Everyone believes that they are right. Think of the well-worn religious parable of the elephant and blind men. Each has hold of a different portion of the elephant. Asked to describe the elephant, each is confined to his tactile perspective, where a leg “is like a tree trunk,” the tail “is like a rope,” the side “is like a wall,” the trunk “is like a snake,” and the ear “is like a leaf.” “So,” says the teller of the parable, “each has their own perspective, and likewise each religion has some portion of the whole truth.” Sounds compelling until you realize this “inclusive” storyteller is claiming to see the whole elephant! He’s not blind, everyone else is. One path or many? Are our divergent beliefs inconsequential? God only knows for sure.
It comes down to authority. Who or what informs our theological ethic? Unaided conscience? Present social mores? Biblical Christians believe that the Bible is our authority simply because it’s God’s revelation to us (Kevin DeYoung said about the parable that everything changes when the elephant speaks!). I could be wrong, but I have good reasons to believe that the Bible is true – all of it, not just my favorite bits. I know there are tough verses, but I have sufficiently studied the doubters’ accusations and believers’ responses. There remain tensions, nuances and depths of understanding that escape me, but I’m comfortable with the admixture of the rationally grasped, the spiritually understood and the mystery when I find neither. After all, the God of the Bible is a God who can be essentially, not comprehensively, understood (Is. 55:8,9).
While the Bible proclaims clearly that ALL are sinful (Rom. 3:23), or sick, if you will, many people don’t perceive their need for saving or healing. Others would save themselves with perfunctory religiosity – church membership, attendance, rituals – and/or they simply work their “balance sheet” accumulating good deeds and minimizing bad, or hope by comparison with others that they make the grade. “Hey, it’s not like I ever killed anybody.” It’s not a competition. If it was, we’d all lose.
You see, no résumé, no balance sheet, and no comparison of deeds will suffice to cancel the debt each of us owes. If we were true to ourselves, we’d rightly argue with Paul about who, indeed, is the “chief of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15). I pity the person who cannot look inside and see something broken, something sick, something that needs fixing. I hope you can see that. If so, I have GOOD NEWS!
The gospel, or good news, is that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). The God of the Bible is a holy God who hates sin. In his grace, he visited the punishment for sin on his sinless Son, Jesus Christ, on the cross. His death and subsequent resurrection “conquered the grave.” If we trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ on our behalf, we will be saved, adopted as sons and daughters. We have no righteousness of our own (Titus 3:5) – instead, we trust in Christ alone. Augustus Toplady wrote in his classic hymn, Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.”
I understand the exclusive claims of this gospel and the offense it is to some (1 Co. 1:23). Whether biblical Christians are right or wrong, we believe that our ability to truly love the world rests on the proclamation of the gospel. Are we clumsy, forgetting the grace shown us? Too often. Grace should be humbling, for it is not merited, not earned and not deserved.
[This article originally appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat.]