In the debris of the ruin of ancient empires we find a priceless gem of indescribable beauty—the New Testament Good News. It once saved civilization from suicide.
Most of the problem that plagues the world centers in the inherent evil of human nature. Somehow it manipulates society and individuals to choose the selfish way. Hence the horrors we face such as the drug culture, corruption, crime, war—a threatening of global ruin.
Admittedly, light is stronger than darkness, but is it also true that good is stronger than evil? Can love possibly triumph over hatred? (For example, can the Middle East ever learn to love? Can cocaine billionaires be converted?) Can good news overcome bad news?
Millions of troubled youth doubt it. They have a gut feeling that humanity's fate is doomed. If AIDS doesn't kill us off, depleting the ozone layer will. "Tomorrow we die," they say, and they give themselves to hedonistic indulgence today.
Their cynicism is at least rational. They know the world's resources could wipe out hunger and want, yet massive poverty mocks us. They sense that if other people's problems are incurable, someday their own will be the same. The 17th century John Donne exposes our true feelings which are perhaps unconscious but nonetheless significant:
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Not only are the youth troubled. Grandparents worry about what kind of a life they will bequeath to their grandchildren. As long as hunger and futility overwhelm the masses in the Third World (which now includes America's inner cities), security in our own world must become increasingly fragile. Can we remain forever a fortress of peaceful plenty in an ocean of resentful want? Must our grandchildren barricade their homes behind AK-47's?
In our own North America we face a disturbing disintegration of society. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson promised that the "days of the dole are numbered." Three decades and hundreds of billions of dollars later, where is the "Great Society"? The poor generally are poorer and the rich are richer.
While our poor are getting desperate, the well-to-do also find that the problems of coping take a lethal toll on the human psyche. Richard Reeves, writing for the Universal Press Syndicate, says that "a lot of us crack—defeated by drugs or alcohol, envy or mobility, our own devils or weakness----Is America going crazy?"
If America with all its money and think-tank capabilities can't solve its problems of drugs, crime, illiteracy, violence, and poverty, youth wonder what hope there is for the world itself. America's freedom example has been "the last, best hope of mankind." If this nation destroys itself, new Hitlers and Idi Amins will start blossoming everywhere.
Insight says that our crime-infested poverty has "assumed horrific dimensions in the cities." The progressive decay of the inner cities shocks those who remember only a few years back an era of civility and security. Vans in Harlem now pull up to the sidewalk to sell crack to a line of people 20 deep. "My worst dreams, my worst, were nowhere near this," says Shakoor Aljuwani of the Youth Action Construction Training Program. "I never thought it could ever have gotten this bad."
Why, with their eyes wide open, do human beings walk right into cocaine and other addictions? Something is dreadfully wrong, because these addictions are fundamentally suicide. Only a very sick species will destroy itself. Unless change comes soon, a conceivable scenario for the 21st century may be a polarized society—hideously massive prisons and hospitals for criminals, AIDS victims, and drug zombies, with "normal" people slaving full time to support them.
An ominous cloud on the not-too-distant horizon suggests the possible coming of a "born-again" Hitler who will yield to outraged public pressure and arrange a cheaper "final solution," this time for criminals, junkies, and miscellaneous undesirables. Nazism was the surfacing of a subterranean stream of collective dementia, perennially waiting for a crisis of popular wrath.
Some sober non-religious analysts now openly blame adolescent sex and marital infidelity as the root cause of our exploding poverty-crime-addiction syndrome. While solid marriages almost always lead to reasonable prosperity and order, single-parent families, with some exceptions, tend to gravitate toward deeper want.
Is It Hard to Believe in a God of Love?
Daniel Moynihan says broken families "ask for and get chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder ... are very near to inevitable." TV and movies propagate raw infidelity of every kind. It's the moral ferment that Jesus predicted for our days: "Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold" (Matthew 24:12, KJV). It waxes cold because people no longer believe in it.
"Iniquity" is lawlessness, an inner heart-rebellion against God's moral principles. If we find it hard to conceive of the existence of a righteous God, all we need to do is to start reasoning backward from the reality of evil: 'The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God" (Romans 8:7). The mystery of perverse human nature is sufficient to prove that the Bible is true because the reality of evil presupposes the existence of good, just as a shadow presupposes a light behind the obstruction.
Whether a person is religious or not, he or she can hardly deny that we have come to a time precisely delineated by Jesus when He said that "men's hearts [will be] failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth" (Luke 21:26). The better informed one is, the more he is haunted by the shadows of tomorrow.
But there is hope. As the daily news gets worse, there is Good News that gets better.
Our Dark Future Is Lighted
The Bible comes on stage with a breath-taking message of hope. It assures us there is a personal God, a Heavenly Father, a Creator-Saviour, who actually loves this "crazy," cruel, selfish, violent, immoral, devilish world.
This Good News outweighs all the bad news because He is the source of a love that is positive, active, and by its nature has to be effective.
The best-known words in many languages are these: "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). Most of us find it hard to hug a filthy, repulsive human being. God is hugging this planet to His heart, bad and dirty as it is. He is like a father embracing a prodigal son, taking the evil into Himself and purging it. This love is the most stupendous truth that mankind can contemplate.
This new idea astonished the sophisticated world of New Testament times. Probably as great a percentage of population then as now believed in a Supreme Being, but both Roman aristocrats and slaves found it incomprehensible that God actually cared for worthless humanity. If He did, how could He watch such injustices as slavery, political corruption, and the gladiatorial bloodshed in the Coliseum, and not do something?
Imagine the stir raised by the apostles when they insisted that God actually loves mean, selfish, cruel, bad people. Not that He loves their badness, but He loves them. "He loves slaves, gladiators, prostitutes, murderers, rapacious tax-collectors, cruel emperors?" asked the Romans. "Yes," said the apostles. "God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved" (Verse 17). This was a radical, revolutionary idea for people who had looked upon God as indifferently patronizing to good people and hateful to the evil ones.
But such an overturning of ancient values could never convince people unless solid evidence backed it up. The apostles must prove that they did not invent such a love from their own imagination. Evidence there was, and it was incontestable: when the Son of God was executed by cruel Roman soldiers, He did the unthinkable—He loved and prayed for His enemies, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do." (Luke 23:34)
No one could remember that anyone had ever before said anything like that. For all the world to see, Christ had demonstrated that "God is love," (1 John 4:8) a genuine kind that humanity could not fake. Now the world was on its way to being turned upside down. (Acts 17:6)
No creature from Mars could have aroused more astonishment than this new idea. A love that depends neither on the beauty of its object nor on its goodness? A love that not only loves ugly and mean people without value, but that actually creates value in them? When people heard about this, they demanded to know more.
The best thinkers of that day had praised the love of the Greek Alcestis for Admetus as the supreme revelation of divine goodness—she was willing to die for a good man. The apostles said no, that's not the real thing: "The proof of God's amazing love is this: that it was while we were sinners that Christ died for us . . ., while we were His enemies" (Romans 5:8,10, Phillips). Jews and Romans looked at one another in amazement.
If there was a God, the ancients imagined Him residing in lofty isolation, waiting for humans to seek Him out. Christ revealed Him in stark contrast as a personal Saviour "come to seek and to save that which was lost." (Luke 19:10)
The Practical Effect of This New Idea of Love
People who heard that News became delirious with joy. Now their humdrum existence suddenly took on precious meaning. Sorrow, disappointment, pain, even the endurance of slavery, and yes, martyrdom, became honored and sacred in the light of such a new revelation. Death lost its terror because Christ had robbed it of its sting (1 Corinthians 15:55-57). God Himself has come close to us, they said, taking upon Himself our nature, suffering with us, corporately becoming one with us! Every believing slave became a prince and every believing prince was ready to kneel down beside his slave.
There was no end to the ramifications of this astounding idea. By coming in the person of His Son, to seek that which was lost, God had done something that seemed incomprehensible. He had stepped down lower and lower into such dark levels of condescension that He reached a depth beyond which humiliation itself could not exist.
Those who heard the apostles saw a stairway, not leading from man up to God but steps He took in descending to the lowest level of our fallen humanity. Not only did He leave the angels behind and humble Himself in becoming a man, He was born in a filthy hovel where rude animals seek shelter. Then He lived a peasant life of menial service and hard work. At its end He chose to be obedient unto ultimate death, facing its horror head-on instead of trying to evade judgment as does the suicide.
And that was not all. What got people's minds swirling was the story that when this Son of God had been rejected by the leaders of His own people, they crucified Him as a criminal on a Roman cross. This meant, as everyone understood, that He endured the ultimate emotional distress of being rejected by God, for it was anciently believed that "he who is hanged [on a tree] is accursed of God" (Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13). (We will discuss this in chapter 6.)
The Son of God had suffered the equivalent of hell! He had sacrificed not only His life here and now, but His hopes for eternity. That kept men up all night thinking and talking about it. They grappled with the effort to "comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge" (Ephesians 3:18,19). He could not see His resurrection coming up.
In the process of contemplating this divine deed, a phenomenal life-changing power was unleashed. After forgetting your meals while you searched out this truth, you found yourself facing life as a new person. A different purpose for living now transcended pain or pleasure. Such love accomplished the impossible for high and low, rich and poor, free and slave: it released "those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage"(Hebrews 2:15). The common denominator lying beneath pain in all human sorrow had evaporated. Catch the thrill those people felt:
In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him… Love [agape] has been among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear. (1 John 4:9-18)
Christ's Resurrection Proved the Gospel True
And then to cap off the glorious Good News, this Son of God had risen from the dead on the third day after His ignominious execution. He had declared in triumph that He possessed the keys of death and the grave, so that all whose hearts appreciated the dimensions of His revolutionary love would triumph over death with Him. (Revelation 1:17,18)
The life-changing dynamics of this love are encapsulated in a priceless gem from Paul. He tells why and how those who believed this love found power in its Good News:
The love of Christ constraineth [motivates] us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again. (2 Corinthians 5:14,15, KJV)
At last a divine truth had penetrated the inmost defenses of our egocentric mindset. Like a heat-seeking missile it had sought the source of our me-first selfishness and annihilated it. Thus the root whence sprang all the bitter fruit of human evil had been eradicated by this humble sacrifice and glorious resurrection of Christ. Almost overnight believing human beings who had been mean, ugly, and cruel were transformed into loving, lovable people. And those on top of the heap who thought they had all that heart could wish discovered how empty worldly success is without Christ. The Good News had done it.
A New Testament document written by Paul supplies a partial list of the various categories of addiction-deliverance which this simple gospel accomplished. Believers had been former "fornicators," "idolaters," "adulterers," "homosexuals," "sodomites," "thieves," "covetous" (what we would call "shopaholics"), alcoholics, and embezzlers. "Such were some of you," says the apostle to the Corinthian congregation. But they experienced deliverance from those ingrown obsessions and became "washed" and "sanctified," new people. (See 1 Corinthians 6:9-11)
There was nothing these people did to achieve such exhilarating freedom from their psychic chains; they had seen something and believed it—the News of the atonement of the Son of God. In a world where selfish cruelty was as common as dirt, this revelation was a catharsis. In the previous thousands of years of history, no philosopher, playwright, poet, or priest, had ever imagined such astonishing ideas.
The Same Good News Is Powerful Today
That love of God for sinners is still the best News anyone will ever hear. It is positive, active, persistent, seeking, and therefore just as powerful today as it has ever been. No way can anyone ignore it. Either you believe it or you disbelieve it. No one can sit on the fence after hearing it truthfully proclaimed.
The most horrible evils our modern world knows stem from that same source of human selfishness as cursed the world of the apostles' day. Could that same News transform the cocaine merchants and their addicts, the prostitutes, the embezzlers, the racists, the murderers, the sensual materialists, of today? Millions of people say yes. Even more important, the Holy Spirit through the Bible says yes. It also transforms the wealthy and educated, the self-sufficient, hard-hearted tycoons, scientists, and politicians.
Three presuppositions make the truth of this unique love appear difficult to believe: (a) Since self-respecting people don't hug dirty, undeserving bad people, why should God do so? (b) How can an infinite God have feelings like we humans have? (c) If He really loves the world, why doesn't He prove it by doing something to halt its present slide to ruin?
Many assume that answers are impossible. Conventional wisdom indeed has none, but here is where the Bible takes the spotlight and refutes the doubts head-on.
We will consider these questions in the next chapter.