The Bible confirms the following:

1. Humankind's slavery to Death is a given.

       The Garden of Eden story proclaims the human condition: we are the dead.

2. No manmade fantasies or inventions of any kind are allowable. Unless God self-reveals, all knowledge and ideas about him are fantasies and inventions.

“You shall have no other gods/make no graven images, etc.” The prohibition against idolatry is constant, but it is also constantly violated.  The Old Testament can be seen as a people’s ongoing record of their own spiritual failure. There is something irretrievably compelling about idolatry; good people can’t stay away from it.

Modern idolatry takes new forms: Narcissism (individual and corporate), Progress (humanity = God, usually driven by faith in technological progress), Ignorance (including avoidance and apathy: “Who cares? I don’t know and I don’t need to know—and don’t bug me when I’m watching Sports Center.”) and  Religions (death is not real but just an illusion). It may be a nice idea, but if it isn’t truly initiated by a true God, it is all just playful denial: the Dead chattering to the Dead pretending they’re not Dead.

The Bible is unique in its consistent witness that God who is above all will not and can not be defined, limited, or even adequately worshipped by human beings.  The God of the Bible is self-knowing, self-naming, self-sufficient, self-valuable, and all-powerful. The Bible also reveals that the God who self-reveals does so as God alone sees fit to do. The God of the Bible is in no way subject to humanity’s desires or wishes.

Question: Aren’t these just human projections onto what we want to call God?

Humanity does not contain these values in and of itself to project onto God.

3. The only allowable knowledge about God must come from God himself.

Personal revelations are indisdinguishable from fantasies and inventions. Unless God speaks for himself, its all just another Mein Kampf. All manmade religion is idolatry.  Again, only the Bible roundly prohibits human modifications to God’s self-revelation. (Hey Scientists: You think you invented objectivity?)

4. If God is to be relevant, he must be evidently more powerful, perfect, etc. than Death.

God must prove God is stronger, more eternal, and more perfectly ubiquitous than death. Otherwise, death remains the observable final power of the universe.

The central witness of the Bible is God’s self-revelation in the person and work of the historical Jesus, who is proclaimed as God Incarnate,  and whose central act was entering into human death only to triumph and prove defeat of death in his resurrection. 

Question: Isn’t resurrection an re-adapted concept—just another invention?

The idea of resurrection is unique and unprecedented.  No one expected, anticipated, or otherwise conceived of resurrection.  It is in Jesus an utterly new, utterly unique phenomenon.  It stands as the singular proof that God—not Death—has the final word.

5. Death in the forms of affliction, pain, suffering, misery and poverty—as well as the biological death of humankind and the cosmos—must be addressed.

Death is not only our biological end, but its shadows mar life with pain, suffering, injustice, poverty, disease, etc. God’s relevance and power over death can be demonstrated in overpowering these shadows of death as well. Pain and suffering are the acid tests of any philosophy, worldview or religion.

The Jesus of history took on poverty by choice, and his ministry is marked not only by proclaiming the eternity of God, but by tireless works of healing. Jesus demonstrates an authority over nature and reality that is not seen in any other worldview.  He addresses not only Death, but its shadows as well.

6. If belief in God, or service to God, is for this life only, then it is pointless, meaningless—all vanity. It must be about more than temporary solutions.

All religious or political enthusiasms designed to make the world a better place are in vain. Yes, they have some temporal value, and do temporarily increase our comfort, but are all swallowed up in death. For a faith system by any name to be worth anything, it must deal with the acid test, and must do so in terms of eternity. Any faith system that is merely temporary—for this short life alone—isn’t worth the time. Science and medicine will take care of us just as well.

Paul says it succinctly in 1 Corinthians 15.9:

If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all humanity most to be pitied.

The proclamation of the Bible is that although science, technology, politics, progress, and every other invention of humankind—as well as the natural cosmos itself—will come to its end in Death, that life eternal is offered to lowly human beings by a loving, all-sufficient God who is infinitely greater than Death—who has proven and demonstrated God’s more-perfect-than-Death reality—and who has revealed this to be true through God’s own self-revelation rather than a human projection.

Before there was science and technology (or even decent astronomy), the Bible witnessed to God’s ultimate intention to save human beings from Death’s seemingly-absolute power by completing the cosmos in a new act of creation. The promise of “a new heaven and a new earth” means a great change in the cosmos, perhaps not unlike the resurrection itself.  Not a mere resuscitation, but an utter, total renovation of all that is worth eternal preservation. 

The Gospel (which means good news) is that God will save those whom he knows, and he knows all of us who come to know him through his self-revelation.

Question: Why doesn’t God self-reveal more completely? Why so cagey? Why doesn’t he just split open the sky and stick his face down to us?

According to the Bible (remember, we don’t get to make this up), that’s God’s business. Apparently, God wants us to be in relationship to him in this tenuous manner. This is the Bible’s definition of faith. We relate to God in the way that God wants and chooses, not the way we want.  That keeps God God and humanity humanity.  Read the Bible.

But the Bible is weird and ancient, full of outmoded worldviews, militant brutalities, and followers who seem like idiots.

True. Enjoy.

And today’s followers are no better.

True, and many have used and abused the Bible in horrendous ways, but that’s not the Bible’s fault. People ruin everything. If your problem is with people, then we’re on the same page. Maybe you don’t have the same problems.

So hang out with us—maybe we can learn something from you.  Find a church—maybe nothing will happen, but maybe something will.  God gives a lot people faith unexpectedly. Sometimes people who don’t want it at all find themselves compelled by it.  In any case, it can’t hurt you to risk checking it all out a bit more deeply.