What If God Was One of Us?
by Tom Goodman
October 2, 2013
In her hit song, "One of Us," Joan Osbourne sang:
What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
Some just consider the song irreverent, but Osbourne was asking an important question: Does God know what we're dealing with down here?
The answer is found in the life of Jesus. The Apostle John beautifully described the life of Jesus as God who "became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14).
This Sunday we'll continue our "Explore God" series with the question of Jesus' identity. Many regard Jesus as one of history's great moral teachers -- another like Gandhi or Buddha, for
example. But, as C.S. Lewis famously put it:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.... Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.... Let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Why is this important? Two reasons.
First, because Jesus is everything it means to be God, knowing Jesus is the best way to know God. Jesus wasn't simply a man who was filled with the presence of God. Jesus was the presence of God. And so if you want to know what makes God
smile, look at what made Jesus smile. If you want to know what enrages God, look at what made Jesus angry. Any claim about who God is and what God likes must be measured by the words and life of the man who was God-in-the-flesh: Jesus Christ.
Second, because Jesus is everything it means to be God, the sacrifice of Jesus was God paying our penalty himself. In 2 Corinthians 5:19 Paul wrote, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." The astonishing claim of the
gospel is that the man hanging upon the cross was the creator himself giving himself up to save his prized creation.
Believers need this reminder as much as those investigating faith. Join us this Sunday at 10 to celebrate the fact that God really was one of us.
--Tom
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