Scott Tibbs
Submitted to the Los Angeles Times
May 3^rd, 2005

Back to Short Writings.

Like so many today, Jack Hitt Pints a false picture of Jesus in his April 26 column in the Los Angeles Times. Hitt claims that "Jesus provoked His followers into thinking for themselves". This presents an ambiguity that the Biblical Jesus never had. Jesus was always grounded in the Word of God. (Remember, Jesus used Scripture to fend off Satan when He was tempted.)

There is little "ambiguity and doubt" in Jesus teachings. He shamed the culture at the time by noting that it is not just sex with another's spouse that is adultery, but lusting after another's wife. This, of course, had already been spelled out in Exodus 20:17. There is no "ambiguity and doubt" in John 14:6 when Jesus says that "no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me."

Jesus did not "guide his followers on their own paths toward conviction and belief." He commanded His followers in Matthew 28:19-20 to go to all nations and teach them "to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." Jesus said in Matthew 5:18 that "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled".

With the false view Hitt and many others have toward Jesus, it is no surprise that Matthew 7:1 has replaced John 3:16 as the most quoted verse in Scripture. (Matthew 7:1, a warning against hypocrisy, is almost always taken grossly out of context.) Men want to follow their own path, which is the essence of secular humanism.