A few years ago I was introduced to a man who was in the process of losing his faith (or so he thought). I’m pleased to report that this doubt turned out to be just a blip in his journey, but as a Christian I did spend a little time thinking about where I might go if something emerged that caused me to depart from the Christian faith, or at least question it very severely. Try as I may, I could not conceive of anything better than what I already believed – if Jesus Christ isn’t Lord of all, then given what I know now, I really would have nowhere else to go for anything better. 

What an astounding realisation, I thought to myself. God had given us something even greater than I had first imagined – through Christ He has given us a positive set of goals, aspirations, standards and values that affirm their truth in one remarkable way – they pertain to a set of ideals that not only resound a noise of ultimate truth, but are so firm in their resonance that one would be inclined to prefer them even if the belief system on which they were founded turned out to be false. In other words, one of the greatest pieces of evidence that Christianity is the truth and that Jesus has the right way is this; if Christianity turned out to be false I’d still choose the Christian way of life ahead of anything else. 

 

I look at the principles of Jesus, His words, His teaching against things that are bad, His attitude to women and to the poor and afflicted, and His instruction to love our neighbours as we love ourselves, and see the antidote to the world’s problems. In fact, if by some miracle we could observe a world in which everyone took on Christ’s teachings and implemented them perfectly into their behaviour and as a raison d’etre, we would see a world consisting mostly of bliss, peace, harmony, unity and utopian realities, the sort we thought were impossible. 

 

Of course the principal factor about Christ’s teachings being the ‘perfect’ teachings is that Christ could substantiate them by His Divinity; that is, He was no mere man but God Himself, the only sinless man who ever lived. As we see in the book of Galatians, what Christ offers us is unlike anything else in the world – it is more stupendous than any alternative belief system or life methodology. His suffering and His death are the things which bring together Divine grace and human understanding of the uniqueness of Christianity:

 

The suffering Jesus endured was of the most physical and mental pain – it was the cost of delivering the truth to us. However hard I try I could never conceive of a better state of affairs than a created world in which God came to pour out His love and grace on the cross so that we could be reunited with Him. A world in which we had to somehow earn our salvation would not be anything like as good – it would be asking the impossible. 

 

The incarnation is so real that any alternative to it would, in my view, be less preferable. We know that our God can sympathise with our hardships because in every way Christ bore the limitations that human beings have – He suffered for us because God wanted us to know that He has been where we have been – He has stood in our shoes. So not only would Christ’s teachings be preferable over anything else that was claimed to be the truth, God’s grace and favour in living as a man was His plan to pay a price for us – a price He knew we had no chance of paying ourselves. As Jesus Christ lived out His time on earth, He wept (John 11:35), He grew intellectually and physically (Luke 2:52), He hungered for food (Matthew 4:2), He needed sleep (Matthew 8:24) – in fact, Jesus possessed all the attributes of humanity. By becoming a human He emptied Himself of the glory of His Divinity and was veiled in the flesh:

 

Jesus had to live by faith and in watchfulness because He did not know the hour of final judgement. If Jesus had not have accepted the limitations of human frailty, He would not have stood in our shoes and could not have taken His place on the cross. What He did not assume, He cannot redeem. God made Himself just like us, because of His love for us – and I can think of no truth more astounding and more magnificent than that. 

A God who loved the world so much that He would be prepared to live as His creation lived, and after enduring the most horrific time on earth could then look upwards to His Heavenly Father and ask that all who had wronged Him be forgiven, is truly a God that I could not fail to follow. Our God is the God who loves us so much that He became like us so that He really could testify that ‘they know not what they do’ – He knew it because He lived it. If ever I had been ignorant of any concept of God and was then asked to create a God-concept in my mind, I think the God we serve would be the one I would aspire to conceive, yet my imagination may not permit me to conceive of a God so great. 

 

That is why I cannot help but think Christ is the truth, and also why I can put my hand on my heart and say that if I were asked to imagine a set of truths and a set of instructions for living in a world of pure happiness, I could not conceive of anything better than the teachings of Jesus Christ. And if, given the opportunity to create our own vision of a perfect world we would fail to succeed in conceiving anything better than that which we already have in Christ Jesus, there seems to me only one place to turn and no logical reason why anyone would delay their decision for a minute longer.