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.

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.

In their defense, these Bible critics are forced into taking these positions if they hope to continue their careers as critics.  The prophetic record of the Bible is astounding.  The position of prophecy in revelation is critical, because the prophecies are always fulfilled down to the last detail.  As a matter of fact, it is the unfailing fulfillment of the prophecies that creates suspicion in the minds of the critics, and causes them to look for other explanations.  They just do not believe such a thing is possible, over and over again, without error.

The unfailing accuracy of Bible prophecy should not be difficult to accept as truth, if the capabilities of the God who owns and occupies eternity are properly understood.  If God fully occupies eternity, it means that God is omnipresent.  He sees past, present and future as the same.  And if God is purposely revealing Himself to people in the natural world, it is a safe assumption that He might speak directly to a few of them.

Pure eternal existence transcends time and must be aware of every instant within time.  Every instant includes what we call the past, present and the future.  If God is really God, why do we think it would be impossible for Him to tell a few people what was going to happen in the future?  It may be that I have become too gullible and simple-minded about this issue, but I just do not think prophecy is a very big deal for God to accomplish.  I am referring to the same God who created all we can see out of nothing and has produced at least one instance of the bodily resurrection of a dead man.  Is prophecy considered to be more than He can handle?

It is harder for me to believe the critics than to believe God is incapable of doing what the Bible reports He did.

1. It would reveal things we could not otherwise know.
2. It would be somewhat of a surprise.
3. It would line up with certain observable facts.
4. It would not conflict with itself, or be deceptive.

The first point is obvious.  If we have the ability to know something as a result of our own effort, a revelation would not be required.  Theoretically, humanity has demonstrated a progressive ability to uncover the mysteries of the natural world.  What we need is information that is beyond the natural world.  The revelation we seek would provide that information.

Regarding point number two, the nature of information we could not otherwise know would obviously be unexpected and would probably surprise us, especially if the information revealed was something we did not like.  Truth in its most transcendent form cannot be controlled, changed or manipulated to be what we would prefer it to be.  It would just be the way it is.

The third point is based on the idea that there would be historical evidence to support the revelation, and facts reported would be verifiable in one way or another.  This is necessary because any revelation given would require involvement of the revelator, with the object of the revelation.  The revelator would have to be God, and the recipient of the revelation man, who lives in a time-based, event-oriented existence.  Any true revelation must involve history, because the revelation would have to take place in the natural world in the form of events.

The last item, which prohibits contradiction or deception, presupposes the revelation would be the truth.  The supernatural occupant of eternity could have no possible motive to lie, because, there would be nothing to be gained by deception.  If you own eternity it is hard to improve on that.

These four characteristics of revelation also give us an idea of the subject matter we might expect in a revelation.  The primary information we need is that which would tell us about God, the eternity He occupies, and our relationship to both.  Man has demonstrated the ability to find out just about everything, but the nature of God and Man’s relationship to God is unknowable without revelation.  The Hebrewwritings (the old testament of the Bible ) meet all four of these requirements.  No other alleged revelations can pass this test.  They invariably fail at points three and four.  They conflict, or do not line up with observable facts.

The history of the Hebrews begins with one man named Abraham.  God told Abraham He would create a nation of people through him and his descendants for a specific purpose.  He told Abraham He would reveal Himself to mankind through them.  The bottom line is that God did what He said He would do and that is the reason these people continue to exist to this day.

To have a feel for the miracle these people represent it might help to construct a comparative situation:  Let’s say I get up one morning and decide to pack up my belongings and move to Mexico.  Mexico is already occupied by Mexicans and I will be just one more new face in the population.  What is the possibility of my starting a family there and my descendants becoming a distinct, cohesive nation of people over a long period of time?  I think the odds against such an occurrence are astronomical.

Within twenty years, my family would be speaking Spanish and all my children would be married to Mexicans.  Within fifty years, the fact that I had moved there from America would be a vague recollection among my great-grand-children.  Within one-hundred years, my name and identity would no longer be a part of family discussions, and few would even suspect there was a time when they were not Mexicans.  My descendants and heirs would become part of the Mexican culture and they would continue to be Mexicans until one or more of them decided to leave Mexico and go somewhere else.

In the history of the world, nations of people are established politically and geographically.  When the politics and governments change, or the geographical homes of nations are altered, the identity of the people eventually takes on whatever the political and cultural order creates.  There is one exception in history to this fact:  The Hebrews.  Their writings indicate they are the personal property of the supernatural owner of eternity and every human attempt to eliminate them as a people has failed.  The Hebrew scriptures constitute the original revelation of a transcendent, personal, eternal God, and from these ancient writings Christianity was spawned.

It is reasonable to believe that such a revelation happened, because that is the only means by which we can know the truth.  Jesus said the desire of God is for us to know the truth.  But the life of Jesus is the culmination point of a broader revelation that began many hundreds of years before his birth.  That revelation is found in the writings of the ancient Hebrew people.  It is the only revelation of this type to be found in the history of humanity.  There are no others.  Only one word begins to describe the existence of the Hebrew people and that word is supernatural.

There are a few awkward problems but it works.  At this point I have made an educated guess about the nature of the machine and I am getting results, although they are not perfect.  About six months later a friend drops by as I am loading some clothes into the machine and inquires about my objective.  I report that I am about to wash some clothes.  Then, my friend tells me the machine is a dishwasher.  At that point I have experienced a revelation.

In this silly little example we can find some truth.  I was not ignorant in assuming the dishwasher was for clothing.  I made a careful study of the machine, observing its parts and characteristics.  The conclusion I reached was validated by the fact that my clothes came out cleaner than when they went in.  I assumed I was correct because it worked reasonably well.

The point is this:  The mere fact that something appears to work does not necessarily mean it is the truth.  It only means it appears to work.  It took a revelation from my friend to get me straightened out and allow me to properly use the machine.  The truth about the machine transcended what I believed about the machine.  Even though it worked reasonably well for washing clothes, it was still a dishwasher.

Man made religions arise out of human evaluations of the natural world and reach flawed conclusions.  Authenticated, supernatural revelation provides true information about the nature of God and His eternity.  Jesus came to describe the dishwasher!