The Reality of the Cross

Earlier this week at our weekly Bible study I was challenged by a friend who related an idea he had read in Tim Keller's The Reason For God. The basic concept is whether one considers God to be a concept or a reality. 

As a concept, God is something to be argued, something to be proved logically, a worldview. You can play with a concept and make it fit your life or meet your needs or ends. A concept is something that supplements existing concepts. 

A reality, in this definition, is the presupposition to all further discussion. While concepts can be interpreted according to my needs and desires, a reality is the interpreting norm for all thought and discussion. Gravity is a reality; you don't just think about it abstractly. It determines how you live. 

This dichotomy has helped me as I think about something a friend I met in China said to me about evangelism and missions. He found it troubling that so often, people who share the Gospel with their friends, by how they go about sharing and what they make out to be most important as they talk about (or live out) Christianity, give the impression that Christianity is, at its core, about accenting to a certain worldview. If someone will say the earth was made in six literal days, oppose abortion, and say something another about Jesus being God, then many evangelists think that their task of sharing the Gospel has been fruitful. Far too often we present a concept rather than a reality. 

There's a certain allure to such a method of evangelism—and I know I can fall into it. If you share a concept, there is more wiggle room to avoid being thought of as intellectually inferior or foolish. It's possible to avoid the offense of the Gospel if you're sharing what amounts to bland unitarianism. 

Instead, my friend told me, share the knowledge of Jesus. What saves? It is not acknowledging that there is one God—the demons believe that, and tremble. It is not holding ethical stances on moral issues, though the Prophets (among other texts) make it clear that such things are important to God. It is not religious appearances. Transformation and salvation comes through Jesus Christ, through knowing him, through regeneration by his blood, and life in the Spirit. 

If someone thinks that what they've heard about Jesus can fold neatly into how they already live, they have not heard the Gospel. It is the purpose of the Church to unashamedly share the reality of Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and coming again. The cross changes everything. Not just individual lives, but the whole course of history. A Christian is one whose life has been so transformed by knowing Jesus that the Jesus' death and resurrection is the pivot around which his entire life is oriented. Pray, then, that God would allow his Gospel to be heard not as a concept but as a reality.