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.
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
