Jesus Christ - The Real Evidence

And we shall start reading at verse 1. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at, and our hands have touched, this we proclaim concerning the word of life. The life appeared. We have seen it and testify to it.

And we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

We write this to make our joy complete. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you. God is light.

In him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him, yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.

May the Lord bless to us that reading from his word. Father, we ask your blessing upon these moments of meditation and explanation and proclamation from your word. Deliver each one of us from the sin of carelessness and enable us, Father, with attention to be driven to conclusions which are in accord with your most holy word.

Help us to discover and to cling on to truth for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. Once again, I'm asking, as I make a request each Sunday evening, for your attention, particularly speaking to some of my young friends in the galleries.

Your time here is wasted unless you listen, and if you listen there may be something of value for you and you'll give other people an opportunity of hearing what I think is one of the most important issues that needs to be raised and answered today. I'm speaking about Jesus Christ and the real evidence as to his life, his death, his resurrection, and the consequences of the Christian gospel for ordinary folk like you and me. And of course I have some mind on the subject matter being put out by the ITV broadcasting authorities during these Sundays.

This is in effect the first of a two-part address. I'll conclude what I have to say next Sunday evening. Easter Sunday seems most appropriate to take this subject matter up again and to explore it with you.

But thank you for coming this evening and I trust that what I share shall be of value because though the ITV authorities have presented some evidence I think they are missing and will miss because of the biasness of the production, they will miss some of the vital and important evidence. So I'm so bold as to take as my title this evening, Jesus Christ, the real evidence, the real evidence. Dr. Johnson, a famous man in English literature some years ago, said to his faithful friend and secretary Boswell, Sir, we make friendships by mistake, believing our friends to be what they are not.

We make friendships by mistake, believing our friends to be what they are not. What a friend we have in Jesus, all our griefs and sins to bear. Have we really made, not just us here in the tab, but millions of people down 2,000 years, an incredible mistake.

Is Jesus not the friend of sinners? Is he not the saviour of the world? Is what has been gathered together in the New Testament equivalent to a fairy tale, a yarn that was well spun in days gone by, but is out of date for contemporary people, clever people like you and me and the broadcasting authorities? I've got a difficulty this evening. I'd love to speak to this subject for a long time and I'd love to bring out an enormous amount of evidence that I think has tremendous weight in underscoring the position that what the Christian Church has always taught about Jesus Christ is accurate and is valid. But I'm dealing with a congregation of people who are mixed in their understanding of Scripture and there's a limit to what I can share at an academic level.

So what I want to do with simplicity as my goal is to suggest to you four anchors, four anchors which are important in holding on to the truth of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. If you visited the Logos when she was in Shoram, O.M.'s smallest ship, you would have discovered that that ship along with the larger one, the Doulos, has a big anchor and when it was dropped at Shoram it held the ship secure even through the ebb and the flow of the tide. And there are certain anchorage points which I think help to pin our faith in the Christian gospel and enable us to believe unblushingly in the 20th century to the simple truth that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world.

The first anchor point is simply this, the Master, the man himself. Jesus Christ, according to a great English poet Tennyson, had a character which was more wonderful than the greatest miracle. A character that was more wonderful than the greatest miracle.

No man ever lived like Jesus lived. Nobody ever lived like Jesus lived. He never lusted, though he was tempted.

He never played anyone unfairly, though he had opportunity so to do. His message was sometimes laughed at and at times people swore at what he had to say and they libeled him, but he never swore back. His friends said, and he was in their close scrutiny for years, he never did anything wrong.

Could anyone say that about you? Even your closest mate? An influential lady who was a Roman sent in effect a telegram to her husband, a man by the name of Pilate, and she said about Jesus, have nothing to do with that man, because he's a just man. And on one occasion Jesus threw down a towel in terms of a challenge to those who were against him and he said, which one of you convinces me of ever having done anything wrong? And they blushingly went away because no one could think of anything. And when ultimately at the end of Jesus's life they brought some so-called witnesses to give evidence against him, the witnesses contradicted themselves and would have been ruled out of any normal court had it been a just one that tried the Lord Jesus.

The mud that they chucked at him, it wouldn't stick. No man ever lived like Jesus lived. Number two, no man ever taught like Jesus taught.

He wasn't a professional in the sense of going to college or university, but he wasn't a fool. He had such a great intellect that he didn't really need much more help than ordinary schoolteachers could give him. But when he started to preach, you fellows in the gallery, when he started to preach, you chaps in the gallery please listen I'd be awfully grateful and we'll have a talk afterwards.

When he started to preach, people listened to him. You see, he had an ability I don't have. I'm having difficulty with some fellows in getting their attention.

Jesus never had that. He was an excellent teacher. He could pull out a story like dropping your hat and what he had to say was so gripping that he never had to stop as I have to stop to try and get people's attention because the stories he told were so alive.

We call his stories parables and you can ransack English literature and Hebrew literature and you can't find a parable like the ones that Jesus told. They were so exquisite, they were so brilliant and the common people came rushing to listen to what he had to say and occasionally there'd be a tinge of humor, a sort of Hebrew joke that he'd get involved, wrapped into the story that he told. We miss it today because we're not Hebrews and we don't live 2,000 years ago but it's their humor that Jesus had when he was teaching.

His greatest achievement, however, had got nothing to do with what he taught in the sense of stories that he related but something to do with the death that he died. No man ever lived like Jesus. No man ever taught like Jesus.

No man ever died like Jesus. You say there you're straining the evidence. Other people have died, they've been hung on a cross.

Other people have had ghastly ends to their life. That's not really what I mean. When Jesus died he knew that death was just around the corner a year or so before it happened and he said like no one else has ever said in human history that his death would benefit other people, that it was basic to his life's work to die because when he died there would be some consequence that would flow from his death which would be of an advantage to people who lived in centuries to come right to the 20th century.

When Jesus moved around the streets of Palestine it was obvious to people that he was different from others because of the life that he lived, because of the teaching that he taught, and because of the expectation of the death that he would die. And laced alongside his teaching were tremendous claims and tremendous acts. He claimed to be the Son of God.

I don't care what the ITV authorities told you last Sunday evening he most definitely made the claim. Chapter in verse are found throughout the whole of the Gospels and he backed up his claim by doing things that ordinary people can't do. For instance he was able to take water and turn it into wine.

He was able to cure a man who was lame because of paralysis. And after he'd done that he said to this particular man, not only do I heal you of your diseases but I pardon you of your sins. And by doing that he claimed to be more than an ordinary man.

He claimed to be God for sin is against God and only one who has been sinned against can forgive. And someone has said as they stood back from Scripture and seen Jesus flash across the page of the Gospels, if Jesus Christ was not God he deserved an Oscar. The man himself, the first anchorage.

The second, the manuscripts. What I mean are those Gospels that are found two-thirds of the way through the Bible and are entitled Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I get so fed up here in Worthing hearing people, young people, and older people say that they don't believe in Jesus Christ and they've never even read any one of the four Gospels.

How biased can you get? More bluntly how daft can you become? How can you reject something that you've never even looked into? Ah but someone says those Gospels were written many years after the Lord Jesus Christ died. They were put together some would say 100 years, 200 years. In other words you got people living some generation or so after Jesus had died and they started to write what they thought about him.

They got little bits of information but they decided to develop it more and they incorporated stories, miracles, just to make him stand out as a sort of Hebrew Superman. Well let's think that through for a moment. Read the Gospels for yourself and ask the question, do they read like evidence that someone has dreamt up, has put together a hundred and fifty years after the life and death of Jesus to delude other people? Or do they read like fact? Do they read like as I was suggesting to you last week, as though a man was actually telling John Mark, the author of the second Gospel, all that he had witnessed and seen? There are interesting little bits incorporated into the Gospel narratives that seem to deny the idea of imagination but reflect real experience that a man had himself witnessed.

They read well, very well indeed. As though they were written before the churches were established. Now listen, you Christian people, here's a point for you.

The Gospels are very early, relatively so. Now if they were written late, shall we say after the time that Paul wrote the epistles, if somebody was manufacturing a lot of the information that's contained within the Gospels, what do you think might be more than just a mild temptation? What about the controversies that were racking the church in the first century? Let's take the one that's up again as a difficulty today, at least difficult for some folks, not for others, about speaking in other tongues. Or what about Jews and Gentiles worshipping together in the same church? An apartheid problem that occurred in the first century.

Now these were difficulties in local churches. But there's not one shred of hint that the Gospels are dealing with these problems. Now look, think this through very, very carefully.

Think the logic of it through. Here are people writing the Gospels with little bits of information that have been passed down 150 years or more after Jesus has died. And the church has got great problems.

This business of speaking in tongues, this business of Jew and Gentile, and should they relate together? Now in the name of sanity, if those Gospels are written late, then why didn't somebody incorporate into the Gospels their own opinion on these vexed issues? So that the churches might at least have something, although invalid judgment, to be able to settle the problems that confronted them. But you don't discover anything like that in the Gospels whatsoever. What was the greatest event that the Gospels record? All right, you're too shy.

How about the resurrection? Do you know what they thought of women in those days? Forgive me ladies, but not very much. Not as a sort of legal testimony. There was a Jewish rabbi by the name of, I think I've got this right, Ben Sira, a long time since I read him.

And he had a prayer. And he says, thank God I'm born a Jew and not a Gentile. Educated and not ignorant.

A man and not a woman. Why? Well you see, in those days, women's testimony was not taken for very much. Not for very much.

They didn't have the same legal rights as women folk have today. When you read the Gospels, tell me, who do the Gospels say first saw Jesus? A woman. That's right, a woman.

The weaker of the two sexes, not only physically, but in the days of A.D. 30 or thereabouts, legally inadequate. Now here are these bright Christians living 150 years after the event or thereabouts, and they're making up the resurrection of Jesus. And so who do they cast as the person who first sees the Lord Jesus Christ? Bags Peter.

I would have thought that Peter was the best man. Or maybe really be sensational in the plot and get Jesus appearing to Annas and Caiaphas. That should cause a stir when people read that the high priests testified to the resurrection of Jesus.

But you don't get anything like this. You don't get the imagination of the novelist. What you get is historic, blatant fact.

A woman saw Jesus Christ. And the very admission of this, it seems to me, indicates the accuracy, the trustworthiness of the Gospel, of the manuscript in part. How about you say, how could they remember what Jesus said? I don't have a very good memory, you confess.

Well you may not have, but not everybody's like the British. I was traveling in India some years ago with a man who got a memory that made me just amazed. I checked him.

His memory had to do with scripture. I checked him at least on 100 passages of scripture, and he knew them off by heart. The Oriental mind, the Eastern mind, is given sometimes to feats of memory, the like of which we in our computer age don't have.

And when you push the Gospel records back into the Aramaic tongue which Jesus spoke, you find that a lot of it becomes poetry. And it's relatively easy to remember poetry. Put all those facts together, and there are many others, believe you me, that I could keep you with this evening, and you are driven to the reasonable suggestion that the manuscripts are basically accurate.

The master, the manuscript, what about the men? I mean the men who follow Jesus, Peter and Andrew and Thomas and Matthew. Now they were ordinary working-class chaps. You might have found them in a garage, had this whole thing occurred in Worthing in the year 2000.

Ordinary people, not gullible. If you were trying to pick some men who ultimately were to devise a story to fool everybody else, to tell untruths about their central, the central character who would influence their lives, then you couldn't have picked a worse bunch than that lot. Peter, a businessman, a Galilean fisherman, blunt, impetuous, spoke first and then thought afterwards.

I sometimes wish he hadn't spoken like you and me. Matthew, well he was a sort of legal rogue, a tax collector, making quite a lot on the side. Not a man to be easily conned, incidentally a man who was given to secretarial work, a good copyist, which might be an interesting thought in view of people even in those days taking notes as to what they heard said.

I wonder if Matthew did that. Put these disciples together, Peter, Matthew, Thomas, a doubter, a skeptic, and think about what sort of people they were together and sometimes you discover they were a very quarrelsome bunch. What was the reason for one of the rows? Well, two of the disciples got in front of the rest of the others, at least their mother did, by asking Jesus, look when you come in your kingdom, let my son sit on your right hand and your left.

In other words, let them be the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. Give them authority in your kingdom. The whole idea was of something very, very materialistic, you see.

This is, in some respects, what compelled them to follow the Lord Jesus and certainly was what compelled Judas to follow the Lord Jesus, the idea of getting some benefit from it himself. Now do you really feel, be honest, use your mind, God gave you a brain to think with, do you really think that these fellows are likely to have made the essence of this story of Jesus up? When Jesus died, they went to pieces. Everything they'd invested in him for three years had been an absolute waste.

Peter could have made a fortune in shekels on the Sea of Galilee in his fishing business and three years gone to boot. Matthew, wow, he was making a right packet anyway. Think of what he lost.

These men were utterly depressed. We had believed that he was the Son of God, that's what they said, but look, look what's happened, he's dead now, he's rotting in the grave. And Peter goes back to his fishing and pretty quickly, what changed these men? Come on, ask yourself the question, what changed them? What caused them to start ultimately to preach the Gospel and to risk their lives? The same death that Jesus suffered awaited them because the Christian faith was what was known in the Latin tongue as a religio illicita, that means an illegal religion and you got butchered for preaching a religion in Rome, in the Roman Empire, that didn't have the certificate of Caesar behind it for proclamation.

The Jews were made an exception. What changed these fellows? There's only one logical explanation. John tells us in the letter that he wrote that David read to us, we saw him, we touched him, we handled him.

These men were not fools and they believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and many of them died awful deaths as a result. My first anchorage, the master. The second, the manuscripts.

The third, the men. Finally, the message. The message that Jesus came to bring.

Who believes that this watch came about on its own? I one day put my hand in my pocket and out came a watch. I never bought it, the pocket was empty when I walked into the church but suddenly I discovered a watch. Isn't it amazing? You think that man needs his doctor.

The world's here. You and I are here. We're alive.

I pinch myself, I feel my fingertips responding to the slight pain of my of my fingernails. I'm a person, I can think, I can taste, I can relate. I'm here.

Where did I come from? If there's no God, if the world is inanimate, if there's no personality behind it, then how do you account for you? Because you've got as big a problem accounting for yourself as trying to suggest that this watch suddenly occurred without a watchmaker. Jesus came into the world to proclaim a message. Fundamentally the message was this.

Our life is dependent on God, who gave us life. I take this watch, I'm not going to do this next thing, and I get a hammer. Bang! I hit my watch.

It's not working. There are bits and pieces there, all the fragments, but it's not working. I can't get this watch to give me the value that I really need to tell the time.

And that's what's gone wrong with our world. Somebody's banged humanity on the head. Not somebody.

The devil has caused things to go wrong. They've gone wrong in your life, they've gone wrong in my life, and the world is in a mess as a result. Now if there is a personal God, and logic is on my side, what conceivably might he do? If he's a personal God, he might move into time.

He might be born as you and I are born. He might cope with temptation as you and I cope with temptation. Only him successfully, and us utter failures.

He might ultimately, having given instruction by which you are to live your life and I am to live my life, he might, and it's a fantastic thought, pay the consequence of all the things that you have ever done that were wrong against this personal God who made you. He might take it away. He might bear your penalty in his body.

He might conceivably do that. And that's what the Bible says God has done. If he didn't, and there's no God, there's no Jesus Christ, and the records are all a fable, what hope for the future? When I die I'll rot.

There'll be nothing else for me, for you. How should I behave right now? Why shouldn't I, if I represent a nation, shoot one of my bombs off onto the other country's area in order to achieve my goal? Why shouldn't I rape? Why shouldn't I plunder? Why shouldn't I steal? Why shouldn't I be bestial? Why should not I live as though there is no controlling force in the world at all? I'm alright Jack, I'll get what I want. And that's precisely the problem that confronts humankind at this very moment.

Because when you say there's no God, then there's no hope. And if there's no hope, then you may as well do your damnest here, because you don't give an account of anything that you've done down here to anyone else. But it takes greater fancy to believe that this world came about by nothing, and that I have a sort of accidental understanding of right and wrong brought by my conscience, and no other controlling power whatsoever.

It takes more fancy to believe that than to believe the old-fashioned gospel of Christianity. There are four anchor points. The master, who was Jesus Christ if he wasn't God? The manuscripts, why did two of the greatest translators of the New Testament, a man by the name of E. V. Rue, and another by the name of J. B. Phillips, say that when they translated the Gospels from the original, it so changed their lives, says Rue in particular, that he became a believer.

And J. B. Phillips says it was just like going into an old farmhouse with all the sockets, discovering that they were alive as you went in as an electrician to link up a new circuit. The master, the manuscripts, the men, and the message. The latter makes exquisite sense over against the nonsense that is often taught by the humanists and the secularists.

I'm going to speak more on this matter this next Sunday, but I'd like you to bow your head right now, and I'd like you to pray a prayer after me in your heart. If you feel that what's been suggested this evening has sense to it, even though it never stole across the TV screens. Heavenly Father, I recognize that Jesus Christ is your Son, that the Bible contains and is your Word.

I ask you to confirm its truthfulness as I give you my life. Cleanse me from my sin, and make me your child, and grant me forgiveness for the Savior's sake. Amen.

We conclude by singing 282 in the yellow book, the supplement, I serve a risen Savior. He is in the world today. I know that he's living, whatever men may say.

282. And on the conclusion of the benediction, if you'd like a drink before we show this film, then please go into the lounge at the rear of the sanctuary. 282.

That authentic note of praise when many have been indicating the personal experience they have of your salvation power. We conclude this part of our evening's activity. Those who need to go, send them away with your blessing.

And those who stay, may what we hear be found to stimulate us in declaring to others the good news of the old-fashioned gospel and the friendship that can be found in Jesus Christ. Amen.