My daughter Meredith was in kindergarten in 2008, the same year of the presidential election.  She came home from school one day in early November, very excited.  "Daddy, we voted for the president!", she exclaimed.  Her school had held a mock election, to give the kids a fun and practical civics lesson. 

I asked Meredith who she voted for.  She replied, "Marack Obana," which I thought was a pretty good facsimile of the candidate's name for a six-year old.  I then asked why she voted for him.   I'm not sure what I was expecting.  I know it wasn't, "Because his economic policies will ensure future economic security," or "I really like his stance on Afghanistan."  But her answer still caught me off guard.  In her sweet little voice, she declared very seriously, "He had the best smile."  I thought about it for a minute and had to agree with her.  If the choice of presidents was based upon the relative smiles of the candidates, Obama would be pretty hard to beat.  The guy had a great smile.

And as I thought about it, I realized that her comment was actually pretty insightful.   A lot of people would likely vote for Obama because he was more youthful, better-looking and simply projected better than his rival.  In America, many people consistently vote based upon what is referred to as the "party line."  If we view ourselves as Republicans, we tend to vote for Republicans.  And we tend to forumulate our opinions about things based upon what the news folks tell us, good or bad and depending upon how our political views jive with theirs.  In other words, we make decisions based upon someone else's opinion, rather than digging in and doing the research ourselves.  We vote, a very important decision, based upon unmeaningful criteria.

If you voted in the 2008 election, think about it.  Did you research either candidate's congressional records?  Did you review any of their writings, speeches or other materials which could reveal their consistency on issues?  Did you develop your opinion based upon any firsthand, direct information?  I'll confess that I didn't.  I'll further confess that my mind was pretty much made up long before the election, simply based upon my own preconceived notions.

And of course, we know what happens when we make decisions this way.  We can make bad decisions.  We shortchange ourselves.  And often, we later regret those decisions.

Which brings me to the point.  And it's an entirely different point, but it stems from making a decision without having all the facts.  Or making a decision, based upon someone else's opinion.  I'm talking about making a decision about God.

Certainly, you may not at this moment feel compelled to make any decision about God.  Your life is pretty good.  You don't see anything problematic on the horizon.  So, why not just keep cruising along in life as you are?  The issue is that, sooner or later, we are all faced with either a crisis in this life that cannot be resolved by natural means.  Maybe it's that call from the doctor's office with the biopsy results.  Maybe it's the loss of a job, or worse, a loved one.  But eventually, something will happen to you that will force you to face the fact that you only have so many years on this planet.  And once you do, you have to decide whether there is anything after.  Do you simply die and that's it?  Or does something else happen.

A decision not to decide is a decision in and of itself.  And a lot of people make a default decision about God.  They decide by default that God isn't really in control of things.  They come to believe that God didn't really create the heavens, the earth or mankind.  They aren't really athiests, but they don't really want to believe in the God of the Bible.

The problem is that they make this decision without really understanding the source document itself.  The make a decision, based upon what they've heard from others. Sort of like Meredith, they voted based upon a criteria that at least to an adult, didn't mean very much.  And like many adults, they decided without digging in and formulating their own opinion.  They didn't actually read the Book itself.

The Bible puts forth God's story.  For now, if it makes you feel better, let's refer to it a "theory" of who God is and what He wants from us.  There are several central components to this theory.  The first component is that God created everything.  The second is that God created mankind as a loving act.  The third is that He sought to have a relationship with mankind, but mankind rebelled against its Creator.  And the final chapter describes how God remedied this rift once and for all.  It's a pretty fantastic finale- God sends His Son, in human form, to teach mankind about Him and ultimately to pay a price so that mankind could have a relationship with Him forever.

If you've made a reasonable effort to read the Bible and compared it's characterization of God with your own life, and concluded that it is a book of fables, then so be it (I'm talking about beginning with Genesis and reading it all the way through to Revelations).  I applaud your initiative and respect your conclusion.  You came to this conclusion based upon the facts and derived your opinion about the Bible's validity based upon those facts.  You are entitled to your opinion.

But if you have come to a conclusion about God without an earnest effort to read the Bible, I would respectfully suggest that you reconsider.  If the Bible is accurate, it describes an eternal and everlasting consequence of your conclusion.  For that reason alone, it's worth careful consideration.  And if the Bible isn't accurate, then the most you've lost is your investment of time to read it. 

I have to agree that "Marack" has a great smile.  And if I were six, I'd likely vote for him on that basis alone.  But I'm not six and I owe it to myself, my family and my country to vote for him, or someone else, for reasons beyond his apparently excellent dental hygiene.  Instead, I need make an informed decision.  Similarly, when it comes to deciding who God is, my decision should be based upon more than a superficial understanding, without having invested any time in the literature that purports to explain it.

Christians believe that Jesus was God in human form.    We believe it because Jesus said it.[1]  In John’s Gospel, Jesus says that He was God in an unmistakable, direct way.[2]  And there is plenty of scripture in which Jesus' actions assert this claim.[3]  For example, Jesus forgave sins.   In Old Testament Judaism, only God could do this.[4]  In addition, you are probably familiar with Jesus’ miracles- water into wine[5], raising the dead[6], healing seriously ill people[7] and others.  All of this leads to the inescapable conclusion that Jesus, at the very least, thought He was God.  Christians read all of it and believe that Jesus was God.

But the purpose of this blog post isn’t to discuss whether Jesus' words or actions prove that He was God.  Instead, the purpose of this post is to discuss Jesus’ perspective.    By perspective, I mean Jesus’ viewpoint.   Specifically, what do Jesus’ words and actions tell us about how He looked at things? 

We have all read and seen the stories of modern day false prophets.  Ex post, or after the fact, it’s pretty easy to spot the fact that they were false.  They say and do things that show that they didn’t really have a Godly perspective- at least of the God that we are familiar with intuitively.  This God is an all-knowing, all-loving God.  And these false prophets generally get it wrong.  They make mistakes.  They prophecy things that don’t happen.  And their actions indicate that they are motivated by selfishness.

I have a friend who recently began to read the Bible for the first time.  Her plan is to read the Bible through, cover to cover.  I thought about how I might encourage her in her Bible study.  In my book, The Reasonable Person, I discuss the fact that some Christians only dabble in the Bible.  They read a verse of this and a verse of that, to support a proposition.  They avoid the Old Testament because it’s, well, old.  They believe that because Jesus changed everything, they don’t really need to read Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and the rest of it. 

But the truth is that we learn a lot about Jesus through the Old Testament.  First of all, if you are so inclined, Jesus birth, life, death and resurrection are described in the Old Testament.[8]  If you read the Old Testament carefully, it’s almost like a secret code of prophecy, in which Jesus is prophesied.  It’s not blatant and obvious, but it’s there.  And I’ve learned that God acts in a subtle way.  He doesn’t use a lot of fanfare because He doesn’t need to.  He’s God.

If you’ve read it, you know that Genesis and Exodus begin with a bang.  They describe the creation of the earth and mankind.  They describe the fall.  And they describe the beginning of the restoration of mankind to God.

But suddenly, you hit Leviticus.  Leviticus is a complex, seemingly endless set of rules and regulations about almost anything you can imagine.  There are rules about dealing with people.  There are rules about sexual relations.  There are rules about property.  There are rules about cleanliness.  And there are rules about animal sacrifice, in order to atone for sin.  You had to kill certain animals, in very prescribed ways, in order to wipe out a particular sin that you had committed.  Leviticus is long and frankly boring stuff.  And a few books later, we read the same stuff in Deuteronomy.

But when you think about it, these rules are exactly what the nation of Israel needed at the time.  God had given mankind everything it needed.[9]  But it wasn’t enough.[10]  Mankind had to take the reins for itself.[11]  They started killing each other.[12] They had been in captivity in Egypt.[13]  Now, they were making a fresh start.  They were heading to the Promised Land.  They had proven that they needed a lot of guidance.  And so God, through Moses, established an intricate and detailed statute which prescribed how they were to live.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone- today, every jurisdiction in the world has established intricate and detailed statutes and codes for exactly the same reason.

So, I wanted to warn my friend that once she reaches these books in the Bible, she should be prepared to drink a lot of coffee.  And then it hit me- the point of this blog post.  I’ll get to the point shortly.  But first, pull out your Bible.  Read through Leviticus and Deuteronomy quickly.  You’ll see what I’m talking about. 

Now flip over to the New Testament and read Matthew 22:34-40.  The religious establishment at the time was trying to test Jesus.  At this point, Jesus had a lot of followers, which was something pretty dangerous for the Pharisees.  They want to show Him to be a fraud.  These law teachers know the scripture well.  They also know that the rules are complex, intricate and numerous.  So they asked Him an unanswerable question.  It was clearly a trap.  They asked Him which was the most important of all of these rules.

In reply, Jesus makes three points: (1) the most important rule is to love God; (2) the second most important rule is to love other people as you love yourself;[14] and (3)  all of the hundreds and hundreds of rules together, in essence, mean #1 and #2.

And this brings me to the point.  If you’ve read through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you can appreciate the significance of Jesus words.  He boiled all of it down into two rules.   Jesus distilled hundreds and hundreds of arcane, intricate and detailed rules into two rules.  And He did it as only the Author of those rules could.  Jesus had inside information, because he gave the rules in the first place.  Jesus’ perspective was a supernatural one.  But, He also knew that the legal system was about to change.  With the sacrifice that He would make, there wouldn’t be a need for animal sacrifices any longer.  So, He was really only concerned with two things- how we would relate to each other, and how we would relate to Him.

So I think my friend is absolutely right with her plan.  By reading it cover to cover, she is going to learn the full story; not just the highlights, or worse, someone else’s view of it.  And she is going to learn about its Author. 

And by the way, we’re still talking about Him two thousand years later.  

 

[1] John 10:30.

[2] Id.

[3] Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 11:27, 27:43, John 14:7-10, Luke 12:8-9.

[4] Matthew 9:2, Mark 2:5, Luke 5:20.

[5] John 2:1-25

[6] John 11.

[7] Mark 1, 3; Luke 4,6, 11; Matthew 8, 12; John 5 are some of the examples of Jesus’ healing miracles.

[8] Christians believe that there are hundreds of such scripture.  Some examples: Isaiah 7, 9, 11, Jeremiah 23, Malachi 3.  

[9] Genesis.

[10] Id.

[11] Genesis.

[12] Id.

[13] Exodus.

[14] This became known as “The Golden Rule.”