Who was Jesus of Nazareth?
Whenever I open the Scriptures, I find myself silenced by the daring weight of Your words. No ordinary man would speak so boldly of himself. One might whisper in doubt, “Who do you think you are?” Yet your answer is steady as the dawn: “I am who I claim to be.”
For generations, men and women have searched for the meaning of life, chasing it across deserts of philosophy and oceans of science, often dying with empty hands. Yet one day, a carpenter’s son from Nazareth gathered a few fishermen and tax collectors around him and spoke words that turned the world on its axis: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
And so the question still lingers in the air, fragile as incense smoke: “Son of Mary, who do you really think you are?”
Darwin looked to nature and told us of evolution, of common ancestry stretching back to creatures of water and mud. Muhammad denied your divinity, declaring you only a man. Our modern age bows instead at the altars of pleasure and possession-consumerists stacking their treasures, hedonists chasing fleeting delights.
But you, Jesus, force us into a decision. Either you were a madman drunk on delusion, or the world that rejects you is doomed!
Even John the Baptist, locked away in the shadows of a prison cell, once sent his followers to ask, “Are you the one to come, or should we wait for another?” And your reply was not theory but evidence: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news.”
Imagine it-eyes that had never known light now flooded with color, tongues that had only tasted silence now bursting into song. Crutches abandoned, streets alive with joy, the poor standing taller beneath the weight of hope.
And the echoes have not faded. Travel to any land, any tongue, any people, and you will find one who whispers, “He changed my life.” Not always by healing the body, but often by mending the soul. Addicts freed without a doctor’s hand, criminals reborn without a judge’s decree, broken spirits lifted without a counselor’s voice.
Paul the apostle once ravaged the Church with fury. Trained in the strictest traditions of Judaism, advancing beyond many of his peers, he burned with zeal for the law of his fathers. So relentless was his anger that he dragged men and women from their homes, sentencing them to chains and death, determined to silence the name of Jesus.
Yet on a dusty road to Damascus, he met the very one he despised. A light brighter than the noonday sun struck him down, and a voice from heaven asked: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” In that moment, the persecutor became the preacher. The destroyer of the Church became its chief architect. The one who sought to quench the Gospel became its loudest herald, penning epistles that still breathe life into hearts across centuries.
Even the darkest of men, like Joshua Milton Blahyi-General Butt Naked, a Liberian warlord who once marched children into war and bathed his land in blood-claims to have seen you. In 1996 he laid down his weapons, deserted his army, and took up a new calling: to preach the peace of the very Christ he once despised.
Such stories weave across the fabric of history. They testify not to delusion, but to a presence that heals, redeems, and makes all things new.
The evidence relies-not in theories or philosophies, but in lives remade: the blind see, the lame walk, the guilty are forgiven, the lost are found, and enemies of the cross become its fiercest defenders.
If Jesus is truly who He declares Himself to be,
then I have every reason to deny myself,
to lift my cross, and to walk in His steps.
If He is who He claims,
how could I clutch at treasures of earth-
treasures He Himself gave freely-
when their highest worth is in the service of His Gospel?
If He is who He claims,
how could I feast and drink and laugh away the hours,
forgetting the eternity that lies before me?
If He is who He claims,
then I will cast aside the sin that clings like chains,
and fix my gaze upon Him alone-
the Author, the Perfecter,
the very Finisher of my faith.
~ Johnex.
