Introduction:
Most of us go through life hearing only snippets of what God and
Christianity is about and sometimes it’s difficult to know how those
snippets fit together. When chatting with people, I sometimes offer to
do a quick 5-10 minutes run through what the Holy Bible actually says
and this is pretty much it.
The best place to start is with God himself. God is made up of 3
separate individual persons. God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ)
and God the Holy Spirit. This is often called the Trinity and although
you won’t find that actual word in the Bible they are often referred to
together.
Lets get a feel for how big God actually is. Can you remember everything
you have thought or done this week, this year, in your life? God knows.
And that goes for everyone in your town, county, country, the world, past, present
and future. That’s huge and yet the nations are as a drop in a bucket to
God. The width of the heavens are the span of his hand. He fits the
oceans in the palm of his hand. Try it yourself to see how much water you can
hold in your palm.
So Almighty God is massive. But what is he like? Here are a few of his
attributes. He is holy and perfect – God cannot do wrong. He is love. He
is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipresent (everywhere). He is a
jealous God and hates evil. He is slow to anger. He is mighty and all
powerful. He can be a wrathful God. The list is very long. But be
assured, he is not always the God that we want him to be and we quickly
need to get out of the idea that he is just there to do what we want,
when we want it. Actually God the Son –
Jesus-
came to earth to live with us for a while, so to get more of a feel of
what God is like, you can read about him in the four gospels Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John – found at the beginning of the New Testament.
As already stated, God is everywhere, but the Bible talks about
God on his Holy Throne in Heaven (more about this later). In addition to
this are the massed forces of Heaven.
Angels. Please don’t
mistake the angels of God for the nice fluffy ones we like to see on our
Christmas cards. These angels are mighty powerful representatives of
Almighty God himself, messengers to do God’s bidding.
So what and where is
Heaven? Heaven is a
spiritual kingdom, outside of our timescale and it is where Almighty God
rules and reigns. It was into this perfect kingdom there came a problem.
One of the angels, indeed the most beautiful angel, became proud and
decided he wanted to be the boss and tried with the aid of some of the
angels to overthrow God. He failed dismally and was expelled from heaven
along with his rebellious forces. His main name was Satan and is
commonly known as the Devil. He is allowed to have his own kingdom for a
time until Almighty God says enough and sends him and his angels
(demons) to everlasting hellfire. Until that time there is a war waging
between the two kingdoms as Satan seeks to corrupt everything that a
pure and Holy God has created. Satan’s attributes are that he is
entirely evil, the father of lies. If you see anything wicked, sick or
evil, you can be sure that he is behind it. Beware however that Satan
can also come as an angel of light and is full of cunning and deception,
being far cleverer than even the highest intelligence found on earth.
And he has a mission that he is totally committed to. He failed in his
bid to overthrow Almighty God so now he targets what is nearest and
dearest to God's heart. You and I (more of this later).
So it was into this battle that God created the physical heaven
and earth, (maybe God used a Big Bang to do this) and took a further six
days to create and develop life on the formless earth. And having seen
earlier the vastness and power of the Creator, there should be no
problem at all believing this. Onto this world, God created and
introduced a man and a woman, Adam and Eve. Much ridiculed, this
narrative holds the fundamental key to why there is so much suffering,
war, misery and poverty in the world we live in and also shows God’s
purpose for us as mankind. Allow me to expand.
God said “Let us make man in our own image”. We didn’t just appear
or evolve from some other life-form. We were made in God’s actual image
and still are. How important is that? But Satan doesn’t want us to
believe that. He would do all in his power to deny God and have us do
the same and he has committed himself to leading us away from God in
lots of different ways even giving us the theory of
Evolution
that everything “just happened.” As you can work out
for yourself, he has been very successful and there is a reason for that
which I will explain later. But if we believed that we are actually a
reflection of God himself, it would cause us to view much in our lives
and culture differently.
I digress. God created us in his image and breathed his
life into us. Why? So we could know him, love him and
rule over the earth. And that is what happened. Adam the first man
walked and talked with God and gave names to all the animals and tended
the wonderful Garden of Eden. But God ever caring saw that the man
needed a companion and so created Eve and she was a beauty.
Adams
literal translation when he first saw her was “Wow”. And all was peace
and harmony. However this state of affairs did not please Satan very
much and he sought not only to destroy this amazing God/Man
relationship, but to snatch the God given authority from Adam so he
instead could rule the earth.
Now at the centre of the garden were two trees, the tree of life and the
tree of knowledge of good and evil and God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the
fruit of the later tree. Strange isn't it that it should be there. But
it would appear that God doesn't want people to be mindless and so gave
them the choice to be obedient or disobedient. This is so very important
because that decision is now for everyone that has ever existed. The
choice to go God's way or to do what
we want to do. God gave Adam and Eve warning and said if you disobey me
(if you sin), you will surely die. Enter Satan. "Did God really say you
will die? Not so. If you eat that fruit you will be like God". Satan had
just introduced the temptation of being like God and the idea of not
needing God. And he is still banging that drum here in the 21st century. Adam and Eve listened to his lies, as have mankind throughout
history, chose to sin and died. Not instantly. They were
exiled from the incredible garden, but much more importantly from God's
presence (spiritual death). That is the result of sin. As we sin, we
also are separated from God.
And then Adam and Eve were introduced to ageing bodies that would
physically die. With this came all sorts of other curses, including pain
in childbirth and weeds in the ground (listed in Genesis chapter 3). I
would just add here that even then, God in love provided clothing for
them and cared for them. But he couldn’t allow them to stay in the
Garden of Eden because they would have had access to the fruit from the
“Tree of Life” which would have made them like God and he wouldn’t
permit that. And this is called the “Fall of Mankind”. Satan stole the
authority given to man and from that time, the bias of all men is
towards evil and away from Almighty God. In the great battle between the
two kingdoms mankind opts for the kingdom of Satan.
The rest of the Old Testament is how God established his people in
the world, how he guided them, cared for them, protected them, put up
with their stubbornness and rebellion and led them through to the
Promised Land. How he gave them laws on how to live and how they could
make sacrifices to him so he would forgive their wrong-doings. How when they
were settled they decided they didn’t need God either and gradually lost
that land and were eventually exiled to
Babylon with
lots of suffering. A recurring theme isn’t it?
So let’s summarise just where that leaves us. God has made it
absolutely clear that he still loves mankind and still wants them to
know and love him and wants them to live with him for eternity in
Heaven. But he has said that anyone imperfect cannot enter into that
Heaven to be with him. The Bible states clearly that all have sinned and
have fallen short of the glory of God. So according to the Bible all of
us will not only die physically but spiritually as well. So God has a
real dilemma. He cannot allow anyone who has sinned into his kingdom, to
experience eternal life. But he wants all of us to be with him there. So
what can he do?
We have got all sorts of ideas. Let me address some of them.
God is quite clear that there in no neutral middle ground. People
argue that because they haven’t done anything really bad, or lived a
good life, that they will automatically go to heaven. But even good
people are not perfect. Adam and Eve sinned once and they were unable to
live with a perfect God. The same applies to all of us.
“But that means no-one can get into heaven”, I hear you say. As
things stand, that is absolutely correct. As part of a fallen world our
default setting is away from God and his glorious kingdom.
But. There had to be a “but” didn’t there? The Almighty God of
love surely wouldn’t leave us stranded here on earth just to exist and
die without hope, without having the opportunity to be rescued. Surely
he wouldn’t let Satan win the battle over you and me so that we would
live all our lives never having the chance of finding out the real
reason why we are here at all. Never ever knowing the real reason why we
are alive on this earth. Never knowing how to have a one to one
relationship with God and never to experience the vastness of his
Heaven, instead going to what is called a lost eternity. Would he
abandon us like that?
Here is the answer. But be warned. You might not like it. Satan
won’t want you to hear this answer at all. You might even laugh at this
answer along with your friends. Your intellectual mind will fight
against this answer. Your pride will resist this answer. Everything in
you will rebel against Gods answer. Why? Because the answer belongs to
another kingdom. Accepting this answer means you have to change
kingdoms. And Satan does not want to lose you. Not that he likes you. He
hates your guts but hates more the idea of anyone ever getting what he
lost for ever.
The answer is Jesus Christ Almighty. God the Son.
You may ask,”How is Jesus relevant to me in the 21st
century?”
We have established that God said “If you sin you die.” or “The
punishment of sin is death”. We have also established that God has to
adhere to this. But on the reverse side we have also seen that Gods
still loves us. More than that. He longs for us to turn back
to him and want to start living his way rather than our own way. He
wants us to know him personally and he wants us to live with him for
eternity in his glorious Heaven. He actually does not want anyone to
perish. So how can he work out this dilemma? How much does he want us?
How far is God prepared to go to win us back?
He decided to punish someone else for your sin and mine. And that
someone was his very own perfect son. Part of God himself. Jesus Christ
– God the Son. Jesus agreed to come - not forced to – to Earth to die
so that all who so choose can give him all their sin, shame, and rubbish
and in return receive what the Bible calls his righteousness. In other
words his perfection. The perfection that will allow us into Gods
perfect Heaven, into the incredible
Kingdom of Almighty God. What a simple mind blowing
answer. Simple on one hand, yet so far reaching and devastating for
Satan. What amazing love. That he would give his life, not for people
who loved him, but for a human race that hated him and actually killed
him.
The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son,
that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
And when Jesus hung on the cross, it wasn’t the crucifixion that killed
him. It was the weight of all the guilt and shame and sin of the whole
world that was put on him. Perfect Jesus, who had never sinned before,
was
suddenly consumed by all the awfulness of everyone’s sin and we know how bad we
feel when we have done something lousy. He was prepared to do that for
us and that is what the Bible calls the “Good News.”
But there is more. It was not enough just to defeat sin. The
result of sin, death, had to be conquered too. And this is how.
On the third day after his death Jesus rose from the dead and so
doing also defeated and overcame the power of death.
Let me just develop this a little. We have said the result of sin is
death. When Jesus went to the grave, because he had taken the world's sin
with him, death’s legal spiritual hold on him was the strongest it had
ever been on anyone (by miles). So when he was raised from death, it was
the ultimate defeat for the result of sin and for sin’s instigator,
Satan. I hope you can understand the amazing completeness of Jesus’s
victory over sin, death and hell.
So where does all this leave us?
The Bible says that we, the fallen human race can join up with Jesus
Christ and claim his victory for ourselves. And if we do that, we will
not die spiritually, but go to live with him for ever and ever in Paradise. We will do an amazing swap. We will give him our
rubbish and he will give us his perfection. That is an incredible deal,
and there is more. If we accept that Jesus died for us for it says that
God the Holy Spirit will come to live within our spirit, guaranteeing
our eternal salvation. And with God living inside of us, it seems we
will then have a very intimate relationship with him. WOW.
Just a word of warning here. It is not enough just to say, “Ok I
accept it, now I’ll go to heaven”. Jesus said “Believe in me, repent and
be baptised”. So we need to believe that Jesus died for us personally,
we need to turn away from living our own way, instead deciding to obey
God and living how he wants us to. And we need to be baptised. This is
not the same as christening (not in the Bible). This is a believers
baptism which is symbolic of dying to our old life and coming up out of
the water being born again of the Spirit of God. Baptism is also a very
public confession of your new life. I have explained this further in
How to
become a Christian
Here are some more benefits to “giving your life to God”. Your
sins will be forgiven. You will be given eternal life when you die, in
Almighty God’s perfect Heaven and you will become what the Bible calls
“a new creation” (please note that God might ask you to make right
certain wrongs). Also your name will be written in “God’s Book of Life”.
You will become a Christian and your reward in Heaven is described like this. “No eye has seen nor ear heard of the
wonders set in store for you” So what is the cost to all this. Jesus gave
his life for us and says that we should do the same. In other words, God
must become the most important thing in your life. God in the centre of
your life and everything else, yes everything, fits around that. This
can be very tough but from my own experiences of indulgence, nothing
compares to walking day by day with my God.
An added bonus. Almighty God has got a plan for your life and if
you are willing he will in his time show you what he wants you to do for
him. This might sound scary but actually it’s the most exciting
lifestyle of them all. Indeed it’s what we were put on earth for.
Now all this leaves us with a choice. Do we pooh pooh it all? Do
we go away and think about it? Or do we investigate further? Of course
it’s your choice. Please don’t rush into it and think carefully about
making any commitment. Above all talk to God about it. Ask him to show
you what to do. If you have a
Holy Bible you could start
reading it, asking God to speak to you. And if you at this point want
to know more, it will mean that Almighty God already has his loving eyes
on you.
God’s promise to you; “All who seek me shall find me”.
Thanks for reading this skeleton and I hope it explains clearly
the basics of Christianity. If you return to the home page you will see
other topics which hopefully will become the flesh on the bones as it
were. As I explained in the introduction they are answering points and
questions raised by people I meet in the pub, the workplace, or wherever
there are people who are interested.
Cheers
Pete |