There have been many great and influential people in the history of the world, who have initiated great changes and been a great force for good . Some have even founded new religions. Is Jesus Christ just another of these great leaders or visionaries?
We believe that Jesus was the Son of God. That before His birth as a baby at Bethlehem He had existed eternally, and that God created the universe through Him. We believe that Jesus came to earth to save human beings from the results of their own folly and rebellion against God, and that through His death on the Cross we can receive God's forgiveness, and be reconciled to Him.
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.’ This is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." (Mere Christianity, 1960, pp. 40–41)
WHAT ABOUT OTHER RELIGIOUS TEACHERS?
There have been a number of religious teachers, people like Buddha, Muhammad and Confucius. The religious systems they founded have many good aspects, and many of their followers are devout and sincere.
Yet they all fall down at our greatest point of need: they offer no solution to the problem of sin, which separates us from God. Jesus Christ alone came from God to bring us back to God. It is in Jesus that we have the proof that God loves us and wants us to live forever with Him.
"This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."
(The Bible, 1 John 4: 9–10)
What really sets Jesus Christ apart from all others is His resurrection from the dead. This is a fact of history, verified by hundreds of witnesses who met Him after His resurrection. Many of them were prepared to give their lives for Him. Down through the centuries sceptics have tried to prove the resurrection never happened, but the facts remain, recorded for us just as all history is recorded. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ there would be no such thing as Christianity and you would not be looking at this web site!
He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter's shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never travelled more than two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things one usually associates with greatness.
He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. When he died, he was laid in a borrowed grave.
Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race and leader of mankind's progress. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the kings that ever reigned have not affected the life of man as much as that One Solitary Life — Jesus of Nazareth.
