Bruce Lee and Why it’s Always About Jesus
“Don’t think – feel! It is like a finger, pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you’ll miss all the heavenly glory.”
And so Bruce Lee introduced an entire generation to Eastern philosophy. That and lots of awesome Kung Fu.
I remember thinking, when watching Enter the Dragon as an 8-year-old, how awesome it would be to fight like that. To do a 360 backflip, kick a man on the chin and then land in exactly the same position without breaking a sweat… I’d be the toast of my street, my school, the entire town.
I never did think much of the whole finger-pointing-at-the-moon thing though.
Wait, that’s not entirely true. I remember thinking it sounded profound. Like something wise and maybe even true. But not enough to move me in a deep, philosophical way. Prepubescent boys in 1980s England were far more interested in Star Wars, karate, and quoting movie lines than pondering deep Zen mysteries, it must be said.
But of course, as a grown-up whose head is now crammed with an overabundance of cinematic one-liners, I often find myself pondering the profundity of such statements.
This thing about fingers pointing to the moon, it certainly does sound intense. I’m a stickler for good anecdotes and truth pictures, so I find myself trying to decipher Mr. Lee’s teaching, particularly in my context as a Christian.
Could it mean it’s dangerous to focus and obsess over a pastor instead of the Christ he proclaims? I can agree with that. Modern consumerist Evangelicalism is the perfect petri dish for this kind of superstar pastor hero worship. Have you heard so-and-so’s podcast? Have you read his latest book? Do you subscribe to his blog? Do you follow him on Twitter? You gonna catch him at next year’s so-and-so uber-conference? He’s just so awesome!
Sure we can and should love our pastors. And it’s OK to have Christian heroes to look up to and emulate (I have plenty). But things go awry the moment we admire the pastor in exchange for the Jesus he’s preaching (if, indeed, he preaches Jesus at all).
In this age of nifty digital content, slick video, and even slicker websites, it’s easy to idolize the messenger while overlooking the Message.
Could Bruce Lee have referred to revelation? Could the “pointing finger” be the stuff about God, the theology, the right doctrine, the ideas and truths that show us who God is?
If so, I say “concentrate on the finger!” Theology, the study of God, allows us to see, understand, and revel in the glory of our Maker. To think that doctrine and “the deep mysteries of God” somehow distract from the awesomeness of God is a falsehood. We study to know, to plumb the depths of His knowledge, to drink deep the pure waters of His revelation in order to celebrate Him, to be refreshed, instructed, rebuked, and grounded in God.
To NOT study about God is to gaze into heaven, ignorant.
This is important, as Jesus is the ultimate “finger” that points us to God. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” He told Philip in the upper room (John 14:9). If we set our gaze on Jesus, if we seek to know Him intimately, we get a fuller, clearer, and richer understanding of our Creator.
More importantly, Jesus is the only way to be reconciled to the Father (John 14:6). If we want to know this righteous and holy God, if we want to be hoisted from our sinful quagmire and restored to Him, we need to focus on Jesus, the very revelation of God, who gave his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).
To not focus on Jesus, to sort of throw our hands up and assume that God is too nebulous to properly grasp (which is what a lot of Christians actually believe these days) is dangerous for the soul, to say the least.
Of course, Master Lee had neither of these things in mind. He was simply telling his student to not overthink Kung Fu. According to Lee, the act of raising your leg and kicking someone 4 feet into the air was simply a wonderful thing to bask in – to feel – rather than to analyze and figure out.
So actually it’s not as mysterious as it sounds. But I thank Lee for pointing me to Jesus.
Who is Jesus?
“Are you the king of the Jews?” – Pontius Pilate to Jesus
Who is Jesus?
Settle this question and you’ll settle your eternal destiny.
Many people think Jesus was some kind of great moral teacher – a guru, preternaturally gifted and enlightened in supernatural matters. He glided along the dusty streets of Palestine uttering maxims and waving benedictions while smiling at the surging masses. He had slick hair, a dirt-resistant robe, and pioneered in the ways of the Fu Manchu.
Some people think Jesus was a prophet, chosen by God to preach truth and model compassion. His style: heal the sick, warn the establishment. His message: God is justice. He was a man with conviction and was never afraid to speak his mind (and upturn temple tables if he had to). His goal was to restore spiritual equilibrium to a world gone terribly sideways.
Many more believe that Jesus was God incarnate – the Word become flesh, deity in human form. Greater than any guru, mightier than any mortal prophet, His deal was a mission of mercy; die on a cross as a sacrifice for sin and save humanity from eternal hellfire. He was the God who divested Himself of all heavenly privileges, became a man, lived a sinless life, then gave it all away in a bloody death so you and I wouldn’t have to face the righteous wrath of the Father for all our offensive sins.
Which of these is your Jesus?
I’m guessing most people like the guru version. He’s non-threatening and zen, someone you could totally hang out with. You could ask him about marriage, finding a job, or who he thinks will win the Oscar for best actor next year. He’d give you a nebulous, vaguely spiritual answer that doesn’t even touch on the issue at hand – and you’d love it! Because even though he doesn’t make sense, that’s the point.
His truth is his truth, your truth is yours, and if they intersect, then great. If not, that’s OK too. Everyone’s safe, no toes have been crushed, pats on the back abound.
Plus he has a goatee, which just legitimizes everything.
I suppose there’s a sizable amount of people that regard Jesus as merely a human prophet – someone awesome, someone to be listened to, someone who makes sense (more sense than our ambiguous guru, anyway).
Jesus the prophet is a little less safe than Jesus the guru because things are slightly more purposeful with this guy; he lays down the law and asks us to actually do things. He’s not one for abstract ideas; he talks about God, purpose, and the human will. He’s compassionate, yes, but there’s also something militant about his style. His is a call to arms – fight the flesh and fight the world if you want peace and redemption.
But he can’t save you. And that’s why people are OK with him. Prophet-Jesus is just a poster boy for taking on the world; he’s great inspiration, nothing more. He doesn’t demand that you repent of your sins; he’s more concerned that you battle the evil and darkness of the world.
Where guru-Jesus would wave his hands and ruffle your hair if you disagreed with him, prophet-Jesus would wag his finger and remind you of the dagger in his boot.
He’s all about morals. Which is why moral people love this version of Jesus; he smiles on their good efforts and gives hearty thumbs up to all acts of human righteousness. For people who think highly of themselves and are trusting in their own ability to make it back to God, prophet-Jesus is their form of assurance.
And Jesus the Redeemer God? Well, I can tell you now, no one wants this Jesus.
He’s offensive. He says we should love Him so completely that all our other affections must look like hatred in comparison (Luke 14:26). He insists He’s the ONLY way to God (John 14:6) and asks that we follow Him by giving up our lives (Matt. 16:25) enduring hardship (Luke 9:23), and expecting persecution (Matt. 10:25). The Redeemer Jesus tells us to fear God who has the power to damn us to hell (Luke 12:4-5). He asks that we turn our backs on the sin we love (Luke 5:32) and embrace Him as Savior. If we reject Him He says we will die in our sins (John 8:24).
Most people can’t stand this message and want nothing to do with the Redeemer Jesus (John 3:19; Romans 3:10-12). To them the idea of God becoming a man, dying a humiliating death, and rising from the grave to ascend in victory to the heavens is as bizarre as it gets.
And a Jesus that makes hardcore demands of faith? As some ancient Roman graffiti of a man looking up to Christ with a donkey’s head declares, “Alexamenos worships his God”, so the world regards the Redeemer Jesus as an absurd joke.
But still the question remains. Who is Jesus and what do we do with Him?
For one, He wasn’t a guru. Sure He spoke wise things. Yes, He spoke the truth. But far from being a placid, proverb-spouting hippie, Jesus claimed to actually BE divine truth (John 14:6). And while He certainly expected an encounter with Him to lead people to enlightenment, what He offered was far more than a simple expansion of the mind: “…you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
Was He a prophet? Sure. He heralded God and the law in no uncertain terms (Mark 12:28-31; Matt. 5:17-19). He preached truth and spoke as one who had authority (Matt. 7:29). But get this; He didn’t just speak divine revelation – He WAS revelation. “When [someone] looks at me, he sees the one who sent me” (John 12:45). Jesus, being fully God in the form of human flesh, was a tangible display of the divine. He was the face of the Father in all His gracious, loving, and righteous glory.
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) He declared. To look upon Jesus is to look upon God. He was more than just a man preaching hard truth; He was God and the message was Himself.
It’s extremely important that we get Jesus right. He wasn’t just a mere mortal who spoke nice things; He wasn’t simply a human prophet with a temporal, earthly agenda.
Jesus’ words and message transcend those of an ordinary man; He was – and is – the very Son of God, sinless, perfect, eternal. His words are true and He is the ONLY one who can save us from our sins.
If we turn from our evil in humble repentance and embrace Him as Savior and Lord, He has promised to cleanse and forgive us, clothe us with His righteousness, transform our minds and hearts, set us on a new path, and restore us to Himself. The Apostle Paul said it best:
…if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Rom. 10:9-13).
C.S. Lewis’ summation on this matter is definitive and I defer to him for a conclusion:
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 a 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.
Make up your mind about Jesus. Your life depends on it.
It Is Finished
Golgotha, 33AD.
Jesus Christ is suspended from a wooden cross between two criminals. Blood flows freely from his punctured wrists and feet, from the deep lacerations on his back, arms, and legs, the result of intense flogging. A crown of thorns is jammed onto his head, causing blood to drip down his face and sting his eyes. Bits of flesh dangle and flutter in the wind, the same chilly breeze that carries voices from a crowd of onlookers, mesmerized by the horror, unable to tear their eyes away.
He said he could save people. Yet He can’t even save Himself.
Jesus’ breathing is tight and spasmodic as He attempts to prop Himself up and perhaps alleviate the agony in His arms. The crucified thief next to Him observes His pitiful, bloody shape; he watches Christ shift and writhe in pain. The thief hurls a couple of insults but is rebuked by the other thief across him who, despite spewing similar insults at Jesus earlier in the day, realizes his error and pleads for mercy from the Savior.
Jesus promises him they’ll be together in paradise later that day.
The hours stretch, the soldiers gamble for His clothes, the skies grow increasingly dim. And then, after six excruciating hours of being naked in front of hundreds, bleeding profusely from the head, back, and just about every part of His body; after shaking relentlessly from the throbbing pains shooting through his nerves every time His body weight sagged against the giant nails impaling Him; after sustaining cramps in every muscle, freezing up His body in wave upon wave of pain; after using up every ounce of energy fighting for oxygen, taking in short breaths but unable to exhale because of the ongoing, cramp-induced paralysis in his chest muscles; after somehow pleading the Father to forgive the mocking crowd around Him, Jesus, a broken man, unrecognizable from happier days healing and preaching in the countryside, slips slowly into the cold clutches of death.
“It is finished,” he cries.
And then He breathes His last.
It wasn’t until my later years as a Christian that I would ponder the Lord’s death in such graphic imagery. It wasn’t until much later in my journey of faith that the meaning of this phrase would be explained to me in all its profound glory.
“It is finished.” (John 19:30)
When these words passed Jesus’ lips right before His death, it wasn’t because he was relieved the pain was finally over. He wasn’t serving notice to the Roman authorities that His trial had finally concluded either.
It was because Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, God incarnate, the Word become Flesh, did the unthinkable – he gave His life as payment for our sins that we might be spared the wrath of the Father and be reconciled to Him.
Let’s break it down.
Every person since Adam and Eve was born tainted with sin (Romans 5:12); we were birthed with a full propensity and desire for unrighteousness, with no care to be holy or reconciled to God. Indeed, from the day we are born we have a compelling desire to have things our way, even if it means screaming, whining, and fighting without any restraint.
We carry these base attitudes into our teenage and adult years, our depravity knowing no bounds. We grow up steeped in sin. We pursue sinful lifestyles and aim to gratify every selfish and immoral impulse in our bodies. We may think and say we do good, that we believe in living good lives but the truth is we crave the darkness, our hearts secretly love evil, and we embrace the world (Jeremiah 17:9; Romans 1:21-32). No one is exempt (Romans 3:10).
But there’s a price for evil. And God, by His holy nature, demands that the price be paid. The infinitely holy God who cannot even look upon sin, whose very nature is the exact opposite of evil, demands that sin be accounted for, in a judicial as well as moral sense, for that is what his Holy nature requires.
The price?
That sin be punished by death and an eternity in hell (Romans 6:23; Luke 16:23).
If it sounds nasty it’s because sin is a deadly problem, one that God takes very seriously. Evil will be punished on God’s terms, the lake of fire being the final judgment for the damned (Revelation 20:15; 21:8)
The only way to escape eternal punishment is to live a perfect life – to achieve perfect righteousness (Matthew 5:48). A perfect existence from cradle to grave that God can look at, evaluate, and declare satisfactory according to His law (Romans 2:12-13).
Anything less than perfect is worthless. We are to be holy just as He is holy (1 Peter 1:16). And it’s either 100% perfection or we’re in trouble.
Which is pretty much what the Bible declares of man in the first three chapters of the book of Romans.
If that was all there was to this deal, the story would end here. We’d all be consigned to hell, terrified and angry and despairing, yet God would glory in His righteousness because justice was upheld, His Holiness and Perfection validated.
But it doesn’t end here. The story is far from over. God may be infinitely Holy and Just but He is also LOVE. And it’s His compelling, perfect love that devised a plan, a means of escape from eternal punishment for man that didn’t require infinite torment in Hell (Romans 5:8).
The plan was simple – send His sinless son Jesus to live that perfect life (John 3:16). To demonstrate perfect righteousness that no one else could achieve. To fulfill the requirements of God’s law without failure. And then offer that spotless life as a penal sacrifice to God, Holy and Righteous and waiting.
Which is exactly what Jesus did. He came, He saw, He conquered evil and death. He lived a pure life, unsullied by sin or the evils of this world. Although tempted and tried in every way He lived a 100% holy and blameless life (Hebrews 4:15). And he eventually offered His life as a sacrifice at Calvary, dying a brutal and humiliating death for the sins of the world.
How brutal was Christ’s suffering and eventual death on the cross? Medical experts have attempted to capture the horrors of crucifixion – Christ’s crucifixion – in graphic scientific terms. The introduction to this article was based in part on what one doctor believes was characteristic of Jesus’ final hours of crucifixion. It was bloody, tormenting, and one of the cruelest ways to die.
But the real pain of the cross was what happened within the Truine Godhead the moment God the Father poured out His wrath on His Son. The Trinity, God in three persons but still one God, experienced something that we as human beings will never fully comprehend. And that was the moment when the Father had to “turn away” from His Son. As Christ assumed the sins of the world, the Father momentarily “forsook” His Son, so abominable was the stench of sin on Jesus.
As Christ took upon Himself every sin imaginable, God treated Him as if He Himself had committed thousands upon thousands of despicable acts. Murder, thievery, rape, blasphemy – you name it, Jesus atoned for it.
All so that we won’t have to.
This act of penal substitution (Christ receiving punishment for our sins instead of us – 2 Corinthians 5:21) was so radical it caused a mysterious, painful tension between God the Father and God the Son. The sins of the world were unbearable to look upon by the Father, so much so that when Jesus became the sin offering, the Father had to turn away. That, more than the physical injuries and emotional pain of the cross, was what wracked the Savior at that moment and caused Him to cry out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
Then, after the great outpouring of God’s divine incense on each sin borne by Jesus, His wrath abated, appeased.
“It is finished.”
Jesus had completed His mission, what He came to earth to do. He bore upon Himself the sins of you and me, atoning for them in our place, satisfying God’s requirement for justice, that we might escape the divine punishment (Romans 3:25; 1 John 2:2).
“By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” says Hebrews 10:10. He gave Himself for us, even endured the Father turning away from Him, so that we might know true peace, mercy, and love.
That’s why He said what He said. His work was done, perfected, and accepted in full by the Father. His resurrection three days later would seal the deal, showing just how dynamic God’s plan of redemption was, how full, final, and victorious His salvation for the elect would be.
This is the means by which we can be reconciled to God, a means which can be appropriated simply by repenting of our sins and believing Jesus performed this great work and rose from the dead to save us (John 1:12; Acts 3:19; Romans 10:9).
If you do not have a relationship with Jesus Christ, that is if you are not trusting in Jesus as the sacrifice for your sins, then you are on a path to eternal damnation. When you one day face the Creator, you will be asked to give an account for all the things you have done; you will have to explain yourself fully to God (Romans 14:10b-12).
And if all you have to offer Him are tainted, man-powered efforts at righteousness, then you’re in deep trouble. For any attempt at human righteousness always falls severely short of God’s demand for perfection (Romans 3:23).
The only thing that can save us is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. And the way it works is this: When you put your trust in Jesus as the ONLY way to save you from your sins, God declares you justified – cleared from your sin (Romans 5:1-2).
Imagine being in court for speeding. The judge examines the evidence and you’re found guilty. Can he just let you off the hook? Of course not; justice must be served. So he sentences you to a hefty fine. The problem is you can’t pay; you’re broke. And just as you think you’re now in more trouble than you can deal with, a man walks in and offers to pay the fine on your behalf. Because he loves you and wants to set you free.
Do you accept the offer?
Substitute speeding with sin and switch the hefty fine to eternal damnation and you basically have a picture of how God’s salvation plan looks. The real question is, when the Day of Judgment comes – and it will come (Acts 17:31) – will you be trusting in your rags of human goodness to save you from God’s wrath or will you stand clothed in the righteousness of Christ, pleasing and acceptable to God?
“He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on Him.” (John 3:36)
I’m humbled and grateful that God made a way for me to be saved and that He suffered the horror of divine punishment on my behalf. His last three words before dying on the cross comfort me because they tell me He paid the price.
May you trust in Jesus for salvation and find comfort in His last utterance from the cross.
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“The work has been done / redemption has been won /
The war was over without a fight / It is Finished”
It is Finished
by Petra
Beat the System, 1985
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Me
Writer, designer, father of two, husband of one. Armchair theologian. Inconsistent blogger and photographer. Still, I try.Tweets
