There are, in a variety of places, little “Build a Bear” enterprises. They work like this: You go to a vender of build-a-bears, and the vender shows you an assortment of bear parts, which you are then free to put together into your own bear, and you pay the vender for this. That’s right. The venders make quite good profits by getting people to do the labor on their own which is normally done in factories. The buyer pays the seller for his own labor. But I’ve rambled long enough about bears.
What I want to draw attention to is another project which goes on in the minds of people, one I will call “Build a Jesus.” There are many people who talk well of Jesus, saying perhaps that he was a wise teacher who taught us to love each other, but nothing more. Now, the four gospels say otherwise–they consider him the Son of God. So where do these people who speak of Jesus as a mere wise man get their Jesus? Believe it or not, there are no other major records of Jesus life anywhere in the world independent of the four gospels. So what people do when they reject the gospels’ claims about Jesus while still building a picture of him from the gospels–and there’s no other picture of him available–they are using the gospels as a selection of parts to Build a Jesus.
Therefore we have all sorts of people who have built their own Jesuses. And I don’t find a Jesus that I’ve constructed on my own worth listening to. That’s another reason I believe in the accuracy of scripture.
build your own jesus?
There are, in a variety of places, little “Build a Bear” enterprises. They work like this: You go to a vender of build-a-bears, and the vender shows you an assortment of bear parts, which you are then free to put together into your own bear, and you pay the vender for this. That’s right. The venders make quite good profits by getting people to do the labor on their own which is normally done in factories. The buyer pays the seller for his own labor. But I’ve rambled long enough about bears.
What I want to draw attention to is another project which goes on in the minds of people, one I will call “Build a Jesus.” There are many people who talk well of Jesus, saying perhaps that he was a wise teacher who taught us to love each other, but nothing more. Now, the four gospels say otherwise–they consider him the Son of God. So where do these people who speak of Jesus as a mere wise man get their Jesus? Believe it or not, there are no other major records of Jesus life anywhere in the world independent of the four gospels. So what people do when they reject the gospels’ claims about Jesus while still building a picture of him from the gospels–and there’s no other picture of him available–they are using the gospels as a selection of parts to Build a Jesus.
Therefore we have all sorts of people who have built their own Jesuses. And I don’t find a Jesus that I’ve constructed on my own worth listening to. That’s another reason I believe in the accuracy of scripture.
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