Believe!
Hopefully you are now beginning to piece together an idea of how the death of Jesus Christ has something to do with the forgiveness of your sins. Stick with me and we will talk about how, exactly, one avails himself of that forgiveness.
What occurs in the New Testament is a new agreement, that is; Living by the law and erasing our sin with an animal sacrifice is replaced by God’s grace. God executes His rescue plan, sends His Son to die for all of man’s sin (for all time). For each of us to establish a one-on-one relationship with God Himself requires only that we believe in the rescue itself … That Jesus was God, that He came here on a rescue mission, and that He died for our sins.
For an overview of how one avails himself of God’s grace, see my page, “Such as I Have”.
The Core of Christianity
In the pages above, I have mentioned the virgin birth. There are two things that are essential to the Christian faith: The first is the virgin birth and the second is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If Jesus had only an earthly father, then He was not God, and if He was not God and He was not raised from the dead, what can He do for us today? The honest and truthful answer is, exactly nothing. I will admit that the virgin birth is the hardest part of the Christian story to rationalize. None of us have ever seen one … and, what we know about the birth of Christ is limited to what we have read, or what we have been told. But this is about faith; let’s think for a minute about other aspects of Christianity that strongly support our faith. We started out with creation, a singularity, something from nothing, spoken into existence at an instant in time. And, for that, we can see strong arguments, the big bang, the physical constants, fine tuning within the cosmos and the incredible technology that exists within a single living cell (do take a minute to read the post, An Unlikely Scenario). Today, we can easily see the stuff of religion and the stuff of science merging together. We have seen Old Testament prophecies concerning Jesus fulfilled. The odds against one man satisfying all of them are huge. Regarding the resurrection, we have an empty tomb (nobody denies that the tomb was empty) and the writings of secular authors from the period 100 AD. Those authors speculated on why, at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, the sky went dark and there was an earthquake. And the most important evidence of the resurrection are Jesus’ disciples and His brother James. They were set afire by experiencing Jesus, alive, after the resurrection. The disciples, to a man, were willing to be endangered, beaten, imprisoned and to die for what they believed. James, a previously outspoken critic of Jesus, became the leader of the Christian Church in Jerusalem. So, why not believe in a virgin birth? This is an incredible story; we need to expect incredible things.
One last thought on this subject: In his book, The Case for Christmas, author Lee Sobel quotes philosopher William Lane Craig, he says this, “If I really do believe in a God who created the universe, then for him to create a Y chromosome would be child’s play.”
OK Folks, we have reached another stopping place. I apologize for the long delay, but sometimes I find it difficult to keep my priorities straight. This page will continue shortly …