The way some Muslims see it, Judaism was supplanted by Christianity, a later revelation from the God of the Bible, and since Mohammed was given yet a further revelation—the final revelation—from the God of the Bible, Christians should really be Muslims.

In his error-riddled Koran, Mohammed botches even the most basic principle of Christianity when he writes that Christians believe in three gods. This false notion of his stemmed from when he was young and hung out with heretical Nestorians. He took their skewered views on the Trinity and further perverted them.

As Jordan says, “There are NO Christians in 2,000 years of church history who believed in three gods!”

*****

Celebrities like Oprah have helped make it real chic to be spiritual today. Jordan pointed out in a recent sermon, “Before the Oprah generation there was Phil Donahue, who was a materialist. You weren’t supposed to believe in God or be in touch with you spiritual side. It’s just material—if you can’t touch it, feel it, spend it, it ain’t real. With Oprah, it’s, ‘Let’s all get along; let’s all get in touch with our spiritual side. Let’s be egalitarian; let’s say everything’s equal.’

“The problem with that is when everything’s equal one thing can’t show up and that’s the truth. In our culture today, the truth doesn’t get an airing, so nothing but error gets aired. I don’t fear for truth. I say let truth have at it—let him out and he’ll take care of himself. What (goes wrong) is when you muzzle him and he doesn’t get an airing.”

*****

There are seven times Jesus Christ speaks on the Cross and every time He quotes Scripture. It’s the Word of God that’s on His mind and He’s operating in obedience of faith to what God’s Word said to Him.

*****

The Bible doesn’t call anybody a fool lightly, so there’s intended impact when Paul reasons that anyone (Editor’s Note: Jimmy Carter is apparently one—read my piece from March 21 for details) who doubts the fact of resurrection, and thinks it’s impossible, is a fool.

Specifically, Paul writes I Cor. 15:35-38, “But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?
[36] Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:
[37] And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain:
[38] But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.”

Jordan explains, “He’s saying, ‘You’re a little slow in your thinking processes. There’s something causing you to doubt resurrection other than an empirical examination of demonstratable facts in history.’

“He says, ‘Don’t you ever stand on a hillside on a spring morning, after winter has touched the creation with the finger of death, and see what has happened? You see creation spring forth out of death into life. Around you all the time is the testimony of resurrection, historically demonstrated to an absolute certainty. So for you just to dismiss out of hand the possibility, and then base your whole philosophy of life on that mistake and assumption, isn’t really smart. In fact, you know what it is? It’s foolish.’

“That’s why Jesus Christ (after He rose from the dead) said to His disciples, ‘O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.’ You see the doubting is really a heart problem; it’s really something inside.

“It’s really that there’s something in the Bible they don’t want to believe, so if they can get rid of (the resurrection), they don’t have to believe the rest. Well, in the Scriptures, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is clear to a historic certainty.”

*****

Notice how people on TV and so forth like to talk about their respect for Jesus Christ even when they don’t believe in Him? You want to ask them, “Why do you want to respect Him?”

Jordan reasons, “They’ll say they want to respect Christ for what He said and did. They’ll say, ‘He had good ideas, He taught good things and He did good things.’

“But when you examine what the Lord Jesus Christ said and did, you find Him saying and doing things that are so organically outrageous that they deny the possibility that He could be a good man and not God.

“There are claims Christ made that demonstrate He had to be the Lord, or a lunatic, or a liar. Now, if He’s s a liar or a lunatic, we dismiss Him out of hand. We would say He’s a lunatic because we don’t want to make Him a liar, but how good is it to trust a lunatic?

“So you’ve got one of two choices. He’s either who He thought He was or He’s not. Now, who did He think He was? If you write down a list of things Christ claimed for Himself you start out with the fact Jesus Christ claimed that all authority in all the universe rested in Him.

“Now, there’s not any other religious leader ever did that. All authority, all power, rested in Him. He was the seat of all authority. He was the one where what He said was true was true because He said it.

“Buddha didn’t do that. Buddha rested his authority in experience. Buddha was a prince in India who, when he got outside the little cocoon he lived in, saw the sufferings in the world and he came back and he wanted to find a way to be rescued from ‘tanha.’

“Now that’s not a lady; ‘tanya’ means ‘thirst’ in his language and it was the lust and the cravings and the passions of his baser nature that he wanted to find a way to be relieved from and get into nirvana, or touch eternity, and that’s why he developed an eight-fold pathway.

“If you go to Buddha, he’ll say, ‘Look, here’s how I did it. Here’s a path that I discovered that releases you into nirvana and if you’ll follow it, it’ll get you there.’ Experience is where he based his authority.

“Confucius analyzed oriental society and he came to some conclusions. He didn’t even believe there was a God; he just applied logic to the problems. He based his authority in logic.

“Mohammed never would have said he was anything; he got visions and all given to him by the angel of light, Gabriel. And he based all of his things in the visions Allah sent to him.

“Jesus Christ didn’t do any of that. He didn’t base His authority in experience, or logic, or in visions. He said, ‘I am the way. I am the truth. I’m the bread of life. I’m the light of the world. No man comes to the Father but by me. It’s me or nobody. It’s me or the highway.’

“In the Sermon on the Mount, He says to the nation Israel, ‘You have heard it said, but I say to you.’ Think about that! He takes all of the things that God had been saying to Israel through Moses all through history and He completely abrogates it.

“He says, ‘I say to you and now it’s what I say.’ Why? ‘Because I said it.’ Now, we don’t tend to make saints and heroes out of know-it-alls, do we? You ask them why they say something’s true and they answer, ‘Because I say so.’ What do you do with a person like that? You call him a kook; you kind of get a little repulsed by him, don’t you?

“Jesus Christ walked into a room and said to a man, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee.’ He didn’t say, ‘The Lord forgive you.’ He said, ‘Your sins are forgiven because I say so.’ That’s somebody who thought He had all authority.

“Before He left the earth, He told His apostles, ‘All power, all authority in heaven and in earth is given to me.’ So the first claim Jesus Christ made about Himself is that all authority in heaven and earth—everything in the universe—belonged to Him. He also thought He was perfect. If you’ve got all authority, you better be perfect. Now we don’t make saints out of people who claim they’re perfect either, do we? You get a little turned off on them, don’t you?

“You ever read that verse in Romans 5 where Paul says, ‘Christ died for the ungodly for scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.’

“A guy going around telling people, ‘I’m perfect,’ well, nobody’s gonna die for him! What do you do with a guy like that? You look around and find his faults, don’t you? You look around and say, ‘You ain’t so good, fella,’ and you contradict him.

“(Thomas) Carlyle said that ‘the greatest fault of all is to be conscious of none.’ We understand that but the Lord Jesus Christ wasn’t that way. A man came to Him one time and said, ‘Good master, what must I do to have eternal life,’ and Jesus said, ‘You can’t call me good if you don’t call me God.’ Whoa!

“In John 8:46, He stood in front a crowd of His enemies and said, ‘Which one of you convinceth me of sin?’ You wouldn’t say that, would you? You might say something like that on Jerry Springer or something, but you wouldn’t do that in front of your wife, or, better yet, in front of your teenage children. Hah! You want to watch Jay Leno take a seat . . .

“When He says He’s eternal, what He’s saying is He knows eternity from the inside out. Buddha never did that. He talked about getting in touch with nirvana, but he never talked about how he was there before nirvana was created. Mohammed wouldn’t have even thought about saying that about himself. No religious leader would.

“Jesus Christ said, ‘I was there before everything was made and then I made everything.’ In John 17, He says to the Father, ‘Glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world began.’

“When He talked to the Father, He talked to Him about eternity like it was home; like you and I talk about being at home and going back home. He made outrageous statements: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ I mean, you read that and say, ‘Geemanibidee, this guy was really sold on who He was!’

“Christ didn’t just show up in the 1^st Century. He understood eternity from the inside because He was eternal. He presented Himself as the center of the universe. Everything revolved around Him and without Him there wasn’t anything left.

“That isn’t all. He said, ‘There’s something wrong with the world and I’m the only one who can fix it.’ Whoa! He said, ‘I come to give my life a ransom.’ A ransom is a payment to rescue people who are perishing. He said the Son of man had come to seek and to save that which is lost.

“Do you understand He’s making claims that are either true or are so blatantly false nobody ought to follow Him? Then He said, ‘I’m going to rise from the dead.’ If He rose from the dead then all these other claims of His have to be assumed. If Mel’s car was stolen, we assume Mel had a car and that he drove there.

“In other words, any time you have a fact, it assumes other facts that got you there. Okay? It’s on the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that He rises or falls. And if Jesus Christ wasn’t raised from the dead . . . I heard a guy the other day on TV say, ‘Well, if Jesus Christ wasn’t raised from the dead—old Pascal’s wager—I still had the best life.’

“Paul certainly didn’t say that. He said, ‘If Jesus Christ wasn’t raised from the dead, you’re still in your sins, and we are of all men most miserable, and you’re nuts to believe in Him.’ (I Cor. 15:19)

“That’s saying, ‘Go out and get real in life because if He isn’t God then there is no God.’ And if He isn’t God then you are just a product of an evolutionary accident, and the survival of the fittest is true, and you ought to go be fit so you can survive. Take all you can and can all you get because that’s the law of the jungle.

“There’s no reason to have any moral consciousness beyond your survival if there’s no God. And if Jesus Christ isn’t God, there isn’t a God. Because Jesus Christ said, ‘I’m it. I’m the perfect manifestation. I’m eternal. Everything in the universe has to revolve around me. There’s something wrong with man that only I can fix; only my death can set right and I’m gonna come out of that grave to prove it.’

“Romans 1 says He was declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. So the resurrection from Jesus Christ is extremely important because it validates who the Lord Jesus Christ really is.”

*****

Jesus Christ had full consciousness of exactly what was happening when Satan entered into Judas to betray Him, but His disciples didn’t. Hence, they slid back into the stupor of unbelief that characterized their nation.

Just as Peter swore he didn’t know Christ, he looked up and found the Lord gazing back down at him and eye contact was made. Soul looked into soul and Christ instantly dispelled Peter’s trance of unbelief, rescuing his faith.

What’s interesting is that Peter’s relationship with Christ began with a look. In John 1:42, it says that when brother Andrew first brought Simon Peter to Jesus, Jesus “beheld him,” meaning He looked him dead in the eye, right into his soul. He then said, “Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.”

Jordan explains, “Peter was brought to faith in the Messiah by a look and then he was upheld and strengthened in his faith by a look. And what you see in Peter’s life later comes from his ability to relax and have confidence in his faith in the one who gave him that look. God told Israel, ‘Look unto me all ye ends of the earth, and be saved.’

“Peter’s response is the response of that ‘believing remnant’ in that last day. That eye contact dispels the intoxicating, bewitching effect (of unbelief) and recovers him because you see what he then does. It says Peter ‘went out and wept bitterly.’

“If you’ll remember from Revelation, the Antichrist is going to put Israel under this drunken stupor of unbelief with the ‘wine of the wrath of her fornication, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.’

“There’s a wonderful passage from Psalm 137: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.’ Why did they weep bitterly? Because they’re in Babylon.

“Well, that’s where Israel is at this time (of Christ’s betrayal); they’re under the captivity of ‘mystery Babylon the great, mother of harlots,’ and yet God has a plan to recover them. The day was Satan’s day; the leaders of Israel are under his control—‘Ye are of your father the devil’—and yet in it all God was providing a redemption for them and Peter’s a picture of that.”

Christ had earlier prayed for Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren,” and obviously His prayer was answered—Peter responded in faith to the look of his Saviour and his faith was strengthened.