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I believe in Jesus. I mean more by that than "I believe Jesus lived" or that "he was a good man." I believe that this Jesus spoken of in the Bible is God and also God's answer to many of our questions about life. In the unfolding story of his life as we read it in the New Testament, I find help to understand the world around us. Most importantly, I find that he shows us God in a way that allows us to have access to him.
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Jesus' favorite word for God was Father. The news that he brings is about the love of a father for his children. A good father works to provide for his children. God's love is not wholly different from that. He acts in a loving way toward all of us. He sends rain. We grow food. He sends sunshine and we walk in the warmth of it. God's love is different from a father's love as well. Many speak of God's unconditional love but God's love is only unconditional in that it is not dependant on us to be true. He gave us the means to a new life with Him. For those who believe, he has opened this life up with newness and goodness.
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God is certainly not the picture many of us had of him as children, someone waiting for us to mess up, but he also is not the God of much recent thinking, whose job is to look the other way when we mess up. He doesn't simply say, "there there, it is all right. You didn't really mean it after all.” That picture is very different from how Jesus describes God. As this has impressed me and it has influenced my thinking, I have also seen that it requires a lot of me. John's words in Chapter 14 come to mind. There Jesus is trying to comfort the disciples about what is to come and he bases his comfort on a place that he is going to prepare for the disciples to be with Him. In that important section of the Bible, He emphasizes the Oneness He has with the Father. Later on in this book He will pray for that Oneness for us. But it is also here that Jesus reflects on the meaning of loving Him. He states that loving Him consists in keeping His commands. Loving God means accepting that He has not only loved us greatly, but that His fatherhood means more than a secure place to go. One author complains:
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God the Father doesn't get much respect any more. Evangelicals focus on the Son, Pentecostals on the Spirit, Catholics on Mary and liberals erase maleness everywhere. Jesus taught about his Father but the New Testament is largely written from the Son's perspective. Most religious figures (Abraham, etc.) were not good fathers. "Few theologians these days seem to want a God who takes charge, assumes responsibility, fights for his children, makes demands, risks rebuffs, punishes as well as forgives. In a word, a Father."
- Kenneth L. Woodward, Hallowed Be Thy Name, Newsweek 6/17/96 |
The real issue for us is to know God in that way, in the way Jesus knew him. We are certainly not just left on our own to do so. Jesus says that He is the "way the truth and the life.” In fact it is in this context that He claims to be the only way and by extension, the only real truth and the only real key to life. It is not that others cannot say true things about the world and even about God. Paul, who wrote several of the New Testament books, will quote from Greek poets and philosophers as he speaks to the meeting on Mars Hill in the book of Acts, chapter 17. He understood, as I certainly admit, that they had some things right about God. Jesus' words do not nullify this, but they do require all other claims to be examined as they stack up against Him. In the Mars Hill case, Paul goes on to challenge the core of what the people there believed. He picked the one place where Greek and Oriental thought contrasts most sharply with Jesus' claims.
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The thing that keeps us from knowing God the way Jesus did is that we unintentionally and deliberately rebel against what he has said for us to do. From our earliest days we could not measure up to the standard he set. The Bible has several words for this rebellion against God but the most common English word is sin. It simply means to "miss the target” much like shooting a basketball and having it miss the goal. No basketball player hits every shot, and no one except Jesus has ever measured up to God's standard. We do live broken lives that need healing but we mostly live selfish lives that need something we cannot produce ourselves. To relate to a perfect person like God we need to be perfect ourselves. Someone once said that if God only chooses to judge us by the standard we use to judge others we would still be condemned. Imagine, if you will, that you had a voice recorder hanging around your neck and every time you said or thought that what someone did was wrong that recorder came on and recorded it. Then imagine that at the end of time God simply used your own words to judge how you behaved. Even under those conditions all of us would still be guilty.
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I believe that God has not left us to our own judgments however. He has shown us a standard by which we must live. All of us fall short of that standard and therefore fail and deserve divine justice. The good news is that God did not leave us in that place but He sent Jesus who willingly took our failures and deliberate sins on himself as he died a torturous death on a Roman cross. While there was real injustice done to Jesus who had committed no crime but had kept the standard of God perfectly, the Bible teaches that the whole thing was a deliberate plan of God to rescue us from our sin. The Bible also teaches that Jesus did not remain dead, but he was raised from the dead and now is ascended into heaven with God, the Father. In these acts he demonstrated the love of God and invites us to become his disciples and receive forgiveness of our sins.
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Basically and simply a disciple is a follower of Jesus. More to the point, a disciple is someone who believes that God has forgiven his or her sins through the death of Jesus on the cross and has decided to hand over his or her life to following Jesus.
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It is my hope that you will become one,
Clay Thomas
Pastor, Galveston Bible Church
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