Are you assured that Jesus is Alive?
“Beyond reasonable doubt” is a legal term. A jury cannot consider a defendant guilty until there is no “reasonable doubt” in the mind of a “reasonable person” that he is guilty.
Similarly, God does not expect people to believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that He is alive today without any reasonable evidence to support this claim.
The Bible Tells Us
What we know about Jesus is primarily learned from the Bible. Some people do not believe that Jesus is Alive, because they do not view the Bible as a reliable historical record. (If you want to learn more about the historicity of the Bible, we recommend you read the book, The Bible as History by Werner Keller.)
The scriptures tell us that Jesus is God, that he came to earth in a human body, and that after he was killed, he rose from the dead with a new resurrected body that is not subject to decay.
The Bible also tells us that He lives today and is at the right hand of God the Father. Jesus intercedes for those who believe in Him. He will return to earth again at a time we do not know, and He will set everything right. Christians treasure this knowledge and want to follow Him and worship Him for all He does for them.
Claims that Jesus Made
- “I am the bread of life,”
- “I am the light of the world,”
- “I am the resurrection and the life,”
- “I am the way, the truth and the life,”
- “Before Abraham was, I AM.”
In the book of Mark Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins. He claimed he is the Lord of the Sabbath and with it the right to reinterpret the law. Jesus claimed that to accept Jesus is to accept God. Jesus affirmed to Caiaphas the high priest that He is “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed.”
In response to this we might consider what one writer has to say about this…
Lunatic, Liar or LORD?
“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 a 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 moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book II, Ch. 3]