Jesus Christ of Nazareth is THE Role Model!

Akiane Kramarik and her portrait of Jesus, which she painted in 2008 at the age of 8!  See the videos linked here and here, where young "Heaven is for Real" subject Colton Burpo picked out this portrait as the only right one.

If I’m going to start afresh on a list of Role Models and people I admire, the place where I have to start is with Jesus, the ultimate role model!

     Detractors try to say he was just a man.  This isn’t true, but even if it is, what a man!  Even His opponents would have to admit He was something quite remarkable!

     There is a small group of disbelievers and anti-Christian theologians and intellectuals (The Jesus Seminar, for example) who try to say the historical Jesus was not a real person, or was an amalgam of several different people, or that His words and life were not recorded accurately in the Bible, but these kinds of kooks can be dismissed as biased or of such a small number and minority opinion that we do not need to consider them.  They are merely a small faction of Jesus haters who are trying to discredit Him and His deeds.  Even most of His critics agree that He was a real person, and that the evidence of His existence is at least as prevalent as the evidence for Cleopatra and Alexander the Great.  If one questions Jesus’ existence, by the same criteria, one would also have to question all the other historical figures, from Socrates and Genghis Khan to Ivan the Terrible and Queen Victoria.

     Once you get past the ridiculous assumption that Jesus wasn’t real, you then have to decide if He was who He claimed to be, or question the accuracy of His words in the Bible.  But even beyond this debate, there is this fact:  Jesus’ mission on this earth is relegated to a mere three year period in which he traveled through a small area of what is now the Middle East preaching and teaching about love and truth and the Kingdom of God, and whether you believe He died on the cross and rose again or simply disappeared without another word, the fact remains that His ministry and His followers grew to completely change the face of the earth forever.  He was more influential and has reached more people than any other person that has ever existed, including all the other religious prophets.  And unlike other faiths, His message is not spread by force (no, not even during the crusades, which was not missionary by nature), but rather by love and compassion.

     Even if you believe that Jesus was just a man, then you should still be amazed by the way in which He touched this world, and you’d have to ask yourself just who was this man, and what was He all about that He was able to change the world the way He did?

     And for believers, Jesus is so much more than just a man.  We understand exactly who He was, and is, and will be, and for us, that answers the question of how He was able to change the world the way He did!  

    I’ll apply Occam’s razor here, which is the principal that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.  When presented with two explanations, one simple, and one overwhelmingly complex, the principal of Occam’s razor says that the answer is usually the simplest one.  Applied to Jesus and Christianity, the simplest explanation is that Jesus really is who He and His followers said He was:  the Son of God, or, as Jesus said of Himself on more than one occassion, "I AM".  This explains the existence of Christianity better than any other elucidation.  In fact, if Jesus wasn’t who He said He was, then He wasn’t as great as His followers claim, for He would have been a loony or a liar, or His words wouldn’t have been recorded accurately in the Bible, in which case we would need all kinds of complicated arguments and theories in order to explain how Christianity developed around someone who wasn’t all the Bible claimed Him to be.  It means either Jesus or His followers, the very people who wrote the New Testament, were liars, or those who compiled the Bible years later, twisting the words and deeds of Jesus into something they weren’t, and that just doesn’t correlate with the doctrine of Christianity in general.  A person may preach the truth of their faith and then lie to themselves and others about other things, simply because they are sinners and are not perfect.  But what they don’t do is to preach their entire faith as truth if they know that what they are preaching is really a lie, especially if the basis of that faith is all about truth!  It just doesn’t make any sense.  What DOES make is sense the simplest answer:  Jesus was God made flesh, who came to earth as a man to preach and teach the Good News about the Kingdom, and then take our place in death so we might have eternal life with a God who would otherwise be unattainable due to our sin nature.

     But no matter who you think Jesus was, the fact is that He was the most influential man ever to walk this earth.  And even anti-Christian Jesus-hater Bill Maher should agree with me on that!