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I am reminded of an encounter I had once with a young woman who was fairly new to American. Like most people, she had HEARD the name of Jesus, but didn’t clearly understand his relevance to salvation. I am by far not the greatest person in the world, but I tried to explain it to her…and I found things a bit harder to explain than usual.
Christian people find it ridiculously easy to say “Jesus died for our sins so that we could be saved”, we take for granted that when you say that phrase, most people from the US will automatically have at least a slight clue of what you are taking about…well try to explain that to a person who doesn’t know WHY we are sinners in the first place, and how the death of a single person is good enough to erase this sin in the eyes of God.
Pointing out scriptures in the Bible means nothing to a person who doesn’t know or care what it says; to them the scriptures are just words in a book that, written in a terminology that most people don’t use.
So…I tried to explain WHY people are born with sin (telling her the story of Adam), and why the blood of Jesus was good enough to save us…that the blood of any animal is life and in the old testament the blood of animals were required for atonement, but because JESUS’S blood is the blood of GOD…once it was shed, there was no more need to slaughter animals for atonement…because that’s just how strong the life in His blood is.
But pretty much anything I explain seemed to trouble her and cause her even more confusion. She asked questions like:
“If God knows everything that you are going to do before you do it…then why did he put The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden…if He knew that Adam would disobey Him before He even created Adam?”
“Why is it that the bad judgment of one man placed a death sentence on all of humanity?”
“Is it fair that (according to Christian faith) we are ALL BORN doomed to Hell…and must spend our entire lives working to prove that we are not? What kind of an existence is that?”
“If God knows the decisions you will make before you make them…then do you TRULY have free will? And if God knows when you are born that your decisions will lead you to Hell…why does He even allow you to be born, knowing the torment you will suffer when you die?”
Of course…no one really knows the answers to these types of questions but God. And by the end of our conversation, I had seemed to cause the woman more distress than comfort. We as Christians take the lessons that we read in the Bible and believe these stories as a way of showing our faith, but when you are someone who was not raised to have faith in our God…God can seem like nothing more than a cruel and sadistic entity that created man purely for entertainment.
Christian people find it ridiculously easy to say “Jesus died for our sins so that we could be saved”, we take for granted that when you say that phrase, most people from the US will automatically have at least a slight clue of what you are taking about…well try to explain that to a person who doesn’t know WHY we are sinners in the first place, and how the death of a single person is good enough to erase this sin in the eyes of God.
Pointing out scriptures in the Bible means nothing to a person who doesn’t know or care what it says; to them the scriptures are just words in a book that, written in a terminology that most people don’t use.
So…I tried to explain WHY people are born with sin (telling her the story of Adam), and why the blood of Jesus was good enough to save us…that the blood of any animal is life and in the old testament the blood of animals were required for atonement, but because JESUS’S blood is the blood of GOD…once it was shed, there was no more need to slaughter animals for atonement…because that’s just how strong the life in His blood is.
But pretty much anything I explain seemed to trouble her and cause her even more confusion. She asked questions like:
“If God knows everything that you are going to do before you do it…then why did he put The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden…if He knew that Adam would disobey Him before He even created Adam?”
“Why is it that the bad judgment of one man placed a death sentence on all of humanity?”
“Is it fair that (according to Christian faith) we are ALL BORN doomed to Hell…and must spend our entire lives working to prove that we are not? What kind of an existence is that?”
“If God knows the decisions you will make before you make them…then do you TRULY have free will? And if God knows when you are born that your decisions will lead you to Hell…why does He even allow you to be born, knowing the torment you will suffer when you die?”
Of course…no one really knows the answers to these types of questions but God. And by the end of our conversation, I had seemed to cause the woman more distress than comfort. We as Christians take the lessons that we read in the Bible and believe these stories as a way of showing our faith, but when you are someone who was not raised to have faith in our God…God can seem like nothing more than a cruel and sadistic entity that created man purely for entertainment.