“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. That 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 the 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 with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” ― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

This is one of my favorite quotes by C. S. Lewis. He carries this same idea into his story The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Peter and Susan question the professor about the strange story Lucy was passing on as fact, the Professor replies in this way, “There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

You see, there is so much truth in this quote. Jesus is an incredibly well documented historical person. No one actually denies that Jesus walked the earth. And with the assurance that Jesus was really, truly here you have to figure out what you want to do with that information. Was Jesus a lunatic? A man who walked the earth under the ludicrous and false assumption the he was the king of the world? Perhaps he was a purposeful deceiver, setting about his days with the goal of turning the world upside down with false information. Or maybe, just maybe he was the Lord of the earth. Maybe he set about his days doing exactly what he said he was doing. Bringing the kingdom of God to earth.

When asking yourself big questions, the question is not, “Was Jesus really here?” but “Is Jesus really who he said he is?” And this, my friend is the single most important question you can ever ask yourself!

-Sarah

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