This talk is the second in our series and is on the theme of what the Bible tells us about Jesus. Now the first thing to ask is this: why does Jesus matter so much? Well, one Bible writer explains his importance in the following way.
The writer says that God has been speaking right down through the ages of the world through prophets - people whose words appear in the parts of the Bible which were written before Jesus was born. But now, says the writer, God has done something different and "has spoken to us by his Son."
Compare the situation to someone writing a biography of Henry the eighth. The person has to research many things: letters, diaries, government papers, memoirs, etc. However, after all the research is done the biographer is still an outsider from a different time and place - somebody who can only give a limited picture of Henry. But what if somebody with a time machine could bring Henry's only son Edward into the present day? Now you would have an insider to explain to you about his own father.
The prophets, like the biographer, could only tell so much about God because their knowledge was limited. But God's only Son, says the Bible, knows everything there is to know about God because he is one with God. So who is God's son? The answer the Bible gives is Jesus.
But how could the writers of the Bible make this claim? It is a huge thing to say that Jesus is equal to God. To try to show you, I want to introduce you to three people who knew Jesus personally.
The first person is Mary. Mary has given us eye-witness accounts of Jesus's early life. They are the closest accounts you could hope for, because Mary was his mother. She tells us that when she was a young woman, living in an unimportant village in Israel, something very special happened to her. It was so remarkable that she told many others about it, until a man called Luke (who may even have spoken to Mary herself) wrote about it in his book about Jesus.
Luke was a very fine historian who investigated his sources and wrote his book with care.His book may now be found in the New Testament - the second half of the Bible and the books of the New Testament are the most reliable ones we have from ancient times. We have a huge number of copies of them and some are very, very old.
Well, Luke tells us about a conversation Mary had with a heavenly messenger. Starting with the angels words, the conversation reads like this:
Here is Mary's claim: the conception of her first son occurred whilst she was still a virgin. Clearly this is a remarkable claim for anyone to make and one might begin to wonder about Mary's sanity or her motives. But she was just an ordinary small-town girl with, to our knowledge, no mental health problems. Furthermore, she had been brought up with a strong belief in the one God of Israel whose standards and ways were different from the other gods of other nations. He wasn't like the Roman gods who were sometimes said to enter into relationships with human beings - for example like the god Mars raping a woman. Mary did not hold beliefs like that and had nothing to gain by making such a story up.
Luke also tells us that other people verified her story. Her husband-to-be, Joseph, was supportive of her. She had some older relatives - Zechariah and Elizabeth - who spent time looking after Mary during pregnancy and were convinced of the truth of her claims. A group of rough, ordinary workmen met Mary and the baby, and were sure that he was uniquely special. An elderly Jewish man called Simeon and a faithful Jewish widow called Anna - both from Jerusalem - were convinced that Jesus had come from God. These were not people who would fall easily for a young girl's story.
Now Mary herself wasn't sure about everything that was going on. But she did insist that Jesus had this remarkable beginning.
The second person I want to tell you about is Jesus's closest friend: John. John spent three years watching Jesus and listening to him, as he spoke to many different people. Then John, like Luke, wrote a book about Jesus.
(In fact, in Manchester you can go and see a small part of a copy of John's book that is around 1900 years old. In other words, it was produced less than a hundred years after John and Jesus walked and talked together in Israel, which is good evidence to show that the copies we have of John's book today are reliable. They're not stories made up by the Christian church centuries later.)
In his book John describes healings of people which were extraordinary. He also records amazing public gatherings where people were fed with food which seemed to come from nowhere. He writes about Jesus altering the laws of nature by, for example, walking on water. These were public acts seen by many and written down by John.
Let me give you an example. The occasion is when two sisters - Mary and Martha - were in mourning because of the death of their brother Lazarus. Jesus was travelling to see the family but arrived four days after the man died. However, Jesus insisted that the tomb should be opened up. Nobody, not even Mary or Martha, expected Jesus to be able to do anything about their decomposing brother. However, this then happened:
Lazarus was not comatose - he had definitely been dead. But Jesus gives him his life back. It was an amazing incident but then John saw countless events like that. John was an eye-witness to Jesus doing things that nobody else could do and for John they were an indication of who Jesus was. You see in John's hearing Jesus made some astonishing claims. Here's one of them:
Jesus claims that he has come from God himself and that he is God's only Son, who can therefore give eternal life to others. Well after three years of observation John could only come to one conclusion: it was true.
Finally, let me introduce you to one more person. This man's name is Saul. Or rather that was his name originally but he later changed it to Paul. Saul was Jesus's enemy. He had heard Jesus's teaching and knew about his great deeds, but he had no time for him. Jesus just made him angry. Indeed Jesus made him so angry that Saul wanted to kill him.
However, Saul did not need to kill Jesus because the authorities had already done that for him. So instead Saul set about pursuing and imprisoning anybody who followed Jesus. Saul simply wanted the whole Jesus movement stamped out as soon as possible.
Jesus's followers, after his death, had hidden like scared rabbits - waiting for the authorities to catch up with them. However, suddenly all their fear vanished and they publicly started telling people that Jesus was alive again. An unimaginable change had occurred in these people.
Saul didn't believe the story. But then something happened which changed Saul completely. Luke, who wrote about it after Saul told him, tells us that Saul was on his way to a town called Damascus when suddenly a bright light flashed around him and he heard a voice speaking. The voice said, "Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me?" And Saul replied, "Who are you Lord?" And the voice said, "I am Jesus."
In that terrifying moment, Saul discovered that it was true that Jesus was alive. As a result this man, who had so hated Jesus, became completely devoted to him. He became a preacher and travelled far and wide, to many cities, telling people that Jesus, the Son of God, was alive. We have a number of letters written by Saul and in those letters he makes plain that he has the highest belief in a resurrected Jesus.
When people met Jesus Christ - when their lives became entangled with his - then they experienced things which were unique and inexplicable, until they came to the conviction that Jesus was the Son of God
These three people met Jesus Christ and the experience convinced them that Jesus was unique; he was, and is, the Son of God. That is the claim of the whole Bible. But will you investigate that claim? Maybe, of course, you are the sort of person with a closed mind. You've never seen anything like this, so it can't be true. But I would invite not to follow that road. Go and listen to the eye-witnesses. You can read their words in the Bible. Find out more about who Jesus is and it may change your whole life, forever.