The Message of Hope
Across the world, and throughout human history, people have posed similar questions: Who am I? How do I fit in? Why am I here? Is there more to life? Is there a God? Is there something else when I die? These enduring human questions have been addressed by religion; whether helpfully or not is another matter. The point is that many and diverse answers have been postulated. Christian faith itself has been subjected to religious treatment; it has been complicated and adulterated with the effect of obscuring the clear, pure message declared within the New Testament part of the Bible - a message that answers all of those perennial human questions. So what is this message?
We actually find it summarised rather well in a verse from the older part of the Bible, from within the book of the prophet Isaiah. Inspired by the Spirit of God, Isaiah wrote:
We are all like sheep that have wandered off and become lost; we’ve all done our own thing and gone our own way .....
This is what God says about you and me - we humans are off course. That is, we have strayed from God and his intentions for us. Instead of living in the way that pleases him, we have lived to please ourselves. This is the condition that we find ourselves in - the Bible uses the metaphor of being ‘lost’, just like the sheep who has wandered off. However there is more to our predicament than this. We are disorientated, but we are also estranged from God because of the choices that we have made. These have corrupted us, spoiled us, and created a barrier to our having any relationship with God.
But then comes the second part of the verse from Isaiah:
And God has piled all of our sins, everything that we have done wrong, on him.
Who is the ‘him’ that is referred to here? The answer is the promised saviour that Isaiah had been writing about just before this particular verse - the saviour whose birth we celebrate at Christmas - Jesus. Jesus was to take upon himself all of the guilt and shame of our wrongdoing, all of our sin, carrying this to his own death in our place. This is the event that we remember at Easter, specifically on ‘Good’ Friday. And in essence, this is the ‘good’ news that Christians refer to as the ‘gospel’. Jesus made a way for the restoration of a relationship with God. It is through this restoration, which is freely available to each one of us, that we have the opportunity of a new life. This means a new start - the slate wiped clean - and a new way of living, free from guilt and shame.
God holds his hand out to you, inviting you to come to know Him and to live in relationship with him. This involves starting afresh on a new trajectory, walking a different path to the past, and allowing God to lead and guide you for the future. Is this good news, or what?
Now, you may have lots of questions, which is why I wrote the book The Viewing: an Outside-In view of Essential Christianity. If you would like to have answers then please obtain a copy of the book, which will also explain how to begin on a new relationship with God. However, if you would like to understand right now how you can come to know God for yourself, then click on the ‘Next’ button.