Divinity of Jesus: The Difference between Christian and Muslim Views

 

            The ocean is a big place.  We had a chance, as a family, to go to the beach earlier this summer.  For a second time in my life I was humbled by having to ask a fellow swimmer to help me out of a riptide.  It was pretty close to shore but it caught me.  Most people don’t like to need help and I felt especially small considering this wasn’t a place with w0rld-class surfing waves. 

            The ocean can do that – make one feel small.  In ancient times, the ocean was a place of industry; fishermen could make good money.  The ocean was the pathway to exploration.  What’s out there?  The ocean was the highway to commerce and the means by which people encountered one another.  Dominant armadas could enable empires to rule the world.

            The ocean was a also a source of mystery and fear.  What creatures lurk beneath the black depths?  How deep does it go?  There were no satellites, no light houses, no GPS, and no coast guard.  The ocean was seen as a place of danger and death. 

            When we were at the ocean and I was raucously riding the waves but also trying to stay close enough to the shore so I could handle any riptides, we looked out, far out to sea.  We watched fishing boats.  We tried to sight dolphins.  We think we saw one.  But the most amazing thing was a man, guy.  He was way, way out there, swimming for all his might.  He’s wasn’t swimming in.  He was swimming parallel to the shore.  I thought, who is this guy?  If he got a cramp or if he became complete exhausted, he was dead because he was so far out, no one could get to him.  In fact, it’s unlikely anyone would see him unless they were looking hard.  He must be a serious triathlete who does the iron-man competition. 

            As amazing as his stamina and strength are in swimming, even he is small next to the expanse of the ocean.  It is beautiful, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring.  And the ocean declares that Jesus is God. 

            Why is this declaration so important?  And why is it so important to do more than just say, “Jesus is God?”

            I write a blog and occasionally I write on the way Islam and Christianity co-exist in the world.  Sometimes this coexistence is a violent collision.  Sometimes it is a warm friendship.  In my writings I make it clear that I see the two faiths as fundamentally contradictory.  They cannot both be true because Isalm sees Jesus as a prophet.  To be sure, Muslims believe in most of the miracles reported in the New Testament.  Muslims revere Jesus.  Muslims love Jesus.

            However, Christians worship Jesus.  This is anathema to Isalm.  To say something is anathema is to say it is so detestably untrue it calls for damnation.  Muslims feel it is damnable to call Jesus ‘God’ because this is a direct assault on monotheism.  God alone is God, and in their view, to say that Jesus is God is to have a second God.

            Christians are as fiercely monotheistic as Muslims or Jews for that matter.  We believe there is one God.  And this one God exists in three forms and three manifestations and the three have a relationship with each other within the Godhead.  Father God, Son Jesus, Holy Spirit – one God; God is three in one.  It is utterly against Islam to say Jesus is God.  It is utterly essential to Christianity that we acknowledge Jesus as fully human and fully God. 

            The two religions can co-exist.  We can and should befriend Muslims.  We can and must love Muslims.  That love includes respecting their commitment to their faith.  Respect means if we want to invite a Muslim to consider Jesus, it has to be that, an invitation.  If he’s not interested, we still love him and respect him and honor him as a friend even when we’re completely convinced that he’s wrong about Jesus. 

            Along these lines Muslim readers have commented on my blog writings.  There is no way Jesus could be God, they say.  One reader linked me to a Muslim talk-show.  It’s a setting that skews younger, is hip, cool and the host had a guest who was a Christian pastor but then converted to Islam.  He was giving 10 reasons why Jesus could not be God.

            We can stop right here and just say, “Who cares.”  We think Jesus is God and he doesn’t so we think he is wrong.  There.  Now can we all just get on with our lives?  We can, sure, but if we take that kind of a shrug-of-the shoulder approach, then our faith is not a reasoned faith.  It is not a thought-out faith.  It is one we inherit, one we accept because it was given from people we trust, and it is one based on our emotions.  Our emotions tell us we are sinners who need Jesus; people we trust – authors of scripture, pastors, youth pastors, Sunday school teachers – tell us Jesus forgives us and we need Him.  And so by trust and by emotion we are Christ-followers. 

            That is all good and nothing I am saying negates that or detracts from it.  What I offer this morning adds to that emotional confession born out of a faith community and relationships with Christians and relationship with the Holy Spirit.  We are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind.  To Love God with the mind, I think includes a reasoned defense or explanation of why we believe what we believe to be true.  And this is where the ocean and Jesus’s demonstration in Mark’s gospel comes into the conversation.

            The ex-Muslim turned youth pastor gives 10 reasons why Jesus never says he is God.  We might say, “Oh yes he does say it.  He says, ‘the father and I are one,’ in John 10:30.”  Be careful with that response.  Remember, this Muslim was a Christian.  He knows many of the references on which we base our belief that Jesus is God.  He looks at that and says, ‘wait a minute.   That means Jesus and God are united, one in purpose, not one in being.  In those terms, God and I are also one because I am united with God.’  He makes this point pretty clearly.  His articulation is not good but his arguments have logic.  Many of the standard verses we use to show that Jesus is God are well-known to Muslims and they have a ready refutation. 

            The host of the talk show says, “If Jesus was really God, why doesn’t he say, ‘I am God?’”  A few years, this very question troubled me, and I went searching for that verse, and it’s not in there.  It’s not in John’s gospel, the primary source for Jesus’ “I am” statements.  It is not in the other gospels.  Why doesn’t Jesus say, “I am God”?

            We need to be able to answer that.  The world is shrinking.  It’s not just in college towns and big cities.  Across America people are setting up homes, people who do not have a Protestant or Catholic worldview.  We can stay isolated, stick to spending time with people who think like us and talk like us.  But if we do that, we dare not call ourselves Christ-followers.  He calls us beyond our familiar circles and once we step out of our comfort zones and into conversations and friendships with people who see the world total differently, we have to be prepared to say why we think what we think.  “Jesus is God.” 

            Why do we think so?  Did he say that?  Not in those words. 

            The statement would have been absurd to the ears of the first century Jew Palestine.  So instead of saying, “I am God,” Jesus said things only God can say.  Jesus did things only God will do.  And Jesus received things only God can receive.  In this way, there was no mistake.  Everyone around him understood him to be claiming to be God; otherwise, they would not have killed him. 

            I am thankful for David Garland’s commentary on Mark’s Gospel.  Before reading it, I always thought the place to look for declarations of Jesus’ divinity was the Gospel of John.

            In Mark 6, Jesus is rejected by his old neighbors in his home town of Nazareth.  Herod, the Jewish King, a puppet of Rome, imprisons and executes John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin and the prophet whose preaching and practice of baptism paved the way for Jesus’ ministry.  On a remote hillside, Jesus feeds 5000 people by miraculously multiplying one person’s lunch. 

            Then he does something very human.  He sends the disciples off on their boat out into the Sea of Galilee.  And in isolation, he prays.  Human beings pray to God.  Jesus was exceptional as a human being and he was 100% human.  His wisdom was supreme; his prayer life incredible; and his love perfect.

            While he was praying, the disciples were out to sea and straining against the wind.  This is different than what we read in Mark 4.  There the windstorm was so fierce, it kicked up the waves to the point that the boat was swamped and in real danger of sinking.  In that situation, Jesus commanded the storm to be silent and it obeyed.  That account illustrates the same truth this one does, but the circumstances are different.  There Jesus was in the boat and the disciples were about to die.  Here in Mark 6, the disciples are not going to die, but they’re also not making progress.  They’re straining at the oars against the power of the mighty sea and the uncontrollable wind.  As he’s praying, he sees them.  This must have been a vision.  Still, this is a human thing.  Peter, Paul and many others had visions while praying.  The clincher is what Jesus does next.

            Alone on the land, praying, in a vision, Jesus sees the disciples as they row at night, and he walks on the sea.  Who does that?  Who just walks across the water?  Jews in the first century would have had a ready answer that they would have accepted without question.  Thinking back to their scripture, they would remember the prophet Habakkuk.  “Was your wrath against the rivers, O Lord?  Or your anger against the rivers or your rage against the sea?  … You trampled the sea with your horses” (Habakkuk 3:8a-b, 15a).

            They would remember the book of Job where God says to Job, “Who shut for the doors of the sea? … Have you entered the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep” (Job 38:8a, 16).  Who?  God.  God walks on the sea.  People were terrified of the unseen depths, but God walks in the recesses of the deep at His pleasure.  At His pleasure, he shuts the sea as you or I would shut a door.

            The disciples and later, Mark’s first readers would remember Psalm 107.  “They saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep.  For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.  … He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed” (107:24-24, 29).  Ancient Israelites spoke in scripture; “it was written;” “as the prophets said;” “Moses wrote.”  This is how they conveyed ideas and understood the world.  So, in these terms, Jesus made very clear statements and some of his statements came through actions.

            Note the end of Mark 6, verse 48.  Jesus is walking on the water and it says he intended to pass them by.  He didn’t.  They were terrified and he got into the boat to calm them.  They had not been terrified by the wind.  They strained against but did not fear it.  But a man walking on the water sent them into heart-thumping panic and Jesus came to them.  But his intention was to pass by.  Why?

            Moses, the greatest of prophets wanted to see God.  God set Moses in the cleft of a rock, and passed by and Moses saw God’s backside glory.  Elijah, the great prophet in the book of 1^st Kings, the one who never died but was just taken up to Heaven in a Chariot of Fire, got so depressed in his fear he was suicidal.  Again, God set him in a cave, and in silence passed by him.  Who are the Old Testament two prophets who join Jesus on the mount of transfiguration in Mark 9?  Moses and Elijah. 

            The disciples out on the sea were not in trouble in the sense of needing Jesus to save them from imminent death.  He didn’t need to walk on water to save them.  He walked on the water so they could see that God was passing by again.  The final verse of this section says their hearts were hardened.  Shortly after this, James, John, and Peter, would come with Jesus to a mountain top where Moses and Elijah visited from the Heavenly beyond to watch God pass by. 

            When Moses asks God’s name in Exodus 3, God says, “I am.”  That is God’s self-identification.  In Greek, that phrase is rendered “ego emi.”  “Ego emi” from Greek to English can be rendered, “It is I,” or “It is me,” or “I am.”  Knowing this, it is pretty clear in John’s Gospel that Jesus is saying “I am” to indicate that he is the same God who visited Moses and named himself “I am.”  I never paid attention to “I am” statements from Jesus in the other Gospels.  But, here, on the sea, a place of dread and terror, the disciples see what sailors fear most, a phantasm, a ghostly creature come to take then to death.

            To their fear, Jesus says, “Take heart, Ego emi, it is I, I am.”  In Mark’s symbolic world, no clearer declaration can be made.  Mark’s gospel shouts that Jesus is God in human flesh, to be followed and worshiped.  To hear Jesus say, “I am God,” you have to turn to Revelation 1:17.  At the end of the verse he says, “I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the living one.”  That is a direct reference to God in apocalyptic language, and Jesus makes that reference to himself.

            Some skeptics won’t be satisfied by such evidence and that’s just the nature of things.  Muslim friends will believe Jesus walked on the water and say it didn’t mean he was God.  Jewish friends will deny that it really happened.  Modernists and naturalists will say it could not have happened and thus it is just a legend.  When Mark wrote it, he did not believe he was writing a legend.  He believed he was describing how Jesus demonstrated for his disciple who he was and is. 

            This is who we worship and follow.  This is the Lord, the master of our lives.  We are in service to Him for eternity.  This is our creator, redeemer, protector, defender, and savior, the one who forgives us of all sin, and makes us new each day.  All that we are depends on who He is.  And thus we submit ourselves to Him completely.

AMEN

Pray the Impossible - A different kind of Ash Wednesday Message

Most Christians agree that the Bible is authoritative. We bicker with each other about the proper interpretation of scripture, but I don’t run into many believers who reject the Bible. Arguments are about what the Bible says. Most agree that the Bible should be read and applied in life.

With that in mind, I step into an activity we agree on – the reading of scripture. I turn to 1 Thessalonians 5:17: “Pray without ceasing.” Also, Matthew 6:5, “And whenever you pray …” I won’t even finish the verse. Jesus assumes his followers will pray. He doesn’t instruct them to pray; of course they pray! He teaches how.

We turn to Matthew 17, where Jesus says, “Truly I tell you if you have faith the size of a mustard seed , you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (vs.20-21). I don’t know if I like that verse. As a pastor, how do I preach that? I have no practical examples from my own life. I’ve never moved a mountain. Typically, I want to admire mountains and maybe climb them, if the climb doesn’t require equipment or technical expertise. Move a mountain?

Really though, Jesus isn’t telling Peter or you or me to move mountains. He never moved one. He’s talking about prayer and impossibility. When we believe in prayer, nothing is impossible.

Remember, regardless of any theological disputes we might come up with, we all agree that the Bible is important. In the Bible, Paul says pray without ceasing, Jesus assumes we will do just that, and then Jesus says when we do it with mustard seed-sized faith, nothing is too big; nothing is impossible. Mustard seed-sized prayers have mountain moving results.

These verses are a small sampling of what the Bible has to tell us about prayer.

Prayer is a normal activity in Christian life. Adherents of other faiths are equally committed to prayer. Devout Muslims pray 5 times a day. Buddhists, Hindus, and Mormons each in very different forms pray. Everything Christians know about prayer is rooted in Judaism and today devout Jews are steadfast pray-ers. And within Christianity, there are countless forms of prayer.

So what can we say prayer assumes about the world? I approach this question as an Evangelical Christian. I cannot answer for someone in any other faith. I would not attempt to give a Catholic answer, or an Orthodox answer, or a Coptic answer. I am trained as a Baptist pastor, and that training and two decades of service in Baptist churches heavily influences how I talk about prayer.

What does prayer assume about the world? It assumes that human beings need help that we cannot provide for ourselves; help that nature will not provide; help that will not come on its own, over time. The idea that we pray operates on the assumption that right now, there are messes that will only be cleaned up when we talk to God and hear from God. Prayer assumes we need to communicate with God.

Remember, the Bible, which Christians acknowledge as word from God, says we are to pray without ceasing, and when we do so with seed-tiny faith, mountains are moved.

If prayer assumes the world – humanity – needs to talk to God and hear from God in order to survive, then what does prayer assume about the way the world should be?

Bad things happen – war; disease; disasters; economic collapse. When the cataclysmic occurs, either in the life of an individual or in a society or in many societies around the globe, prayer assumes we should talk to God, and we should do with the unfaltering belief that God will hear us. Not only will God hear us, but God is all powerful and is able to give the help we need.

Prayer does not assume that in an ideal world there is no suffering. Suffering leads some to pray and others to give up on prayer. Assuming how the world should be, prayer is the central action in the divine-human relationship. Today millions pray. In assuming how the world should be, prayer assumes people would pray in faith, which for the most part they don’t right now. Some do, but most have very little spiritual acumen when they bow their heads.

What does prayer assume about the world? That people need to be in conversation with God.

What does prayer assume about the way the world should be? People should pray in faith – belief that is so strong it defies common sense. That mountain cannot move from here to there. Jesus says it can.

A third question: what does prayer make possible? In Mark chapter 9, the disciples, minus Peter, James, and John, failed to overcome a demon that inflicted terrible epileptic seizures on a boy. The nine disciples were overwhelmed by the possessing spirit. Then Jesus came along and won the victory over the devil’s minion. Why? He said, “This kind only comes out through prayer” (Mark 9:29).

In my own life, I remember flying across the Atlantic Ocean, remembering a great task I had ahead of me. I wept because I was overwhelmed with the work ahead. I felt completely unprepared, totally unqualified. But, I knew the task was mine and mine alone. But, not mine alone! From my pitiful “woe-is-me” thoughts, I moved into prayer. I was calmed by the reality that God would walk with and help along the way. It doesn’t mean the work hasn’t been hard. It has. Prayer made it possible for me to be relax as I anticipated the work and then to succeed at those points when the work was too much for me.

I think you and I together could brainstorm 100 other things prayer makes possible. I would sum it up this way. Prayer makes it possible for us to hear the voice of God, to live in the power of God, and experience the helping presence of God in all the moments of life.

It that’s a rough synopsis of what prayer makes possible, what does prayer make impossible? Once we have understood a little bit about prayer and entered a life of prayer, it is impossible to say something is impossible. Rejecting the impossible doesn’t mean we get whatever we want. God is not Santa Claus. God is not a credit card with no limits and no requirement of payment.

Jesus does not say, “Ask and your heart’s desire will be given to you.” He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” What is “it?” A few verses later, he clarifies. “If you who are evil know how to give good things (like a fish) to your hungry children, how much will the Heavenly Father give good things to those who ask” (7:11).

Prayer makes it impossible for us to not ask. We can choose to ignore God, but we cannot say, “God you ignored me in my need.” God sees us and is ready to meet our needs and meet us in the dead center of our worst with the depths of his limitless love. Prayer makes it impossible to say, “God has forgotten me.” Prayer makes it impossible to say “There’s nothing I can do.” There is always something we can do. We can pray.

Then, the final question is what culture does prayer create? My fellow Bible-reading Christ followers, I want to answer this final question in two ways.

First, prayer creates a shared culture among us. We are different in how we would approach difficult life challenges than we would be if prayer was not an option. One of us may be hit so hard by catastrophe, he simply cannot pray in the moment. However, the body of Christ, the church, comes around that wounded one and prays for him. That phrase means we lift his name and his burden up to God. It also means that we pray in his place until he is able to join them and pray for himself. Until his wounding is healed enough for him to go God, we go to God on his behalf and in his stead. So, prayer creates a culture of connectedness – between people and God, and also individuals with one another.

Second, prayer creates a culture of the possible. Christians enter into scenarios human logic disregards. We’ve never done that. We can’t do that. That can’t happen. In a culture where we believe prayer is real because God is real, we don’t say those things. We dare believe that when we pray for imprisoned Christ-followers in North Korea, our prayers make a difference. When we go before God on behalf of the suffering people of Haiti, our prayer somehow helps. We go to our knees and pray for women who are completely oppressed in Iran, and we believe it makes a difference that we prayed.

Believing that, we know we can do something about the biggest problems in the world. And knowing we can do something means when we don’t pray, that makes a difference too. Failure to pray is failure to participate with God in a way God has made for us.

The season of Lent involves the practice of spiritual disciplines. Believers fast, sacrificing some food or activity. Sisters and brothers in Christ do season-specific individual devotions as signs of their desire to turn back to God. Lent is a season of repenting. I encourage these practices. Give something up for Lent if it helps you focus on Jesus. Repent of your sins and receive forgiveness. Spiritual discipline, including prayer, is the way to live as one follows Jesus.

As we think about the culture of prayer, I believe this year, God is calling us to more than the personal prayers and individualistic spiritual devotion. I think individual practices are part of the call, but I believe specifically in Spring of 2011, God is calling us to mustard seed-sized prayer that yields mountainous results. We are going to together pray the impossible.

In any type of prayer, we have meaningful experiences in specific identification. Exactly what “impossible prayers” will we pray in 2011? I suggest going before God in prayer in the following areas.

- Prayer for Political Upheaval in Northern Africa and the Middle East

- Prayer for Orphan Care

- Prayer for Victims of Disasters

- Prayer for the Persecuted Church

- Prayer for Missionaries known to our churches

- Prayer for persons battling Addiction

- Prayer for Women (in situations of trafficking and in countries like Afganistan)

- Prayer for Water (in places like India, Yemen, and Haiti where water is scarce)

It is entirely appropriate to pray for God to be at work in our individual lives. Equally, it is important to pray for God to bring the redemption of Jesus in our families, in our churches, in our communities, and in our nation. All those prayers matter. But tonight, in the spirit of the culture of praying the impossible, pray for the world and dare to believe that in ways we don’t understand, our prayers matter to God. Make a priority prayer and pray beyond your circle of familiarity. Pray for one of the circumstances listed above. Pray for it every single day from now till Easter. As a part of your Lenten discipline, move mountains. Pray the impossible.

AMEN

The First and the Last - The Living One

I must confess a theological struggle that has plagued me recently. As followers of Jesus, we make the claim that Jesus was and is 100% God. In the incarnation (Jesus coming, born of Mary, and living as a 1st century Jew), he is also 100% human. Without a blink, we determinedly make both claims. Recently, I blinked.

With a scrutinizing eye, I combed through John's Gospel to find where it is definitively stated that Jesus is God. I didn't have to go far. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:1, 14a, NRSV). Case closed: Jesus is God! But for me, the case wasn't (and isn't) closed.

I continued reading and what I found is Jesus being referred to as the "Son of God." Jesus is the one "sent by God." Jesus doesn't say, "I am God." Jesus continuously subordinates himself and speaks of God as a Superior Other. Jesus is subservient to the Sovereign God. For me this became more than just a difficult notion to understand. It's a given that it is hard for a human to grasp that Jesus is a man and at the same time is God. Here's what became hard for me. The Bible over and over failed to say Jesus is God. Why?

I share all of this to be open with you about my own theological pickle. I hesitate to call this a moment of doubt or a crisis of faith. The more I read of John's Gospel, the more I became convinced that whatever else is true, one thing I am sure of is our call to worship Jesus. I don't think I have ever been more confident that life is all about serving Jesus and salvation is only found in Him. I am just not so sure about what we (Christians) have said about him.

So, what to do? How does a pastor preach every week with these questions swimming through his mind? This inner theological debate has waged in my brain for months, and you haven't head a thing about it. Why am I am coming clean now?

The key for my own understanding (and return from the edge of theological abyss back to evangelical orthodoxy) has been a text in Revelation. The resurrected Christ is speaking to John: "he placed his right hand on me, saying, 'Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one'" (Revelation 1:17-18a). The phrase "living one" would have been understood by a first century Jew as referring to God and no one else. It was used repeatedly in Isaiah in that way, and the same idea is conveyed about God in Revelation 1:8. So, for Jesus to tell John he is "the living one" is to self-identify as God. I really needed Him to do that.

That self-identification, coupled with the verses from John I cited, helped me sit down and exhale. I can, on faith, believe in two key Christian doctrines - the trinity and the dual nature of Christ. Of course I am an unfinished product and I continue to have theological questions. But I am relieved to have this one calmed to the point that I can speak openly of it to my church. Starting today, I am going to spend the next several months sharing other insights from Revelation. I recommend you read it through, several times. I also recommend Craig Keener's commentary on Revelation in the NIV Applicaton Commentary series.

I conclude with this. Don't be afraid of your questions or doubts, and don't bury them or pretend they aren't there. Our growth in Christ comes when we are 100% honest with Him. So if theological uncertainty is nibbling at your soul, face it. Take the questions head on. If you need to, come to me and let me help you. I have questions too. Jesus is the answer.