[Actually, that is not my intent. I will try to relate the incident as purely as it is possible for me after this length of time, and promise not to extend the tale out into legendary proportions.]
I am what is popularly called a "tent-maker" in Christian circles; a missionary who raises his own income by working in the country he or she is serving God by. The allusion comes from the work of the Apostle Paul while he worked by the Gentiles. It is not that I am a renegade, or itinerant cleric, but this has been God's will for my life and the life of my family until He deems otherwise. It is interesting work. But, let me be the first to say that it is not without its own hardships. I make my income by teaching conversational english to Japanese students. My students come from all walks of life, and so I have a wonderful cross-section of people with which I work. My goal, however, is not monetary, but to bring the lost to Christ - for Jesus IS the answer to our problems and I am deeply in love with people..
Anyway, one Friday afternoon, at Oita's premier medical university, a group of doctors began discussing with me the problem of "cults." The subject hovered around a group known as Jehovah's Witnesses, but one good doctor was surprised and asked me if these people were not actually Christians. After all, they say they are Christians, and he had a good Hindu friend who said that this was so. In fact, I said, the Jehovah's Witnesses are a christian cult - but cults are in no way confined to the Christian belief. They develop as society interacts with religious faith.
I said that what made the JWs (as we say in Canada; Jehovah as they say in Japan) a cult was their view that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was the Archangel Michael; himself a creation of God. And I gave the definition of a cult as 'an organization utilizing but modifying tenets of a religion in order to gain personal control over individuals for the exploitation of those individuals to the benefit of those in authority over them.'
I explained that a tenet was a principle belief, and that THE greatest tenet in the Christian faith was that Jesus of Mary, adopted son of Joseph of Bethlehem, was God incarnate. And that one could not alter this fact of the Christian Faith and remain a Christian. Because: in the Christian World View, Man has been born into Sin, which is no longer a mere act of disobedience to God, the Creator, but a curse, from which none can escape, that will result in our eternal deaths. Yet, from the beginning, God planned a means of forging our escape, and that was promised through the seed of Eve, and through the seed of Abraham, and again through the seed of David. Such that at the right time God could enter woman and be born a perfect man, after the lines of Abraham, and King David, to be our escape: an escape that is made complete when we choose to believe in what He has done for us by paying for our sins through the death of His own human body on the Roman cross. [Only you must understand that I was in no way so eloquent as this: my words were fraught with pauses and emotion.]
This was when my good doctor of psychiatry asked me what I now call 'the thirty second question.' He said that it was a confusion for him to understand God incarnate in Man. How could God be Man? And, did this not mean that Man was God? Didn't Man create everything? He asked me: "How can you prove that Jesus was God?"
To this I said that I could no more answer his question in thirty minutes, than in the thirty or so seconds he required before his interest was caught up in other thoughts! I explained that I knew Jesus was God because of the proof given to all of us by the Bible itself. The Bible is a history book, I said, and no ordinary history book either! The Bible has been analyzed by thoughtful men and women generation upon generation and yet no one has been able to debunk it; its logic remains immutable, written by God through Man over many centuries, and culminating in the life of God incarnate, the son of David, and in the lives of His Church within the first century after His death and resurrection.
I noted the strangeness of the Jewish and Roman leaders being unable to produce the body of the slain Jesus from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea. A defeat that would have cut short the 'Jewish heresy' at its inception. The Jews and the Romans were no fools! Yet, they could not for all of their collective abilities do this.
I noted that the risen Lord Jesus talked with and was seen personally by over 500 people, and that he remained in the company of His Church and taught them for forty days before leaving us by the human miracle of ascending into the clouds. This is no fabrication but history. We cannot erase the words of testimony though our human judgement may be biased again them, except by finding fault with the documentation itself, and there remains no just condemnation yet.
However, I said, there is another kind of proof that I share with all Christians, and that is that I have tested God and found Him to be very real in my own life. This is a subjective proof I admitted. It can not be used conclusively for anyone else's sake: everyone who chooses to trust in and believe in Jesus Christ finds that it is true.
My dear friend shook his head. It was literally too much for him to believe. The only absolute proof that Jesus Christ is God comes from faith in Him.
I would like to take the time to make this point to you. We must be very careful what we conclude constitutes reality. Everything we believe is coloured by our own deeds and desires. We need to examine first our hearts before condemning the evidence. What we will lose by believing in the living God? Is this loss a sufficient reason for our disbelief? Are we being fair? May God bless your meditations into these things.
