What Christians Believe

What Christians Believe

 

When we study religious beliefs around the world, the first big division in beliefs is that some people believe in God or gods and others don’t. Most people on this planet believe there is a God or gods, something more than what we see, behind our universe.  But a minority of folks don’t believe there is a God, or any gods and they are called “atheists”.  Or “agnostics” if they don’t know.

 

Then the people who all believe in God or gods can be divided again into two groups according to the sort of god they believe in.  Some of the world’s people who believe in a god, believe that he is beyond good and evil.  They believe that everything is good in one way and bad in another. This view is called “Pantheism” and the Hindu religion is Pantheistic. Those who believe in Pantheism usually believe that the god they worship animates the universe like we animate our bodies. Pantheists believe that the universe is god and anything you find in the universe is part of God.  The tree is god and the river is god.  And the poisonous snake is god. 

 

The other and opposite idea concerning God is that God is quite definitely good and righteous.  He is holy and knows no evil. A God who cares and loves good and hates evil and wants us to love Him and live our lives doing good things.  This other view of a righteous and good God is held by Jews and Moslems and Christians.   

 

 Jews and Moslems and Christians believe that God created the universe, but that God is not the universe, just like the artist who paints a picture is not the picture.  Christians believe that God is separate from the world He created.  And Christians believe that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made.  And that God insists, and insists very loudly, on putting them right again. 

 

There are some views that try to pass for Christianity that go something like this: (There is a good god or force in Heaven and so everything is all right. All you need is love and all those other teachings in the Bible are outdated. So, they leave out those old-fashioned troublesome doctrines about sin and hell and our need for salvation.  People who argue this way insist that Christianity must be what they want it to be.  A Pollyanna religion - all goodie good. They quote verses about love in the Bible and throw away all those passages about justice and judgment.  Or our need for redemption!  Always insisting they must have a simple religion! 

 

But real things are not simple!  If you want to go on and ask what is really happening – then you must ask for something more than simplicity!  You must be prepared for something more complex.  Besides being complicated, reality is usually odd.  Not neat or obvious or what you might expect.  We might be making Christianity up if it offered us just the kind of universe we always expected.  But Christianity has that odd twist about it that real things have.  The problem is not simple, and the answer is not simple either!

 

What is the problem?  The problem is that our world contains much that is selfish and bad. There are two main views that try to explain this problem.  One is the Christian view that this is God’s good world gone wrong.  And the other view is called “Dualism”.  Dualism is the view that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything.  Neither power created the other. One power is good, the other bad.  And this earth is the battlefield in which they fight it out.  One power likes hatred and cruelty and the other likes love and mercy. 

 

The Christian also believes that this earth is a battlefield between good and evil and the evil power is spoiled goodness. There must be something good first before it can be spoiled.  Scripture tells us that Satan or Lucifer was created by God as a good and perfect angel – a very beautiful and powerful angel. He was good until he became so proud of his beauty and power that he rebelled against God and caused other angels to rebel too.  And He and the other rebellious angels were finally thrown out of heaven. (Revelations 12:7-9)   

 

In order to be evil, Satan had to have life and intelligence and free will.  All gifts God gave him. Free will is what has made evil possible.  For Satan and even for us.  God gave us free-will too.  Free-will to choose good or evil. To love God or to rebel against God.  

 

Of course, God knew what would happen if we used our freedom the wrong way.  He must have thought it worth the risk.  If God had not given us free-will we would be puppets that move only when God pulls the strings. A world of automated robots – of creatures that work like machines - a world hardly worth creating.   

 

Scripture says that the sin of Satan was pride – he wanted to do things on his own without God.  He wanted to be the center, in fact he wanted to be God.  We humans can fall for this also.  We want to run our lives on our own terms and not let God’s good laws get in the way.  And then we wonder why things don’t go as we wish and blame God.  But Scripture tells us that God cannot give us joy and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.  There is no such thing.  All good things come from God.  

 

God selected one particular people - the Jewish people- and through the Jewish prophets, God spent several thousands of years teaching the Jewish people His laws and teaching them about Himself.  It’s all recorded in the Old Testament of our Bibles.  Christianity is really Jewish.  Jesus said that He came to fulfill the Jewish Law and the prophets. (Matthew 5:17-20)

 

How does Jesus fulfill the laws and the promises or covenants that God through the prophets gave the Jewish people (and us)?   Over the many centuries the Jewish people had tried to follow the many laws that God had given them.  But even the best of them failed.  It became apparent that no human could fulfill God’s laws.  No one could stop sinning in their own strength and avoid God’s judgment.  (Romans 3:23-24) Without some outside help we are all lost!

 

But that’s when the Christian’s loving and merciful God steps in and gives us that outside help!  We believe that the death of Jesus Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world.  God sent His Son, Jesus Christ to die on the cross and somehow put us right with God and give us a fresh start!  In other words, Christ disabled death (eternal death) itself.  Scripture says that His blood takes away our sins.  This truth is so amazing that we can’t understand it all!  But Christ’s death on the cross is the heart of the Christian message.  The very heart and soul! 

 

You may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it.  But if we could fully understand our salvation, that fact would show it was not what it professes to be – the inconceivable, the uncreated, the gift from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning!  Christians accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works.  That’s where faith comes in.  God calls us humans to use the faith He has given us to accept His gift of salvation!  And after we reach out in faith and accept the unbelievable Gift offered to us, then we begin to see!

 

Much of this blog is taken from C.S. Lewis’s book “Mere Christianity”