Donnie L. DeBord

Why Jesus? Every religion has a founder. That is where the similarity ends. You can admire the Buddha’s teaching while doubting the details of his life. The systems survive their founders, because the systems are the point. Christianity will not let you do that. Take Jesus away and there is nothing left to take. No teaching detached from the teacher. No system that floats free of the person. The apostle Paul said it with characteristic bluntness: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). Christianity ultimately stands or falls with Jesus Christ. Not with an idea about him. With him. That is why the question will not leave us alone. Who was this man, and what did he think he was doing?

I have watched students come alive when they finally see that Christianity is not first a code to keep or a puzzle to solve. It is a person to know. Everything else, the ethics, the hope, the worship, flows downhill from him. Get Jesus wrong and nothing else can be gotten right. Get him right and the rest begins to fall into place, the way a room comes into focus when you finally see the face you were looking for. I want to share some reasons for why Jesus is everything. 

The Claim That Will Not Let You Admire Him From a Distance

Come with me to Capernaum, to a house so crowded that four men have to tear open the roof to get their paralyzed friend inside. They lower him down, mat and all, and land him at the feet of Jesus. The man came for healing. Watch what Jesus gives him first. “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5).

It is a strange first gift, and the scribes in the corner notice immediately. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark 2:7). Notice: their theology is exactly right. That is what makes the scene so electric. They are not wrong about God. They are wrong about the man in front of them.

The prophets announced forgiveness, but always in God’s name. When Nathan confronted David, he said, “The LORD also has put away your sin” (2 Sam. 12:13). The prophet declares what God does. Jesus speaks in his own voice, as the one doing it. The Greek word is aphiēmi: release, remission, the cancellation of a debt. And only the creditor can cancel the debt.

That is why C. S. Lewis would not let us get away with calling Jesus a great moral teacher and leaving it there:

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.

Lewis listed the claims that force the choice. Jesus forgave sins in his own name, behaving as “the person chiefly offended in all offences.” He claimed to have always existed: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). He claimed he would return as judge: “The Father… has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father” (John 5:22-23).

Authority, Not Advice

“But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:10). Then, to the paralytic: “Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” And he did.

The word is exousia: authority, right, jurisdiction. Not borrowed, the way a prophet’s authority is borrowed. Inherent. Jesus proves the invisible authority by exercising a visible one. Lame legs stand up so that watching eyes can see the thing eyes cannot see: sins forgiven.

And the authority has a ground. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). Why? Because “by him all things were created… and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16-17), and “he upholds the universe by his word of power” (Heb. 1:3). The one who made the lame legs can remake them. The one offended by every sin can remit every sin. His hearers felt the difference at once: “He taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22).

Forgiveness Has an Address

Here is the logic the scribes grasped and we must not miss. Forgiveness is not a general sentiment. It has an address. If I steal your car, my apology to your neighbor settles nothing. Forgiveness belongs to the offended.

David understood this. He had sinned grievously against Bathsheba and against Uriah, and yet he prayed, “Against you, you only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). Every sin is first and finally against God. That is why “who can forgive sins but God alone?” is sound doctrine. And that is why Jesus forgiving sins in his own name is either blasphemy or deity. There is no third option.

But forgiveness also has a cost, and the cross is where Christianity names it. “In whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:14), “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20), “he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death” (Col. 1:22). “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5). “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). Forgiveness is not God waving the debt aside. It is God paying it.

Lewis saw the same logic from the human side: “Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person, and he would not need it.” Fallen man is not merely imperfect, needing improvement. He is a rebel, one who “tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself.” The rebel cannot adequately repent of rebellion. So God provides the penitent the rebel cannot be: the sinless one who stands in the rebel’s place. Anselm put it with scholastic precision centuries earlier: the gravity of sin is measured by the dignity of the one offended, so only one who is both God and man can make satisfaction.

The Word Was God

The Gospel of John opens where Genesis opens: “In the beginning.” And then: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The Greek is theos ēn ho logos, and the word order matters. Theos here is qualitative, not indefinite. John is not saying the Word was “a god,” one divine being among others. He is saying the Word was everything God is. The Word stands on the Creator’s side of the Creator-creature line.

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). The verb is exēgēsato, from which we get “exegesis.” The Son is the Father’s exegesis. “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). When Thomas fell down with “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28), Jesus received the worship instead of rebuking it.

Paul sings the same Christ in Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God” (1:15). Eikōn: the visible manifestation of the invisible, not a shadow or a copy. “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (1:19). Plērōma: totality. Not a portion, not a spark. “The exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3).

And none of this was invented at Nicaea. Colossians 1:15-20 is widely recognized as a hymn Paul is quoting, which means the highest Christology is also among the earliest. “He was manifested in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16) is another early confession, already being sung. Before the Sanhedrin, Jesus said, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power” (Mark 14:62), reaching straight back to Daniel’s vision (Dan. 7:13-14). Nicaea defined what the church had always sung.

The Word Became Flesh

But here is the wonder that will not fit in a slogan: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The verb is eskēnōsen: he tabernacled. The wilderness tent, the glory-cloud, Sinai. The presence that filled a tent now fills a body.

Athanasius, wrestling with why God would do such a thing, framed the dilemma this way: “It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit wrought upon man by the devil… It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.” Man was perishing, and God could not abandon his work.

Could God not simply have demanded repentance and been done with it? Athanasius says no: “repentance [does not] recall men from what is according to their nature; all that it does is to make them cease from sinning… No, repentance could not meet the case.” The damage could not merely be forgiven. It had to be cured. So the Word himself came, taking a mortal body that death might be destroyed in it. And the direction of the whole movement is redemptive: “He became man that we might become divine.” He took what we are to give us what he is.

The church had to fight to keep both halves of that sentence. In the fourth century, Apollinarius taught that Christ had a human body but that the divine Logos replaced the human mind. A Christ without a human mind is not fully human. And if the mind is not assumed, the mind is not saved. It was the ancient version of every attempt to thin out Christ’s humanity: keep the divinity, trim the man.

The Cappadocians answered with a sentence that has guarded the incarnation ever since. Gregory of Nazianzus, writing against Apollinarius: “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved. If anyone has put his trust in Him as a Man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation.” Gregory of Nyssa pressed the same point at length: the whole man, body, soul, and mind, must be united to the Word, or the whole man is not redeemed. Basil stood with them. At Constantinople in 381, the church condemned Apollinarianism, and the principle stands: what is not assumed is not healed.

One guardrail, because it matters. Philippians 2 says the Son “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7). The emptying is defined by the taking. He added humanity; he subtracted nothing of deity. He started, and remained, at the highest place. The church’s tests for this have always been concrete: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2), and the risen Jesus himself: “See my hands and my feet… a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39).

The Death and the Rising

All of this moves toward the cross and the empty tomb, because the hymn in Colossians moves there too. “Making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). “He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death” (Col. 1:22). Real body. Real blood. Real death. A merely seeming man could only seemingly save.

And then: “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18). “Declared to be the Son of God in power… by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). The risen one speaks: “I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore” (Rev. 1:17-18). The resurrection is the Father’s amen to everything the Son claimed.

Lewis, with his gift for saying the thing plainly: “We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.” Theories about how the atonement works are, he said, “mere plans or diagrams,” useful if they help, to be dropped if they do not. The that is non-negotiable. Hold the theories loosely. Hold the cross tightly.

The Choice

God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. … Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

So we are back where we started, and the question will not be evaded. Lunatic, liar, or Lord. There is no door marked “great moral teacher.” “There is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4:12).

Why Jesus? Because Christianity is not a system of ideas that survives its founder. It is a person who forgives sins in his own name, bears authority over heaven and earth, is everything God is, became everything we are, died the death that makes peace, and rose as the firstborn of the new creation.

That is not only a doctrine to be defended. It is good news to be received. The one who said “your sins are forgiven” to a paralyzed man says it still, and he has the scars to prove he can pay what he remits. The one who tabernacled among us in flesh has not withdrawn. He remains what he became, and he invites what he assumed: come, all of you, mind and body and soul, and be healed.

Augustine prayed it a lifetime ago, and the church has been praying it since: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Jesus is the rest. That is why Jesus.