true, that we need above all else. You say, sir, this is very biased reasoning. This is very empirical. Ah, but... we have such a thing as physical hunger. How did we know what was good for that? How do we know that a loaf of bread is good? And is what it claims to be. We find we have physical hunger. We make the experiment, and the bread deals with it. Do you want better proof? We find, if we are honest, that we are sinners, and we are worried about our sins if we are sensible. And we find one solitary man in all history. He claimed that he had come to die a sacrifice for human sin. Isn't this likely to be true? If he is not true, humanity has no answer to its fundamental need.