On Tuesday, we had a talk from someone from the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries about science and faith. The speaker said that rationality and the Christian faith are not mutually exclusive. People misinterpret faith to mean a leap in the dark, an irrational decision. In the Christian faith, sure, there is some element of trust, but a lot of it is actually very rational. Even the whole flow of the gospel itself is overflowing with rationality.
In church and at Singapore Youth for Christ (SYFC), we were taught a gospel sharing tool called “Two ways to live”. Through the in-depth learning of the gospel through the tool, it really impressed upon me how logical the gospel is. God, being our creator, has the right to rule over mankind, His creation. If God’s rightful rule was not first established, sin would not seem wrong. But because he was our creator and thus has rightful rule over us, man rebelling against the creator is wrong. And when anybody does wrong, it is natural that the wrongdoer is punished. Thus the death and judgment that results from the rebellion against God is totally deserving.
This judgment is not unfair, as we have done wrong, and God, being the creator, has the right to punish us when we rebel against His rightful rule. The harder a piece of bad news is, the better the good news after it becomes. The severity of the punishment only makes Jesus’ deliverance from it even greater. And thus everything before must first be established, so we know what Jesus is saving us from and into through His death on the cross. His resurrection shows His power over death and thus His authority and ability to give us new life.
The gospel is really so logical! (Of course, this depends on whether you first believe that “God is the creator” is true, as the whole logic stems from there. Even coming to the conclusion that God is creator has some element of rationality, but this topic has been addressed so often, and due to a lack of knowledge about it and word count, it shall be skipped.)
In the final box of this gospel tool, the listener is asked to make a response after listening to the gospel. They are asked to make a choice, whether they want to continue living their own way, resulting in them being condemned by God and facing death and judgment, or if they want to live God’s new way, which results in them being forgiven by God and given eternal life. With one way to life and one way to death, personally I find the choice very logical.
Even if the motive behind the choice might be to escape judgment, who would voluntarily choose death? And yet, in the many times that this gospel tool was used and this response had to be made, many people chose to continue living their own way. They either did not believe that living their own way would result in the aforementioned consequences, or they consciously chose to live the way that leads to death. Indeed, thank God for opening my spiritual eyes, to believe in the truth of the gospel and to see the value and logic of choosing to live His way.
Elvira Tan
No comments:
Post a Comment