Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?

Our journal entry today brings us to Psalm 110 – the most quoted scripture in the New Testament. Jesus and the disciples used this passage to bring forward a question that had to be answered. It had to be answered by the Pharisees, and it has to be answered by our generation today. Most importantly, it must be answered by each of us as individuals.

This psalm records a conversation David overheard between God and Jesus – if you have a bible with study notes, you might find in the margin that “The Lord says to my Lord” is translated in Hebrew as “Yahweh (God) says to Adoni (Messiah/Jesus)”. David’s account of this is later used through scripture, to solidify Jesus the Messiah as sitting at the right hand of the father (a position of strength and power).

During Jesus’ ministry, the Pharisees had been denying him as the Messiah, questioning him, and trying to trip him up. Jesus challenged them with this question of “how is the Messiah both the root of David, but also his Lord?” as referenced in the psalm.

C.S. Lewis puts it this way in his book Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.