My Origin, My Destiny: Christianity's Basic "Value Proposition"

By D.C. Collier

According to Guinness World Records, there have been five billion copies of the Bible printed and distributed throughout the world, covering two-thirds of earths population. But with all that exposure, only a few Bible owners have actually read through its contents and fewer still have any idea of its life-enriching themes.

In spite of modern societys scientific advances, thoughtful people everywhere are still in search of lifes persistent great questions like:

Is there more to my life than meets the eye?

Why should I believe that God exists?

Is everything just a giant cosmic accident, including me?

Am I more than the sum of my parts? Who am I?

Is there a problem between me and God?

What can I do about it? Why bother?

Whats the big deal about Christianity?

This book humbly addresses these and other burning questions through the prism of the living, breathing, holy Bible. Along the way, you will be introduced to two of the most spiritually therapeutic truth streams that bubble across the Bibles pages. Whether you are a seeker or confirmed believer, these themes will literally revolutionize your understanding of the original, unembellished Christian faiththe faith that turned the then-known world upside down.

Do you want to be a truly fulfilled person? Here is authentic fulfillment: becoming the kind of person God created you to bea person who is fully alive, as Dallas Willard put it. C. S. Lewis wisely observed, Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither. Interested?

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781512766202

D.C. Collier

D. C. Collier is a Bible teacher, discipleship mentor and writer focused on Christian apologetics. He is a graduate mechanical engineer and has spent most his professional career in high technology, specializing in the computer data storage industry as a market analyst and publisher. In addition to his degree in mechanical engineering, he has done post-graduate studies in electronic control systems and industrial hydraulics. He founded an Internet financial publishing company and served as CEO for more than twenty years, and he was co-founder of an Internet web services company in the field of medical information services. He graduated in biblical studies at the Fairhaven Bible Discipleship Intern Training Program. He teaches Bible classes and serves as a spiritual mentor to men in the renowned Santa Barbara Rescue Mission’s men’s residential Addiction Recovery Treatment Program. He and his wife Ann reside in Santa Barbara, California.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 D.C. Collier.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-6621-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-6622-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-6620-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919473

WestBow Press rev. date: 12/1/2016

Contents

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Why This Book

Introduction

Old Time Religion Still Rocks

The Basic Premise of This Book

Chapter 1. Is Christianity Dying?

The Uniqueness of the Christian Faith

The Global Impact of Christianity

Why the Decline of Religion in Modern Societies?

Chapter 2. There’s A Party Going On!

Your Personal Invitation into the Mind of God

A Brand–New Deal, a New Covenant

Earthly Life is Uncertain. Big time.

Chapter 3. Man’s Cinderella Syndrome

Our Universal Identity Crisis

That Pesky Homing Instinct

So, Who Am I? No, Really.

Grasping the Bigger Picture

Chapter 4. God, Hiding in Plain Sight

The Great Mystery of Our Origins

An Atheist’s Worst Nightmare

Will the Real God Please Identify Himself?

Chapter 5. Salvation: Necessary or Optional?

The Problem That Salvation Addresses

The Definition of a True Christian

No Time for procrastination

My new position as a believer

Chapter 6. The Origin of Everything

Creation

Mankind

In God’s Image

Chapter 7. The First Adam Got It Wrong

Something is Wrong with This Picture

Adam 1.0, As Created

Adam 2.0, Sinned into Being

Last Adam Foreshadowed

Chapter 8. The Last Adam Did So Much Better

Approaching God

Messiah Foretold

Messiah Revealed

Chapter 9. Where This Leaves Us

Cosmic Challenges

Genetically Predisposed

God’s Righteous Protocol

The Global Predicament Created by Man’s Power of Choice

Chapter 10. Securing Your Eternal Destiny

The Gospel of Your Salvation

Saving Faith

Grace, Brother, Grace

What Exactly Saves Me?

Chapter 11. So, What Now?

Being a Disciple

Position Versus Practice

Getting into God’s Flow

About the Author

Appendix

Developing Your Devotional Life

Evidence for The Resurrection

Notes

Acknowledgments

T o my editor and dear friend, Shannon Wright, for faithfully completing this daunting but infinitely rewarding project. Her finely honed professional editing skills have been invaluable.

And to my eagle–eyed content reviewer, Mostyn Gale, for his painstaking scrutiny of the theological propositions in this volume, assuring adherence to evangelical orthodoxy and faithfulness to the plain sense of the biblical text.

Dedication

T o my faithful friend and spiritual mentor, Walter S. Bleecker. A dedicated man who patiently endured my perpetual shenanigans as a non–Christian running away from God.

I learned more from him about Christianity than all the Bible verses and churchgoing in the world could do at the time. He showed me what personal sacrifice, dogged determination, and love for others looked like—in the flesh. He found out about me through mutual friends, and he set about the daunting task of reaching me for Christ.

I was a heavy–drinking, rabble–rousing divorcé with no interest in God whatever. Walter traveled—uninvited—forty miles each way to my home in the San Francisco Bay Area on countless occasions, only to be avoided, shunned, or turned away at my doorstep. Each time, Walter faithfully dropped off materials, tapes, and Bible verses with absolutely no assurance that they would find their way into my hands. This went on for months, until I finally moved.

However, I never forgot that man. His memory haunted me, like the hounds of heaven. Then, over the subsequent twenty years, in a series of dramatic encounters, I came to faith in Christ. I went on to enter Bible School, followed by active ministry in a number of church settings—all without knowing what ever happened to Walter.

Then, in circumstances that could only be described as providential, I met a man named Alan Bleecker through our church in Santa Barbara—still not knowing that Alan was Walter’s son. One thing led to the other and Walter moved to Santa Barbara (of all places) and, through Alan, I had a highly emotional reunion with my heavenly hound. I thought sure I’d have to wait until I got to heaven to thank him, and there he was on my doorstep again, only this time I let him in for good.

In the subsequent two or three years, Walter and I met for some of the most invigorating and spirited discussions of my Christian life. He earnestly challenged me to go higher, reach deeper, and achieve more in my ministry. Before his passing in October 2014, I shared my vision for this book and, in one of our last meetings together, he inspired me to move forward without delay. I took that for the divine commission that it was. We have him to thank for this humble tome.

I just hope heaven has lots for Walter to do. A man like that needs to stay really, really busy.

Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness! Matthew 25:21

Why This Book

A spiritual memoir

A ccording to Guinness World Records, there have been five billion ¹ copies of the Bible printed and distributed throughout the world, covering two–thirds of earth’s population. But with all that exposure, only a few Bible owners have actually read through its contents and fewer still have any idea of its life–enriching themes.

Despite modern society’s scientific advances, thoughtful people everywhere are still in search of life’s persistent great questions like:

Is there more to life than meets the eye?

Why believe that God exists?

Is everything just a giant cosmic accident, including me?

Am I more than the sum of my parts? Who am I?

So what’s the problem between us and God?

How can we fix it? Why bother?

What’s the big deal about Christianity?

This book humbly addresses these and other burning questions through the prism of the living, breathing, holy Bible. Along the way, you will be introduced to two of the most spiritually therapeutic truth streams that bubble across the Bible’s pages. Whether you are a seeker or confirmed believer, these themes will literally revolutionize your understanding of the original, unembellished Christian faith—the faith that turned the then–known world upside down.

The first of these truth streams concerns the red cord that runs from Genesis (the Bible’s first book) to Revelation (its last book), which describes the one and only means of approach to God that assures acceptance into his life and kingdom. The second great truth stream is the story of God’s two Adams, spanning the entire sweep of human history. The Bible reveals that all of us enter life already in the First Adam through birth—our default position in which we have no choice. We then learn of an offer to be transplanted into the Bible’s Last Adam, through spiritual rebirth—a conscious intentional act of faith toward Christ. Our eternal destinies hinge upon which of these two Adams we are connected to when our brief lives on earth come to an end. Nowhere has the subject of our roots had more profound implications—thus, our book title, My Origin, My Destiny.

This book is a culmination of my lifelong search for absolute truth about life, death, and the hereafter—something of a spiritual memoir, containing my most cherished insights collected from renowned Bible scholars over the course of my admittedly bumpy spiritual pilgrimage. I am deeply indebted to clergyman, scholar, and author Eugene H. Peterson and his brilliant translation of the Holy Bible, The Message, which we have liberally quoted throughout this book. Peterson discussed the reason that he wrote The Message:

While I was teaching a class on Galatians, I began to realize that the adults in my class weren’t feeling the vitality and directness that I sensed as I read and studied the New Testament in its original Greek. Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. I knew that the early readers of the New Testament were captured and engaged by these writings and I wanted my congregation to be impacted in the same way. I hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people: those who hadn’t read the Bible because it seemed too distant and irrelevant and those who had read the Bible so much that it had become old hat.

It is abundantly clear that matters of the spirit have experienced a seismic shift in recent times. As recently as fifty years ago, it was possible to have a relatively civil and respectful discussion with almost anyone concerning subjects like absolute truth, the person of God (or at least the notion of a creator), an ongoing supernatural immaterial realm of existence, the possibility of heaven, the reality of hell, and the expectation of eternal life. Such matters seemed to be at least tolerated as viable alternatives to the growing purely materialistic view of things.

In our overwhelmingly postmodern culture, such things have largely been dismissed as intellectual curiosities or have simply been banished to the land of myths, legends, and fairytales. After all, the thinking goes, if we are just evolved from lower life forms, what place do matters like God, salvation, sin, and eternal life have? If all we do is go poof in a few years anyway, why bother? Could the atheists be right? Is religion just a crutch to make sense of a meaningless existence? But then, if our existence is meaningless, how would we know it? We would have nothing to compare it with. C. S. Lewis made that point in his book, Mere Christianity:

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Furthermore (the thinking goes), who’s to say which religion is right, even if there is more to life than meets the eye? Aren’t Buddhists, Hindus, or New Age practitioners just as right as the more traditional Judeo–Christian crowd? Then what about Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Science adherents?

This book traces a path from the general biblical worldview to the specific subject of spiritual salvation. We open by challenging the myth that Christianity is dying out in our modern world. Then, on to describing the Bible’s assertion that there is a supernatural, invisible kingdom without end into which all are invited, requiring us to opt in or lose out. We contrast this eternal kingdom with our fleeting temporal existence, limited to the short span of our lifetimes. We reveal a cosmic identity theft that has been going on right under our noses, one which has robbed us of a true sense of who we are in God’s eyes—glorious beings destined for better things. We discuss why belief in God is the only rational explanation for all that exists and how this uncaused cause brought everything into existence as an expression of divine love and creative genius.

We then turn our attention to the second of the two main truth streams—God’s two Adams: The First Adam originating from the earth and the Last Adam emerging from heaven. And we explore why your eternal destiny is linked to one or the other of these Adams. In taking up the Last Adam, we discover the red cord, mentioned earlier in this section, that runs through scripture, clearly pointing to the singular divinely appointed way of approaching God. This is in response to the life–threatening human condition that stands squarely between us and the God who made us. Then, we turn our eyes to the broad uplands of God’s improbable, sweeping solution to this problem, having to do with the red cord. We close with how anyone can extract themselves from their roots predicament in the First Adam and can change family trees to forever alter their eternal prospects. Take these things seriously, and you will never be the same again!

Although I have had my share of formal biblical training, I am not a theologian per se. I’ve been down the dusty trail of formal religion and, despite valiant attempts, have come up empty–handed when it comes to real, life–altering insights. This tome is written in layman’s language with a minimum of theological jargon. As a degreed engineer and technology entrepreneur, I am not easily misled—I’m a trained skeptic. And yes, I can report that, once I finally surrendered to God’s winsome overtures and stopped trying to save myself, I had a direct encounter with the living Savior and can verify that the things of earth have grown strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace, as the lines of an old hymn put it.

As a teacher and mentor at the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission’s renowned residential addiction recovery program, I have observed the widespread confusion about religion’s practical role. This is no place for ecclesiastical pretense or theological wrangling. Men and women with nothing to show for their lives but broken relationships, legal disputes, and dim prospects for the future are facing life–destroying consequences if they continue in their addictions. This no–nonsense environment calls for nuts–and–bolts solutions. And I’ve seen firsthand what works for people struggling with self–defeating behaviors.

I’ve been exposed to and studied religions of every flavor and, while respecting their respective intentions, found all to be wanting in one critical respect. They lack eyewitness evidence and the verifiable return of someone who has crossed over into eternity through physical death and come back to tell about it. And that is exactly where the Christian faith parts company with its competitors. Scripture unashamedly asserts that Jesus Christ crossed over and came back to tell about it. Yes, many people claim to have had near–death experiences, complete with details about tunnels and white lights. But what about someone who was killed in a public execution witnessed by thousands, expertly embalmed, and buried in a sealed and guarded tomb—for three days?

I have come to cherish the words of an angelic eyewitness to this death and subsequent resurrection that occurred two thousand years ago: Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’²

If you are a seeker of truth, suspicious that there may be more to life than meets the eye, read on. From the start, you should know that this is no comparative religions textbook. For an analysis of the wider spiritual emporium out there, with its flavors of the day, you need to look elsewhere. I’m cutting to the chase and presenting, to the best of my ability, the base case for Christianity—largely stripped of confusing denominational distinctions. I have never been one to look elsewhere when the real thing is staring me right in the face. The Apostle Peter had the same thought when he uttered, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.³

Sooner or later, like it or not, we will all come face to face with the hereafter and the possibility of meeting up with our creator. So, I pose this question to you: What if you stepped out of your comfort zone before that fateful day arrives and take God up on his offer for a divine personal appointment? Suppose that encounter could usher in undreamed–of possibilities for you—possibilities that stretch out into eternity? What’s to lose? As Blaise Pascal said:

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Introduction

S o many religions. So many choices. Some of the nicest people I have ever known have been Buddhists. If life was a nice contest, they would win every time, hands down. I’ve also met some pretty cranky Christians. If life was a human merit and demerit contest, many of them would come in dead last. But the problem we have is not whether we are nice or cranky. The problem is at the level of our very natures as descendants of Adam and Eve. It’s not about our behavior (although our behavior demonstrates symptomatically the level of our problem), it’s about what makes us tick. We need a nature change, a complete species transformation so fundamental as to switch forever our relationship with God and, concurrently, to profoundly alter our eternal prospects. Being nice and behaving well is certainly commendable and, heaven knows, this brutish world could use more kindness. But, absent this spiritual transformation, our good behavior will only have made us better citizens of earth—we will remain completely unfit to be citizens of heaven.

Old Time Religion Still Rocks

There is a reason that Jesus Christ chose to use the now much–maligned term born again as the only way out of this cosmic dilemma. He was not given to excessive hyperbole. He picked his words carefully. Unless we get back to the state of our birth and start over, we’re eternally done for. The problem is solvable, but you must overcome any objections you may have about there being only one way. There is one problem, and only one way out of it. Here is a tantalizing clue to God’s ingenious plan of salvation from Chapter 7 of our book:

Adam and Eve disobeyed a direct order of God and ate of the Tree–of–Knowledge–of–Good–and–Evil. The resultant effects upon their formerly carefree lives were immediate and devastating. Among them were a searing sense of guilt and shame which drove them to fashion clothing out of fig leaves to cover up their nakedness. But then God comes along and instructs them to take off their makeshift coverings and to put on coverings that he provided from God’s own hands. The next thing they saw were blood soaked animal skins from freshly killed innocent creatures who, up that moment, were just minding their own business in the garden. Thus, the principle of substitution—the innocent for the guilty—was introduced in a garden that had never seen death before. We have every assurance from this that Adam and Eve are in heaven today because they had the good sense to accept these coverings from God and put them on—finally they listened to God and obeyed his instructions and were saved from their own misadventures.

This ancient story forms the heart and soul of the Christian faith. God’s means of redeeming the human race has never changed. It runs through the Bible from cover to cover. Please, read on…

_________________

The First Adam received life, the Last Adam is a life–giving Spirit. Physical life comes first, then spiritual—a firm base shaped from the earth, a final completion coming out of heaven. The First Man was made out of earth, and people since then are earthy; the Second Man was made out of heaven, and people now can be heavenly. In the same way that we’ve worked from our earthy origins, let’s embrace our heavenly ends.¹

_________________

Our title, My Origin, My Destiny, summarizes the most radical and yet least understood promises to mankind in the entire Bible: your eternal destiny is directly linked to your physical and spiritual origins—that is, to your genetic heritage all the way back in time.

In the physical world, we have no control over our origins (our parentage, place of birth, or social status, for example). As recently as two centuries ago, even in advanced cultures, people’s origins pretty much defined their destinies, absent the extremely unlikely intervention by a member of a higher class legally adopting them. In England, if you were born of a coal miner, you were destined to be a coal miner; if you were born of landed gentry, your future was correspondingly blessed with sociological, educational, and economical advantages that the lower classes could only dream of. In some parts of the world, antiquated caste systems of hereditary social stratification still seal the fate of hordes of low–born children to lives of indentured servitude to the day they die. Millions of children the world over are born into conditions of grinding poverty that perpetuate their parents’ disadvantaged status in life. Likewise, we descendants of Adam and Eve were born spiritually destitute and, absent divine intervention, will die that way.

But suppose there was a way to intervene in this otherwise determinative process to change origins and to produce an entirely different outcome. We’re not talking about the natural realm here but the much more important and longer lasting supernatural realm. Suppose God could intervene and adopt us into his family, placing us in line for unimagined blessings. Suppose he could remove us from one family tree and transplant us into another—from low–born to blue blood in a single stroke.

Scripture divides all mankind into two spiritual species—either you are, from a positional standpoint, in the First Adam, or you are in the Last Adam. The stakes are high in this. If I choose to live my entire life in the First Adam, the condition of my natural birth, the eventual eternal outcome will be spiritual shipwreck. If, however, I choose to accept God’s offer to switch my spiritual origin so that I will be included in the Last Adam, the result of my supernatural rebirth, my eternal prospects become instantaneously and irreversibly transformed beyond my wildest dreams.

_________________

Today’s prevailing postmodern worldview stands in glaring opposition to the Bible’s unwavering focus on the preciousness of each individual person. Am I the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces, or am I the special creation of a good and all–powerful God, as Randy Alcorn put it? The course of our lives and our eternal destiny hang in the balance over this crucial issue. But first, I must be willing to face a rather inconvenient truth…

In his book The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis wrote:

The Fall of Man was not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration as it may now occur in a human individual; it was a loss of status as a species. What man lost by the fall was his original specific nature…

This condition was transmitted by heredity to all later generations, for it was not simply what biologists call an acquired variation; it was the emergence of a new kind of man—a new species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence. The change which man had undergone was not parallel to the development of a new organ or a new habit; it was a radical alteration of his constitution, a disturbance of the relation between his component parts, and an internal perversion of one of them. Our present condition, then, is explained by the fact that we are members of a spoiled species.

This book cuts through the murkiness of religious dogma and gets to the heart of the Christian message—that we, all of us, are born with a species problem and that we need the direct spiritual intervention of God to solve it. We are not inventing anything or uncovering secret codes. We are just setting forth the no–frills truth with denomination–neutral instructions on how you can take that narrow road for yourself and connect with God to achieve your true, life purpose.

The Basic Premise of This Book

Unless you just arrived here from another planet, as a fellow earthling, you were born with a species problem. Though you may be ideally equipped for this rather brief life on earth, you are in no way equipped for life in heaven—absent divine intervention. The Apostle Paul stated the problem this way: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.²

To illustrate: in orbit, an astronaut needs a special spacesuit to move around outside of his space vehicle or he will immediately perish. Likewise, you and I can never survive the atmosphere of heaven without being appropriately outfitted.

That outfit is ingeniously provided in the form of Jesus Christ himself who, upon the physical death of each of his believers, acts as a kind of interstellar star ship to transport and deliver us safely into the heavenly realms. And, best of all, we remain safely embodied within him for all eternity.

When Jesus Christ entered the human experience, he did not come as a scrubbed and robed theologian or philosopher. He came as a common laborer from the backwoods of Galilee, with callouses and scars befitting a carpenter. He wasn’t raised in princely comfort or educated in the higher disciplines. He was raised in the dusty streets of a tiny hamlet that was under the brutal boot of a tyrannical dictatorship. He understood the violence, cruelty, injustice, and diminished prospects of an enslaved people. That is what made his message—one of a future kingdom where justice would reign—so appealing. At the same time, his practical, down–to–earth teachings seemed to make sense of everyday life in a world that defied reasonable explanation.

God is recruiting volunteers now to join him as family members and partners in the loving fellowship of those taking part in a tremendously creative project, under unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast scale, with ever increasing cycles of fruitfulness and enjoyment,³ as Dallas Willard put it.

Further, we don’t have to wait to die to commence this heavenly life, but, upon being born again (the requisite ticket to board), we experience inner spiritual transformation that immediately revolutionizes our lives in the here and now.

Tickets to ride are free of charge, and anyone may apply—not just religious or exceptionally good people. But before proceeding, consider this penetrating question posed by Willard: One should seriously inquire if to live in a world permeated with God and the knowledge of God is something you truly desire.

If you do, God promises to create a whole new spiritual you, not only fashioning you into a greatly improved citizen of earth but also making you into a fully qualified citizen of heaven.

Do you want to be a truly fulfilled person? Here is authentic fulfilment: becoming the kind of person God created you to be—a person who is fully alive, as Willard put it. C. S. Lewis wisely observed, Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.⁴ Interested?

Chapter 1. Is Christianity Dying?

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

—Friedrich Nietzsche

H ave you heard the one about God dying? This revolutionary notion was immortalized by Friedrich Nietzsche. And how about Christianity—is it dead as well? If we confined this question to the United States, the evidence appears overwhelming—at least for the organized church in America. A June 2015 Gallup poll reported:

Americans’ confidence in the church and organized religion has fallen dramatically over the past four decades, hitting an all–time low this year of 42%. Confidence in religion began faltering in the 1980s, while the sharpest decline occurred between 2001 and 2002…In addition to serious scandals that have come to light…the increase in the share of Americans identifying as nonreligious or as members of a non–Christian faith is another reason that confidence in the church has declined.¹

Yet when viewed more broadly, beyond the United States, nothing could be further from the truth. In an article by The Washington Post in May 2015, the editors debunked this popular myth in an article entitled, Think Christianity is dying? No, Christianity is shifting dramatically.² They went on to point out, While Christianity may be on the decline in the United States, the world is becoming more religious, not less. Religious convictions are growing and shifting geographically in several dramatic ways.³

For a religion that began with a rather unpromising launch—the gruesome death of its founder and the hunting down and martyring of most of its early followers—Christianity has defied the odds for more than two millennia. As of 2010, those identifying themselves as Christians account for 31.4 percent of the world’s population. That’s 2.17 billion people, and it’s projected to increase to almost three billion by 2050.⁴

So what might account for Christianity’s survival, despite centuries of the most intense persecution imaginable? If it was just another religion founded by just another Messianic pretender, why hasn’t Christianity landed on history’s rubbish dump, forgotten by all but stalwart historians bent on endless trivial pursuits?

The Uniqueness of the Christian Faith

Ask any professor of comparative religion, and they will tell you that Christianity is just one of many religions—and not particularly unique. Is that true? Consider:

• Christianity’s founder claimed to be God in the flesh.

• Christianity’s founder was also in every way a man.

• Christianity’s founder returned from the dead, as personally witnessed by his earliest followers.

• Christianity’s founder stated unequivocally that he provides the only way to God in heaven.

• Christianity’s founder promised that he will someday personally return to rule the earth.

• Christianity’s founder takes up residence in the body of every one of his believers to personally live the Christian life through them.

• Christianity’s entire benefit package is transferred through faith—not earned through any form of human effort, especially religion.

• Christianity was foretold thousands of years in advance in the Old Testament scriptures of the Hebrews and revealed, to the letter, in the New Testament of the Christians.

• Christianity’s founder is currently raising up a special cadre of followers to take part in ruling the universe for all eternity.

These are hardly the claims of just another religious also–ran. He leaves us to decide whether he was an outright liar, a raving lunatic, or God himself.

Even a casual reader of the Bible will observe that Jesus towered over everyone else, with each encounter. Kings, religious rulers, prostitutes, and peasants were halted midstride by his piercing insights and otherworldly wisdom. No one was his equal. Had Jesus met up with the likes of Aristotle, Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Newton, Darwin, Hawking, or Sagan, the results would have been the same—this humble carpenter from the sticks would have silenced them all.

But Jesus’s most audacious claim, the one that would eventually lead to his arrest and execution, was his claim to be God in the flesh. Now don’t get the wrong idea. This notion of his Godhood was not a retrospective invention of his followers, nor was it a fanciful interpretation of what he said. Because in that day, in that culture, such daring assertions were likely to result in public execution or an extended stay in the Roman version of the funny farm. Yet people today persist in discounting his claims and have reduced him to a far safer great moral teacher or some such politically correct diminution. C. S. Lewis, a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist, would have none of it:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.⁵

Remember, this was the same Jesus who said, Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter–in–law against her mother–in–law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.⁶

So much for the Hollywood Messiah, dumbing down his message to attract screaming crowds as he uttered sappy platitudes. Jesus spoke bluntly and unapologetically, leaving little room for doubt about his identity or his message.

The paradoxical exclusivity and inclusivity of Christ’s message

The following words of Jesus have drawn clenched fists and spitting rage among the religious and non–religious alike since they were uttered two millennia ago: I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.⁷

Such exclusive claims did not go down well with anyone, particularly the religious leaders of his day. He was sweeping all other religions off the table with a single stroke. Any other approach to God was declared to be futile, regardless of its popularity or the sincerity of its followers. Period. These were either the words of a madman or of someone who knew that his claims would be eventually backed up by verifiable results.

But equally sweeping was the inclusivity of his many invitations to follow him and to be with God in heaven: Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.⁸

That word whoever is as unconditional as his claims to be the only way to God.

The Global Impact of Christianity

It was once written:

Two thousand years ago, a Man was born in a small village that most people of the world had never heard of, and the Child of a woman who owned nothing. He grew up in another village where He made things from wood until He was thirty years old. For three years, He was a teacher who traveled from village to village. He never wrote a book. He was never elected to be the leader of any group or organization. He never had a family or owned his own home. He did not go to College, or have any diplomas or degrees. The world didn’t think of Him as a great man. He never traveled far from the place where He was born.

He was only thirty–three years old when many of His friends turned against Him. His close friends ran away, leaving Him alone. He was turned over to His enemies and went through a trial without any real reason. He was nailed to a cross between two robbers. While He was dying, those who nailed Him to the cross gambled for His clothes—the only thing He owned on earth. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Almost two thousand years have come and gone, and today He is the most important Person in the human–race. Time is divided by His birth and death. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the governments that ever governed, all the kings that ever ruled, put together have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as Jesus Christ.

—Anonymous

In the roughly two thousand years since Christianity came into existence, its effect on the cultures around it has been profoundly positive and transformative. R. R. Palmer, distinguished American historian at Princeton and Yale universities, stated:

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the coming of Christianity. It brought with it, for one thing, an altogether new sense of human life. For the Greeks had shown man his mind; but the Christians showed him his soul. They taught that in the sight of God, all souls were equal, that every human life was sacrosanct and inviolate. Where the Greeks had identified the beautiful and the good, had thought ugliness to be bad, had shrunk from disease and imperfection and from everything misshapen, horrible, and repulsive, the Christian sought out the diseased, the crippled, the mutilated, to give them help. Love, for the ancient Greek, was never quite distinguished from Venus. For the Christians held that God was love, it took on deep overtones of sacrifice and compassion.

Palmer added:

The history of Christianity is inseparable from the history of Western culture and of Western society. For almost a score of centuries Christian beliefs, principles, and ideals have colored the thoughts and feelings of Western man. The traditions and practices have left an indelible impress not only on developments of purely religious interest, but on virtually the total endeavor of man. This has been manifest in art and literature, science and law, politics and economics, and, as well, in love and war. Indeed, the indirect and unconscious influence Christianity has often exercised in avowedly secular matters—social, intellectual, and institutional—affords striking proof of the dynamic forces that have been generated by the faith over the millenniums. Even those who have contested its claims and rejected its tenets have been affected by what they opposed. Whatever our beliefs, all of us today are inevitable heirs to this abundant legacy; and it is impossible to understand the cultural heritage that sustains and conditions our lives without considering the contributions of Christianity.⁹

Interestingly, the effects of the forced removal of Christianity after its assimilation have proven to be devastating to the very fabric of what is left of those societies. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal concerning the ISIS–driven persecution and exile of Christians in Iraq illustrates this point:

Iraq is home to one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world…But their numbers have plummeted to around 200,000 from 1.5 million before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. A Christian exodus, if it isn’t reversed, would be a devastating loss for Iraq. Iraqi Christians are well–organized, and for years they’ve tended to the educational, cultural and social needs of the wider society…Christians have always played a key role in building our societies and defending our nations, Jordan’s King Abdullah has said.¹⁰

How striking that these comments came from Muslim leaders!

From another, equally tortured part of our world, comes a memoir from Joseph Kim, Under the Same Sky, describing his upbringing in, and eventual escape from, North Korea. After suffering years of smothering repression, starvation, even cannibalism under the whims of the brutal Kim family regime, he manages a harrowing escape to China. But there, the official policy is to track down and repatriate North Koreans. However, he discovers a ray of light amidst all the darkness in his life:

In China, Mr. Kim’s luck turns. A stranger advises him that Christians help North Koreans, so he wandered the streets of Tumen City looking for crosses. When he found one, he writes, "I walked into the church. I saw a verse on the wall, Matthew 11:28: ‘Come unto me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’ I felt it had been written especially for me…His Chinese church friends fed and sheltered him for a year—all the while risking arrest and imprisonment for the crime of helping a North Korean.¹¹

In his rather exhaustive study, How Christianity Changed the World, author Alvin J. Schmidt traced the impact of Christianity on values that many in the world take for granted—none more evident than in the value we put on human life. As one reviewer of Schmidt’s book commented:

Our modern–day value of human life was rooted in teachings of Christ and the actions of early Christians in rescuing newborn babies abandoned on the trash heaps of Rome. Whether through infanticide, gladiatorial games, glorification of suicide or human sacrifice there was an almost global attitude that human life was cheap before Christianity.

He added:

The most beneficial institutions of our society find their roots in the influence of Jesus Christ. Early Christians founded the first hospitals, orphanages, and feeding programs combating the pervading view of the time than it would be better to just let the sick, the poor, and the orphans die. Monastic libraries provided the inspiration for the first universities in the twelfth and thirteenth century. Even government institutions and our concepts of liberty, justice, and equality are rooted in the law of God and biblical patterns.¹²

The list goes on, as Schmidt points out the impact of Christianity on labor and economic freedom, science, art, architecture, literature, music, holidays, words, symbols, and expressions. And today, the church continues to give voice to the voiceless on critical global matters, holding national and business leaders accountable for the effects of their policies on the poor and underprivileged. For example, in an article in The Wall Street Journal, the head of the Catholic Church spoke out about long–simmering frustrations over global inequality:

Pope Francis issued a broadside against the global economic system, denouncing a structure based on worship of money, blaming it for inequality, military conflict and environmental degradation…the pontiff called for a globalization of hope that would guarantee the needs of all…Pope Francis illustrated the world’s problems in personal terms, invoking the endangered peasant, the poor laborer, the downtrodden native, the homeless family, the persecuted migrant, the unemployed young person, the exploited child …casualties of a system that has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature. ¹³

Who else can match that singular voice for its scope, clarity, and moral force in the world today? Regrettably, although the world unhesitatingly holds the church accountable for its faults—and rightly so—it tends to ignore or minimize the overwhelmingly positive effects it has had, working quietly and unassumingly around the world.

Unrelenting opposition

Considering the cumulative good that the Judeo–Christian worldview has delivered over the millennia, one would expect that it would be universally welcomed with open arms. Such, as any casual reader of world history will attest, is not the case. In fact, things seem to be worsening. In his book, What’s So Great about Christianity, Dinesh D’Souza set forth a chilling summary of the current war on religion that is being waged on a global scale:

The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control school curricula so they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but also evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion—and especially the Christian religion—disappear from the face of the earth.¹⁴

But amidst all the darkness there is hope…

The personal impact of Christ on lives today

To see beauty is to see light.

—Victor Hugo

In a futuristic passage of Old Testament scripture, the prophet Isaiah writes, But there’ll be no darkness for those who were in trouble. Earlier he did bring the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali into disrepute, but the time is coming when he’ll make that whole area glorious—the road along the Sea, the country past the Jordan, international Galilee.

The people who walked in darkness

have seen a great light.

For those who lived in a land of deep shadows—

light! sunbursts of light!

For a child has been born—for us!

the gift of a son—for us! He’ll take over

the running of the world.

His names will be: Amazing Counselor,

Strong God,

Eternal Father,

Prince of Wholeness.

His ruling authority will grow,

and there’ll be no limits to the wholeness he brings.¹⁵

In his characteristically unequivocal manner, Jesus declares, I am the Light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.¹⁶

This light, this precious light, has been leading the blind into the bright uplands of God’s blessings for thousands of years.

The principal reason Christianity has flourished for millennia is that it delivers on its promises with astonishing regularity. Josh McDowell provides many examples in his book, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. After a lifetime of hating his father for what his alcohol addiction had done to their family, Josh became a Christian in college and, like millions of others, was instantly changed from the inside. He wrote:

The love of God inundated my life. He took my hatred for my father and turned it upside down. Five months after becoming a Christian, I found myself looking my dad right in the eye and saying, Dad I love you. I did not want to love that man, but I did. God’s love had changed my heart.

Soon afterward, Josh’s father became a Christian, as well. Josh added:

My father’s life was changed right before my eyes. It was like someone reached down and switched on a light inside him. He touched alcohol only once after that. He got the drink only as far as his lips, and that was it—after forty years of drinking…over a hundred people in the area around my tiny hometown committed their lives to Jesus Christ because of the change they saw in the town drunk, my dad.

Josh concluded:

You can laugh at Christianity. You can mock and ridicule it. But it works. If you trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions—Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives.

Why the Decline of Religion in Modern Societies?

So, what accounts for the statement by a researcher that confidence in the [U.S.] Church has been steadily declining since the 1980s. As Americans become less religious, confidence in the Church as an institution is plummeting?

Perhaps it has something to do with what Mahatma Gandhi observed, I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

Touché.

Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

By way of illustration, how do you cook a frog? S l o w l y. Otherwise, he’ll jump out of the boiling water. The Christian church in America, and that of other so–called advanced countries around the world, has been slowly cooking in a mesmerizing stew of its own making. Material comforts, terminal busyness, ceaseless entertainment, and the relentless accumulation of stuff have exacted a devastating toll on spiritual life. Although many people identify themselves as religious in surveys, they live their lives as practical atheists. Increasingly, Christians withdraw to gated communities, exclusive retirement compounds, and affluent congregations satisfied with preaching to the choir. Gone is the evangelical fervor of early church history and, with it, the willingness of ordinary believers to confront the world and its secular culture in the streets and back yards.

I know you inside and out, and find little to my liking. You’re not cold, you’re not hot—far better to be either cold or hot! You’re stale. You’re stagnant. You make me want to vomit. You brag, I’m rich, I’ve got it made, I need nothing from anyone, oblivious that in fact you’re a pitiful, blind beggar, threadbare and homeless. Here’s what I want you to do: Buy your gold from me, gold that’s been through the refiner’s fire. Then you’ll be rich. Buy your clothes from me, clothes designed in Heaven. You’ve gone around half–naked long enough. And buy medicine for your eyes from me so you can see, really see. The people I love, I call to account—prod and correct and guide so that they’ll live at their best. Up on your feet, then! About face! Run after God!¹⁷

And to make matters worse, to increase the appeal of Christianity to the masses, many mainstream denominations have dumbed down the central message of salvation and morphed it into a social gospel that sounds more like a pop psychology self–help seminar than a matter of life and death. H. Richard Niebuhr put it this way: We have made Christian faith the story of how a God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment, through the ministration of a Christ without a cross!

A particularly corrosive trend among all too many Christian churches is to deemphasize—if not deny altogether—the presence of virulent evil in the world. The notion of Satan as a person who is actively perpetuating evil seems so far–fetched, even to Christians, as to be relegated to the dusty shelves of theologians and mystics and best left out of the public discourse for fear of being viewed as weird. Yet here we sit every night, helplessly watching CNN parade an endless cavalcade of murder, mass slaughter, mayhem, global chaos, and apocalyptic threats by those promoting Islamism—and we assign it all to mere human dysfunction and political vagaries. What is behind this state of institutional denial? In an article in The Wall Street Journal, entitled, How to Beat Islamic State, Maajid Nawaz offered valuable insight:

I call this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Many well–meaning people in Ms. Rowling’s fictional world are so petrified of Voldemort’s evil that they do two things: They refuse to call Voldemort by name, instead referring to He Who Must Not Be Named, and they deny that he exists in the first place. Such dread only increases public hysteria, thus magnifying the appeal of Voldemort’s power.¹⁸

We tend to fear the supernatural, the immaterial, especially if it tends toward evil. This is what gives it its power. Anyone with a child knows the only way to dispel the fear of the boogeyman is to let them look under the bed. But the Bible declares, and Jesus repeatedly emphasized, that there is a cosmic boogeyman known as Lucifer, or Satan, who is bent on chaos and destruction. Jesus put it this way:

A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.

I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd puts the sheep before himself, sacrifices himself if necessary. A hired man is not a real shepherd. The sheep mean nothing to him. He sees a wolf come and runs for it, leaving the sheep to be ravaged and scattered by the wolf. He’s only in it for the money. The sheep don’t matter to him.

I am the Good Shepherd. I know my own sheep and my own sheep know me. In the same way, the Father knows me and I know the Father. I put the sheep before myself, sacrificing myself if necessary.¹⁹

Yes, there is real palpable danger