All I Can See is Jesus

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.

All that glitters is not gold. And if it were gold, it wouldn't matter. Nothing can compare with the sight I've seen. This tired world—at its best—this dim, polluted planet spinning through the night; at its very best it has nothing to offer to you or to me that begins to compare with what I've seen. That's what I want to tell you about today. Something has happened to me. It's not just a biochemical reaction in my brain, or a spike on my encephalogram. It's not the result of a mind falsely wired by the use of too many recreational drugs. It's the fact that on the lengthening walk of my life, I am coming to the place where all I can see is Jesus.

All I can see is Jesus.

The Word of Scripture records Him as saying, "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me" (John 12:32). The next verse states: "This He said, signifying what death He should die." The death that this Person died was different than all others, because He was different than all others.

He was like us in that He walked this world in a human body identical to our own. There was nothing George-Lucas-like about this human Being of flesh and blood—nothing about His life that had the look of Industrial Light and Magic. When He died on the cross no credits began to roll across the sky. Friends, the credits were what had been rolling in His life every day. The Holy Spirit was entwined in His experience without measure. They shared indescribable joy together and the world is better for it. That's why today, all I can see is Jesus.

No person ever lived like Jesus. Nobody.

Although He was also God, He was altogether human. He made this world, this universe. He designed the human mouths that spat at Him in His dying agony. Lovingly He had shaped the human hand with all of its carpal and meta-carpal connections and fine nerves. Even worked it out so that it could hold a hammer. Those same human hands at last nailed Him to a cross. He made the human brain with unequaled computing power, not just to calculate but to feel. And that brain that He made conspired with the brains of others and devised the lies against Him that condemned to death upon a cross. And when at last they took Him out to Golgotha, He breathed the loving prayer, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). That's why all I can see is Jesus.

Was He just a Man—perhaps one who couldn't feel? Was He insane or insensible? Didn't He know they were killing Him? Oh yes, He knew it. He knew. But although they killed the Lord of glory, asking that a murderer be released instead, still He hung upon the cross and expired in order that a deadened race might live. And that's why all I can see is Jesus.

He was God: infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere present, spanning all time and space; unchanging. But while He was unchanging, He miniaturized Himself. He laid aside His divine powers and came to earth a helpless babe. He grew through the stages of life. He was infant, child, then teenager, then adult. The Bible says that He was "tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). He healed and wept and touched and talked. And Oh what talk. On one occasion a group of hard-boiled officials were sent to take Him. But as they approached to carry out their orders, the sound of His speech fell on their ears. The words were words of Spirit and life. There was something about what He said unlike anything else that had ever entered their hearts. When they returned back empty-handed, their leaders demanded to know why they hadn't brought Him. And their answer was testimony that we need to recognize today. They said, "Never man spake like this Man" (John 7:46).

The sentiments Jesus uttered cannot really be classified as sentiments in the normal sense. They were so much more than feelings—even the feelings of an excellent person. They were and are the ethical engine of the Mind and more than mind that made the cosmos. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5). "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God" (Matthew 5:9). "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you" (Matthew 6:33). "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7:12). When we consider these principles, we are staring down the very barrel of unselfishness. These principles are the foundation of God's government. He can cause us to become like that inside too. That's why all I can see is Jesus.

Free of Religion? Oh Really

Someone will say, "You are self-deceived. You are myopic. You see what you want to see. If there weren't a God (and there surely isn't ), humans would have had to invent Him, and that's exactly what they have done."

Is that what I've done? How can you be so sure that it is not you who are self-deceived?! You claim to have shed superstitions and crotchety old crutches like faith and creation. But what thin whisps of nothingness have you replaced them with? Have you truly shed the superstitions about God, or have you just revised them?

Today some scientists are going back and looking at earlier ideas more "scientifically." Maybe we should too.

Among the most swash-buckling of leaps in the contemporary scientific credo is the deft jump with which the chasm of pre-biological evolution is crossed. Now by that, I mean that according to evolutionary theory, at some point matter evolved from lifeless chemicals, into reproducing biological life. In the early 1950s Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted experiments widely hailed in the scientific community. They sent a spark through a mixture of gases thought to simulate the atmosphere of earth long ago. Their experiments produced several amino acids used in the composition of living cells. Rapidly the news spread that the early earth, in a scenario containing only naturalistic assumptions had been able to spontaneously produce life. The news was trumpeted through the press. The results of the experiments were incorporated into high school science textbooks. Many of us were taught these things in public school. It appeared as if life had been created by a technique reassuringly similar to that employed by Dr. Frankenstein in the movies.

Only trouble is, those experiments have been revisited in the last few decades—and mostly by chemists. Their experiments have shown that organic compounds produced on the early earth would be subject to certain chemical reactions almost certainly making them unsuitable for constructing life. Add to that the recent, less sanguine conclusions of geochemists that the atmosphere of the early earth was very different from that envisioned in the Miller-Urey experiments, and in all probability that early pre-biotic (before life) soup never could have existed. This means that there is, after all, absolutely no reason to conclude that the right mixture of chemicals along with a few lightning bolts thrown in could supply the origin of life. The gaping chasm between the unliving and the first living cells has never been crossed. That great, swash-buckling leap—that now broken link in the "theology" of this "science"—is quickly passed over. Another thing you could call this, is fraud.¹

Not only has that foundational experiment been repudiated, but something else has been happening. Scientists themselves have begun admitting that the aura of objectivity and rationality claimed and cultivated for science doesn't always live up to the billing. What they have been pressing upon the last few generations is nothing less than a new religion sold as science. Perhaps you sat in those classrooms. Perhaps you heard those ideas regurgitated through your science teachers.

In the Centennial Celebration (one-hundred years since the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species), held in 1959 in Chicago, the eminent scientist Julian Huxley gave an address containing in part, these excerpts.

Future historians will perhaps take this Centennial Week as epitomizing an important critical period in the history of this earth of ours—the period when the process of evolution, in the person of inquiring man, began to be truly conscious of itself. . . .

This is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution, from atoms and stars to fish and flowers, from fish and flowers to human societies and values—indeed, that all reality is a single process of evolution. . . .

In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created, it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion. . . .

Finally, the evolutionary vision is enabling us to discern, however incompletely, the lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era.²

It has been supposed that science is beyond this. But what did we have here standing naked in the light? The bombastic plow of science cutting a rather decided furrow and pitching nothing less than an ideology, a "new religion." And that's what this all is. "A completely naturalistic metaphysical system, in which matter evolved to its present state of organized complexity without any participation by a Creator."³ Even the scientist Michael Ruse, who testified at the infamous Arkansas creation trial in 1982, now admits "that the science side has certain metaphysical assumptions built into doing science, which—it may not be a good thing to admit in a court of law—but I think that in all honesty that we should recognize."⁴

The "just the facts, ma'am" PR we've been sold about what science is and how it works is nothing but a sophisticated sales-pitch for a metaphysical (i.e. truly supernaturalistic and hence religious) ideology—pitched to wide-eyed kids in public schoolrooms while mom and dad were off at work trying to make ends meet so they could buy a new color TV set and a new Hi-Fi stereo. No one seemed to have had a clue that this steady diet of godless, humanist religion in the classroom would lead to a world like the one we have today, with every moral boundary collapsing and every kind of confusion and every kind of danger erupting from every hidden seam. And now we are here. Not there. Here.

And boys don't grow up anymore knowing how to be boys, nor girls, girls. Your teenage son or daughter may come home and tell you they are gay or you may get a call from the school that there has been a shooting and your children are dead; or that they shot a dozen other kids to death. We hear these things. I don't need to name any more of these creepy possibilities.

The Word of the Living God assures us that the psychological deceptions of a demonic and alien mind are pouring undistilled into the brightest of unprotected heads today. And why not? Seeing Jesus is an option that has been almost effectively kept hidden from their experience. The world they live in preys upon them, selling every movie and CD with sex appeal and "buy it, you deserve it" marketing. Every kind of lie is afoot. Every kind of mask is drawn over the face. To believe in a Creator God, a God of love like our Jesus—is old fashioned, uncool, unsophisticated, too restraining.

That's right. The authentic Jesus is too powerful for the best that this corrupt world has to offer to compete with. So they don't give Him an opportunity. So all most people see is trash, when Satan gets his way.

You are on a journey. We all are on a journey. Our planet is the ark, and the race is in passage. We are traveling from a broken yesterday to a restored tomorrow. But it is only possible because Jesus bore our just moral penalty, and bought us another opportunity to see. Those who look can live. Those who refuse the light remain confined within the walls of an illusory coffin; one that it looks like you can get out of when you want to. But you can't. The only way out is Jesus.

Opened Eyes

"Pastor, you are pressing your dogmamdash;when I do that—I want to vomit. Here we are after 6000 years of sin, and we are told, and our weak minds threaten to believe, that after all, things are getting better.

Come on.

Open your eyes man. Look around you. Is this paradise? If you were able to get a hold of everything material you ever wanted, would it be heaven, or would you find yourself just a few blinks into boredom, still unfulfilled? You were designed as a worshiping being. You would still experience the craving. You would still come short of fulfillment. You would still be looking for the only One who can fill your vision. You would still be looking for the One altogether lovely, the One whom your eyes were designed to behold. You would still be looking for Jesus.

Oh how much better He is than the hare-brained theory of human origin somewhere in a puddle of sulpher-smelling chemicals. How much more fulfilling is the idea that the God of all that is, found us, His humble creation, worthy to come and die for, than the idea that the universe coughed and in a mathematically meaningless moment we accidentally happened. How vastly superior the hand nailed to the cross than a toxic bubbling flatland of heartless chemical reactions. If you will look closely out onto that dark shoreline you will see nothing that satisfies. You will search that horizon on every side, all 360 degrees of it, in vain. And at no place on the cold rasping wind-blown skyline will you spot a cross or He who died for you; the One named Jesus.

And if you have (so far) sold your soul for the pleasures of this world, and if that is all you've ever known, and if you are still not satisfied, then know that you are not alone. No, not at all. Every human-heart that's ever beat has powered a longing for more than sensation and more than a full stomach. The Scriptures tell us that, far from limping onto this world out of a nameless sea, God made us in His image, male and female. It says that He placed eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11): a love for more than what the common turtle or snail is interested in. We were designed as moral beings, to know the difference between right and wrong and to cleave to the right; to be satisfied with nothing less than godlikeness. The fall has sure spun that around on us. But deep down inside we know that we want what's right. We reach out for the Source of all goodness. We sense that we need to go to Him. We know that what we really need is that God-turned-Human fountain of goodness. We need Jesus.

If you are living without Him, your wings are clipped, your boat is tied, your car's out of gas, your canoe is paddleless up the creek, your cup is empty, and your hard-disk still needs reformatting. You are in need of Jesus.

I have seen something I never thought I would see. I have found what I hadn't at first known I was in need of. I have discovered He whom I needed to discover. I have opened the door and experienced Jesus coming in. Peter wanted to walked on the water, and Jesus said it was O.K.

Do you want to walk on water? It's O.K. But you can only do it, if you focus your eyes carefully on the point of the cross, and look up into the eyes that look back at you. And when you look into those eyes—those penetrating, soul-knowing, loving eyes—then all you will see is Jesus.

1. For more on this, consider Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial, pp. 104-105.
2. Ibid., pp. 152-153.
3. Ibid., p. 153.
4. Ibid., p. 163.