Dr. David W. Mosher Author

  "Is he Lord, lunatic, or a liar?" — C.S. Lewis

The house was quiet. The screen glowed in the dark.

I was watching a TV program about the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and one scene stopped me cold.

Jesus was standing on the wide stone steps of the Temple courtyard. The Pharisees were circling him, confronting him — voices sharp and loud against the stone walls. His disciples pressed close behind him, partly to protect him and partly to hear his words. 

The crowd held its breath.

They were accusing him of blasphemy — of claiming to be God. Jesus didn't raise his voice. He didn't back down. He just looked at them — steady, unafraid — and answered.

His disciples had walked every dusty road with this man. They'd eaten together, slept under the same open sky. They called him Teacher. Master. 

They loved him. 

But standing on those Temple steps, they were being pushed toward a question they'd been quietly carrying for months: Was this man really the Messiah? Not just a great teacher. Not just a prophet. But God himself stepped into the world as a human being?

That question didn't leave me when the screen went dark. My thoughts shifted from the ancient Jewish Temple to our culture today.

I kept thinking: What if this had happened today? 

What if the entirety of the ancient biblical prophecies about the coming of the Messiah were meant to be fulfilled in our day?

Imagine a man walking into your life. He speaks about God with a kind of quiet authority you can't explain — like someone who doesn't just know aboutGod but really knows him. 

His words reach something deep inside you. You feel seen in a way you usually don't. His words touch questions you have had for years — and they are answered gently and completely. In a way that no other pastor, teacher, or spiritual leader has ever done.

Then imagine he steps into a hospital room. A sick child. Frightened parents. He whispers a short prayer — and the illness is gone. Completely. The doctors have no explanation. The tests come back clean.

Or imagine he speaks over a crowd of people carrying depression, anxiety, years of pain, and one by one, you watch those burdens lift. 

Or people you know by name. People whose pain you've prayed about for years. They walk in broken. They walk out whole.

Would you believe?

Or would you still find a way to explain it away?

This is the tension C.S. Lewis put his finger on when he wrote that Jesus of Nazareth is one of only three things: Lord, lunatic, or liar.

Lewis's point is sharp and simple. The comfortable middle option of simply calling Jesus a great moral teacher and leaving it there quietly falls apart. It doesn't survive the weight of what Jesus actually said. 

Because a great moral teacher doesn’t tell people he can forgive their sins and has the power, innately, to heal them with a simple word. That’s something only God can do. 

A great moral teacher doesn't say, “before Abraham was, I am.” Reaching back across centuries to claim the very name God revealed to Moses, the deliverer of the nation of Israel at the burning bush.

A great moral teacher doesn't claim to be “the resurrection and the life” as Jesus did, standing at the tomb of his beloved friend Lazarus just before raising him from the dead.

If Jesus said and did what the Gospels record, only three explanations exist. 

Either he was telling the truth and is exactly who he claimed to be. Or he was deliberately deceiving people who trusted him, which makes him a liar of extraordinary cruelty. Or he was sincerely deluded — a man who genuinely believed something about himself that wasn't true.

Lord. Liar. Lunatic.

Today, people describe Jesus in all kinds of ways. 

Some see him as a deeply spiritual man who lived close to God.
Some call him a prophet.
Some think of him as a teacher whose words still carry weight. Some hold him at arm's length, unsure. 

And many people feel something when they hear his name — comfort, or longing, or a question they don't know how to ask.

All of that is understandable. The story of Jesus of Nazareth has never been a simple one.

But underneath every description, every tradition, every interpretation, there's one question that won't stay quiet.

Not who others say he is.
Not what tradition says.
Not what you've been told.

Who is Jesus to you?

This question is rarely answered in loud, high-pressure, or emotional moments. It gets answered in the quiet moments — when you let yourself be honest, when you're willing to follow the question wherever it leads. 

Even if the destination surprises you. 

The disciples standing on those ancient Temple steps had to answer it.

C.S. Lewis had to answer it.

Millions of people across twenty centuries have had to answer it.

Now it's turning toward you.

Who is Jesus of Nazareth to you?

— ✦ —

(Excerpt from my upcoming book “The Messianic Mission: The Truth about Jesus of Nazareth.")

Copyright 2026 © Dr. David Mosher

 If you read through the stories of Jesus in the Bible, looking for a pattern in how he moves, you find it quickly. Jesus moves toward people. Not occasionally. Not only when it’s convenient. Always. And right at their point of need. 

Jesus touches the leper that no one else would go near. He stops for the blind man calling from the roadside. Jesus steps into a crowd gathered to stone a woman and quietly scatters them. Again and again, the stories show the same thing — wherever there is need, Jesus moves toward it. 

But his very first miracle is the one I keep coming back to, because it doesn’t look like the others. 

Jesus is attending a wedding in the town of Cana. His mother, Mary, was there. There’s no crowd of sick people waiting outside. No one is in a crisis. It’s just a celebration — music, food, families gathered. And then, quietly behind the scenes, the wine ran out. 

Mary noticed and brought it to Jesus. At first, he hesitated. She persisted. And then he acted, turning over 100 gallons of water into wine. The celebration continued. Nobody outside a small circle knew what had happened.

So why here? Why this?

You first must understand what running out of wine meant in that ancient culture. The wedding feast lasted for days. The family hosting it put everything on display — their generosity, their honor, their care for their guests. Running out of wine wasn’t a minor inconvenience. It was a public failure. It was a shame that would follow that young couple from the very first day of their marriage.

Imagine throwing a party and running out of food in front of everyone. Now imagine that story following you for the rest of your life. 

Years later, people would still remember the day the wine ran out at their wedding. That kind of shame doesn’t make headlines. It doesn’t look dramatic. But it settles into a person and stays there.

Jesus didn’t let their story begin that way. He stepped into a moment that most people would have considered too small for God to notice. Quietly, behind the scenes, he gave back what was about to be lost. Not with fanfare. Not in a way that drew attention to the failure. He simply acted, and joy returned to the room.

That tells us something important about who Jesus is. He is not only willing to meet us in our crises and catastrophes. He will meet us in our shame, quietly, behind the scenes. Jesus is with us in the failures no one else sees, the embarrassments we carry in private. He is already there in the moments that feel too small to bring to God but hurt far more than we let on. Jesus is always present. 

And yet. 

If Jesus cared enough to save a couple from social embarrassment, why does he sometimes go silent in situations that feel so much more serious?

Jesus doesn't always act immediately. He had a close friend named Lazarus who was dying, and Jesus was a long way off. His sisters, Mary and Martha, sent word to Jesus. The man who healed strangers would surely come immediately for someone he loved. 

But Jesus waited.

Long enough for Lazarus to die.
Long enough for the body to be buried.
Long enough for everyone watching what happened next to know, without a doubt, that what they were witnessing was impossible. Not a coincidence. Not a fever breaking. A dead man walking out of a tomb. 

But the people who loved Lazarus didn’t know what Jesus was doing. From where they stood, it looked like he simply hadn’t shown up. That’s an important thing to consider, because sometimes that’s exactly how it feels.

Here is where we need to remember — Jesus is God. 

Here is where the question from before comes back around. If Jesus really was telling the truth about himself — if he wasn't a liar, wasn't deluded — then he was already present at that tomb before he ever arrived. Let that sink in for a moment. 

He is not just an excellent teacher, or a Rabbi, or a spiritual leader. Jesus is God, and Jesus was already present in the situation, even though Martha and Mary couldn’t see it yet.

When Jesus finally arrived at the gravesite, he simply spoke his friend's name and called him back to life!

But — why did he wait?

Why?

It is often the question we ask when our hearts are broken. Why did this happen? Why didn’t God stop it? Why is he silent now when I need him most? Maybe it’s a friendship that fell apart, and you prayed it would be fixed, and it wasn’t. Maybe a family member passed away after everyone was praying for them to live.

These are honest questions. And I want to treat them honestly.

There is no clean answer that makes the waiting feel easy. The Bible doesn’t offer one, and I will not pretend otherwise. Maybe you know that waiting. The days between the prayer and the answer that didn't come. The phone call you kept expecting. It doesn't feel like a bigger plan from inside it. It feels like being forgotten. 

What I can say is this: in both stories, Jesus was not absentduring the waiting. He was moving toward something larger than his friends could see from where they were standing. 

When Jesus finally arrived at the tomb, he wept. He wasn’t unmoved by those four days of grief. He simply hadn’t finished yet.

That doesn’t dissolve the pain. But it does mean silence is not the same as absence. And delay is not the same as abandonment.

Jesus spoke plainly, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart, I have overcome the world.”

Jesus didn’t promise a life without pain. He promised his presence within it. 

Jesus didn’t travel to every town healing every person he met — not because he didn’t care about people’s pain and suffering, but because he had a bigger plan. A larger mission. Jesus had a plan to end it all. 

All sin.
All pain.
All death.

So where does Jesus actually focus his attention? 

When Jesus described his Messianic Mission, he said he was sent to preach the gospel (God’s good news) and heal the brokenhearted. Not the sick first. Not the poor first. The brokenhearted. That’s not an accident. That’s a choice. That’s intentional. And it tells you where his attention goes. 

Brokenhearted people are at the heart of Jesus’ mission.

God does not always prevent our hearts from breaking. We live in a world of choices — our own and others. Those choices can wound us deeply; they can alter the course of our lives in ways we never asked for and cannot undo. 

God doesn't take away our ability to make choices — even the ones that hurt each other. That freedom is real, and so are the wounds it causes.

But Lazarus wasn't wounded by someone's choice. He got sick, the way bodies in this world get sick. That's a different kind of brokenness — not the kind caused by human freedom, but the kind woven into a world where things decay and die. 

God allows both. Not because he wants either, but because that's the kind of world this is. Which raises the real question underneath all of this—if God allows it, does that mean he's absent from it? Not exactly. And that’s the question the tomb is about to answer.

Martha and Mary didn't have the answer yet either. They just had to decide what to do with their grief while they waited. Many of us learn over the years to carry our sickness and brokenness rather than bring them to God.

Our pain and grief become a familiar weight. Anxiety becomes background noise. The wound stays open; the pain is managed, but gets covered over and worked around. Sound familiar? 

Not because healing isn't available. But because the pain we carry the longest is often the pain we trust God with the least.

Jesus understands this, and he doesn’t shame us for being broken. 

Jesus doesn’t grow impatient with how long we’ve been this way. He doesn’t require us to have it all together before we come to him.

Jesus is always ready. He is always present. Just as he was at the wedding feast and at his friend’s tomb. Even when moments seem shameful or hopeless, Jesus already knows what he’s ready to do.  

So, keep this in mind: even when God seems silent, he is still with you. He is present. And even if there’s a delay, it doesn’t mean he won’t move. He was already moving toward the tomb before anyone told him Lazarus had died. Maybe he's already moving toward whatever you haven't said out loud yet.

— ✦ —

(Excerpt from my upcoming book “The Messianic Mission: The Truth about Jesus of Nazareth.")

Copyright 2026 © Dr. David Mosher