The truth of Easter

ARTICLES OF FAITH

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Posted 11 hours ago

"All religions were created by people in power who were just trying to keep the rest of the people under control."

"Christianity was just a fabrication from the details of a whole gamut of other religions."

The two young men in the drop-in centre were obviously invigorated by their newfound arguments against the uniqueness of the Christian faith, much of which they have gained by watching lots of documentaries on TV and lots of who-knows-what from who-knows-where on the Internet.

They have had the intellectual integrity at least to read a portion of the Bible, and they were insistent a couple of Christmases ago that I watch The Passion of the Christwith them (yes, at Christmas!). Now I found myself "defending the faith" amongst a handful of young people who say they have no use for religion yet were passionately interested in discussing it! Hmmm...

Many of the questions people have about Jesus, the Bible and the Christian faith are honest. It's a pretty big thing to claim that 2,000 years ago there once was a man who thought He was God's special son, who backed up His claim by healing people and raising them from the dead, and then proclaimed everybody had to believe in Him in order to have eternal life.

According to our accounts of His life, Jesus trounced His own culture's religious teachers and confused His own disciples most of the time, something which is not too surprising if Jesus was indeed what He claimed to be -- someone come from heaven.

"If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? (John 10:33 (ESV)," He said on one occasion to a trained religious leader. And it was no surprise they tried on several occasions to eliminate such an arrogant, sacrilegious troublemaker.

"It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you," they said, "but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God."

It's no wonder that now we have the same trouble when we assert to people we live with, work with and go to school with that this Jesus Christ actually died on one occasion 2,000 years ago as a substitution for the whole human race, to suffer death and hell on our behalf so that the God who created the world could be reconciled to all of us who have at one time or another rejected God's presence and His ways of purity, mercy, generosity, and truthfulness.

It's even weirder to claim that Jesus came back to life again by God's power and still lives now in heaven as the God man who will one day judge the whole world and restore it to the way God originally intended. Harder still might be the idea God gave all of us who do believe in Jesus His spirit of holiness to live inside us, giving us the power to do right, and live right, as examples of what He came to restore in us.

But this new supernormal lifestyle is, in fact, the only thing that will offer any proof Jesus really lived and died for us.

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Jesus made it even clearer: "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:35 (ESV)"

I guess then, my defence of the faith may not really depend on my arguments about the historical facts of Jesus's life and death, but on whether I have been changed by the power of God. I hope that anyone who sees me in action will see that Easter really happened....

Andrew Fortier, Northumberland Youth For Christ