Modern society has become spiritually energized, but invests that energy in everything BUT the Biblical Jesus.  Anything goes in this modern cafeteria of spirituality, EXCEPT guess who?

The world is for the most part suffering from Biblical illiteracy.  The average person has no idea what the Bible says.  There is no understanding about how the Bible was written and no understanding of its reliability.  Instead, myths have been promoted and accepted about the Bible:

1.  It has been changed
2.  It was written by men with an agenda, who were less than truthful and accurate.
3.  The Bible is not authoritative.
4.  The Bible is just a book of nice ideas that we can pick and choose from to make any point we want to make.

Unfortunately, many professing Christians are equally ignorant of Biblical facts.   Many refuse to accept it as the absolute word of God, that reveals Him as he is and who he is.   Modern Christians like to pick and chose what they believe about their faith and they actually make God up as they go -  relying on their feelings rather than Biblical truth.

The reason the Bible and the Biblical Jesus is resisted is because human beings are rebellious and the Bible clearly teaches that the rebellious will never enter God’s kingdom or his presence.  The moment that a rebellious heart acknowledges the authority of the Bible and the truth presented there about the Biblical Jesus, the smell of spiritual death begins to rise in their nostrils.  Denying the authenticity of the Bible creates a license to continue in rebellion and avoid conviction about their true spiritual condition (spiritually dead to God in their sin).

The authenticity of the scripture and the historical truth about the Biblical Jesus is available for any honest person seeking truth to pursue.  Unfortunately, far too many really don’t want to know the truth, so they accept false allegations and misleading charges about the Bible and about Jesus.

Over 90% of the people who have ever been born on this earth are alive today.  The vast majority are spiritually lost and will be so eternally, unless they come to know and accept  the Biblical Jesus.

Let’s say this hypothetical child has been fearful, angry and selfish his entire life to the extent that his behavior has polluted our entire family.  His selfishness over the years spread among his brothers and sisters to the extent that they became fearful, angry and defensive too.  There seemed to be no end to the strife and anguish they caused each other as the years passed.  Their inability to love one another finally reached such proportions that they began to blame me (their father)  for all of their difficulties.  They became ungrateful for the things I had given them and rejected all that I had tried to teach them.  They eventually became convinced that I was the reason for their unhappiness and began to curse me.

 Even as my children hurt one another and curse and blame me for their unhappiness I still love them.  They are unaware of what drives them to be what they are and do what they do.  In one sense, I can see why they would think their condition is not their fault, but it results from their free will and the choices they make every day.  They fact that they want to deny responsibility for their condition does not change them from being the way they are. 

 I love my children but my wrath against them is just and is based in the truth.  My judgment is that I will not leave them an inheritance I know would be wasted and abused because of their selfish, fearful nature.  But my wrath is not directed personally against my children.  My wrath is against the evil fear and selfishness that drives them to hurt each other and me.  My heart goes out to them in their condition, but justice requires me to judge them unworthy of an inheritance and to cut them off.

 If righteousness and love are the foundation of God’s character, justice must proceed out of that condition.  Perfect righteousness and perfect love produce perfect objectivity and the twisting of truth is impossible under those conditions.  Perfect objectivity that erupts from righteousness and love must support truth in every case.  Upholding truth is justice, and if justice is fostered out of perfect righteousness and love, then God’s justice is perfect too.

The final result of love, righteousness and justice is judgment.  Without judgment there can be no justice.  And without justice, righteousness and love cannot be preserved.  All of this creates a problem for humanity, because the Bible reveals that eternity itself is rooted and sustained by God’s perfect righteousness and endless love.  The perfect righteousness of God cannot tolerate unrighteousness in His presence or in the eternity He occupies.

Out of His perfect righteousness and love, which is fearless and unselfish, God has justly judged that unrighteousness will not be allowed to pollute his eternity.  Since human beings are fearful and selfish it means we are unrighteous.  Our unrighteousness bars us from being in God’s eternal kingdom.  This is a hard judgment for people to accept but it is the price of failing to achieve perfection.

The bottom line issue is that human beings are inherently selfish and God is not.  Selfishness is the root of the human problem and is the source of our unrighteousness.  Conversely, perfect righteousness is produced from a condition of being perfectly unselfish.  This requires a bit more explanation.

The Bible clearly establishes righteousness as the foundational characteristic of God’s nature, and also describes God as love.  Human beings tend to interpret these words in a way that makes it difficult to develop an understanding of their close relationship.  Most of us equate love to the feelings we experience in our relationships with the opposite sex and we think righteousness is all about how we behave and the things we do. 

But love is really about selflessness and righteousness has much to do with our deepest motives and thought.  Now we can begin to understand how love and righteousness are joined together.

 Fear and concern for self, which is a characteristic of every human being walking the face of this earth, produces emotions that detract from our honesty with others and ourselves.  As long as that condition is a reality we will demonstrate selfishness and will probably do some “unrighteous” things along the way.  The only way Iwe might avoid being unrighteous is to be perfectly unselfish and be absolutely fearless.  That kind of perfection as a result of human effort isan impossible goal to achieve.

We (human beings) justify our lives within our own experience, and evaluate our behavior in accordance with our own ideas of right and wrong.    If we only think of righteousness in human terms, it will never accurately line up with the righteousness of God.  Human standards of righteousness are usually related to whatever we think constitutes acceptable behavior.

If the defectiveness of one person is greater than that of another, we conclude the person with fewer defects is more righteous.  When we compare the specific defects we find everyone has them, and we tend to discount their serious nature unless they have produced some obviously extreme behavior, such as a criminal act.  Because of this, humans cannot establish a perfect standard of righteousness.  Human standards will fluctuate with individual fears, opinions, cultures, and situational issues.  However, the righteousness of God does not vary and is based in perfection.

When you see the righteousness word in the Bible as it is attributed to God, it is usually describing God’s character, or His nature, or His actions, or His attitude.  And, you usually find it used in conjunction with three other words: love, justice and judgment.  Of the three, the most difficult word for me to associate with righteousness was love.  The two did not seem to fit together.  However, understanding righteousness unlocks the door to eternity for humanity.

The Bible repeatedly states that God is righteous and  God is love.  God is also just and  righteous – meaning that he is loving and just in all of His judgments.  Indeed, of these four words (righteousness, love, justice and judgment) two of them go right to the heart of God’s revelation of Himself to the world.  The two words are righteousness and love.  They are bound up together almost as if they are one.  Righteousness and love describe God’s personage, His heart, His essence, His throne, His Kingdom, and His eternity.  In fact, God’s foundational nature is characterized by righteousness and love.

The Bible states that we must attain the same righteous perfection to enter eternity with God.  It also says we can’t attain righteousness by our own efforts or works.   It can only be acquired by “faith”.

In the history of the Jews the nature of man’s relationship to God is totally exposed.  Human beings are left without defense before the awesome, transcendent God who claims to be the author of life itself.  In the sin revelation, the message is clear that the best efforts of man are not enough to achieve righteousness or please this holy God.

Sin may be the most hated word in the history of the human race, and one of the most misunderstood in our modern day.  Many have come to believe there is no such thing, and if there is, it does not present any problem for them in their relationship with God.

No human being in their right mind would have voluntarily created such a religious doctrine out of their own thinking, because they would have created an  impossible problem to overcome by their own effort.  In the Old Testament Bible revelation man always fails and no solution is provided that will produce a permanent, peaceful relationship with God.  Man is portrayed as dust and beyond hope.

Man on his own would never have written it that way.  Man would have created a theology by which he can triumph and appease God, thus fulfilling his dreams and desires.  We do not see this as it is revealed in the history of the Hebrew people.  We see sin, death and judgment.  Man’s desire is to embrace ideas and concepts that will produce the results he wants.  The things that man wants are found in naturalistic concepts of deity, and in bizarre idealistic theories.  That fact indicates  naturalistic religions are primarily functions of human thought, no matter how convincing the human explanations may sound.

The concept of sin is a foundational difference between the revelation of the Hebrew God, and the god-concepts of other religions.  The uniqueness of the Hebrew revelation is in a personal God, and the revealed nature of sin which other theologies and secular ideas do not embrace.  Sin is a hated concept and humans want to reject it as truth.

The doctrine of Sin indicates that man is a dead duck.  The only way a person who thinks they are alive can come to understand that they are really dead, is by revelation.  Because we are talking about spiritual death, it is a hard concept to grasp in a biological brain that thinks it is alive.

Moses and his two-million destitute people departed Egypt and lived in the Sinai desert with no visible means of support for forty years.  During this period, God gave the timid sheep-herder the Ten Commandments and a detailed system of orderly living that essentially survives among Orthodox Jews to this very day and serves as the basis for common law throughout the world.  This is no small accomplishment in any age and ranks as one of the most astounding facts in the history of mankind.  If someone led two million people into a desert today, how long could they survive?  A huge UN relief program would probably have to be organized to save them.

After Moses and his people wandered around in the desert for forty years, his rag-tag outfit eventually moved into the land of Canaan and subdued established cultures living in fortified cities with virtually nothing in the way of armament that compared with their enemies defenses.  Yet, they somehow succeeded.  The only thing they had going for them was God.

A Stormy Relationship

The rest of the story is of a people struggling with and against their God.  At times they experienced great highs and amazing national success.  More often, they were involved in corruption and rebellion.  About 800 B.C., individuals began to appear who were called prophets.  Though he was not labeled as such, Moses was actually the first prophet.  He had warned those who were in the desert with him of what the future history of Abraham’s people would be.

Moses’ warnings were periodically ignored or forgotten by subsequent generations and their descendants also discounted the messages spoken by later prophets who were sent to them.  These prophets claimed to be uttering the very words of God to this stubborn people and predicted their future fate if they continued to ignore the commands of their God.  The warnings were quite specific and the news was not good.  The prophets told them what would happen and who would cause it to happen.  Every bit of what was prophesied happened.

Because Abraham’s descendants persisted in ignoring God, time and time again they were conquered by other nations and carried away into foreign lands.  But God always preserved a remnant and continued to nurture and develop them as a people.

Abraham’s descendants were restored as a recognized nation in their ancestral homeland of Israel in 1948, and to this day, their national existence is continually threatened by the hostile nations that surround them.  Yet, they continue to survive.

The revelation in the Old Testament is of a transcendent, personal God, who literally created this people from nothing and owned them body and soul.  Creating something from nothing is a characteristic of this God.  He relentlessly pursued this people as they fell away time after time.  They were truly a people He had called to be His possession, and He expected them to respond accordingly.  They rarely did.

In the midst of this sprawling epoch that reminds one of a bad marriage taken to the extreme, there appear great shafts of spiritual light that burst on the scene in various forms.  Revelations concerning the holiness and righteousness of God abound from beginning to end, as well as, the revelation of the nature of sin.  In these revelations, God clearly claims to be the author of life, perfection, goodness, love, and the absolute owner of eternity and time.

At center stage of the entire Bible revelation is a striking theme positioned at the heart and soul of these people.  This theme is built around prophecy that the day would come when God would raise up a deliverer for His people and he would be their king.  In these prophecies, the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus is foretold, hundreds of years in advance of his appearance, down to the last detail.  The prophecies indicated this king would come into the world for the purpose of redeeming mankind from sin and to make them righteous.

Eventually, God told Abraham that through his descendants He would create a nation of people who would be His people, and through them God would reveal Himself to the world.  At that time Abraham had no children and no prospects of having any.  He was very old and his wife, Sarah, was considered well beyond childbearing years.  From a human perspective, the probability of Abraham’s descendants becoming a nation was very unlikely, especially since God had sent him to a strange land.  But Abraham believed God and went where he was told to go.  It was at this point in time that God introduced the principle of faith.  God declared Abraham righteous because he believed God would do what He said.

When Abraham was well into his ninety’s, he had a son named Isaac, and Isaac produced a son named Jacob.  Jacob had twelve sons.  Two generations removed from Abraham, Jacob’s boys were busy marrying the daughters of the Canaanites and were well on their way to being absorbed into the local Canaanite community.  But that is not what happened.  If another generation had passed without some means to hold them together, Hebrew history would have come to a screeching halt.

One of Jacob’s sons was named Joseph and he was somewhat of an irritant to his eleven brothers.  Joseph was his father’s favored son and they were jealous of him.  So one day, when Joseph was still a teenager, his brothers sold him to a passing slave caravan and explained his absence to their father by saying Joseph had been attacked and eaten by an “evil beast.”

Though he was a slave, Joseph eventually became the number-one man of the Egyptian Pharaoh and through some rather miraculous circumstances he wound up managing the entire Egyptian government.  When a famine struck the middle-east, Jacob’s sons went to Egypt in search of food and the brothers were amazed to find Joseph in charge.  To shorten the story, Jacob, his sons and their wives all moved to Egypt.  There were about seventy in the immediate family at the time and Joseph arranged for them to live in a segregated portion of the land, a factor that kept the Hebrew people from assimilating with the Egyptians.

Four-hundred-and-thirty years passed and Abraham’s descendants had multiplied to number nearly two-million, enough to be called a nation.  However, during this time period all of them had become slaves of the Egyptians.  Though their circumstances were not pleasant, God managed to create a situation that held Abraham’s descendants together long enough to give them their own, distinct, cultural identity.

The ability of many to see the truths of the Bible has been restricted by a sensed obligation to view the Bible as a science book first and a spiritual book second.  However, if the Bible was a science book and spelled out the specifics of all science, and had revealed those specifics in the age it was written, it would have been rejected as lunacy.

The Bible reveals the details of the relationship between God and man.  That is its purpose, and that is what it does.  Some people do not like the news.  To deny the truth of the Bible, they insist it should be a science book first.  In truth, the Bible does pass the test of science, if the possibility of the supernatural is permitted a place in the discussion.  To deny the possibility of the supernatural is the ultimate presupposition and may even be irrational in view of the likelihood that the entire physical universe is probably the result of a supernatural act.  There is no factual basis for denying the reality or the possibility of supernatural activity in the natural world.  The writings of the Hebrews indicate supernatural events are a part of the history of humanity.  The existence of the Hebrew people is living proof of that fact.