The sin that plunged the world into a history of pain and suffering was not adultery or murder but eating a piece of fruit.  Eating fruit per se is not evil.  The evil was the thought that motivated the act.God had commanded us not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If God is good, then the command is good, and God’s intention in keeping us from the knowledge of good and evil...  Read More

God saves sinners.  ‘Evangelical’ means ‘preaching good news’, and “God saves sinners” is the good news that we evangelicals preach.  Five of the fourteen points of our church’s statement of faith cover God’s saving of sinners, and I’m spelling out those ideas in this blog series.  We’ve started by trying to understand the problem:  sin.  The most common misconception is that ‘sin’ is ‘crime’, i.e...  Read More

Evangelicals always talk about “giving people the plan of salvation” so people can “get saved.”  We never talked this way in the Catholic Church, so when I converted, I had no idea what evangelicals were talking about.The plan of salvation seemed to boil down to a few salient points:1:  God condemns sinners to hell.2:  We are all born sinners.3:  Jesus died to forgive sinners.4:  Sinners are saved...  Read More

The book of Genesis presents God as the good Creator of a good world.But the human race entertained suspicions that God was not good but rather a deceptive manipulator seeking to oppress us, not bless us.  We declared our independence from Him to save ourselves from (as we saw it) God’s suffocating control.  Each soul had to instead trust itself to determine good and evil for itself.  Each soul ha...  Read More

Crucifying rebels was the business of Roman soldiers.  Hardened to pleas for mercy and deaf to agonized screams, the Romans hammered spikes through the forearms and feet of the condemned, hoisted them up, and moved on to the next victim.  Then they had lunch.  It was all in a day’s work.Seventy years before Christ, they crucified 6000 stragglers from a slave rebellion along the road between Rome a...  Read More

We believe…[Jesus Christ] arose bodily from the dead… The central contention of the Christian faith is an insistence, not upon a doctrine, but that an event actually occurred in history:  a dead man, Jesus, was raised from the dead and lives.Since the scientific revolution people have snubbed the notion of miracles, especially resurrection from the dead.  Such stories, they say, are the quaint sup...  Read More

We believe that Jesus Christ…died on the cross a sacrifice for our sins…Sacrifice – the idea that something is wrong in the world and that something must die to appease God/the gods to set things right again – is an ancient and almost universal concept in primitive religion.  Most ancient religions sacrificed animals, but a few (the Aztecs most notoriously) sacrificed human beings.Perhaps worst of...  Read More

He [Jesus Christ] died on the cross a sacrifice for our sins....We are so accustomed to this phrase that we miss the mind-blowing mystery.Not the last part of the statement.The first part.“He died…”In the previous blog I explained that we believe “Jesus Christ is true God and true man”.  He is “I AM”, the One who is, who has life in Himself.The one who does not die.Because He CANNOT die.Yet He die...  Read More

The third point of our statement of faith says:  We believe that Jesus Christ is true God and ‘true man, having been conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary.We have talked about the first great mystery of the Christian faith:  that one infinite God exists in three persons.  This is what God has revealed about Himself.  We don’t comprehend it; we confess it and worship Him.The secon...  Read More

“We believe in one God, Creator of all things, infinitely perfect…”God is “I AM”:  a person who always was and always will be.  He is being.  He is life.  Existing before all things, He brought all things into existence.  As the Creator, He is the definer of the good and the perfect, the standard by which all values are measured.  What God loves and approves is good and what He disapproves and des...  Read More

“We believe in one God…existing in three persons…”Francis Schaeffer said everything originated either from nothing, from matter, or from a person with a mind.No one (that I know of) seriously proposes that everything came from absolutely nothing.  Even Stephen Hawking, who proposed that the universe popped into existence out of ‘nothing’, assumed that subatomic particles were inexplicably ‘there’ ...  Read More

“We believe in one God, Creator of all things, infinitely perfect and eternally existing in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”God revealed His Name to Moses:  I AM (Exodus 3.14).  The One Who Is, the Existent One.  Uncreated and unbegun.  Just is – and therefore was.  Always was.  As He says about Himself:  “I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 44.6).I AM was...  Read More