(remember, these are unedited/draft show notes, not a transcript — listening is always better…and if you listen AND follow along below, you’ll see why)
Focus Question:
What's THE trilemma?
Intro:
Pssst, hey you. What if I told you I could help you not make a fool of yourself? What? Of course I’m serious. Trust me, these three little words will keep you from talking nonsense and thereby being the laughingstock of the neighborhood.
Today is a day of stories heating up…OT heat getting turned up on Babylon, and in the NT we turned the corner from John describing rising opposition to Jesus to some pretty radical confrontation. Yesterday we heard significant dispute about Jesus’ testimony and who Jesus is, and today it’s about who his opponents really are and a reeeally claim by Jesus about himself. Which of course then leads to today’s focus question, “What’s a trilemma” and “What is THE trilemma?”
New Testament segment:
Passage: John 8:31-59
Translation: CSB (Christian Standard Bible)
Verses: 28
Words: ~601
Back in episode #1159 we asked the question, “What did Jesus’ accusers hear when they heard the words “Son of Man?” And exactly 50 shows later we have a similar situation…Jesus just said “Before Abraham, I AM” — present tense. And like Son of Man, his listeners knew he was equating himself with the very same YHWH who identified himself to Moses as “I AM.”
So Jesus just called himself God, and they knew it.
Now if someone you knew called himself the creator of the universe, what would you think?
A trilemma is a three-sided problem. Like di-lemma except with three options instead of two. But because of the well-deserved popularity of C.S. Lewis, often when Christians refer to the trilemma, they’re referring to how Lewis described the problem — if Jesus claimed to be God, he’s either a liar, a loonie, or, in fact, Lord.
And as usual, I’ll wrap this up with another little tidbit in our closing Bottom Line segment.
Old Testament segment:
If you imagined the book of Jeremiah like a movie, we’re heading to a climax. We’ve only got three chapters to go, and after a bunch of oracles of judgment about many lesser nations, the next two about God’s judgment on the great and conquering nation of Babylon.
Passage: Jeremiah 50
Translation: CSB (Christian Standard Bible)
Verses: 46
Words: ~1364
Wisdom segment:
Passage: Proverbs 17:16-20
Translation: CSB (Christian Standard Bible)
Verses: 5
Words: ~79
The bottom line:
At the top of the show I promised (in a way) to help you keep from making a fool of yourself. To do that, let me read to you a direct quote from CS Lewis
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. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. ~CS Lewis
Liar, lunatic, or Lord. Jesus is one of those three. And psych, I wasn’t so worried about teaching you a way to not look foolish to people — I was talking about not being foolish before God. Because after all, one day every person who’s ever lived will have to answer that question. And the prize for that little game show? Eternity either face to face with God or, well, eternity where you’ll spend a long, overly warm time wishing you’d made a different choice.
Love you!
ForTheHope is a daily audio Bible + apologetics podcast and blog. We’ve got a passion for just keepin’ it real, having conversations like normal people, and living out the love of Jesus better every single day.
Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in digitally-extended communication and connection, an award-winning speaker, award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. Follow him on Twitter -- @RogerCourville and @JoinForTheHope – or his blog: www.forthehope.org.
Sources and resources:
(1) D. A. Carson, ed., NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 1370.