Is God a liar?
Did He mean what He said, that He offers us eternal life, but only through His Son, Jesus Christ?
“If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater; for this is the witness of God which He has testified of His Son.
He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself; he who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of His Son.
And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.
These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.”
(1 John 5: 9-13)
The Good News of Jesus Christ makes a number of startling claims, including:
Jesus Christ is the visible image of the invisible God
that he lived, died, rose again and ascended back to God
that he is the only begotten Son of God, the Father
that God offers us eternal life, through faith in the Son.
Now St John, one of the disciples of Jesus, makes the claim that if we do not believe in Jesus, we are making God out to be a liar. Many people do not believe in Jesus, but does this mean that by not believing in Jesus, they are making God out to be a liar?
Jesus is reported by the same author that He said this:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
Now, this is a very specific statement. No one can reasonably claim that Jesus ‘misspoke’. Again, the same author reports Jesus as saying:
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” (John 5:24)
and again:
“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.” (John 11:25)
Indeed all of the four Gospel authors insist on this point: Jesus promised eternal life to those who believe in Him.
So, it is clear Jesus is reported as meaning what He said.
Is Jesus a raving lunatic, as C.S.Lewis once wrote, ‘like a man who declares himself to be a poached egg’? Clearly not, given the wisdom of His teaching and discourse. So, who lied? Either the disciples lied, or the copyists of the texts lied, or Jesus lied, perhaps?
Did the disciples lie? Well, they did not behave like liars. People normally lie because they are afraid, but the disciples, once they became the apostles, fearlessly declared this Gospel, this Good News, even though it cost most of them their lives. None ever deviated from their insistent testimony that Jesus is the Son of God and that God has promised those who believe in Jesus eternal life, and that Jesus had risen from the dead.
Did the copyists lie? Given that the New Testaments books were widely hand copied, any fabricated stories would show up as families of manuscript documents with widely different content from the other families. Despite there being tens of thousands of preserved manuscripts, NONE show evidence of later fabrications. This is powerful evidence that amply justifies them as being sufficiently well preserved sources of the orginals so we can say with certainty not one single Christian doctrine is in doubt, such as, for example, the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.
So, did Jesus lie? Or was He at the very least mistaken? If Jesus had not been raised from the dead, it might be quite easy to claim that Jesus lied, and that when Jesus said this:
“For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself.” (John 5:26) he was somehow speaking metaphorically, and certainly not literally.
But all of the apostles insisted that Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again on the third day. And the post-resurrection body of Jesus was reported as being somehow very different and beyond anything we know of in this creation. It is a historical certainty that the apostles believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus to a man.
This is not a minor aspect of Christianity – it is the critical issue upon which it stands or falls.
Jesus had clearly told the discples He would be scourged, crucified but on the third day would rise again. If Jesus was not raised, how do we account for the certainty that the apostles had in the resurrection of Jesus? If Jesus had not been raised, they would have believed after Jesus death that Jesus was not who He claimed to be. The fact that they did all believe in the resurrection is extraordinary evidence that He was, in fact, resurrected.
So, if Jesus did not lie, and the copyists did not lie, and the apostles did not lie, that leaves God. i.e. if we do not believe that God offers us eternal life, then logically we must believe that although Jesus, the Son of God, stated to the contrary, God does not so love the world and God will not give us everlasting life. But if God lied, then God is not holy, and if he is not holy, he is not God, but the author of the sickest joke it is possible to conceive of. We are effectively claiming that God spoke the entire Creation into being, its hundreds of billions of galaxies and each galaxy containing hundreds of bullions of stars, so that he could make billions of humans each with trillions of cells, so as to reveal to them a completely false hope of eternal life with Himself. Why bother? It would make no sense.
Therefore, we need to recognise that if we believe that Jesus is not the means by which God gives us eternal life, then logically we are calling God a liar, and calling Him a liar makes no logical sense. Therefore, we should rather confidently place our trust in the Word of God, for:
““God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19).
Now, you may still strongly object to the proposition that it is through faith in Jesus that God offers us eternal life. If you cannot defeat the proposition by logical argument, then you may think that your loyalty to your own beliefs (which might be that there is no God, or perhaps you may believe that His name is Allah and He has no son, and that Mohammed is His messenger) requires you to suppress the message of the Gospel by force. Afer all, if every believer in the world in the Gospel is converted or killed, then there is no Gospel, and your system of belief has won. It should be simple, surely?
I would suggest that you should consider a prediction that Jesus made, which was that, “ Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away.” (Luke 21:33). Those who ignore Jesus’ prediction, and try to suppress His message by force, only achieve this: they merely show that the actions that their belief system motivates them to take reveal the real evil that lurks at the heart of their beliefs, which is that ‘my might is my right’. Indeed, mass killings under Communism have been of the order of 100 million, while under Islam these have been around 300 million. Despite these efforts to stamp out the Christian Gospel, its message continues to give new life and hope to millions of people year after year. It offers new life and hope to each and every man, woman or child, including you, dear readers.
God bless you all,
Graham Ford
President