Fall at His Feet

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” John 20:27,28 NIV

It is common these days (and I suspect, has been for quite some time) to view Jesus as something of a sage or philosopher, a guy who had a lot of good ideas about how one should live a just and moral life. It's possible that it's equally common for people who identify themselves as Christian, do so on the basis of their subscription to the wisdom and--well, "truth" is too restrictive a word due to the contemporary notions of moral relativism and the subjective nature of truth--let's say "appropriateness" of his teachings.

Many have pointed out that Jesus doesn't leave one this option. As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I am 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 a be 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."

But of course people rationalize this away all time by asserting that all the claims to divinity by Jesus were added later by either the writers of the Gospels or copiers centuries later. The wealth of scholarship affirming the reliability of the Biblical canon is ignored by such. Once this path is taken, its very difficult to retrace steps, and the argument changes to one akin to grappling with sand.

For anyone seriously addressing the question of our eternal status with God, however, it's essential to understand that this pallid concept of Jesus simply will not do. Our redemption, our reconciliation to God, our salvation will never be achieved by a belief in Jesus' teachings alone. A reliance on the resurrected Son of God, and a declaration, as the apostle Thomas, that Jesus in "my Lord and my God!" is required. As Lewis continued:

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.