John 3:16 “God so loved the world that
He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but
have eternal life.”
And what
did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong:
and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard)
to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded.
Secondly,
He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories
scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to
life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.
Thirdly,
He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into
their heads the sort of God He was — that there was only one of Him and that He
cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament
gives an account of the hammering process.
Then
comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a Man who goes
about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has
always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.
Now let
us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he
was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it.
But this Man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in
their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was
infinitely different from anything else.
And when
you have grasped that, you will see that what this Man said was, quite simply,
the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:14 The Word became flesh and
made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and
Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
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