Christianity is a story. More than that, it is an epic tale of God guiding His people to understand Him and helping us grow up.
Before the beginning, there was God. This is hard to understand, because God doesn’t exist in a place as we understand it. He also doesn’t exist in time. He created both space and time, so He is outside of both. We can’t really understand it, so all we can do is accept it.
Because God is outside of time and space, He can see all of time and space at a single glance. He can see the implications of an action in its full outworking across all of human history before it happens. It also means that He can walk with every one of us through every minute of our lives. Each one of us is the complete focus of all of His attention all of the time. This is a little unnerving, but completely true. This is why every hidden thing will come into judgment. There is nothing we can hide from Him. It also means that we can relax, because He has truly seen us at our worst and still loves us. It also means that ‘before’ creation, He knew that men would fall, become sinful and require salvation. This is what we mean when we talk about God’s plan. Nothing can take Him by surprise. Nothing can frustrate His plan in the big picture, although we can frustrate His intentions for our lives by being stubborn.
The other thing to note is how God deals with us as His people. God treats His people like a parent treats a child. In our early history, He set up simple rules to follow. These rules are for our protection and to show us how to live in right relationship to each other and to Him. As humanity got older, His approach changed. We still have to follow the rules, but through Jesus’ sacrifice, He eliminated the penalty for failing to follow them. Please see Salvation. The intent never changed, but He has been trying to help us get to the point where we live rightly by choice rather than because we are following the rules.
We see a big change in His approach to us with Jesus life, death and resurrection. The rules still apply, because they show us the right way to live. Now, we can take a more mature path. If we follow Jesus and seek God’s forgiveness, the penalty for not following the rules is removed (although the consequences of our actions remain). It can be looked at as a rite of passage. As a people, we have matured to the point where, like a teenager or young adult, we just try to live the way He wants us to live. He chastises us and disciplines us, but situationally rather than as part of a rigid system of rules.
This also means that we accept responsibility for failing to follow the rules. If we don’t take the path of accepting Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf and seeking to follow Him, then the penalty for failing to follow the rules still applies. Since nobody can follow all of the rules all of the time, we therefore incur the eternal death penalty, the date of execution of which is set to immediately follow our mortal death.
The Story
In the beginning, God created everything. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the question of how. Was it in seven literal days? Was it by a process involving evolution? Was it some combination of both?
It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that He did it. He called it good. Remember that “good” doesn’t mean the same thing to God as it means to us. It is entirely possible that God made more than is outlined in the text.
He also created people. He created man to serve Him and look after the creation for Him and placed him in a garden. He created woman to help man. He created man and woman to be in a specific relationship with Him and with each other. We will discuss this in greater detail in What are people. The Bible is the story of God’s interaction with His people. It is the story of how He introduced Himself to humanity and helped us to grow into the relationship He wants us to have with Him.
The Fall
At some point, Adam and Eve did something stupid – they rebelled against God. They decided that it was they – not He – who got determine right from wrong and how things should go. God executed His judgement on them by casting them out of the garden. He cursed the world and made it a world of work, trouble and death. I will break this out in more detail in the portion of What is sin that deals with original sin.
So there they were – man and woman in a cursed, hostile world. In the early years, they multiplied and prospered. From the beginning, though there were problems. People never got out of the habit of rebellion against God’s rules about how they should live. Adam’s first son Cain killed his second son Abel out of jealousy. This habit of rebellion and self-rule – of being governed by our passions rather than the rules we should be following and then lying about it – has been with us from the Fall.
The Bible is unclear about a lot of things, but we shouldn’t let them worry us. God’s creation was complete, but we can’t really know much about it. It probably wasn’t very much like we think it was. We have to focus on the information we have and not be concerned about what we don’t know.
Time passed. People became increasingly evil. There were also other beings roaming the world and causing trouble. The Bible calls these the sons of God and names them the Nephilim. Not much is known about them except that they were giants and they were known for forcibly taking women and having children by them. God put them into the uttermost part of the outer darkness to await judgment (See Gen 6:4 and Jude 1:6).
Eventually, there was only one man, Noah and his family that still loved and respected God. God decided that the time had come to clean out the evil. He killed every one of His people (and the Nephilim) with a flood. People lived a lot longer in those days. From Adam to Noah and the Flood was about 1600 years, even though there were only about ten generations.
God restarted His people. Now they understood that He is God and understood His power. They understood that evil was serious, and He would react to it seriously. He was teaching them and they were learning.
After the flood, God blessed His people and they prospered. They were still steeped in sin, though and before long rebelled against God in a very visible way. They tried to build a tower (Babel) that would reach the heavens and make a name for themselves. God confused their languages and scattered them so they would not cause too much trouble.
Then God showed Himself as God to a man named Abraham. God promised him and his descendants all of the land from Egypt to the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq, although that promise was not fulfilled in his lifetime. God promised him a son. His wife was barren, though so he slept with her maid and produced a son named Ishmael. He thought he would help God do what He promised rather than relying on Him. Later, God made it possible for Abraham’s wife to have a son who he named Isaac. Once Abraham understood that God’s promise related to Isaac, he cast out Ishmael. The descendants of Isaac became the Jews, and the descendants of Ishmael became the Arabs. Even though God intended His promise to apply through Isaac, He followed through on the letter of His word, looking after and prospering Ishmael, although not with the special plan He was working through Isaac. God is just. He kept His promise in spite of Abraham’s foolishness. Both groups became incredibly numerous and both claim the lands from Egypt to the Euphrates River. Abraham’s reckless action resulted in thousands of years of violence and bloodshed.
Abraham learned from his mistake, though. God asked him to sacrifice Isaac to Him and spared him at the last minute. Because of his faithfulness, God reiterated His promise that through Abraham’s descendants, all nations would be blessed.
One of Abraham’s descendants was a man named Jacob. God appeared to Jacob in a dream and reaffirmed his promises. God renamed him Israel. His twelve children founded the twelve tribes of Israel.
The family moved to Egypt as a result of a famine. Through a series of events, prophetic dreams and miracles, one of his children, Joseph became second in importance to the Pharaoh. They prospered. The next Pharaoh didn’t like the Israelites and enslaved them.
One of the Israelites was named Moses. He was raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter. When he grew up, he killed an Egyptian and hid out in the desert, where God appeared to him in a bush that was burning but not consumed by the fire. God told Moses to free the Israelites. God pressured the Pharaoh with a series of plagues and miracles until he was forced to let them go. Later, he changed his mind and tried to chase them down, but God destroyed him and his army.
While they were in the desert, God performed many miracles for the Israelites to keep them alive. He also provided them a set of rules to follow. There were many rules to follow, but He provided them with ten basic rules that covered most of how He want them to relate to Him and to each other. These Ten Commandments were designed to help God’s people live the way He wants us to live.
Now, God’s people were mature enough to understand rules and importance of following them. They still needed a reason to follow them, though because while they feared God, none of them loved Him enough to live the way He wanted them to. So God set penalties to go with the rules. The penalties don’t make much sense to us because they relate the way God sees things rather than the way we see things. He demanded that people who committed certain types of offenses be killed. This makes sense if you remember that God needed to keep His people from straying from Him. He needed them to keep the evil out of their community so they wouldn’t get used to it and accept it as normal. For breaking His laws, God demanded sacrifices of various kinds of animals. This is because, from a heavenly perspective, sin is a capital crime. If you sin, you must die. Because His people were still rebellious by nature and not mature, God accepted the death of animals rather than the people. God didn’t ignore His justice, He just carried it out in a way that wouldn’t lead to His peoples’ destruction. This was a temporary solution, but God already had a plan in place for a permanent solution.
When Israel settled in the land God promised to them, they were ruled by God through the heads of the tribes. God used His priests to hold them accountable to His rules and help them escape His wrath by sacrifices.
During this time a pattern developed:
- Israel would stop listening to God and worship idols
- God would put it into the heads of some neighboring tribe to attack Israel
- Israel would panic and cry out to God for help
- God would raise up a leader who would get Israel out of trouble
- Life would become good in Israel after God blessed them because they returned to Him
- Israel would become complacent, stop listening to God and worship idols
And the pattern would repeat. We should not criticize the people of Israel. We are no better. We follow this pattern today, both as individuals and as peoples.
These attacks became more and more severe until God eventually had the entire nation taken into captivity by the Babylonians, then later occupied by the Romans. It was during these events that many of the people God raised up to save His people predicted that God would raise up a person who would save them once and for all. But they were talking about a person who would save them from the eternal results of their sins, not save them from their enemies on earth. This is why the Jews so completely misunderstood the nature of the predicted messiah (savior) and rejected Jesus.
As God repeatedly hammered His people for disobedience, He was gradually forging the framework He would use to save all people from their sin. He made Israel into a fiercely stubborn people who were dedicated to Him as their one God in a world of societies that had many gods. He had evolved their culture into what it needed to be to allow Him to help His children move to a more mature outlook on God, rebellion and sin. He set the stage for His next big act – the biggest since Creation.
God delivered on His promise to Abraham during one of these times of domination by a foreign power (Rome). He did something we can’t understand: He Himself entered into His creation as one of us. There isn’t any way to explain this without saying things about Him that are wrong, because we don’t really have any idea what God is like. We can guess from the hints in the Bible, but we can’t really know. This means that we have to be very careful what illustrations we use to help ourselves and other people understand, and how we talk about them. Please see Who is God for more detail about who and what God is.
Jesus
It was neither too early for Jesus to be born, nor too late. Jesus was born at precisely the correct time to achieve God’s design, according to His plan.
Jesus was completely human. He had to be in order to stand before God in our place and take the punishment we have earned for our sin.
Jesus was completely God. Jesus was born to an Israelite girl named Mary, who was a virgin. God “overshadowed” her and caused her to be pregnant with Jesus.
Jesus was born like any other baby. Jesus was a normal man with likes and dislikes. He probably had a favorite food and things He preferred not to eat. He worked, played, ate, drank, slept, laughed, cried, bathed and went to the bathroom like everybody else around Him. He was a man with a face and voice His friends and family would recognize if they met Him on the street. He was also completely God. He was, and remains, God and yet is distinct within that unity. How God could remain completely God while allowing one portion of Himself (Person) to be a complete component of God yet limited by being an absolutely normal human is well beyond anything we can understand.
Jesus grew up in the house of His adopted father, Joseph. Jesus was a Jew – He believed and followed all of the laws God handed to His people throughout history. He never broke any of them, nor rebelled against God. He was ‘without sin’. Many of the people of His day recognized this depth of understanding and purity. He was known as a teacher.
Almost nothing is known about his early life. As a youth, He and His parents went to the temple in Jerusalem, and they accidentally left without Him. When they went back to find Him, He told them that, of course, He would be at His Father’s house.
The next time we see Him is at the small town of Cana, where He was attending a wedding. When the wine ran short, He turned several large jars of water into very good wine.
He gathered a number of followers, including twelve men He specifically chose to be His close companions. For the next three years, He traveled around the countryside teaching the people what Judaism really means and who God really is. Throughout His time He performed many miraculous signs to prove His identity as the son of God. He forgave people their sins. He healed people. He multiplied food. All of the demons He encountered acknowledged His identity and authority as God. He also claimed to be God.
That is why the priests and leaders of Israel rejected Him as a blasphemer. They tried to trap Him and discredit Him. When that failed, they denounced Him and turned Him over to the Romans to have Him executed.
Jesus voluntarily went with the Romans and was tortured to death. He allowed Himself to be killed and, in some way that we don’t understand, took God’s judgment on us for our sin and rebellion onto Himself. Because He did this, the penalty of God’s law has been paid. We no longer owe God a life for our sin and rebellion. This didn’t remove the law – just paid the penalty. Although some laws were repealed in the New Testament by God, the overwhelming majority remain in effect. They still tell us how God wants us to live. We still have to follow them. Now, however, we try to follow them because we love God and are grateful to Him for His mercy rather than out of fear of the consequences. We have matured as a people.
After He was executed and buried, He descended into the part of the outer darkness where the unclean spirits wait for final judgment and declared His victory to them. He rose from the dead. For the next 40 days, He appeared to hundreds of people to prove His claim to be God. He demonstrated His identity as God so completely that His eleven remaining close followers changed from being scared to walk outside to being fearless preachers and teachers. Every one of them was tortured and killed for following Him except John, who died in exile.
After Jesus returned to heaven, His disciples told everybody they could find about what had happened, per His instructions. People believed them, and started meeting together to learn and teach each other about “the Way.” Thus the church was born.
One prominent Jew named Saul was an especially harsh persecutor of the young church. God struck him down, blinded him and appeared to him in a vision. Saul changed his name to Paul. God helped him use his formidable education and striking wisdom to learn and make sense of Jesus’ words and actions. He then wrote letters explaining them to a number of churches. These letters were preserved and passed down and make up most of what we now call the New Testament. The Gospels were written to help people remember what Jesus did and said. All of this happened within the lifetime of people who had seen and known Jesus.
Since that time, the church has continually thought about and refined its understanding of Jesus, who He was and what He did and said. Because the church is made up of flawed and rebellious people, many of them have done terrible things, often claiming to represent God in doing so. They will answer to Him at the last judgment. The overwhelming majority of Christians and the church have quietly lived humble and peaceful lives following His Way.
The story continues
For the two thousand years following His death and resurrection, many people have tried to reject what Jesus said. They have tried to poke holes in it or refute it entirely because they refuse to acknowledge that God is in charge. It isn’t that there isn’t sufficient evidence, but that they refuse to see it or accept it if they are forced to. They are “without excuse” and will answer at the last judgment.
Many, many people have tried to follow Jesus’ Way and have made the world a better place.
We don’t know where we are in the story. We may be somewhere in the middle, or the final judgment may happen tomorrow. Once God has decided that the time is right, He will take all of the people who ever lived and bring them together. He will judge all of us. He will take His people into His home and send the rest to the outer darkness forever. He will then destroy everything and start over.
God’s people will have finally matured into His children. The law will no longer be necessary because those who have chosen Him will know how to live the way He intended from the start. They will live with Him in the new heaven and earth and serve Him as adults. They will dwell with Him in His peace and love forever.