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Christianity Made Simple
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, California, USA
Delivery: 2007-02-03
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2007-02-03 21:15Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-xms.php
Straightforward—that’s what we sometimes need; a straightforward explanation of what Christianity is. On a cold and technical level, Christianity is the world’s most prominent representation of ethical monotheism. That is, Christianity teaches that there is one God, and that humans live in a universe in which there are moral values. But what about on a personal level? What can we say today to make Christianity simple?
Let’s start with one verse: John 3:16:
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
The key points are apparent. First, at issue is whether we perish or have everlasting life. Our definitions of what it means to perish or to have everlasting life are crucial. Secondly, we see that God has taken the initiative to make it possible for us have eternal life, and that our definition for believing in Him is equally crucial.
If we understand what this verse is saying, we’ll be prepared to understand something of what God is seeking to accomplish, of what our active part is and is not.
The Source Material For Christianity
Many will explain Christianity to you in what are essentially legal terms. And here is their explanation:
God created man and then prohibited him but one thing. Man promptly disobeyed, sinning and thus forsaking eternal life. The human race was now lost. But Jesus offered to come and die in man’s place, to take the penalty each person deserves. He died on the cross substituting His life for ours. Those who are willing to accept His sacrifice for themselves, receive also the gift of eternal life. God offers to make many desirable changes in the life of the believer in Jesus, although the future behavior of the believer makes little difference whether he is saved or lost.
In this view, eternal life means an irrevocable promise that one is saved. To perish means to spend an eternity experiencing the uninterrupted tortures of hellfire. To believe means to make a heartfelt commitment in which one acknowledges that Jesus Christ is God, that He died for my sins in my place, that He offers me forgiveness and that I can have a personal relationship with Him and a guarantee of heaven.
What we have just described, more or less, is the evangelical picture of Christianity. We can certainly agree with much of the explanation, if less so some of their definitions. There is a legal aspect in salvation. What is interesting is that this paradigm is mostly built on certain writings of Paul. But there is more in the Bible than the writings of Paul.
A More Biblical View
The Bible is a collection of 66 books that Christians understand to be the product of a phenomenon called inspiration. Most of these books are found in the so-called Old Testament, or Tanakh. It contains three main divisions of books: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.
Then we have the New Testament. Its writings are also seen as divided among three main groups: Gospels/History (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts); the writings of Paul (about half the New Testament books), and the General Epistles (Epistles of Peter, James, Jude, and John). You also have the book of Revelation (prophecy).
We are not going to present today the evangelical model. We are going to develop the ideas that stand at the core of Christianity from the Tanakh and the various New Testament writings. Thus we will arrive at a more broadly based conclusion about what Christianity is. We will call this viewpoint the transformationist paradigm.
We will find that it says the following:
- Man must learn to be truly human.
- Man grows by cooperating with a power outside of himself.
- Man is saved by that power, and cannot lay claim to salvation on the basis of any of his own personal virtue.
- Man accepts not only the sacrifice of Christ for Him on the cross, but also the presence of Christ living within Himself.
- Man, in the transformed life, by overcoming here and now, provides evidence that God dealt fairly with sin in the great war between good and evil.
Now then, without further elaboration, let’s walk very concisely through the Bible from front to back and discover Christianity made simple.
Christianity Made Simple
Consider everything up to this point as preliminaries. But now, let’s study the Bible together. Turn to the beginning of the book of Genesis.
Genesis 1:26, 27, 31; 3: Creation and Fall
Man and woman were made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26, 27). That is, we could reason, we could make moral choices, we were free. Another important piece of the picture is that when God made this world, everything started off as being very good (Genesis 1:31). The world was not booby-trapped. There were no minefields or unmarked hazards. There was nothing evil about enjoying life; it was God’s intention that we enjoy it.
And yet, only three chapters into this book of beginnings, the original humans, Adam and Eve manage to make a tragic decision that plunges our world into thousands of years of suffering in a contest between two moral systems. They sinned; they chose, after having been warned, to disobey God, to turn rebel against His government. As a result, the very humanity they lived in was changed, disordered. Now their own organism was psychologically disordered so that they were inclined to indulge themselves. Their nature was changed so that they were unsafe. And so they were cast out of Eden.
That part of our humanity that loved righteousness had been impacted. That part of human nature that is militantly in favor of righteousness was now bent so that it was very much attracted also to evil, indeed, moreso to evil. Now there was a problem in human nature that had not existed when God made the race. What had been “very good” was now very compromised. Now man was unable to recover himself. Now he needed help or he was doomed.
When they sinned, God pronounced His judgment on each participant in the rebellion, Adam (Genesis 3:17-19), Eve (Genesis 3:16), and the serpent (Genesis 3:14, 15). Starting with the serpent, God promised that the woman would have children and that one of those children one day would crush the serpent. This was the promise of a Savior. God told the serpent that He would restore in humankind the enmity, the capacity to be enemy with the evil that they had lost. He said that He would “put” enmity between humanity and Satan. He would put back what they lost in choosing rebellion. He would make it possible for man to resist. He would interrupt Satan’s plan to destroy the race and to fight against God’s government of goodness. The battle was on!
Job 1; 2; 42:7: Radical Faith Is Possible
In the part of the Tanakh called the “Writings” we have the book of Job. Job is understood to be one of the very oldest books in the Bible. At the beginning of the book, Satan comes into God’s presence and gloats over all the havoc and evil he is causing on earth. But God challenges him. He asks Satan, “Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil?” (Job 1:8).
God claims that He has a follower who loves goodness and will not do evil. Satan claims that this is not so, but that Job for selfish purposes will sell-out. God then permits Satan to bring a series of sorrows and tragedies upon Job to demonstrate who is right about Job. Job himself does not know about all this behind the scenes action. It seems to him as though God is causing him all this pain. Nevertheless, Job insists on his own innocence while appealing to God yet refusing to declare Him to be unfair.
The situation becomes even more desperate after a second round, but Job insists on trusting in God. He will not let go his faith! After this Job’s friends come to him and one by one they try to reason philosophically with him and to persuade him that he must have sinned and that otherwise God would not be afflicting him thusly. But Job resists all these explanations and refuses to sin. In the end Job is vindicated and so is God.
The story of Job tells us that even though this man did not know very much about what was truly happening behind the scenes, although it seemed that his world was coming unglued around him, he insisted on trusting in God, he refused to think that God was unfair, but he never let go of the facts in his own case, either. He knew that he had not sinned against God. The story of Job shows that even very early in the history of humanity, God was at work. Even so early on, the battle between good and evil raged. How did Job live as he did? He walked closely with God and had a radical trust in Him. God was putting enmity between the serpent and the seed of the woman, and he made it possible for Job to resist Satan’s subtle attacks. The war between good and evil was advancing.
Isaiah 53:3-6: With Christ’s Stripes We Are Healed
Consider this passage from verses 3 to 6:
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.
Here we have what Christians believe is a prophetic foretelling of the coming of the Seed of the woman. God would enter into human flesh, infinity would take on humanity. The challenges that we face in learning to become human He too would face in learning to become human. He would live an uncompromised life of goodness, He would reject the option of His sinning at every step of the way. The life He lived would not only draw those who were responding to goodness, but attract also the rejection and contempt of men. He would be rejected by those that He came to save. When He hung upon the cross He would be thought to be under God’s judgment for His own sins, but He was really there paying the price of ours.
He was God but He walked through life as a man. He carried our sorrows, He knew what it was like to live as a man, be tempted as a man. He had the right to use His own divine powers but He refused to exercise that right. He lived out the pattern that we needed Him to live out. He was God but He showed us how to become truly human.
Finally, He was condemned to die on a cross. He was punished in our behalf, for our sins, but the Bible says that with His stripes, that is, with His punishment, His sacrifice, we are healed. By being God yet dying as a man, the merits of His perfect character would become available to us. He would become a legitimately human sacrifice for us as members of this same poor human race. His death not only showed that men may overcome, but that the power of God is enough to save us from our own dangerous inclinations and to make us whole. Christianity has everything to do with this idea: “with His stripes we are healed.” Christianity is not about an obscure legal transaction but about changing the believer. Jesus would show in His life how man can cooperate with God and what the result of that cooperation is.
John 1:9: Christ Lights All Toward Home
John 1:9 says that Jesus “was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every man, as we already noticed in Genesis 3, has a bent, impacted, prone-to-indulgence human organism. What he has within himself makes him his own worst enemy. Through his life he has followed feelings that led him astray, he has chosen to indulge the easy way rather than the right one, and in consequence, he has built up in himself a briar patch of bad character choices, become a toxic disaster as a human. Satan led and he has followed along in the same slime-trail. He finds himself, in every case, in a sorry state. But this is only part of the story.
The Bible teaches not only that man inclines himself to do evil, but that God has from the beginning promised that He would intervene. Into the darkness He would send light. Over and over again the Bible says that there is something left within man that can be reached. The Father promises to draw us by the sacrifice of His Son; Jesus says that even those who are evil desire good gifts for their children; Paul in Romans says that it is the goodness of God that leads us to repentance. And John says that Jesus lights every man.
Every man, here, leaves no exceptions. Everyone has been granted opportunity to cooperate with God’s desire to renovate him internally; everyone has been granted opportunity, in this life, here and now, to become truly human.
Where there is darkness Jesus brings light. Every spark of interest in the spiritual, every love for goodness, every admission of the justice of God, every affirmation of one’s own guilt, is a demonstration that Jesus lights every man. He shows every person what is right and what is wrong. More than this, He draws every man to what is right. You thought you made your own choice to come to Jesus? Think again. Your own choice, yes, but the reason you were able to make such a choice was because God’s goodness drew you, Jesus’ influence lighted you.
Man enters this world and soon finds himself in a nearly complete darkness. All the ideas a devil can think of are thought of and placed in his path. He does battle, not only against his own inclinations but against every philosophical trick and sneaky provocation to self-justification the demons can suggest. The Christian is granted repentance by Christ. Jesus finds a way to every heart and gives the option. But then we choose. He will not choose for us. He lights us, but we choose whether or not to walk out of the darkness.
Galatians 2:20: Christ Lives In the Believer
Jesus died on the cross but He rose again. All the other supposed Saviors of other religions just died, but Jesus died and in His decease conquered death. He rose again. He lives today. Paul discusses it. Yes, we are going to use some Paul texts today. I did not mean that there was any problem with the parts of the Bible that Paul wrote; far from it! But his message is inspired by the same Spirit that inspired the others. The whole Bible is found to harmonize with itself. Paul wrote:
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me (Galatians 2:20).
He said he was crucified with Christ. That is, he accepted Christ’s death for him on the cross of Calvary, and consequently he accepted the daily cross that God placed before him, Paul, personally. He said, “I live, yet not I.” It was not Paul, the old Paul, the unconverted Paul, who lived. It was the Paul who was risen with Christ—he is the Paul that lived on. It was not the pre-human Paul but the truly human Paul who lived. It was not the self-indulgent, self-justifying, sin-embracing Paul, but the self-denying, God justifying, righteousness-embracing Paul—that is the Paul who lived by the faith of Jesus the Son of God.
Have you Christ living within? Or are you alone inside? Have you invited Him in? He wants to live with you, inside of you. He wants to help you, grow you, impact His world through you for good. But that can’t be done while you hold on to all the crooked things you have built-into your character during your life of sin. Christ within helps you surrender the old life, item by item. It makes it possible for you to become truly kind, truly human.
Revelation 14:1-5: Final Triumph
Finally, we turn to the book of Revelation. Remember, we are letting the various different sections of God’s Bible inform our understanding, not just an interpretation of one writer.
Here in revelation 14:1-5 we have Jesus but here He is seen standing with the redeemed, those who have been bought back. This picture shows that they are not only bought back but brought back. Jesus stands with a group of true humans, men and women who have chosen God’s ways. They saw their own corruption and they saw God’s purity and they saw there would be a price to pay, a struggle for them against habits and inclinations. And they chose the struggle. The result is a redeemed race. They have God the Father’s name written in their foreheads. What does that signify? God’s character echoed in theirs.
These have learned to follow Jesus wherever He goes. They may at the first have thought Christianity meant something different. But when they saw that it meant conquering oneself, instead of resisting that, they embraced it. They began to cooperate with God. They began the (yes, we will use the word) “work” of replacing their old system of behavior with God’s new (to them) system of behavior. They began embracing His love and His power offered them to become better people.
God is not just building up a people who are willing to admit they need Him but who then refuse to change, expecting Him to change them against their own wishes. He is creating a people who let Him make them into conquerers. We are diamonds in the very rough, but if we cooperate with Him the result will be unique godly people who reflect His light into the world. These are described in Revelation as those who have no guile in their mouths, who stand without fault before the throne of God.
These people are Job multiplied. Job, and a few others down through the 6,000 years past testified that God was good and that He was able to remake men and women in His image. But this dribble of a few heroes walking across the pages of Scripture could have been flukes, aberrations, free radicals, surprises, freaks. And so, in the end, God creates, in one final generation, a whole group of overcomers. Their faith in Him is vindicated by what He does in their lives, and conversely, what they choose to become vindicates Him. He is right in insisting that the universe run under righteousness rather than selfishness. He is right in laboring to save man. Man is savable, redeemable. God has rightly dealt with the sin problem, and we see in the outcome of His gospel the result: holy people even in bent flesh.
A Return to Definitions
We spoke of definitions. In John 3:16 to perish means to choose sin and to be finally destroyed in its eradication from the universe. But what is believing and having eternal life? Very simply, eternal life means the doing of the will of God. It means bringing the appetites and passions under control. The path to eternal life is rugged and steep. When Adam sinned this was the result. What would have been a walk in the park became a mountain climb.
The condition of our receiving eternal life has never changed. It is still perfect obedience, perfect righteousness. But most Christians think that for that to happen in your experience today is impossible. They say that it can’t be done. So they settle for a legal fiction and they call that the gospel. Their explanations actually complicate Christianity.
But what shall we do with the experience of Job? What shall we do with the Messiah with whose stripes we are healed? What shall we do with the Savior who lights every person who comes into the world? What shall we do with the Christ who lives within? To believe means to embrace all these. And now we are prepared for John 3:16 again:
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Can you begin to see that Christianity is less about meeting the requirements of some kind of heavenly IRS, than about God’s desire to grant us the experience of true humanity. When we think of this text, but use the biblical definitions, the picture falls into place.
Conclusion
Man must learn to be truly human. He grows by cooperating with a power outside of himself. He is saved by that power, and cannot lay claim to salvation on the basis of any of his own personal virtue. Man accepts not only the sacrifice of Christ for Him on the cross, but also the presence of Christ living within Himself. In the transformed life, by overcoming here and now, we provide evidence that God dealt fairly with sin in the great war between good and evil.
And so, Christianity is simple, just as simple as learning how to be truly human. It is as simple as learning to trust your parents even when you don’t understand them completely, like Job. What makes Christianity hard is when you try to be one half-heartedly, when you say you will be a Christian but then insist on relying partly on yourself. Have you ever been driving somewhere and you knew you had become lost but instead of letting yourself be helped, you kept on driving around in circles? Then you understand.
Someone will say, but pastor, you left out all the business about depravity, the fire and damnation and the threatenings. No I didn’t. But I did not dwell on that very much because God doesn’t either. Fear is an imperfect motivator.
You know what you need. You need to see what God is doing and join in on it. We conclude with isaiah 53:6 which points out the facts as plain as day. This is your case: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” If you want to embrace His working in you, to follow His light, then enjoy the whole of the biblical vision. Nothing will ever make God or you any happier in this life. GCO
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