WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS CHRIST (Part One)

It would take a whole book to give you the reasons why I believe in Jesus Christ and follow him as my Savior and Lord. Those reasons have been accumulating over a lifetime. Some of them have been discarded or changed as I have grown older. Others are newer as I have experienced more of life. But if I were to distill the reasons I believe in Jesus Christ I would want to include the following.

            The first reason is the existence of life itself. As I observe and participate in life I am aware of its incredible variety and complexity. The size of the universe, and the minute calibrations that are essential to sustain life, convince me of the reality of God who has created life for a purpose. Life does not make sense to me without the initiation and sustaining power of the Creator. As St. Paul put it, “he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else…. For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25,28). Through the miracle of creation God provides the genesis and environment that makes life possible. “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever” (Rom 11:36). The origin of life, the sustainer of life, and the end or goal of life is God. Which God? “For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live” (1 Cor 8:6).

An atheistic view of origins does not make sense to me. To view the universe as nothing more than a gigantic organism, or a complex mathematical formula, or a biological computer, flies in the face of the reality of human identity and relationship. A purely secular, merely scientific view results in reducing life to naturalistic phenomena. It is an inadequate interpretation of human behavior that does not account for meaning, purpose, significance and value. Love cannot be defined in purely secular terms. Community cannot be sustained from solely secular psycho-sociological, political and economic perspectives.

Life that has purpose and hope to it necessitates a Creator who is personally involved and lovingly concerned for his offspring. That is why God continually communicated with his people through prophets, and why he came himself to intervene on our behalf. The Creator revealed his purpose through his spoken Word, and also through his Living Word, Jesus Christ. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men…. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-14).

I believe that Jesus Christ is the human face of the Creator. Why do I believe that? Because his life perfectly reveals God to me. He acts as the Creator by exercising his power over nature: stilling the storm, multiplying the loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, and defeating death. He acts as God by exercising the power to forgive sins, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and to pass divine judgment. He shows us the significance of human life, and its eternal value, through his life, death and resurrection.

Without a belief in eternal life, human life would be, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Life, with all its meaning and significance, makes no sense to me without life beyond the grave. When my grandmother died I was 12 years of age. I simply could not believe that a life that was so valuable could suddenly cease to matter. Ecclesiastes in the Bible states the obvious: “God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Jesus came to reveal the nature of eternal life, to assure us of it as a gift, through union with himself. As we live with him we enjoy the reality of eternal life. He is “the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” I believe that this is true, because I believe that he is the origin and source of life, and that he has defeated human mortality through his own death and resurrection on our behalf.

(to be continued)