Kindle Notes & Highlights
When I want to share the message of Jesus with someone, I nearly always ask what I then asked my hairstylist that day: “What would you say the message of Christianity is?”
But Christianity is utterly different.
“What if I told you,” I said to the lady holding sharp scissors near my head, “that the message of Christianity was that none of us is really good deep down”—I usually add, “including pastors”—“and that we can never be sure our good stuff is greater than our bad stuff, but that God loves us anyway and will consider bad people good?”
“The essential message of Christianity,” I said, “is not that we should be religious or try to do lots of good works. The essential message of Christianity is that God loves bad people so much that he sent Jesus to die on the cross to forgive them, so that if anyone stops trusting their own good works and starts trusting Jesus, they will be declared good forever and be saved from judgment.”
The more familiar we get with the truth claims of our faith, the more we see how utterly unique they are.
The first thing to say is that, from the Christian perspective, it is not the type of sin that one commits that deserves punishment from a holy God but the
Now, we do acknowledge that murder is a more serious sin than gossip. We can see the degrees of types of sins in the real-world punishments God commands for corresponding offenses in the Old Testament books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But this does not mean that there are some sins God “lets slide” while there are others he cannot under any circumstances forgive.
So the Christian view holds the same seriousness about sin as Islam, only more so, because it leaves no wiggle room in terms of degrees of sin.
See, in every other religion, including in the other two major monotheistic religions, the way one receives pardon from God is through some kind of achievement—doing enough good works, faithfully attending worship services, “having your heart in the right place,” or even simply being or becoming a member of the religion. Only Christianity says that while all those things are good things, they cannot earn us the forgiveness of sins.
Thus, in every other religion where God is said to forgive, he has to do so by in some way compromising his holiness. In other words, he sort of tips the scales toward his mercy and away from his righteousness. He kind of “bends the rules.” He sacrifices one part of himself in order that we might take advantage of another.
By Jesus’ sacrifice, God reveals and defends His justice in two ways. First, Jesus’ suffering for the sins of His people means that any sins unpunished beforehand are now fully punished in Christ. God leaves no sin unpunished. Mercy and grace do not come at the expense of justice. Second, because the sins of the faithful are fully punished in Jesus, God may justly declare righteous those who have faith in Jesus. That’s what it means to be justified in God’s sight—to be declared righteous by faith in Jesus. The cross, rightly understood, is God’s own answer to any objection that He is unfair to
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The Christian God is both just and justifier, and he does his justifying as an act of sheer grace, forgiving sinners not by their obedience (because we could never obey well enough) but by Christ’s.
In truth, lots of people worshiping one God does not mean they are worshiping the same God.
This makes it difficult to distinguish Christianity from Judaism, if only because we aren’t dealing with Judaism so much as Judaisms. On the other hand, Christianity has remained almost entirely unified for two thousand years on the central matters of its theological claims. But one stark contrast between the Christian view of God and the Jewish view is this thing called grace.
Christians believe that we must believe about God what God has revealed about himself, and that to disbelieve what God has revealed about himself and to worship some more preferred version of God is in fact to worship an idol.
Jesus is saying two incredible things here. First, he claims to have been in existence before Abraham. This is an overt claim to preexistence, in fact to eternality and omnipresence. And by saying “I am”—asserting that thousands of years ago, not only was he, but he currently is—he is applying the sacred name of Yahweh (“I AM”) to himself. This may sound subtle to modern readers but it’s not subtle at all. Jesus is in fact claiming to be God. We know the orthodox Jews understood him to be making this claim, because the very next thing they do (v. 59) is pick up stones to kill him, which is
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Jesus is saying that if somebody worshiped the true God they would worship him, because he is of the same nature as the true God. And he is saying that if anyone rejects him they reject the one true God. And further, he is saying that if anyone—including these orthodox Jews—does not believe in him they are more aligned with the enemy of God, Satan himself.
Jesus is himself saying that to reject him is to reject God, deny the truth, and reveal oneself as being “not of God.”
And if he is right—as I believe he is—then to disagree with him is to disagree with God. To deny him is to deny God. To reject him is to reject God. And to worship God at the exclusion of Jesus is to worship another god altogether.
In every other religion people seek God. Only in Christianity does God seek people.
But it’s even more exciting than that. He actually comes down and lets you look him in the eye. It is actually this kind of face-to-face personal relationship that the Old Testament pages are pointing to, hinting at, and foreshadowing.
See, in Christianity, what we have is not simply a personal God who seeks relationship with humankind but the personal God who seeks relationship by becoming a man.
The Christian doctrine of incarnation draws a very visible line in the religious sand. If one does not affirm that Jesus is God, one does not worship the same God as Christians.
The complementary line of thinking goes something like this: I could believe in God, but only if he held to my own ideas and values.
If you still insist that you couldn’t worship a God you can’t totally understand, I would suggest that you’re really only interested in worshiping yourself.
the Trinity is the reason we crave relational intimacy.
The mission of Jesus isn’t simply to reconcile us as individuals to God but also to each other. The mission of Jesus is to make a community.
The religious person will suggest that love comes from God. But Christianity teaches that God is himself love (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is not God. But God is love.
Now imagine that the One who is Love himself sacrificed himself. Imagine that the eternal loving fellowship of the divine community sent out one of their own to die not just for their friends but for enemies! Why would this loving fellowship do this? To make the enemies friends, of course.
I want to argue, actually, that while many people can agree that every person is interesting, only biblical Christianity treats all human life as sacred.
These utilitarian values are not absent from the evangelical Christian world. They pop up in a variety of ways. One of the instances that bugs me most is in the abortion discussion. You have likely heard this line of reasoning from earnest pro-lifers before: “You should be pro-life because you never know if you’ve aborted the next Einstein, the next Beethoven, the next Martin Luther King Jr., the next Pasteur or Salk, etc.” I mean, what if you aborted the curer of cancer or of AIDS? The motivation behind these kinds of statements is understandable, and the underlying reasoning is sound:
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we are actually right now perilously close to abortion based on predictive value.
No, the utilitarian view of human life has no place in the Christian worldview, and evangelicals should give it no place in their efforts against abortion, as powerful or convicting as those arguments might seem to be.
The Christian view of humanity would argue, in fact, that abortion is wrong whether you happen to be aborting the next Mother Teresa or the next Adolf Hitler.
what Job is saying here tells us that the treatment of persons as non-persons is something for which we will give an account to God. At the day of judgment, when we are faced with the billions of unborn children who have been murdered for the sake of convenience or fear, “What then shall we do?” When God rises up to ask us to give an account for our ambivalent response to human trafficking, to the sex trade, to pornography and adultery and countless other variations of sexual objectification, to the marginalization of the elderly and the disabled and the poor, to racism and discrimination,
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Jesus comes to develop these thoughts of God into perfect action, commanding us to love our enemies and then actually obeying his own command by dying to forgive people who hate him.
Only Christianity believes that the one God is a community of three Persons who eternally and coequally love each other so much that this love had to overspill the bounds of their perfect relationship into the world they created to reflect their own love.
Christians believe that the Bible teaches that men and women are made in God’s image but that men and women are also desperately wicked. We have, at the same time, an incredibly optimistic view of the world and an incredibly pessimistic view of the world.
The worst storms I have faced in my life have not occurred outside of me but rather have been found inside of me.
Only in Christianity do we find this necessary tension between human potential for both beauty and evil. And only in Christianity do we find this wonderful tension between what we deserve in our sin and what we win in Christ.
We are worse than we think we are.
But most religious worldviews also share the sentiment. Every religion deals with human evil in its own particular way, but because every religious system (except for Christianity) suggests that salvation, enlightenment, fulfillment, heaven, or what-have-you is achievable through adherence to a certain set of behaviors, codes, or steps, they all basically affirm some trace of innate goodness in humankind rendering such adherence possible.
This is the startling biblical picture of sinners apart from God. We are not merely religiously disabled persons needing assistance. We are not drowning in the water, waving our arms and shouting for help. The biblical picture is that, spiritually speaking, we are corpses bobbing in the water. We don’t need a life preserver; we need life.
So the perfect mirror of God consented to becoming broken. And he did this so that anybody who would stop going their own way and look to him might see their brokenness restored.
There is nothing more spiritually dangerous, however, than a “safe Jesus.”
Basically, Jesus is here saying in his Sermon on the Mount—which many non-Christians look to as the chief evidence that Jesus was all about peace, love, and good vibes—that anyone who slacks off on the Old Testament law is in serious trouble.
“Good teachers” don’t say such things. But a God teacher would.
When you modify Jesus and cast him as some kind of safe religious consumer product, you lose the power his words and works actually have, basically because you’ve lost Jesus.
The first reason is simply this: you have to respond to Jesus’s truth claims.
The thing people can’t do with an exclusive Christianity is truly be apathetic about it. Jesus is clearly forcing the issue now.
