On the Unbelievability of the Christian Message

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The other night I was thinking about how unbelievable—incredible—ridiculously impossible the Christian message is. 

It’s preposterous. 

Am I imagining all this?

 

How could any rational person fall for the idea of a good God creating a good world, then creating human beings, and then giving them the freedom to choose whether or not to listen to Him when He tells them how they should live in that world? 

 

Preposterous that a good God would give the persons He created the ability to destroy themselves and others and the good world around them. That he would allow them to be selfish, greedy and so dangerously careless as to refuse to choose to live by the owner’s manual He gave them?

 

And speaking of the Bible, that’s another ridiculous idea: that He would write a book, over a period of roughly 1500 years, using the minds and fingers of at least 40 of the very human creatures who messed things up in the first place—a book full of information about Himself, and about us. 

 

And that He would expect us to believe that stories in that book, translated into thousands of different languages, survived over the last 2000 years, intact, because they contain wisdom that has proved to be relevant in every culture since the beginning of time. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations

 

And even more incredible that, after all has fallen apart, over and over again, down through the centuries, He has devised some plan that would rescue even the worst of us from the destruction around us—would forgive us and restore all things to their original state for us, and then give us a chance to live “happily ever after” when our lives on earth are finished. 

 

No one could have made this stuff up.

 

But, when I think about it, lots of things I see around me are just as incredible. 

 

Ridiculously impossible. 

 

Impossible that my body, when I was a baby, contained the building blocks of three other human beings who would be created and fully formed, one at a time, over the next 36 years of my life, and that their bodies contained eight other human beings who would also be born and grow up and grow old like me.

 

And I’m just getting started:

 

Not just MY body, but an elephant's body, a goat's body, a whale's body, my cat's body--this is incredibly mind-boggling.

 

All the great wonders of the world, created by God and by the humans He created, and all the wonders of the universe—all incredible, unbelievable, impossible,

and yet they exist. 


Unless I am imagining all this?

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