The One Thing Jesus Cannot Be
There are many things people have called Jesus.
Some have called Him a liar.
Some have called Him a lunatic.
Some have called Him Lord.
Increasingly, modern people call Him a good teacher.
Of all the conclusions that can be drawn about Jesus of Nazareth, that last one is the most popular.
It is also the one thing He cannot be.
That probably sounds strange. After all, even many non-Christians are willing to speak highly of Jesus. They admire His ethics. They praise His compassion. They point to the influence Christianity has had on law, charity, education, and civilization itself.
Many people who reject Christianity still want Jesus.
They simply want Him with the supernatural parts removed.
They want the Sermon on the Mount without the Resurrection.
They want the ethics without the authority.
They want the teachings without the Teacher.
The result is a position you hear everywhere now, and it sounds humble, even generous.
It goes like this:
“I don’t know if God is real, but Christianity seems to work. The values are good. The civilization it built is good. Jesus was a good teacher.”
You can hear a softened version of it from Jordan Peterson on any given week, but the position itself is much older than Peterson. Generations of skeptics, agnostics, and cultural Christians have tried to keep Jesus’ morality while discarding His claims.
I want to say something that will sound strange coming from a preacher: for all its sophistication, that position is not an intellectual one. It cannot survive five minutes of honest thought.
I am not picking on Peterson. I pray the man comes to know Christ, and I think he is closer than he lets on. But the position has to be named for what it is, because a great many people are hiding inside it, and it is a house with no floor.
Here is the problem.
Walk the logic with me, because the logic is the whole point.
If Jesus was good, then Jesus was true.
A good man does not build his entire life and ministry on a lie. Liars are not good.
So the moment you grant that Jesus was a good teacher, you have already granted that what He taught was true.
You cannot keep the goodness and discard the truth.
They come bolted together.
And what did He teach?
Not merely a tidy ethic about being kind to your neighbor.
He taught that He Himself was the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him.
He stood in front of trained men who had memorized the first five books of the Bible—not five chapters, the whole books—and He told them, “I and My Father are one.”
They understood exactly what He meant.
They reached for stones because, in their hearing, He had just claimed legal equality with God.
He claimed to be God.
So now the door swings only three ways.
If a man claims to be God and he is not God, he is not a good teacher with one eccentric blind spot.
He is a liar or he is a lunatic.
If he knows he is not God and says it anyway, he is a deceiver of the worst kind, and you should run from him.
If he believes it and it is false, he is not eccentric—he is deranged, and you should run from him faster.
A man wandering the streets announcing his own divinity does not get filed under “good teacher.” He gets a cult, and sooner or later he asks his followers to drink something.
Liar.
Lunatic.
Lord.
Those are the seats.
There is no fourth chair labeled “good teacher who was mistaken about being God.”
That chair was never built.
Jesus Himself shut the back door on this.
When a man came to Him and called Him “good teacher,” Jesus did not accept the compliment. He turned it around:
“Why do you call Me good? No one is good but God alone.”
He was not denying that He was good, and He was not denying that He was God.
He was forcing the man to finish his own sentence.
You want to call Me good?
Then say what that makes Me.
And if you will not follow My teaching, you do not actually believe I am good—you only like the way it sounds.
That is the real shape of the modern position.
It wants the fruit without the root.
It admires the cathedral and denies the quarry the stones came from.
It will praise the Christian sexual ethic and the Christian conscience and the Christian habit of caring for the weak, and then it will say, with a straight face, that the man at the center of it all may or may not have been telling the truth about who He was.
You cannot have it.
The reason the teachings seem good is because they were true.
And they were true because the one teaching them possessed the authority He claimed to possess.
The moment Christ ceases to be God, His ethics cease to be binding.
They become preferences.
Suggestions.
One philosopher’s opinion among many.
The goodness you are admiring was His claim to be God working itself out in history.
Pull the claim, and the goodness collapses with it.
There is no longer any reason it should be regarded as authoritative, true, or morally binding.
It becomes one voice among countless others.
This is why “Jesus was a good teacher” is not a safe, moderate, reasonable thing to believe.
It is the one thing He cannot be.
It is the only verdict the evidence forbids.
You may call Him a liar. I think you would be wrong, but at least you would be thinking clearly.
You may call Him a lunatic. Wrong again, but coherent.
What you may not do, if you have any respect for logic, is call Him good and stop there.
Goodness drags truth in behind it.
Truth drags Lordship in behind it.
And Lordship will not let you stay where you are.
So the question that met Nicodemus in the dark meets you now, and it has not changed in two thousand years.
Who is Jesus to you?
Not who is He to the culture.
Not who is He to the historians.
Not who is He to the man on the podcast.
Who is He to you?
Because if you have decided He was good, you have already decided more than you meant to.
You have decided He was true.
And if He was true, He is Lord.
And not Lord of the parts of your life you find convenient.
He is Lord of all, or He is not Lord at all.
There is no middle seat.
There never was.
