The Core of Christian Faith

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Human beings and the world were designed together. This world provides for us everything that we need in order to get by. It gives us agreeable climates so that we can live and live comfortably. Sadly, there are millions of human beings who ignore these good gifts and instead choose to live in Minnesota.

Now, admittedly, I’m a little bit salty about Minnesota today. I practically had to dig my way here today through the snow. I know that we need the snow, right? Intellectually, I know that it has to be here, but that doesn’t change how I feel. In a certain nonreligious way. I could say I have faith that this snow, even though I don’t like it, is going to ultimately do something that is good. But that doesn’t change how I feel about it in the moment.

This is actually one of the questions that I end up fielding most often from Christians. Christians who know that God has secured for them good blessings in heaven and that they are theirs. But at the same time, have to go through the struggles and difficulties and evils of this world. Nowhere is this more apparent than with death. There’s no evil in this world that rivals death. There is nothing that so clearly illustrates that this place has fallen. We have death because we have sin and it hits hard.

So Christians end up oftentimes with questions around these most difficult points when you are experiencing the death of a loved one, because intellectually you might know that God has won wonderful things for that loved one who has passed away. You might know that they are right now enjoying the victory feast in heaven, produced and provided by God. At the same time, you might be feeling very different from what your head knows. You might be feeling anger and sadness and pain. So the question that I oftentimes gets is, does that mean they lack faith? Is the way that I feel in the face of death, a bad reflection on my state of faith?

Remember that this world is populated by evil people with exclusively evil desires who do evil things. And yet God is so unbelievably powerful that he’s able to come into this place, filled with all of this evil and still work his will still work it for good. In fact, it was through this absolute worst of evils that God worked his absolute greatest good. On Jesus’s last day. We could read it as a story of just moving from one horrifying, hideous evil to the next. We don’t call Jesus’s last day evil Friday. We don’t call it Sinful Friday or Dark Friday. We call it Good Friday, because all of those things that were committed over the course of that day were placed on Christ on the cross. All of the sins that we commit today were placed on Christ, on the cross. He paid the punishment for all of that evil and swapped out for his own perfection.

That is the essence of Christian faith. Just like my non-Christian faith in the idea that the snow will one day do something good and that we need it doesn’t alleviate my suffering. Just in that same fashion, I might know that death is transformed into something new, a portal into eternity, and yet still have feelings that are attached to the fact that it was necessary in the first place. That it takes place in the first place. The core of Christian faith is clinging to the hope that God has won for us in Christ. Even when we feel the effects of a sinful world.