Tag: God’s plan

The Bible’s Bad News

The text discusses the dual nature of the Bible, presenting both bad and good news. It argues that all humans are born with a sinful nature leading to eternal separation from God, but offers hope through Jesus Christ. Belief in Him is essential for salvation and eternal life, forming the crux of the Christian faith.

Before we are exposed to the Bible, a person’s view of themselves and probably of other people is that we are basically good. Similarly, most people want to believe in existence after physical death. We also want it to be good. So many passively believe that there is some sort of Heaven or other favorable existence awaiting them. It is very natural. I want to believe it too.

The Bible is meant to be extremely good news, but getting to the good news first requires hearing and accepting some very bad news that we don’t want to be true. The problem is that the proof of the bad news is all around us. The bad news is this: every human being is born with a distorted, sinful nature that did not come from God. That nature is probably resident in our DNA. It came from our common ancestors, so everyone is impacted. The distorted coding of our DNA produces a body, in particular a brain, that cannot believe the words of God on its own, it does not retain the ability to know and communicate with God that we had, it produces a personality that basically selfish, it creates desires for things and actions that God forbids, it creates a tendency to follow the ways of its designer and the designer is Satan.

Who wants to believe that? I don’t. The bad news gets worse. The condition of having a sinful nature, if unchecked, produces a sinful live that can be wildly dysfunctional and short.

Worse than that is the news about the default, eternal destiny of a human being. Sinners who do not and naturally cannot keep God’s laws perfectly will be permanently cut off from God and will suffer a horrible existence permanently. That is certainly something I would rather reject as unthinkable and false.

Then I look at humanity’s track record. It isn’t pretty. I look deeply at myself, and even though I was saved in my infancy, I see it. I see selfishness. I see the difficulty of believing God’s Word. I see the tendency to sin. I can’t argue against the accusation. I also am cornered into believing that the Bible’s presentation of the default destiny of a human is true.

The Bible, however, isn’t done after the presentation of the bad news. It is good news. The news is that God foresaw the problem we would have and produced a plan to counter it before the problem actually came to be. Objectively, it is a strange plan. Many are not inclined to believe it. There seems to be simpler ways to go about it. In a way it seems too good to be true. It is counter just about every other way the world works.

God will follow His demand for perfection. He does not deviate from His original requirements. That is how He is, so there is no “easier” route. He creates instead a way for naturally imperfect humans to have perfection.

This is what Jesus is for. The proof of Jesus’ historicity is strong. There are clear, specific prophecies about Him that can be shown to have existed before His birth. He did a slew of clearly miraculous things before eye witnesses who later went to their premature deaths as believers and vocal witnesses. He won over His own brother who initially did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one prophesied about (who would?). He appeared to and won over a sworn enemy in Saul/ Paul. Outside of the biblical evidence are mentions of Christ and Christians dating to the first century. You have to want the narrative of the Bible to be untrue to write this stuff off.

The good news is this:

6 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

John 3:16-18, Jesus speaking (ESV)

It works out this way. We can’t keep God’s demands perfectly, so Jesus (the incarnated as a human Son of God)keeps the Law without error. He isn’t born with the same genetic sinful nature because of His unusual, virgin birth. Then, for the legal condemnation that we have earned, He voluntarily dies on the cross during which He is forsaken by the Father (i.e. damned) temporarily, probably three and one half hours. This fulfills half (the big half) of God’s requirements for sinners. The other half is that we physically must die. It is our only “contribution”.

The way that Jesus’ accomplishments get applied to an individual is not God just declaring it so. It isn’t even that we believe God’s promise and God takes note of it and writes our name in a book, though that happens too. It is that God somehow unites us with Jesus through something He does in the background when we are baptized in the name of Jesus. The fulfillment of the Law, the required getting through our sinful nature to create faith, and the uniting us with Christ is all done as a gift to us–a very valuable and costly gift. It is complex. It is different from “you get what you deserve or pay for”, which is the general rule of how the world works. It does seem too good to be true, because this mechanism can theoretically forgive even some terrible sinners. It depends on God getting through to them somehow.

Another thing that I would rather not believe is that the majority of mankind won’t benefit from this historical and generous opportunity.

13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

Matthew 7:13-14 (ESV)

That means that some pretty nice people will still die in their sins because they rejected Jesus. Please don’t be one of them. Please don’t be a part of the “”many. Be a part of the “few”. The eternity spelled out for us that I have tried to describe in this blog is both terrible and beautiful. Jesus is the key to being a part of the beautiful. I know that the number of the few will be a large number of people. That is good. It can be more.

Will Good People Be Lost?

The text discusses challenging biblical concepts, particularly the harsh consequences of sin and the unpredictability of salvation. It highlights that both minor and major sins lead to damnation unless atoned for by Jesus. It explores divine love and justice, emphasizing God’s plan for salvation, the unique role of Jesus, and the urgency of sharing this message with others.

There are a couple of things that God reveals in the Bible that are tough to accept. One is the severity of the punishment for sin. Sin can manifest itself in people in ways that are not that destructive. Still, unless it is atoned for by Jesus minor sins are as damning as major ones, and damnation is serious and permanent.

The other difficult thing is that some fairly serious criminals can come to faith and be saved, while other nice people never do and, yes, they are lost. That doesn’t seem fair to us, but we have the wrong perspective on the situation. It is almost inherent to our being to feel that good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things. Other world religions fall in line with this tendency. But that is not how it always works in this situation.

If I were to add a third difficult thing to accept it would be that a God of love would accept this arrangement. To sort this out, we have to take a deep dive into the character of the being who has created all things and who is the ultimate judge of what is good and evil.

The first thing to note is that God didn’t create any being in order to damn them. He foresaw that certain individuals would rebel against His primacy and that sin and evil would be a real thing, but rather than scrap Creation God had a plan from the beginning.

4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

Ephesians 1:4 (NIV)

The plan wasn’t for every creature. It doesn’t have a way to save or reform Satan, a cherubim/seraphim. It doesn’t have a way to save rebellious angels/demons. Their rebellion is different in a way. They choose out of a completely free will to reject God. Adam and Eve did not conceive of evil on their own. Satan deceived them. The rest of us are deeply influenced by our “sinful nature”. This is some sort of genetic abnormality created by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3) and passed along to everyone. Other creatures are dragged into this cycle of sin, death, and decay unwillingly.

The plan shows the primary characteristics of God, which is love and justice. He is willing to make to ultimate sacrifice to save. The Son of God becomes a human and absorbs the main penalty for sin Himself. But God doesn’t just forgive because He can. He keeps His law in tact. Jesus even asked if this could be done a different way as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Father’s commitment to not arbitrarily change His own law led to Jesus going through with the plan.

25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

Romans 3:25-26 (NIV)

He is “just” (i.e. He won’t change the Law), and the justifier (He makes a sacrifice out of love to save.)

A further statement about God’s intent is found in the most famous passage in Scripture:

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

John 3:16-17 (NIV)

Because of the nature of the plan, Jesus is not an option. He is the only way to stand before God as sinless. Even very good people are sinful. We all do something contrary to God’s will every day. We are all modified physically from what we are meant to be. When we call somebody “good” or think of ourselves as “good”, we are speaking relative to others we have known or heard about. We don’t meet that criteria relative to God.

“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good.”

Matthew 19:17 (NIV)

Even knowing the interplay between God’s love and God’s justice, the situation of those who are not connected to Christ can be disturbing. Especially if we know them personally. It is not a bad thing to be disturbed. God is disturbed. It should move us to do what we can. We can tell people of the pertinent parts of Jesus’ story and urge them to read it if they can. We can tell of the promise and the Bible’s description of our human situation. We can even share the rational proofs for the reality of the Bible’s revelation. (Please look at my other blog: http://givingchrist.com for some of these.). We can also demonstrate the love of God through action. God must do the rest. If there is a chance of connecting them to Christ, God will do whatever He can during life and possibly beyond it until Judgement Day. But people will be lost, and some of them will be “good people”.