An Email to a Friend About What Christians Believe
David,
I enjoyed talking with you about Judaism and Christianity. I could tell you
have a real interest in spiritual matters.
When
we were talking we didn’t have a chance to finish our discussion about the
Christian concept of God being One God. First, let me say that the below is not
to be taken as an argument against your beliefs, it is just a statement of what
I believe most Christians believe.
As I
said, Christians believe that God is One, in the sense that the Godhead is
three in One- the Father, the Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit (what has been
called “the Trinity”). The three are distinct personalities, but are not
separate, in Christian thought. How that really works is one of the mysteries
of our belief. As you may know (and I don’t know your level of knowledge
about Christianity), we believe that the man Jesus was fully God and fully man
and was the person prophesied by Isaiah, the prophet, in Isaiah 53 as the
suffering servant. In Genesis chapter 1:26, it says “Then God said, ‘Let Us
make man in Our image…” which to me denotes a plurality. Also, Genesis 3:
22 says, “…Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil…”
also denoting a plurality.
In
reading the New Testament, Christians believe Jesus fulfilled many of the
prophetic statements in Isaiah 53- at least that’s what we believe. There are
other prophecies and types of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament but I will not
get into all those. Let me just clarify, that I don’t blame the Jews for the
crucifixion of Christ, the way some have in the past have and caused friction
and antisemitism. I personally believe that the whole human race, beginning
with Adam’s sin, caused the crucifixion of Christ that was carried out by the
Romans, under the power of the evil one, satan.
There
is a meeting described in the Book of John chapter 3 in the New Testament
between Jesus and a leading Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus came to Jesus
in the night and initiated a conversation in which Nicodemus said, “Rabbi,
we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs
that You do unless God is with him.” Jesus then said to him, “Truly, truly, I
say to you, unless one is born again [the better translation is “born from
above”], he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Then Nicodemus said, “How can a
man be born when he is old? He cannot enter the womb and be born, can he?” Then
Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the
flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” And then
they have more conversation and Jesus says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent
in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man [Jesus] be lifted up;
that whosoever believes may in Him have eternal life. For God so loved the
world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in [into]
Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
I
assume you are familiar with the story of the brass serpent that God told Moses
to raise up on a pole, so that the sinning Jews who simply looked at it would
be healed of the serpent bites. Now, it has always bothered me why would Jesus
compare himself to a brass serpent. But, as I studied the matter more, I
realized that the devil came to Adam and Eve as a serpent and inflicted his
evil into mankind when they disobeyed God causing sin and a curse of death to
fall on mankind and the earth. When that happened, God and man had a problem.
God originally placed Adam on a type of probation and gave him a powerful
thing-free will and choice. Adam disobeyed God and misused his free will by
eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, when God wanted him to
eat of the Tree of Life and live forever with Him in obedience to God and His
love. The serpent devil had usurped Adam’s rights as to the earth and God then
had to institute a plan to redeem Adam and Eve and their children and beyond.
Eventually, we see God working through Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph,
Moses, Joshua, etc. But, back to the brass serpent.
Christians
believe that when Jesus went to the cross and died, God looked upon Jesus as a
representative of the entire human race and He became sin and the sin-bearer.
Therefore, when Jesus died, in God’s eyes, He was not only the lamb that takes
away the sin of the world, He was the symbol of the serpent of the
curse, sin, and death. Therefore, Jesus’ reference to the brass serpent to
Nicodemus was because He foresaw His death on the cross as the embodiment of
all our sins. The brass serpent was the type of all sin and Jesus became this
before God and in God’s eyes and reckoning, when He was lifted up on the
cross, like the brass serpent lifted up on the pole. Also, Adam’s sin, caused
by the serpent, brought a curse on the ground. God told Adam and Eve in
Genesis 3, “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it
all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for
you…” The curse on the ground was signified by the “thorns and thistles.” The
New Testament records in Matthew 27: 28-29, “And they stripped Him, and put
a scarlet robe on Him. And after weaving a crown of thorns, they [the Roman
soldiers] put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand; and they kneeled
down before Him and mocked Him , saying ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ And they spat
on Him and took the reed and began to beat Him on the head. And after they had
mocked Him, they took His robe off and put His garments on Him, and led Him
away to crucify Him.” The interesting and compelling thing about the crown
of thorns is that it is a type of the curse of the thorns God stated to Adam.
Therefore, the crown of thorns was symbolic of Jesus not only carrying all our
sins but all of our curses on us and the world on Him in His death on the
cross. So, the serpent in the wilderness saved the lives of the people
who would only look at it as told to them by Moses. Likewise, Christians
believe that when we look at the Jesus, our sin bearer in faith in His being
lifted up in the wilderness of Golgotha (the place of the skull and death),
that we will be healed spiritually (and bodily in the future resurrection of
the dead upon Christ’s return) by our savior on the cross and His resurrection
from death in victory, three days later.
Before,
Jesus’s death, He had been examined and questioned by the High Priest, which we
believe was a type of what the High Priest and the priests had to do to the
sacrificial lamb before the sacrifice to make sure it was perfect
and without any spot or blemish. The examination of Jesus by the High
Priest, as set forth in the Christian Bible, accomplished that requirement so
that Jesus was proved to be the perfect “Lamb of God” for His sacrifice on the
cross, so that God could righteously pour out all punishment for man’s sin and
sins on the Lamb- Jesus.
The
New Testament indicates that at some point before Jesus died on the cross, He
cried out to God asking Him why He had forsaken Him. Of course, God did
this because Jesus became sin and the abandonment was but for a moment as Jesus
died. That is why the resurrection of Christ is important in that it shows that
God was satisfied with and accepted the sacrifice of Jesus by raising Him from
the dead. The apostle Paul writes in one of his letters that without the
resurrection of Christ Jesus, we Christians are still in our sins and not
forgiven. So, the resurrection is critical to our belief and without it, we are
but fools on our way to destruction. But, with the resurrection, we have the
hope of eternal life in Christ and with Him on a new earth and a new heaven.
God
first showed all of us His plan of redemption when he took the Jews out
of Egypt through Moses. In doing this He created the great type and sign
of the Passover, where the Jews had to take their family into their house, kill
a lamb, and spread the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and lintels so that
the death angel would passover them as it killed the first born of the
Egyptians. As Moses proceeded in the wilderness with the Jews, God had
them to make a tabernacle and instituted the sacrifices and the Law. Christians
believe that God was demonstrating that all sin can only be atoned by the
shedding of the blood of an innocent perfect lamb, which was shown time after
time in the sacrifices by the wilderness Jews and then carried on up until 70
A.D. when the Romans destroyed Herod’s temple. Christians believe that Jesus
came as an ordinary man (all the while also being God). The New Testament says
that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.
Christians
believe that no sinful man could be a “savior.” Because of sin, God was done
with the old creation, with the sinful fleshly man. Man was not only sinful in
his actions; man’s very nature had the sin principle in him inherited from
Adam. In other words, each person was “in Adam,” when Adam sinned in the sense
that we all came from Adam’s seed, which contained his sin-ruined DNA.
God’s righteousness and law required that in order for God to remain righteous,
but pay the penalty that the law required, that God would have to come as an
ordinary man and innocently die, as the sacrificial-once and for all- lamb to
cause God’s wrath against sin to be satisfied. And God knew that there was no
ordinary man that was qualified to do this. Only God could do this, so He came
in Jesus, as a perfect man, lived a perfect life keeping God’s law (not the
multitude of man-made rules of the Pharisees). He lived in God’s will
continuously on the earth and kept each of God’s laws. So, when Jesus was
nailed to the cross and shed his Holy blood into the ground, that was God
paying man’s price and ransom, as well as satisfying the wrath of God against
sin. God demonstrated that He accepted this sacrifice by raising Jesus,
as the Christ, from the tomb on the third day. He appeared to over 500 people
in His reformed resurrection body, ate food, walked through walls, disappeared
and appeared, and then was taken up into Heaven, where He was glorified and
seated on His Throne, at the right hand of the Father. When this happened, the
Holy Spirit came to earth and filled the believers at Pentecost and later the
gentiles. Just as God was in Jesus reconciling the world to Himself; Jesus is
in the Holy Spirit, Who is also in the spirits of those who believe and trust
Christ for their salvation before God. The Jewish Christian, the Apostle Paul,
who wrote the book of Romans in the New Testament, said about Abraham: “What
shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found?
For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about; but not
before God. For what does the Scripture say” ‘And Abraham believed God, and it
was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ Now to the one who works, his wage is
not reckoned as a favor but as what is due. But to the one who does not work,
but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as
righteousness…For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be
heir of the world was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of
faith.” (Romans 4:1-5; 13).
I am
sure you are familiar with the covenants revealed in what Christians call the
Old Testament. The New Testament book of Hebrews was written to the Jews who
had become Christians and were having challenges to their faith. In
chapter 8, it talks about the high priest, the tabernacle, and the covenants.
The writer stated that Jesus had become the mediator of a new and better
covenant. The writer goes on to quote from Jeremiah 31:31, “Behold, days are
coming,’ declares the LORD [when the Christian version references Jeh--h,
it uses the all caps, ‘LORD’], ‘when I will make a new covenant with the
house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made
with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the
land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’
declares the Lord, “but this is the covenant which I will make with the house
of Israel after those days,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will put My law within them,
and on their heart I will write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be
My people.’ ‘And they shall not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man
his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know Me, from the
least of them to the greatest of them’ declares the Lord, ‘for I will forgive
their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more.’ ‘When He said, a
new covenant’, He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is growing old is
ready to disappear.” (and
then in the beginning of the 9th chapter of Hebrews the writer
explained about the old Temple and the altars and the High Priest entering to
the Holy of Holies once a year performing the ritual for sins.) Then, in verses
11-15, the writer says, “But, when Christ appeared as a high priest of the
good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect
tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not
through the blood of goats and calves but through His own blood, He entered the
holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood
of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been
defiled, sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood
of Christ, who through the Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God,
cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? And for this
reason He [Christ] is the mediator of a new covenant, in order that
since a death [of Christ] has taken place for the redemption of the
transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have
been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.”
So,
the laying upon Jesus of the sins and curses of all mankind-- past, present,
and future-- in the cross and death of Christ satisfied the full wrath of God
against all sin. This death of Christ and Christ’s receiving the full
weight of all man’s sin allowed God to enter a state of rest in Christ, so that
God’s wrath against sin was exhausted in the death of Christ. Therefore,
God no longer holds man’s sins against anyone, who will enter into this
covenant relationship with God through Christ’s death and resurrection by faith
that this is true. This new relationship is the being “born again” (born from
above) through faith and our reliance upon Christ’s cross and resurrection for
our being made righteous and acceptable to God because of Jesus Christ and His
love for Jesus (and us because we are now in Christ by God’s act). Abraham was
the father of faith in his belief in the promises of God. Christians believe
that if we believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in faith that
it has brought about forgiveness of sin and sins, and we are placed “in Christ”
by God and are no longer “in Adam.”
Romans
8: 3-4 tells us that, “...if anyone
is in Christ, this person is a new creation; the old
things passed away; behold, new things have
come. Now all these things are from God, who
reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of
reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world
to Himself, not counting their wrongdoings against them, and He
has committed to us the word of reconciliation.” 2Corinthians
5:17-21. “[God] sent his own Son [Jesus] in a body like the bodies we
sinners have [except without sin or the sin nature]. And in that body God
declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for
our sins. He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully
satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the
[Holy] Spirit.”
The
Christians are attempting to reconcile the world to Jesus, those who will
believe in the gospel message of Jesus Christ crucified, raised, glorified, and
Lord of all, including the people who will believe into Him and Him as their
Lord. The early Holy Spirit-filled believers began to spread the message
of the gospel throughout the world. The new believers were shortly called
“Christians” and they began Christ’s church in small groups meeting in homes at
or near Jerusalem until God scattered them throughout the world by the Romans
destroying Jerusalem in 70 AD. There is much more to it than that but that is
just an overview of what most Christians believe. The book of Acts is a
fascinating account of the new Christian religion’s birth, struggle to realize
its purpose, and live out the life message of Jesus on the earth.
I hope
that the above is helpful to an understanding of some of the beliefs of
Christians, as I see them, since I don’t speak for all Christians. I am
happy to answer any questions you may have, if I can, but I am not a
theologian, just a sincere follower of Christ.
Danny
C. Wash
