The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

Author:Lee Strobel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2012-01-03T16:45:27+00:00

9: THE PROFILE EVIDENCE

Did Jesus Fulfill the Attributes of God?

Shortly after eight student nurses were murdered in a Chicago apartment, the trembling lone survivor huddled with a police sketch artist and described in detail the killer she had seen from her secret vantage point beneath a bed.

Quickly the drawing was flashed around the city-to police officers, to hospitals, to transit stations, to the airport.

Soon an emergency room physician called detectives to say he was treating a man who looked suspiciously like the flinty-eyed fugitive depicted in the sketch. That's how police arrested a drifter named Richard Speck, who was promptly convicted of the heinous slayings and ended up dying in prison thirty years later.

Ever since Scotland Yard first turned a witness's recollections into a sketch of a murder suspect in 1889, forensic artists have played an important role in law enforcement. Today more than three hundred sketch artists work with U.S. police agencies, and an increasing number of departments are relying on a computerized system called EFIT (Electronic Facial Identification Technique).

This recently developed technology was successfully used to solve a 1997 kidnapping that occurred at a shopping mall just a few miles from my suburban Chicago home. The victim provided details about the kidnapper's appearance to a technician, who used a computer to create an electronic likeness of the offender by choosing from different styles of noses, mouths, hairlines, and so forth. Just moments after the drawing was faxed to police agencies throughout the area, an investigator in another suburb recognized the Picture as a dead-ringer for a criminal he had encountered earlier. Fortunately, this led to a quick arrest of the kidnapping suspect. Oddly enough, the concept of an artist's drawing can provide a rough analogy that can help us in our quest for the truth about Jesus.

Here's how: The Old Testament provides numerous details about God that sketch out in great specificity what he's like. For instance, God is described as omnipresent, or existing everywhere in the universe; as omniscient, or knowing everything that can be known throughout eternity; as omnipotent, or all-powerful; as eternal, or being both beyond time and the source of all time; and as immutable, or unchanging in his attributes. He's loving, he's holy, he's righteous, he's wise, he's just.

Now, Jesus claims to be God. But does he fulfill these characteristics of deity? In other words, if we examine Jesus carefully, does his likeness closely match the sketch of God that we find elsewhere in the Bible? If it doesn't, we can conclude that his claim to being God is false.

This is an extremely complex and mind-stretching issue. For example, when Jesus was delivering the Sermon on the Mount on a hillside outside Capernaum, he wasn't simultaneously standing on Main Street of Jericho, so in what sense could he be called omnipresent? How can he be called omniscient if he readily admits in Mark 13:32 that he doesn't know everything about the future?

If he's eternal, why does Colossians 1:15 call him "the firstborn over

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