Have you read any of the gospels?

Have you read any of the Gospels? I’d be interested to know the impact that a serious reading of a Gospel would have on an adult who had never been exposed to Christian things before…

You may have difficulty believing in the supernatural, but when you read of the miracles performed by Jesus, the visit of angels announcing his birth to a virgin, Jesus casting out demons who recognised him as “the Holy One of God”, and saying, “You are the Son of God” (Luke 4.34,41) – you must admit, these Gospel reports are quite consistent with the activity of an all-powerful God.

Did you know that Jesus multiplied a few loaves and fishes so as to feed a crowd of 5,000 people? That he touched a leper and his leprosy was cleansed? That on three occasions he raised back to life individuals who were dead? That he calmed a storm by rebuking the wind and the waves with his authoritative word? That he turned large quantities of water into wine at a marriage feast? That he gave sight to a man born blind? That he healed every person in the crowds who came to him for help?

Evidently, here is a totally unique man with supernatural power to do good in various forms to people in all kinds of needs. His miraculous works bore witness to his divine power. “The works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me,” said Jesus (John 5.36). He further said, as he might say to you today: “If I am not doing the works of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10.37-38).

I have written about the witness born to Jesus by himself and by the Father; here, his miraculous works bear witness to him too. As he had promised, he sent the Holy Spirit of God on the apostles (recounted in Luke’s second book in the New Testament, “The Acts of the Apostles”, chapters 1 and 2), and they were thus divinely equipped to write the Gospels. Of John’s Gospel It was attested: “we know that his testimony is true” (c.f. John 21.24).

And as the apostles preached Christ in their first proclamation as Lord and Messiah they insisted again and again that they had seen Jesus alive after he had risen from the dead: “This Jesus… killed by the hands of lawless men, God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death… This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2.23-24, 32). “You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses” (Acts 3.15). “The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed… we are witnesses to these things” (Acts 5.30-32). So Luke sums up “With great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 4.33).

Jesus’ resurrection from the dead constitutes the final divine attestation to the deity of Jesus: as such it deserves particular attention.

Clive Every-Clayton