I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What, and he talks a lot about how we search for meaning in our lives in the context of relationships. Before The Fall, Adam and Eve found their worth and identity in God alone. But since The Fall, we have found our identity elsewhere. We look for validation in ones that seem better than us and disassociate from those of “lower stature”. Upon reading this, it totally makes sense, as I am guilty of this all of the time. Miller describes this concept as the Lifeboat Theory. The Lifeboat Theory comes from this question: If there were a lifeboat adrift at sea, and in the lifeboat were a male lawyer, a female doctor, a crippled child, a stay-at-home mom, and a garbageman, and one person had to be thrown overboard to save the others, which person would we choose? That question assumes that everyone has a different worth. But Jesus came to prove that we are all worth the same thing, all worth His death on a cross for our salvation and redemption. Miller goes on quite extensively about this subject and he begins talking about Jesus and who He was. He talks about how in Jesus’ time, most people didn’t recognize Him as God, but as some crazy loon who thought He was God. I am going to give you a section of this chapter and then ask a question we should all really contemplate.
“Sometimes I think it is easier for you and me to believe Jesus is God now that He is heaven than it might have been back when He was walking around on earth. If you would have seen Jesus do miracles, and if you were one of those who were healed by Him or if you were one of the disciples, then it would have been easier, but for most people, especially the Jews, Jesus would have been a stumbling block.
At the same time, however, we are at a disadvantage because the Jesus that exists in our minds is hardly the real Jesus. The Jesus on CNN, the Jesus in our books and in our movies, the Jesus that is a collection of evangelical personalities, is often a Jesus of the suburbs, a Jesus who wants you to be a better yuppie, a Jesus who is extremely political and supports a specific party, a Jesus who has declared a kind of culture war in the name of our children, a Jesus who worked through the founding fathers to begin America, a Jesus who dresses very well, speaks perfect English, has three points that fulfill any number of promises and wants you and me to be, above all comfortable. Is this the real Jesus?
Is Jesus sitting in the lifeboat with us, stroking our backs and telling us we are the ones who are right and one day these other infidels are going to pay, that we are the ones who are going to survive and the others are going to thrown over because we are Calvinists, Armenians, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics; because we are Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, or liberals; because we attend a big church, a small church, an ethnically diverse church, a house church, or is Jesus acting in our hearts to reach out to the person who isn’t like us—the oppressed, the poor, the unchurched—and to humble ourselves, give of our money, build our communities in love, give our time, our creativity, get on our knees before our enemies in humility, treating them as Scripture says, as people who are more important than we are? The latter is the Jesus of Scripture; the former, which is infinitely more popular in evangelical culture, is a myth sharing a genre with unicorns.”
Question is: Who do you believe Jesus is, the former or the latter?
