Vexed No.3 Why is Jesus unique?

Mark chapter 8, starting to read at verse 27. Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, who do people say I am? They replied, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others one of the prophets.

But what about you, he asked, who do you say I am? Peter answered, you are the Christ. Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. He then began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.

He spoke plainly about this and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. Out of my sight, Satan, he said, you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.

What good is it for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his father's glory with the holy angels. This is God's word. He makes the world his spiritual and calms the troubled breast.

His manner to the hungry soul and to the weary breast, and to the weary breast. In the rock of which I build my shield and hiding place, Mine ever-fading, treasuring till, live round their stores of grace. Jesus, my shepherd, my priest and king, By thy way I end, accept the praise I bring.

Accept the praise I bring. But when I see thee as thou art, I'll praise thee as I ought. Till then I hope by the music of thy name, Refresh my soul in death.

Refresh my soul in death. Let's pray again, shall we? Loving God and Father, we come before your throne. We sing our songs and our songs move our emotions.

But our songs enthrone, enshrine the convictions of our hearts. We come to you because you are the one who sent into this world our beloved Lord Jesus. And so many of us here have come to the conclusion that there's no one else worth living for.

We praise you that our hope for today and our hope for the future is all wrapped up in him. We thank you he is our anchorage and we have an anchor that keeps the soul. We pray that in a world that shifts, in a world that knows much treachery, we pray that our faith in Jesus Christ will constantly hold us and we ask that those who do not know him may come to a knowledge of him by your grace.

We ask that this evening as we look into your holy word that you will speak to all our hearts, confound even our unformed fears, and make clear convictions that we can cling on to that will take us through the rest of our lives and on into glory for Jesus' sake. Amen. If you go to Calcutta, right in the heart of the sprawling metropolis, where the water is still coloured and has an acrid taste when it comes even out of the tap, and when there's flooding, the sewage spills into the main roads, you'll find the temple Kali.

Kali is an Indian god, an awful god. Some of the sights that you see in the temples just terrify you to the extent that I never go as a tourist. The Indians have many, many gods and Kali is perhaps the most grotesque.

Alongside that temple there's a clinic, it smells of disinfectant. And within that clinic there's a wonderful retinue of women folk headed up by a remarkable diminutive Albanian called Teresa. And her clinic really is particularly founded there, deliberately so, because she wanted to show the contrast that there is between the god whom she serves and the Christ whom she worships and the variety of gods that are in the Indian pantheon.

Pantheon being a word that describes the collection of gods. They've got at least one million. In fact, if you go into some Indian ashrams, you'll find a portrait of the late President Kennedy.

He too has made it as far as the divine stakes are concerned. On a train journey last time I was out there, I started to talk to two of the people with whom I was sharing the compartment along with Alan Bush. And as a train journey was going to last 30 hours, it was good to make acquaintance.

One was a medical man from Hyderabad. He worked with the Indian railways and he was the doctor who serves many of the hundreds of people in that area who also work on the railway, which is the biggest employment agency in the subcontinent. Another man was just an ordinary executive and they were both Hindu.

And we talked the hours through on the subject matter which really commands our attention this evening. You see, the Hindu has no real problem with the Christian in terms of acknowledging that Jesus is God, provided that the other hundreds of thousands of gods also can come alongside. But the thing that makes Christianity distinctive and seemingly a little exclusive is that Christians claim that Jesus Christ and He alone is the revelation of God to this world, to the extent that one of my colleagues in East London was in trouble having put a text outside his church indicating that there is none other name given amongst men whereby we must be saved apart from the name Jesus.

And the difficulty was from the Muslim community who wanted to have some judgment that that was a text which was bias against the Islamic faith. And without blushing, one has to say it is and it will always be, because as far as Christianity is concerned, there can be no compromise whatsoever. Jesus, on the occasion to which Scripture referred, the Bible reading that Anne brought to us, He asks His disciples, who do you say I am? And He takes a couple of suggestions that are floating around in the bazaars and then finally Peter comes along and says, Jesus, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus congratulates Peter, flesh and blood does not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. Peter, you've got it right. If you were to read John 3.16 in some of the versions in France, you would come across this, if I put it from the French directly into the English, for God so loved the world He gave His unique Son.

Unique is a synonym which stands for the NIV's equivalent rendering when it says of Jesus Christ that He is God's one and only Son. Is Jesus then so exceptional that outside of Him a man cannot know salvation? And the answer is yes. The question then is put, but what is your proof? And what you can say is that the body of evidence that the New Testament gives, along with the experience of countless millions of Christians down the centuries and around the world today, it demands that conclusion.

There is something quite extraordinary about Jesus. You start to read of His life in Scripture and immediately when you check Him at the beginning you are compelled by the evidence which suggests that His birth is not a usual birth. The Old Testament was written centuries before the New Testament, but the Old Testament has a predictive component.

And on several occasions men are given great inspiration as to where the Messiah will be born and what features will attend His death, will attend His life, His birth, His life, and His death. Take a man like Malachi, the writer of the last book of the Bible, and he says about the birthplace of Jesus, but thou Bethlehem Ephrata, I'm giving you this in the authorised version, but thou Bethlehem Ephrata, though thou be little amongst the thousands of Judah, yet out of you will come forth to me one whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. What does that mean? Well it's pretty obvious that it's telling us that Jesus will be born in that place which is little more than a hamlet, Bethlehem, small amongst the thousands of villages and hamlets and towns in Judea, but it goes on to suggest that even when you've tracked Jesus down to His birth in a manger in Bethlehem, you have not answered the question, is that the beginning of His existence? Now, let me crack open what I mean by applying it to your life.

When were you born? Well, some of you will say the 1950s, others the 1960s, some the 1970s and the 1980s. You've got a birth date. That was the moment when you were born, when you came into this world.

I would argue that your birth actually, at least your formation as a personality, was nine months before, but before that conception there was no existence of which you were aware. That was your starting point, but not Jesus. Born in Bethlehem's manger and yet to try and find the beginnings of the Lord Jesus Christ will take you right back into eternity and however far back you go, you will find that He, existing as the second person of the Trinity, is always there because He is the Great I Am.

He is the One who has no beginning. He has no end. He's born into this world in Bethlehem and He takes upon Himself the form of a person like you and like me, and yet He is quite exceptional.

His birth on earth was miraculous. You came as a result of the co-union of two people, but there was no human seed that was ever placed in the womb of Mary. Jesus was born of a virgin.

The Old Testament prophet got it right in the seventh century when he says, a virgin shall conceive, and Jesus therefore does not inherit that tendency towards sin that you and I know. He's unique in as much as although Bethlehem saw the commencement of His life on earth, His existence was eternal. It goes back to the beginning of time and when you get to the beginning of time, it's before then.

He's ever the existing Almighty God and He comes into this world in a most remarkable fashion, preserved from human tendencies towards sin. And when you open up His life, when you start to unfurl it from the Word of God and you minutely examine Him, you can find that this person who speaks more about sin than anyone else, more about judgment than anyone else, does not acknowledge any flaw or imperfection in His life. Now that's interesting because our Lord is a very lowly man.

So humble, He'll walk around like a peasant. Occasionally He will use the poor man's animal, the donkey. Our Lord will stoop to wash the feet of His disciples.

There is nothing arrogant about Jesus. There is nothing boastful about our Lord Jesus in the way that we might boast about our achievements. He exposes sin in other people.

He will call the religious leaders of His day hypocrites, but He never acknowledges any imperfection Himself. And those who are the nearest to Him concur. A woman who's married to the Roman procurator Pilate dashes off a telegram to her husband because he has been caught in a dilemma.

He has to satisfy his own conscience and he also has to satisfy the Jewish leaders who have Jesus Christ on trial. And Pilate's wife sends to her husband this note, have nothing to do with that just man. Peter is an old man and towards the end of his life he writes a couple of letters for people like you and me.

Those letters are contained in the New Testament. And he says of Jesus that He did no sin. When they blasphemed Him, when they cursed Him, He never blasphemed back.

He never cursed. I would like to tell you that I'm a man who's utterly impeccable, that there is nothing amiss with my life, that I am in no way a bundle of contradictions. But my problem is that you could put a phone call through to my home and ask my wife.

But when the nearest and dearest, as well as those who were just casual acquaintances of Jesus, pass judgment on Him, they concur that this man has no mark, no stain upon his character. Which one of you, says Jesus, as He throws down the gauntlet, which one of you convicts me of sin? Ransack the files. Check the records.

Go back to Nazareth. Investigate at Bethlehem. Go around the towns that I visited.

Can you find any inconsistency in my life at all? And no one responded as He threw down His particular challenge. He's unique. I don't really have problems with miracles.

I mean problems in believing miracles. It seems to me that if you have got in place those two or three things that I've already taught, then this particular person who is born so miraculously, who lives so impeccably, will have a power the likes of which you and I will never know. Now the Bible states that this world did not come into being as a result of fluke evolutionary processes.

What it does tell us is that behind the world there is a mind. And when you start to read John's gospel, you come to this particular conclusion, even in the earliest verses, that Jesus Christ, before He was born on earth, was instrumental in the creation of the world. Through Him all things were made.

Without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life. Now if that is right, just assume for a moment, even if you have doubts, allow me this for a second or two and consider it as though you agreed with my presupposition.

If the One who made the world comes into the world, would you not expect Him to show a peculiar authority, a peculiar power? Would you not expect that He would work alongside the forces that He has built into what we call nature and sometimes accelerate them and sometimes suspend them? Would you not think that in every category of the natural world, every category of the human world, He would be able to exercise a significant, unique power? And so, at the beginning of His ministry, He turns water to wine. Handed by a young kid, a handful of loaves and fishes, by divine multiplication and to meet the needs of hungry people, our Lord performs a spectacular miracle. He is Lord of the forces that He built into the natural cycle of events.

He can walk on the very waters that He has caused to come into existence. Not because He is a miracle worker full stop, but because He wants His disciples to see that though He is a man, He is more than just a man. Of His humanity, there were no doubts amongst the bunch of men that were following Him.

They saw Him eat. They knew that He'd been thirsty. They knew at times that He was tired.

He'd slept in the stern of the ship. Man truly, but not man only, more than just an ordinary man, someone who is never caught on the horns of a dilemma when there is a domestic situation creating embarrassment, like that wedding at Cana in Galilee, or with the disciples who are apoplectic because they cannot resolve the problems of hunger amongst this crowd of people. Jesus will show them.

One of the great problems in our world today is mental sickness. Sometimes this is a physical thing. Sometimes a chemical thing.

Sometimes it can be a demonic thing. And in the world in which our Lord Jesus was familiar, as He walked up and down the streets of the villages of Israel, He came across many men and women who were troubled by demons. Now if He is the Lord, not only just the Lord of the world, but the Lord of spirits, even evil spirits, He will be able to speak to a man who is possessed.

And those malevolent things that are working for the harm of that individual will respond to the supreme command of Jesus. If He is the Lord of life, then there can be occasions when He sees, for instance, a widow woman whose only means of survival will be as a result of the kindliness of her son, but her son is dead. Her son is in the coffin, and Jesus spies this woman, and He touches the coffin, and the son is raised.

And by the grave of Lazarus, He speaks the Word, and Lazarus comes back. Our Lord Jesus is not constantly doing miracles of this proportion, but occasionally He will. To do what? To establish this fact He's more than just an ordinary man.

But you see, there's a logical aspect to all this. It fits into a pattern. If He is who He implies He is, then He will have an ability that is such none of His disciples could possibly match it at all.

It will have them utterly flabbergasted. Now Jesus is a psychologist. I mean by that He understands human nature.

Not only does He understand human nature, but He has intuitive powers. On one occasion He sees a man who is going to follow Him, and this man is just sitting idling the time away in a sycamore tree, and Jesus comes along to Nathanael. He knows about Nathanael.

How come that you know about me? Did my brother tell you? No. It's not often that a Jew from the south will go to the north by the shortcut, because that will take him through the land of the Samaritans, who did not rate in terms of social calling amongst the Jewish nation in those days. Jesus, however, throws convention to the wind, and He finds Himself by a well called Sychar, near the town, the modern town of Nablus.

Now He's not there by accident. It so happens that a woman comes at an unusual time of the day to draw water. The reason for the unusual time, well, she doesn't want to mix with the rest of the women, because, well, she's loose living, and in those days that wasn't considered just to be a minor thing.

Now Jesus is by that well, and He engages her in conversation, and as He starts to unpack certain things that He needs to say, she realizes that He's got more knowledge of her than she feels comfortable with, and she comes to the conclusion, you're a prophet. And in one sense it was a whole in one. He was a prophet, more than prophet.

He understood about the woman. He has an insight into human nature. There is nothing that He does not know in terms of realizing where people are at and what they're about.

And our Lord, when He speaks to people like this woman, when He speaks today through His Spirit to people like ourselves, He doesn't leave you with the idea that He just wishes to be judgmental. In fact, that's one of the staggering things about Jesus. The first prayer my mother ever taught me was, gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child.

The Jesus who turns out the money changes and uses great passion. Well, that is an authentic part of the character of our Lord, but He generally meets individuals with compassion and understanding and a realization of what is wrong with them. He condemns the sin, but He always loves the sinner.

He spoke about death. I mean, even in this passage that was read to us, Peter having declared who He is, you are the Christ, Jesus says, well, don't go telling everyone that at this moment. He then began to teach them that the Son of Man, the favorite way in which He referred to Himself, must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and teachers of the law.

He's got a thing about death. I mean, Jesus is constantly talking about death. He really is, but not in a morbid, melancholic fashion.

He realizes that when He goes to Jerusalem for the last time, He is going to be butchered. But, He never speaks about His death without adding two riders. One, He will weigh the value of His death, and the second is He will link His death to His resurrection.

As for the value of His death, well, again, using the popular expression that He liked in order to delineate, to describe Himself, He says, the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost. He came to give His life a ransom for many. Do you know what a ransom is? If you lived some years ago, although they still have modern equivalents, three bells outside of a shop would have indicated a pawnbroker.

You go along because you don't have much money, but maybe you've got a watch, and so you go to the pawnbroker and you say, look, I've got a bill. I can't pay the bill. I need some money.

You hand your watch. He gives you a receipt. He gives you some money, and then when the days have dawned, which are a little more pleasant for you, and more money has come along, you can come back to the pawnbroker, and you can redeem, you can ransom your watch.

You'll pay more, but you can have it back. Now, that is how our Lord Jesus referred to His blood. My blood will be shed for the benefits of other people.

The Son of Man comes not to minister to Himself, but to give His life as a ransom for all. And when He speaks of this remarkable death, He talks about what will happen later on, because He's aware that on the third day, He will be raised from the dead. Jesus Christ is the only man who made an appointment and put it down in his diary to keep after his death.

He really did. I mean, Peter has denied the Lord Jesus Christ, but Jesus has in mind to see Peter at the very point when He first met Peter, three years of the commencement of His ministry. And that's exactly what did happen.

So, here is another aspect of the uniqueness of Jesus, His understanding of His death, the evaluation of His death, and the fact that He was so jolly certain about His resurrection. Now, just stop and think for a moment. I mean, if I started to make some of these claims about myself, you would think that the best thing to do would be to take me off to Chichester, where there's a special hospital that maybe can treat this condition.

And there are those who say that about Jesus, that actually He was a little deranged, and yet you've got the problem. What problem? Well, in our holiday, or on our holiday, Rowena and I went up to Stratford on Avon, and there we listened to a couple of Shakespeare plays, and Shakespeare was a very wonderful man. He had a great mind.

His literature input into the English language is almost unparalleled, apart from what? Apart from Jesus. You see, you read what Jesus taught. Take the parables, those brilliant little stories, so succinct, so simple, and yet they encapsulate the most wonderful truths.

Jesus puts down the finest code of ethics that has ever been stated, the Sermon on the Mount. Is this the product of a deranged man? I say to some, well, I can stomach his ethics, but it's the miracle bit. So, let's take away the miracles.

Let's assume that these miracles are accretions. That means to say, they are fanciful stories that have been written into the account of Jesus' life years after He had passed this scene. Well, your basic problem is this, that when you examine the teachings of Jesus, especially in the fourth gospel, you will find that His teachings were built on the miraculous activity in which He had engaged.

In other words, you can't take scissors and cut away the teaching of Jesus and chuck on one side the miracles of Jesus, because they are both intertwined. So, what you begin to see when you start to examine the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, on the basis that He is more than an ordinary man, He is the Son of God, you begin to see this logical pattern, this wonderful tapestry, the balance between the humanity and the deity, the fatigue of Jesus, the miraculous abilities of Jesus, the denunciation of sin, the compassion of Jesus. You see a man who is perfectly in control.

When he is on trial for his life, he does not lose his cool. It is the chief judge who does that, who rips his garment, not Jesus. And when finally he is pinned to the cross, the incredible thing is, it was not crucifixion that killed Jesus Christ.

I repeat, it was not crucifixion that killed Jesus Christ. What was it? It was the voluntary offering over of His Spirit, having appreciated that the reason why He had come into this world had been completed, the work the Father gave me to do, I've done. Now, Lord, I offer you my Spirit.

Jesus, always in control, the majestic Son of God. And after His death and His resurrection, look at those disciples, look at them on the day of Pentecost, see the contrast. Before they're scared, they're frightened like rabbits, they'd run away, or if you like biblically, using the metaphor, they're like sheep.

The shepherd's been taken, the sheep are scattered, but look at them now, look at Peter. He addresses a multitude of people. He's not a man who's got letters, he's no degree, he's not been taught, he's not a trained spokesman, and yet he speaks with such authority.

How do you explain it? I mean, Peter was so scared that a damsel, a young woman, put the fear of death into him when she asked him about his association with Jesus in the palace of the high priest. He was so timid, but now he is so courageous. A bunch of men, eleven of them, extended by their close colleagues, men and women, one hundred and twenty, come together in a room on the day of Pentecost.

The power of Jesus descends upon them. And then these men and women, filled with the Holy Spirit, they start to preach in Jerusalem, they go to Judea, they go to Samaria, they go to Galilee, they go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and e'er long this message of Jesus Christ, the crucified Nazarene who was raised from the dead, it takes root in the Roman Empire. Now, this empire did not have fertile soil to receive this message.

Most of those people were atheistic. Some of them were baptized in superstition. Why is it that early Christianity made such an impact to the extent that at the end of the Acts of the Apostles we are told, these are men who have turned the world upside down? And the answer is, these early men and women were so sure.

They were so utterly convinced. You see, they're just ordinary working class people. You can take a bunch of them from the east end of London, you can take them from Sheffield, from Manchester, from any of our major cities, you can take them from here in Worthing, they're not gullible people.

They don't want to risk their lives on some farce, some pretext, some story about some mythical wonder worker. It doesn't make sense. The only explanation I tell you, the only explanation for the success of the church in the days of the Acts of the Apostles, the first century, the second century, the third century, is that they believed that this man Jesus Christ was more than just an ordinary man.

He is unique, he is worth living for, he is worth dying for. And the power that flooded through Jesus was in some measure caught by themselves and helped to authenticate the message that they proclaimed. And that's what I told those two guys on an Indian train, though not quite like that.

You see, put it together and what is your conclusion? I've argued this in many pulpits up and down our land, colleges and universities. I've asked people, look, consider the evidence, take it. I'm not talking about the total inspiration of the Bible, I accept that, you may not accept it.

I'm not even talking about some philosophical concept or some theological doctrine that I happen to believe about the end of the world and so on and so forth. I'm asking you to consider Jesus, nothing else, Jesus. You see, the greatest question that any man can put to another man or woman is, what do you think of him? Who is Jesus? Who is this Jesus? There was a French philosopher by the name of Renan, last century, he wrote a book called La Vie de Jésus Christ.

Maybe a little with tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless, this is what he said at the end, speaking of the Saviour, rest now in thy glory, noble founder. Thy work is complete, thy divinity is established. Between thee and God, men will no longer distinguish.

Who is Jesus? He is the Son of Man, He is the Son of God. But you can stick as close to Jesus as a barnacle sticks to a boat and still not be a Christian. To be a Christian means that you confess Him as your Lord, you receive His Spirit into your heart and you know that the blood that He shed has cleansed you from your sin and He will then position you to live for Him this side of eternity and receive you ultimately into His everlasting kingdom.

Who is Jesus? He's unique and I'm proud to say He's my Saviour. Let's pray. So what do you do? You do what logic tells you to do and as you respond you'll discover that behind the logic there's even a stronger pull, it's the power of God's Spirit.

You say, yes Lord, I'm like that woman by the well, you know all about me. I've done things which I wish I didn't have done. Sometimes when I look into a mirror I dislike myself intensely.

But Lord, you sent that woman back renewed. Do the same for me. Lord, the preacher taught me that your blood spilled was a ransom for my soul.

I accept its benefits and confess my sins. Blessed Jesus, erase my sin. From the records of heaven and give me the gift of your righteousness.

Beloved Saviour, when you ascended to your Father's right hand, you bestowed your Holy Spirit upon the church. Grant me the fullness of your Spirit. Blessed Father God, Son and Holy Ghost, bring me into your family circle.

Position me for life and for eternity. Amen. Well, did you do it? If you did, I'd like you to talk to me or one of my brothers and sisters in the foyer who will be of help as we share together more about the great things that God has done for us.

I think I suggested, my Jesus, I love you. Is that right, Jenny? Fairest Lord Jesus. That's as good.

Let's go for that. It's in the supplement 33 and it's coming up on the overheads. This great ancient hymn from almost the beginnings of Christianity.

Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler of all nature, Son of God and man the Son. 33. Let's stand.

We receive our offering as we sing.