For Further Reading
14
Why Faith in Jesus Matters
Mark Mittelberg
Everybody has faith.
It’s true! Every person you know—including the one in the mirror—trusts something she believes in but which she can’t prove or know in an absolute sense.
The serious Buddhist lives as if the eightfold path of Buddhism will lead to spiritual enlightenment. He can’t prove that the tenets of his faith are sound, but he carries on in the hope that these are the right ideas that will lead to the best possible outcome.
The dedicated Hindu banks on the belief that reincarnation is real, and that through constant effort and faithful devotion, over many lifetimes, her bad karma can be worked off. She hopes this process leads to the point where she will finally be purified and find liberation from this illusory world of “maya.” She can’t prove it will happen, but she seeks to live as if it is true.
Devout Muslims try to live by the five pillars of Islam, believing that Allah is God, Muhammad is his prophet and the Qur’an is God’s holy book. They can’t know for certain that these things are true—there isn’t a way to personally verify them—but they live by faith that they are right.
Committed Christians, myself included, live in the trust that God exists and Jesus is who he claimed to be—the unique Son of God. We believe that his death on the cross was allowed by God to atone for our sins, Jesus paying the spiritual death penalty in our place. We’re convinced we have good reasons and evidence to conclude that these things are correct, and we stake our future on that trust. But it’s trust just the same; we don’t have absolute proof.
What about the casual Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or Christian who merely pays lip service to his particular faith system but largely ignores it in daily life? There are millions of these people too—and they’re living by faith that faith issues aren’t very important to live by. Even the person who casually says, “Oh, I never worry about things like that!” lives by faith that people need not concern themselves about these matters.
This might surprise you, but even atheists live by faith—including the so-called New Atheists. They operate in the belief that there is no Creator, no higher moral law to which they are accountable, no divine judgment and no afterlife. They can’t prove any of these things. They don’t know for a fact that there is no God, spiritual standard, day of reckoning or existence after death. In fact, most people in the world believe that denying these things goes against the evidence as well as human experience and therefore requires more faith.
I’ll say it again: everybody has faith—in something. So why am I arguing that we should put our faith in Jesus, and why am I so convinced that this is really important?
Great questions. Let’s start with the first one: Why trust in Jesus?
Why Trust in Jesus?
To begin, faith of any kind is only as good as what it is focused on. Trusting in a bridge over a canyon is beneficial only if the bridge being crossed is, in fact, trustworthy. Belief in a medication is helpful only if that medication is appropriate for the ailment and therefore beliefworthy. (Some medications help, some don’t do anything, and some can cause serious harm.) And faith in a philosophy or religious point of view is worthwhile only if that viewpoint is actually true and helpful, and thus “faithworthy.” So what makes Jesus more faithworthy than the other options?
Jesus had credentials like no other leader, teacher, philosopher or prophet, and these credentials give us solid reasons to trust in him. Let me put it in the terms of this book: God is great, God is good—and so is Jesus.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed the parallels, but in spite of his human nature, Jesus and his early followers gave strong evidence that he also exhibited the characteristics of God. Let’s look at a few examples, beginning with the area of greatness.[1]
Part of God’s greatness is his infinite power—what theologians call omnipotence. Yet we see through the historical record that in the New Testament Jesus had the ability to take control of nature, calming fierce storms with simply a word. He was able to do the miraculous, from changing water into wine to walking on water itself. He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and sometimes even raised the dead to life. His ultimate show of power was when he came back from the grave himself on the third day after his brutal death by crucifixion.
Another aspect of God’s greatness is his infinite knowledge, or omniscience. But we see in Jesus, too, the ability to know people’s thoughts before they said a word—sometimes before they were even in his presence. He knew Judas would betray him, and when and where he would do it, and he predicted Peter’s unlikely denial of him before it happened. He also prophesied that he would suffer and that the “temple” of his body would be destroyed, but that he would raise it up again three days later. Further, he foresaw the demolition of the Jewish temple, the city of Jerusalem and the nation of Israel. All of this was fulfilled by the Roman Emperor Titus about four decades after Jesus said it would happen.
God is also described as eternal and beyond time—a claim Jesus made for himself when he told his religious opponents in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am.” They understood the immensity of this declaration—he was claiming to have preexisted the patriarch Abraham, who had lived some two thousand years before their time. More than that, they recognized that he was applying the biblical name for God—“I AM” from Exodus 3:14—to himself. In fact, they were so incensed about his claim of divinity that they accused him of blasphemy and picked up stones to kill him.
Notice, however, that Jesus never tried to correct or change their perceptions. He didn’t say: “Hold on, fellows, you’ve misunderstood what I was trying to communicate!” Rather, he reinforced his claims to deity when he said in John 10:30, “I and the Father are one”—and again they called it blasphemy and tried to stone him!
The writers of the New Testament, who walked and talked with Jesus (or who associated closely with those who did) and who knew for certain what he said and did, reinforced these claims. We see this throughout the Gospels, as well as in the letters to the churches. For example, the belief in Jesus’ eternal nature was underscored when the writer of Hebrews penned these classic words: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). And the apostle Paul taught Jesus’ deity clearly in many of his writings, including Colossians 1:15-16, where he declared Jesus “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.”
In fact, God’s power is demonstrated best in his act of creating the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1), and yet Jesus’ disciple John, in harmony with what Paul said in Colossians, states clearly in his Gospel that Jesus “was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (Jn 1:2-3). In other words, Jesus is eternal, and prior to his incarnation as a man he participated with the Father as a cocreator of the universe. (It’s from passages like this that we begin to understand the biblical doctrine of the Trinity—that there is one God who exists eternally in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.) The writer of Hebrews echoed these thoughts when he declared that God “has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe” (Heb 1:2).
Granted, we don’t see these characteristics of omnipotence, omniscience, eternality or divine creativity expressed in their fullest measure in Jesus. According to Philippians 2, that’s because Jesus, in the act of taking on human nature, temporarily let go of the equal position he had with the Father (Phil 2:6-7), and humbled himself by taking the form of a servant (Phil 2:7-8). In so doing he was not stripped of his divine attributes, but he willingly curtailed his expression of them, at least for a season. Thus we see him operating without fully accessing the knowledge and power that were inherently his, in order to complete his earthly mission. But even in this self-limited situation, we still see clear glimpses of his divine attributes peeking through—qualities and abilities not seen in any other religious leader before or since then.
More than just sharing the Father’s greatness, Jesus also exhibited divine goodness as well. So many religious leaders over the ages have talked in ways that made themselves look good, but then utterly failed to live up to their own rhetoric. The closer we look, the less impressive they appear. The moral microscope is not kind; even exceptional people manifest weakness and failure under close scrutiny.
That’s why it’s so amazing that nobody ever found fault with Jesus—for anything. That included his closest companions, who would have easily picked out any character flaws, moral or ethical inconsistencies, or old-fashioned human error and frailty. But nothing was reported in terms of moral defects or weakness—not even from Jesus’ own mother, who certainly would have known!
This is important not because a leader needs to be perfect in order to be followed but because Jesus repeatedly claimed to be the Son of God, meaning he uniquely shared the Father’s divine nature. If that claim was true, it would certainly require that he be sinless and without flaw.
Throughout the Gospels we see Jesus’ enemies trying to catch him doing something—anything—wrong. But even they were left quibbling over peripheral details, like whether Jesus kept certain obscure rules to the letter of the law. In the end, these opponents had to hire false witnesses to invent stories in order to try to accuse Jesus. Knowing as they did that none of it was true, you can imagine their frustration when at one point Jesus threw the reality of his sinless life back at them: “Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?” (Jn 8:46).
When it was all said and done, the only accusation that they could level against Jesus was the one mentioned earlier: blasphemy. And he would have been guilty as charged—had he not so clearly demonstrated through his moral goodness, supernatural power, divine insights and clear teachings that we was, in fact, the Son of God.
Jesus was also consistently loving, patient and kind to the people he encountered. He could be direct and challenging, but he always mixed in grace too. He was like the heavenly Father in every way, and he presented himself as one who could be followed with confidence. There never has been, nor will there ever be, another person like Jesus. He looks good from any distance. In fact, the closer you observe him, the more impressive he becomes.
We all have faith in something, so why not put your faith in the one who won’t disappoint, the one who demonstrated that he could be trusted? As we put it earlier, he is faithworthy.
We’ve responded to the first question, Why trust in Jesus? Now let’s turn to the second question, Why is faith in Jesus important?
Why Is Faith in Jesus Important?
Going back to the broader themes of this book, let me state part of the answer like this: God is great, God is good—but we’re neither. It seems that to the degree Jesus is similar to God, we are dissimilar.
Consider again God’s greatness. He is, as we have seen, incredibly powerful. We are by comparison puny. Think of those who are great by our standards: those with power, or those who have fame or money. Doesn’t wisdom (along with time) show us that these things are fleeting? Kings and rulers once considered great often fall to the very ones they had led. Politicians seen as rising stars can soon become the scorn of their own party—even of their entire nation. And those who abuse power are usually the ones whose defeat is the most dramatic. There’s even a popular phrase to describe this: the higher they climb, the harder they fall.
Fame? Pop stars who were the hottest tickets ten or twenty years ago are often forgotten or, worse yet, demeaned and ridiculed. Many leaders in entertainment, media, television and film look back and realize they were merely enjoying fifteen minutes of fame. Even those who get years of fame come to realize how empty it is; suicide seems to be at least as prevalent among celebrities as it is among ordinary folks. Notoriety doesn’t fix personal problems; it magnifies them. Thus fame often ends in infamy.
And wealth? It does not bring lasting joy, power or influence. It can bring a measure of happiness and satisfaction, but often the person ends up empty and alone. And even with the benefits it can offer, money can’t indefinitely forestall the inevitable onset of aging, weakness and death. As the saying goes, the one who dies with the most toys . . . still dies.
God also has unlimited knowledge and wisdom—but we have more questions than answers. For all of our learning we’re still trying to crack the code of how God put it all together in the first place. Fifteenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler is credited with saying that science is simply “thinking God’s thoughts after him”—and it’s apparent that even now we have a lot of catching up to do. The renowned astronomer Robert Jastrow famously wrote: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”[2]
In the New Testament, Paul summed up the situation powerfully: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength” (1 Cor 1:20, 25).
And there’s also no point in trying to compare our longevity with God’s eternality. God’s words in the Old Testament book of Isaiah make the contrast clear:
All men are like grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the LORD blows on them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God stands forever. (Is 40:6-8)
By whatever standard we measure human greatness, it falls far short of God’s incredible and infinite greatness. And need we even discuss our goodness compared to God’s? The history of our race is not pretty. Our track record is littered with examples of our constantly disregarding God’s commandments as well as our own consciences.
That was true in the distant past, but now things are getting better, right? With education, knowledge and modernization, we’re learning and moving further toward more excellent moral behavior, aren’t we? The short answer is no; education has not provided the progress we hoped for. In many ways, it has been the opposite. C. S. Lewis observed, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” Theodore Roosevelt noted that “a man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.” Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Great About Christianity, explains some of what we’ve seen in our purportedly enlightened modern era when he reports that “in the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. . . . [They] have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.”[3]
That hardly sounds like enlightenment or progress. But the problem is not just in the past, on the other side of the ocean or with some foreign regime. Local news today reveals murders, kidnappings, shootings, rapes and robberies. These things are becoming so common that most of us have a hard time paying attention to the frequent reports.
But let’s be really honest. These evils aren’t just “out there” in our communities. They’re in our workplaces, neighborhoods, families, and ultimately in our own minds and souls. The Hebrew prophet declared: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer 17:9 KJV). Jesus explained that the everyday sin of anger is really like murder; the commonplace sin of lust is actually like adultery. When we understand morality in that way, we begin to understand how pervasive the problem really is—in each of us. Even on our best days our thoughts are tainted and our motives mixed. British author G. K. Chesterton once replied to the question “What’s wrong with the world?” by simply and honestly saying: “I am.”
Contrast all of this to God’s goodness—what the Scriptures refer to as his holiness—and it’s clear that we fail to come anywhere close to his standards. In fact, the Bible says plainly: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). This is the bad news of the Christian message. As that passage explains a few verses earlier:
There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.
(Rom 3:10-12, quoting Ps 14:1-3; 53:1-3; Eccles 7:20)
The Bible adds even more sobering information a couple of pages later, where we’re warned that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). That’s the reality that ultimately makes faith in Jesus so important. It’s the realization that God is good, and we’re not. We fall far short of his moral standard and even rebel against it. We deserve punishment for our sins and failings, and the payment is spiritual death. This “death” means separation from God in a place of regret for all of eternity. And here’s the real killer: there’s nothing we can do about it. We owe a debt before God but have nothing in our moral bank account with which to pay it.
Thankfully there is also good news. He doesn’t want to leave us in our helpless, hopeless condition. We can explain it like this: God in his goodness still cares about us, and in his greatness God made a way for us—through Jesus.
The most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, tells us “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” God came to earth as one of us, in Jesus, not only to teach us what is right but also to die in our place. He was our substitute who came to pay for all that we had done wrong. “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23 states, but it goes on to say that “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (emphasis added).
Why is faith in Jesus so important? Because we so desperately need what he offers! In fact, Jesus himself, early in his ministry, sums up his mission in two statements: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost” (Lk 19:10)—namely, us! And “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28). That “ransom” was the payment he would make on the cross, when he died to cover our moral debt and pave the way for us to receive his forgiveness, his leadership and a relationship with God as his adopted son or daughter.
Jesus also warned us that there was no other payment, and no other religious leader, book or organization that could ultimately lead us back to God. “I am the way and the truth and the life,” he explained clearly. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). This can be a very unpopular message, but Jesus—the one with divine credentials—backed it up with his life—as well as his resurrection!
Yet it’s not enough to just know all of this. You can nod your head in agreement that God is great and God is good—and so is Jesus. You can even admit that you’re very unlike him, and that you fall short of his standards. This is an important first step, but biblically defined, faith entails more than a mere nodding of the head or the acknowledging of certain truths. It includes those things—we must start by understanding and agreeing with the right ideas—but then we must respond to them.
Think of it in terms of flying. It’s not enough to just believe in aviation, to spend time in airports, to affirm the skills of airline pilots. No, that will not get you to Pittsburgh. You need to act on those beliefs by actually climbing on board an airplane. That’s real faith, and it can get you where you want to go.
Likewise, John 1:12 says, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” Yes, we need to believe the truth about Jesus, but we also need to personally receive him. Genuine faith in Jesus entails both elements.
This book may have convinced you that God exists. Or maybe you already believed in him, but it has helped you to better understand his greatness and goodness. And perhaps this chapter has given you a stronger appreciation of the shared nature of Jesus and the Father. If so, that’s wonderful. But it’s not enough. It would be a tragedy if the only impact of this book was to help you become a more astute theist or a better educated theologian. Some of the most miserable people in the world are religious men and women who fill their heads with information but don’t let it affect what they do or who they become. Contrasted to that, Jesus said he came so that we “may have life, and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10, emphasis added).
Saul was one of the most religiously zealous people to ever walk the planet, but his heart was full of poison as he sought to destroy God’s work among the early Christians. Saul became famous for his persecution of the church, including his support of the murder of one of its first leaders, Stephen (Acts 6—8). It wasn’t until Saul finally met the risen Jesus, and understood and embraced the grace of God that was paid for by Jesus’ death on the cross, that Saul found real life. Today we know him as the apostle Paul, the man who took the message of God’s grace to the ends of the earth.
As Saul, or Paul, later looked back over his life he summed it up by saying this:
Everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith. (Phil 3:8-9 NLT).
That’s why faith in Jesus matters so much! In a sense, Paul’s story is also my own story—and it can be your story, too, if you’ll climb on board with Christ by responding to him in faith. I hope and pray that you will. The God who is great and the God who is good is ready and waiting for you to come home to him.
For Further Reading
Bowman, Robert, and J. Ed Komoszewski. Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2007.
Evans, Craig A. Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2006.
McDowell, Josh, and Sean McDowell. More Than a Carpenter, rev. ed. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2009.
Mittelberg, Mark. Choosing Your Faith . . . in a World of Spiritual Options. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2008.
———. Faith Path: Helping Friends Find Their Way to Christ, DVD and Workbook. Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009.
———, ed. Choosing Your Faith New Testament. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 2008.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.
———. The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000.