The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between

by Gregory Koukl

For those who receive mercy, the home we have been seeking all of our lives will be ours. It is the Father’s house, and there is a place for us in it.17 And he will say, “Come. Enter. Enjoy. Be with Me.”18 And when he does we will realize (if there ever was, really, any question about it) that our hunger for home was always our hunger for him. And we shall have him.

The two indispensable things you need to know about Jesus have little to do with his teachings in general. Instead they have to do with who Jesus was and what he came to accomplish, also known as the person and the work of Christ. Jesus was a true human being, just like you and me. But there was something more. He was the Word made flesh, the unique God-man, the King of the universe who came down and got low for us. Jesus did not come to spread social justice, but to live the life we ought to have lived, then to trade his perfect life for our rotten ones. That trade happened on a wooden cross on a crop

of rock outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem—a place the locals called Golgotha, the skull. Jesus was crucified by Romans at the request of the Jews for claiming to be their king, the charge posted at the top of his cross. The greater anguish for Christ, though, is not the brutality he feels at the hands of men, but the punishment inflicted by the Father for a different list of crimes—our crimes, also “posted” on that cross—until the King’s anger is spent, his justice is satisfied, and Jesus’ task is finished. Jesus takes our guilt so that we might have his innocence; he takes our sin so that we might have his goodness. That is the trade, the gift offered by grace, to be received in simple trust to restore our friendship with God. When we trust him, we are born anew inside, “plugged in” once again to God, our only source of genuine life.

God, the Creator of the universe, in order to rescue man from punishment for his rebellion, came to earth and took on humanity in Jesus, the Savior, to die on a cross and rise from the dead, so that in the final resurrection those who receive his mercy will enjoy a wonderful friendship with their sovereign Lord in the kind of perfect world their hearts have always yearned for. If you are a Christian, this is your story. If you are not a Christian, this is also your story, because this isn’t a religious fairytale. This is the Story of the way things really are.