How I Met the Biblical Jesus (And Lost the Shallow One)

People meet Jesus in many ways. Mine was typically unspectacular. Born to Christian parents, I grew up in a Christianity that sometimes came quite close to the kind described in the early 2004 movie Saved!. The film portrays—sometimes quite brutally—a kind of Bible-quoting evangelicalism that is high on group emotion and personal salvation but woefully inconsistent and shallow on the demands of Christian behavior and biblical thinking. Jesus was preached as the Savior, but I cannot remember any consistent preaching on the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and moral teachings.

How many times as a young person did I make my way to the altar rail when the call to conversion was made by visiting evangelists? On my knees, with tears, I determined to be a better believer. Clearly, those times equaled the number of times I was quite convinced I was not saved. In my youthful and superficial way, I kept meeting Jesus and then losing him.

In college, my childish faith died. I began the serious business of growing up and proving to all—including myself—the significance and importance of my own person. In this project, Jesus had no place.

One day, as an adult, I met Jesus—or should I say, Jesus met me—at the beginning of my adult life. In the middle of a PhD program (ironically in ancient Gnosticism, no less), my life of self-affirmation and success-seeking came to a screeching halt. I was studying religion simply to put “PhD” after my name so I could finally believe in my own significance. The doctorate was not to help others with knowledge I might acquire. It was to help me. But I was running out of gas. Selfish living can drive you nuts, and I was beginning to doubt I had the inner resources to pull off this final effort of self-affirmation.

It was the beginning of the discovery of Jesus—not just as the personal Savior but as the Lord and Creator of the universe, and thus the all-consuming discovery of the Bible’s theistic worldview, of which Jesus is both the center and the fulfillment. In a profound, emotional experience, I saw Jesus on the cross, in time and space, really dying for my sins. He granted me inner cleansing, brought me reconciliation with my Maker, and allowed me to accept my real self—giving me the freedom to stop being consumed with me and instead be concerned about him and serving others.

This is the biblical Jesus I know and love. When I compare him with the Jesus of Gnosticism, only he makes sense of my life.

Meeting the Biblical Jesus

Sometimes the Gnostic Jesus is presented as “a new Jesus” for a new global era. The fact is, the Gnostic Jesus is just as old as the biblical Jesus. If one is a valid option, then so is the other. Historical distance is no obstacle. A verse in the New Testament, written close to the time of Jesus, says it eloquently: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever.”

The God of Jesus

The God Jesus serves and reveals is the personal, transcendent, good Creator who is the loving Redeemer. I am drawn to this God because of a deep sense of what the apostle Paul calls “his eternal power and divine nature” revealed “plainly in the things he made.” The God of the Bible—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—mysteriously but certainly explains the origin of order, beauty, morality, and personhood that I find so essential to my own being.

God as the universal spirit inhabiting all things is, in a certain sense, liberating. Yet it produces impersonal speech like this from a modern Gnostic elder: “God will reveal itself in full. God is revealing itself all of the time.” To know that I live in a world created by a personal God—not in an impersonal universe where I must find and create my own way—is profoundly satisfying.

Actor and essayist Ben Stein captures the sentiment well: “We are not responsible for the operation of the universe…. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.”

My soul is drawn to the personal Creator with a sense of utter necessity. The choice is not academic or merely interesting. The stakes are almost incalculable. The Bible teaches that everyone knows God through his creation, but many refuse to recognize him and instead worship creation itself—the heart of idolatry and deliberate rebellion. We will all pay eternally for this life-defining choice.

The Message of Jesus

The Gnostic Jesus, like the Buddha, Lao-tse, or Sufi masters, offers deep teaching on esoteric spirituality—techniques that quickly become salvation by works. What attracts me to the biblical Jesus is that he came not just to teach but to accomplish a task I cannot accomplish myself. By his actions alone, in obedience to God his Father, in the amazing drama of grace, Jesus brings about the end-time utopian kingdom. People enter it by faith as a gift from God. This message holds the immense promise of a transformed universe.

The Humanity of Jesus

The biblical Gospels give us rich details about Jesus’ physical and national origins so we can understand his teaching in context. The Jewish/Old Testament background of Jesus holds together as a coherent, believable picture. Nobody questions that the human Jesus was born into a Jewish family at the time the Gospels indicate.

In contrast, the Gnostic account of a mystical guru who appears from nowhere feels like later speculation as Christianity spread into the pagan Greco-Roman world. The Gnostic texts show no interest in grounding Jesus in a real historical time and place. From human experience, the Gnostic Jesus—with no family or historical background—does not ring true. The biblical Jesus feels like part of my own human reality.

This historical reality brings an unparalleled, joyful element of personal communion to faith. The original followers knew him, loved him, received him, lived in his presence, had fellowship with him, and prayed, “Come, Lord Jesus.” In biblical Christianity, Jesus is received as a real human being of the past who—because he was raised from the dead—is experienced as an objective personal reality in the present.

Jesus as a real person mysteriously reveals the personal heart of God, assuring me that I am not alone in an impersonal universe.

(End of Part 1. Continued in Part 2: The Divinity, Spirituality, and Victory of the Biblical Jesus)