Assignment: 800-1000 words
Thank you for allowing me to write you today about the Gospel. You may not believe in God, you may have an entirely different set of beliefs than I do, or you may be indifferent about the subject, not having thought too deeply about it in the past, and in all of these cases, I want you to know that I believe each and every person is made in the image of God, and to let you know that you are loved. Please don’t find offense in anything I have written. I don’t mean to offend, but to inspire you to think about the topics of God and morality.
A little about my background and journey into Christianity. I haven’t been Christian for long, having only been saved since 2018. Prior to researching Christianity, I fell into the category of “God is not real. Science can explain everything.” When I finally came to a place in life where I was willing to be honest and investigate religion, I found that Christianity held up to all the scrutiny thrown at it. As someone who may not be religious or a believer in God, you might think to yourself “Religion and Christianity have a lot of baggage associated with it.” That is true, a lot of people throughout history have done very bad things in the name of religion and Christianity, and some people continue to do so. I don’t put my faith in a title, like Christian, and I don’t put my faith in people who claim to follow a specific religion, but I do put my faith in Jesus Christ.
Before focusing on Jesus, it might be beneficial to address science, miracles, and morality. When I started my journey, I didn’t believe in God. I thought God and miracles were things people believed because they wanted comfort. My Christian friend and I watched a creation debate and discussed it afterwards. It was that debate that led me to watch many others between creationists and evolutionists. After doing so, I was surprised by the fact that evolutionists couldn’t explain the beginning, the start. Science can be used to observe, test, and explain. I subscribed to the Big Bang Theory, implying the universe had a starting point. If that is true, then there must have been a “creator” or “uncaused first cause”. As I was struggling with creationism, I read that Stephen Hawking had written “The universe can create itself from nothing.” This view seemed to go against common sense, as well as science. At that point, I went from “There is no God” to “There must have been an uncaused first cause, i.e. God.”
The next step is morality, and depending on a person’s thoughts of morality, it brings the question “Can God be known?” After I settled on the fact that “Nothing cannot create the universe, there had to be something,” I was left with the thought, can we know goodness? Is there a right and a wrong, aside from our opinion? If so, who defines it? Society? God? This subject led me to go from God is just “the cause of the universe,” to “God can be known.”
I found the struggle of morality to be a heart issue. I struggled with the idea that if there was an arbiter of goodness, and if those values didn’t align with my own, then I would be the one in the wrong. So much of society would be wrong, since society tends to focus on the physical. There were two topics that helped put morality into perspective. If evolution was real, how could a person argue against slavery and the holocaust? As I studied those two topics, I realized it was Judeo-Christian values that were used to argue against them. If evolution was real, and we were all a cosmic “accident,” then these two movements could not be objectively wrong. There were, in fact, wrong. We all know it, and it can only be defended by appealing to a higher authority than ourselves.
If the above was true, there was a creator, and that creator was the authority of all things good, then that creator was personal because He chose to make us and chose to reveal Himself to us. As I investigated Christianity, I was surprised by the evidence of the historical reliability of the Gospel writings, along with non-biblical evidence of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Prior to being Christian, I thought Jesus was nothing more than a man wrapped in legend, but after looking at the evidence and reading the Gospel’s, I came to conclude that Jesus was who He had said He was, who the Gospel’s said He was, and who the evidence show’s He was.
To wrap up, it is best to conclude with the question “What is the Gospel?” In short, God is the ultimate standard. God is good. God is love. God is perfectly just. Sin, the transgression of God’s law, brings with it a punishment. Just as breaking an earthly law brings with it judgement and punishment, when someone breaks God’s law, it too brings judgement and punishment. Scripture tells us that the punishment for sin is death, a separation from God. That is where the Gospel, the good news, comes in. God the Father sent his Son, who was without sin, and who willingly took our punishment so we may have eternal life. His death paid for all sin, for all men, and all one must do to receive this free gift of Grace is to repent and believe. Turn away from their sin and put their trust in Jesus Christ. Christ, who is Lord even over death.
I’ll leave you with a passage from John 3:16-18. This perfectly summarizes the Gospel, that due to our own sin and actions, we all fall short, but because of Christ’s love and grace, we may have eternal life.
16 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.