This file can be printed for personal use and study. © Reachout Trust - www.reachouttrust.org
That Jesus is the Christ (John 20:31)
Faith is very popular these days, I don't know
if you have noticed. The strange thing is that, while faith has content,
the focus of this faith that preoccupies the modern world is - faith.
This is no better illustrated than in an account a pagan friend, explaining
his faith, gave me. Faith, he said, is like looking up a mountain. What
you see at the summit is what you expect to see. I see what I expect to
see and you see what you expect to see. I see Buddha, you see Christ another
sees the goddess. In this way the object of faith is faith, i.e. it is
faith to which people look to explain and order their world. If I define
my world as pink and you decide it is yellow then it is pink to me and
yellow to you. Faith has made it so. The problem is that the world exists
and is defined quite independently from how I choose to view it i.e. it
is predominantly green brown and blue.
As we saw last week, the purpose of the gospels is "that
you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God".
The object of the Christian's faith is Christ. What we believe about him
does not depend on what we choose to believe. The gospels were written
that we should believe that he is the Christ, that is the anointed one
who was prophesied from the beginning. That he is the Son of God, i.e.
God the Son, Emmanuel, God with us.
In Galatians we are warned about believing another gospel:
But even if we or an angel from heaven
should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you,
let him be accursed (Gal.1:8)
If the gospels were written to this one end, that we should believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, then surely this is the vital core
of Paul's message and we should get right what we believe about this more
than anything else. To the Christian believer Jesus is the Christ, the
one anointed to save people from their sins. To the Christian he is the
Son of God, God the Son whom the Father did not spare because of his great
love for us.
Doctrine, then, matters and we are not free to believe what we choose
but, in light of the gospel, must know what it is God calls us to believe.
We cannot simply look up the mountain and see what suits us but must declare
with the Psalmist:
I lift up my eyes to the hills - where
does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven
and earth (Ps.121:1)
My help comes not from my faith but from the object of my faith, and the
object of my faith is not my invention but my Creator, not as I imagine
him but as he is. May we know him as he is this week and walk in the good
of knowing him because to know him is to know life, as we will see next
week.