For Jesus to be the One of prophecy, He needed to be more than a man — He had to be God. Join us as we discover why Jesus could not have been just “a good teacher” or “a moral man.” See why there is no other option than these three…and decide for yourself if He was a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.

<p>For Jesus to be the One of prophecy, He needed to be more than a man — He had to be God. Join us as we discover why Jesus could not have been just “a good teacher” or “a moral man.” See why there is no other option than these three…and decide for yourself if He was a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.</p>

North New South Wales Conference

He is the One

Justin Torossian

03 No Other Option

♪♪ Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or He was Lord.

He was anointed as Messiah exactly as the Bible said he would be.

God has given us abundant, credible evidence for Christ's divinity, so that when he invites us to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, the decision is a very easy 1 to make.

So if he wasn't a liar, and if he wasn't a lunatic, then There is no other option.

It must be that he was and is who he claimed to be, the long expected Messiah, God incarnate, the savior of the world and Lord of all.

If you type into Google the word Christmas, you'll come up with 2, 620, 000, 000 results.

If you type the letters J-E-S-U-S in, within a split second, you'll have over 1.1 billion results.

If you search the online bookstore of Kindle for Jesus, you'll come back with over 60, 000 books.

Now, if you were to wade through this sea of search results, you'd find a variety of clashing views as to who Jesus was.

Some results, like the Bible, would portray him as God.

But the majority of them would portray Jesus as only a good and moral man, or just a wise teacher or prophet.

But as we'll see together in this message, a man who made the claims that Jesus made about himself cannot be a good prophet or a moral teacher.

For the thinker, these actually aren't even an option.

If you're joining us for the first time in this series, go back and check out the first 2 messages.

And they'll set the foundation for what we will cover right now.

For those who've been with us, you've seen some amazing Old Testament prophecies that Sharissa and Lyle have walked us through so far.

The entire purpose and focus of those Old Testament prophecies is that the coming Messiah would not just be a man, but that he would also fully be God.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace.

This babe, born in a manger of Bethlehem's stable is called the everlasting father.

Micah 5 verse 2, But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, and remember there were 2 Bethlehems in Israel and here God specifies which 1 Jesus would be born in.

It goes on, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the 1 to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting, or from eternity.

In other words, in order to be the savior of the world, the 1, the Messiah, would have to be God himself in human flesh, without a beginning, but having existed forever.

Now, it's hard for us to wrap our minds around something or someone with no beginning.

And that's probably because everything we see around us had a beginning.

There was a point before which I existed, before you existed.

Almost anyone older than you and I can remember that time.

Your car, your house, your school, they all had a starting point.

Earlier this year, I discovered a new sport, freeboarding.

It's been around for about 10 years, but it was new to me.

I'm still trying to convince my wife of that, but it is.

It's like snowboarding, which I love and hardly ever get to do anymore, except instead of on the snow, it's on paved roads.

And yes, of course, this means that you have to be all padded up in case you fall.

But Shirvessa and I found a new neighborhood being created on the top of a hill near our home.

And the roads up to it were perfect for learning.

Empty lots, open space, and virtually no traffic.

But within just a few months, houses seemed to pop up out of the ground like plants.

You know, we remember well the time before these homes existed.

But for God, He remembers the time before everything existed.

The trees outside, the birds that fly, all life on planet Earth, and even the planet itself had a starting point.

In fact, everything in existence other than God himself was brought into existence by him.

So since everything in the natural world had a starting point, it's no wonder that it's hard for us to wrap our puny human minds around a God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who had no beginning and have always existed.

But this is exactly the picture that the Bible paints.

And as we'll see in a moment, this was the claim of Jesus himself.

When you read the Gospels, it's impossible to miss this.

And we're gonna look at just 7 verses together on this, and I'll let you be the judge.

John chapter 5 verses 17 and 18, Jesus told the Jewish leaders, my father has been working until now and I have been working.

Therefore, the Bible says, the Jews sought all the more to kill him because he not only broke the Sabbath, that is according to their rules, but also said that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

So Jesus said something to the Jewish leaders that he fully knew would be understood as him claiming equality with God the Father.

Unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.

We're gonna come back to this 1 later on.

John 8, 58, a few verses later, Jesus says to them, Most assuredly I say to you, Before Abraham was, I am.

Christ was here actually claiming to be the great self-existent God.

The I am that I am, who spoke to Moses from the burning bush centuries before, who predated Abraham himself.

And we know that they understood him to mean this because the very next verse earth 59 says that they took up stones To try to stone him to kill him with John 10 next verse verses 30 to 33 He said I and my father are 1 Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him.

Jesus answered them, many good works I have shown you from my father.

For which of those works do you stone me?

Verse 33, the Jews answered him saying, for a good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy and because you, being a man, make yourself God." No explanation needed for this 1.

In John 11, 25, Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life, just before he proved it when he raised Lazarus from the dead.

Jesus was claiming to be the source and the originator of life.

The Old Testament scriptures that Jesus so clearly believed and based his life upon very clearly state that God alone is the author of life.

Doubting Thomas, as he's often called, when he saw Jesus' resurrected body and the wounds in his hands and his side and saw that it was Jesus, he proclaimed, My Lord and my God.

So Jesus was worshipped as God and he accepted the worship.

Last verse of all, Luke 5 verse 20, Jesus told a crippled man, let down through the roof of a house that he was in, your sins are forgiven you.

And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, who is this who speaks blasphemies?

Clearly, by claiming to forgive sins, Jesus was claiming to be God.

So friends, unequivocally, without question, Jesus claimed to be God, the eternally existent 1, in human flesh.

You may have noticed that all but 1 of our verses came out of the Gospel of John.

Now John actually skips the Christmas story in his gospel.

So you may be thinking, Justin, why are we reading from the gospel of John?

After the other gospels had been written, that is Matthew, Mark, and Luke, heresies or false teachings that were inconsistent with the rest of the scriptures had arisen about the divinity of Christ.

And they claimed that Jesus was simply a man.

And so John wrote this gospel at the request of the faithful Christians.

And the Gospel of John gives us crystal clarity about the divinity of Christ.

Through John, the Holy Spirit makes abundantly clear to us that not only is Jesus the 1, but he knew and he said that he was the 1, that he was God incarnate.

Of all 4 of the Gospels, John has the most of these powerful statements like we read.

Now these claims of Jesus create an interesting dilemma, or trilemma.

In the mid-19th century, the Scottish Christian preacher called Rabbi John Duncan formulated what he had called a trilemma, and this was in the late 1850s.

His argument was that, and I quote, Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or secondly, he was himself deluded and self-deceived, or third and finally, he was divine.

And he said, there is no getting out of this trilemma.

It is inexorable, which means inescapable.

Duncan wasn't the first Christian to point out this trilemma, and he wouldn't be the last.

Lewis made this trilemma popular again by advantageously adding amazing alliteration and saying that Christ must either be liar, lunatic, or lord.

Published later in his book, Mere Christianity, C.S.

Lewis writes, I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him.

I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.

That is the 1 thing we must not say, says Lewis.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

Charissa Fong Torossian

01 Who is Jesus?

It must be that He was and is who He claimed to be, the long-expected Messiah, God incarnate, the Savior of the world and Lord of all.

As we head into the Christmas season after what has been a crazy roller coaster of a year, There is 1 thing we can safely expect.

Christmas carols with distancing and maybe masks, but we're going to hear them in the shopping centers, on television and on the radio.

Songs like Away in a Manger, Silent Night, the first Noel, and I know there'll be plenty of other songs sung too, but the point is the world will be singing again about the birth of Jesus as it does at this time of year every year.

But question, who is Jesus And what makes his birth so special?

Google offers us a thousand different answers But regardless of what anyone thinks really as our price said the single most powerful Figure not merely in these 2 millenniums, but in all human history has been Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus is the most influential person in history.

Even Donald Trump agrees with this, by the way.

He's more influential than Plato, Buddha, Confucius.

Obama has the most followers on Twitter in the world, 126.8 million.

Soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, he has the most popular Instagram account in the world with 239 million followers.

Friends, Jesus is followed by over 2.1 billion people around the world and has been followed by billions more over the last 2000 years.

The Bible telling his story is history's all time bestseller.

His birth, which we remember every Christmas, it divides history, BC before Christ and AD and a Domini or in the year of our Lord and Jesus made claims that no 1 else in their right mind has ever made as Thomas Schultz said not 1 recognized religious leader not Moses Paul Buddha Muhammad Confucius have ever claimed to be God that is with the exception of Jesus Christ.

Christ is the only religious leader who ever claimed to be deity, that is God, and the only individual who has ever convinced a great portion of the world that he is God.

Josephus, he was born just 6 years after the crucifixion of Christ, wrote of him and his death.

And the Greek historian Herodotus spoke of Jesus also.

In fact, we have more eyewitness accounts attesting to the existence of Jesus than that of Julius Caesar.

The Bible is a book written by over 40 different authors from totally different walks of life, from kings to tax collectors, shepherds, fishermen, you name it, it's there.

And it's written over a period spanning 1, 600 years.

And it's written on 3 different continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and in 3 different languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

And yet this book, it is pervaded by 1 single theme, God's planned rescue of human beings through the Messiah from the problem of evil.

The Old Testament, which makes up about 3 quarters of the Bible, it is filled to the brim with predictions of the Messiah, so that when he came, people could look at him and say, that's him.

And you might say, well, hang on a minute, Charissa.

How do we know that the Bible wasn't made up to fabricate the claims of Jesus?

Well today we have over 5, 600 manuscripts of all or part of the Greek New Testament on display in museums and libraries across the United States and Europe.

In fact, some of these manuscripts date as far back as to the second century.

We have 10, 000 Latin manuscripts and 9, 300 early manuscripts that exist.

The closest book in the human race is Homer's Iliad, and we have only 643 partial manuscripts for it.

We can be more certain about the original text of the Bible than about the original text of Shakespeare's plays.

When I was single, some of the best relationship advice that I was given was this, if you don't know what you're looking for, You'll find it every time.

And I've since realized that this advice applies to more than just dating.

Because many people today think that Christ was Jesus' last name, but it's not a last name.

Christ is a Greek word, Christos, meaning the anointed.

And the Bible uses this name over 530 times in reference to Jesus, the person of Jesus.

The word Messiah is the Hebrew equivalent of Christ.

Well, after the crucifixion, Jesus' followers were understandably crushed.

They had hoped that Jesus would be this Messiah figure who would rid them of Roman rule and restore the kingdom to Israel.

But their idea of the Messiah wasn't the same as God's.

This is why after his resurrection, the Bible tells us that Jesus reviewed with his disappointed disciples, the ancient prophecies regarding himself.

And I read from Luke 24 verses 25 and 27, Then Jesus said to them, that's he said to them, oh foolish ones and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

For Jesus, his death and resurrection made perfect sense because it fulfilled what the prophets had said would happen.

And since Jesus said that this was the only way his followers could understand him too.

Right now, I want you to take a look with me at the biblical record.

We're going to see for ourselves how closely Jesus fits the prophetic blueprint of the Messiah.

You see, there are at least 61 major prophecies that contain some 330 details about the Messiah written centuries before Jesus was born.

The Scriptures foretold that the Messiah would come as a human.

Genesis 315 says, And behold, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between you, your seed and her seed.

He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

Now, Satan, we could say definitely bruised the heel of Jesus when his feet were nailed to the cross.

But I want you to notice that in calling Jesus the seed of the woman, God was indicating that his promised 1 would come as the offspring of a human being, not as an angel or as an alien from outer space.

The New Testament confirms that Jesus fulfilled this prophecy.

We read in Galatians chapter 4 and verse 4, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son born of a woman.

He came as a helpless babe, as a human, he came to reveal himself and his love to us.

The scriptures foretold too that the coming Messiah would be a male child, not just a human, but specifically a male child.

Isaiah 9 verse 6 says, For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, the mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

And of course we know from reading the Gospels, he was born as a baby boy.

The scriptures foretold that the Messiah would be born a Jew.

God told Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish nation, In Genesis 22 verse 18, He said to him, In your seed, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.

The Messiah was to be born a Jew, not an Egyptian or an Aussie.

And Matthew chapter 1 verse 1, first verse of the New Testament reads Jesus Christ the son of David the son of Abraham in addition to being Jewish the Messiah was also to be from the lineage of David who was the king of Israel Jeremiah 23 5 and 6 says behold the days are coming says the Lord that I will raise to David a branch of righteousness.

A king shall reign and prosper and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.

And verse 6 says, And Israel will dwell safely.

Now this is his name by which he will be called the Lord our righteousness.

And centuries later, the Bible says in Matthew 20 verse 30, that 2 blind men were sitting by a roadside when they heard that Jesus was passing by and they cried out to him and said, have mercy on us, oh Lord, son of David.

The scriptures foretold the place of the Messiah's birth even.

The Bible reads, But you, Bethlehem Ephratah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the 1 to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from old, from everlasting.

Do you realize that that Christmas carol we love to sing, O little town of Bethlehem, is actually about an incredible prophecy made by the prophet Micah that pinpointed the Messiah's birthplace almost 800 years before he was born.

Matthew 2 verse 1 reads in the New Testament, Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.

Most people don't know that there were actually 2 Bethlehems in Israel.

1 was about 11 kilometers from Nazareth, but the 1 that is specified in Micah's prophecy was 145 kilometers away.

God uses the ruler of the Roman Empire to do it for him by decreeing that all the world should be taxed for a census.

And because of this decree, Joseph takes his heavily pregnant wife in her third trimester on a long road trip by donkey.

Lyle Southwell

02 The Forbidden Prophecy

So if he wasn't a liar, and if he wasn't a lunatic, then there is no other option.

It must be that he was and is who he claimed to be, the long expected Messiah, God incarnate, the saviour of the world and Lord of all.

♪♪ Embedded almost in the centre of the Bible, you're going to find a prophecy that is so explosive in its fulfilment that there are those who have been spending the last 2 and a half thousand years trying to cover it up.

And they've been very successful because I can almost guarantee that you've never heard of these 4 simple verses from the book of Daniel.

In fact, this prophecy is so controversial that there was an ancient religious order that endeavored to ban anyone from reading it and a secret society, a violent secret society from the Dark Ages that did all that they could to cover it over.

And of course, whenever you get a prophecy like that, you know that's something that I want to know something about.

This is a prophecy that is all about Jesus Christ.

In Daniel chapter 9 the Bible says, and the prophecy begins in verse 24, but we'll begin in verse 23, the angel Gabriel is talking to Daniel, he says, "...at the beginning of your request the commandment came forth and I have come to show you for you are greatly beloved.

Therefore understand the matter and consider the vision." It's actually an explanation that Gabriel is giving of a much longer prophecy that came in chapter 8 but that's a subject for another episode on this program.

Verse 24 the Bible says, 70 weeks are cut off for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy.

There's some interesting events that take place right here, but there are 2 of them that jump off the page, and I want you to notice what they are.

Notice what it says here, to make reconciliation for iniquity and to bring in everlasting righteousness.

Only Jesus ever made reconciliation for iniquity and he did that on the cross and so here we have a prophecy coming hundreds of years before Jesus came showing what Jesus would do but when would Jesus do that?

Does the Bible even tell us when Jesus would come and when this prophecy would be fulfilled?

Notice what it goes on to say in verse 25.

"'Know therefore and understand "'that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to Messiah the Prince is going to be 7 weeks and 62 weeks which makes 69 weeks in total.

So 69 weeks after the commandment to restore and to rebuild Jerusalem, we can expect the coming of the Messiah.

The question we have to ask ourselves is, did that actually happen?

Did the Messiah arrive and did he arrive on time?

There are 2 aspects that we need to discover before we can decode this prophecy.

First of all, we need to note that in the Bible, in Bible prophecy, apocalyptic prophecy, a day symbolizes a year.

And as we mentioned earlier, this little section here of 4 verses is part of a much longer prophecy that is an apocalyptic end-time prophecy.

But this little section has been cut off to focus on Jesus Christ as our Messiah.

This is a principle that is found throughout the Bible.

We can find it from 1 end of the Bible to the other, but possibly 1 of the most popular verses that is used to demonstrate how it works is found in Ezekiel chapter 4 and verse 6, where the Bible says, "'And when you have accomplished them, ' By the way, this was an acted out prophecy that Ezekiel acted out in the marketplace each day.

He says, when you've accomplished them, lie again on your right side, you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah 40 days I have appointed you, each day for a year.

When it comes to understanding this prophecy, we need to recognize that in the Bible, a day symbolizes a year.

Well, if we go back to the prophecy the next thing that we need to find out is when does the time period begin?

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He is the One

03 No Other Option

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03 No Other Option

28m

01 Who is Jesus?

28m

02 The Forbidden Prophecy

29m

Sound Doctrine