The Cross in the Christian Life

Through the recent discovery in this new Age of Information, that the natural world is filled with complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information, this now clearly exhibits the realization that the Intelligent Designer of the natural world, knew and knows what He is doing across-the-board.

In creating living organisms and non-living material things, God displays skill far and away above anything that we can manufacture.

This now makes the leap from science to theology that closes the gap between science and biblical-quality faith, a hypothetical gap that should never have been fabricated.

We now understand both in the natural world through science and in the composition of the biblical narrative stories of faith, the modern fact-based evidence that God correctly knows what He is doing in everything.

God is a bridge that we can safely cross from the concrete material realities of the natural world to the abstract thought of precisely how human beings created in the image of God, can best conduct our lives at the peak of intellectual and moral reasoning.

The connecting of the dots between the natural world, and the biblical narrative stories of faith, both equally display the brilliance of God.

This dovetails with the idea that after living a journey of faith within our God-composed life-script, after the pattern given in the biblical narrative stories of faith, we can look back in hindsight and conclude that God knew what He was doing. 

God knew what He was doing long before our own individual story-endings bring to light the foresight of God, having set us early and punctually on-time upon a course that made our life-scripts beneficial to ourselves and to others, having well-defined purpose, meaning, dignity, and worth.

That God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours, now connects beautifully and seamlessly with the entirely secular field of science, which turns-out after closer inspection, to not be secular and faith-free at all.

The key point, the central tenet in the biblical narrative stories of faith is that God displaces our ways with Hishigher ways for the highest, noblest, and most unselfishly love-filled reasons. 

God composes life-scripts for us that we can willingly enter into through the narrow gate of faith, precisely because He alone possesses the best ways of doing things at the peak and the pinnacle of perfect precision.

Today’s Christians should no longer be suspicious of science. 

The truth of the existence of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world, now eliminates the plausibility of naturalistic explanations for the origin and operation of the phenomena in the living and non-living natural world.

This provides our modern culture with a sharp U-turn to the pre-Darwin period where belief and unbelief were balanced between moral, metaphysical decisions…unweighted by atheistic materialism falsely claiming the support of science on its side.

The sudden appearance of the highly sophisticated and complex information contained in the life-script of Abraham, created the novel and innovative concept of God displacing our plans with His higher ways and thinking through a new and different life-script inserted into our lives. 

This can accurately be called the Abraham Explosion in relation to the similar occurrence 535-million years ago in the natural world during the Cambrian Explosion.

These two events are similar in that they represent a top-down, actualized manifestation of complex information having functional coherence[1] coming suddenly into existence in a moment of time without evolutionary, gradual progression.

An Abraham Explosion could not occur in a past geological era through pre-humans living hundreds of thousands of years ago, because fully mature human beings are the only known living organisms that possess the capacity for modern intellectual and moral reasoning (Gen. 1:26).

Like the coordinated ensemble of biodiversity and ecology to be in-place to receive the new creatures coming into existence at the Cambrian Explosion, human beings needed the broad array of moral concepts to be in-place for the Abraham Explosion to actualize.

Like the need for there to be an atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen to be in-place for flight to occur, the incredible environment of right and wrong, truth and error, and the consequences of our actions must be in-place for a biblical-quality journey of faith to be possible.

The fact that there are no transitional, intermediate life-stories leading-up in human history as precursors to the Abraham Explosion, dovetails seamlessly with the same reality that occurred 535 million years ago at the immergence of complex life-forms. 

One key end-point outcome of a journey of faith following God for Old Testament Jews and for New Testament Christians in the early church and today, is that we are supposed to be able to look back in reflection at some point in time, about the course and direction of our lives. 

We should be able to say in hindsight: “God knew what He was doing in guiding and directing my life, better than I could possibly have known about or orchestrated on my own.  He led me through a narrow path that was right and correct, in a way I could not have foreseen or anticipated ahead of time.”

This concept is categorically different from human fiction-writing.

The suspense-filled story endings for Jack Ryan, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, James Bond, Tom Sawyer, Elizabeth Bennett, and even for Sidney Carton in Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities are that they knew what they were doing, that theyresolved their particular conflict through human ingenuity, persistence, technology, and the application of their unique talents or their unique positions at the time.

The Bible is the only work of literature in all of history that has stories with endings that resolve with the realization that God knew and knows what He is doing.

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[1] Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed (with Dr. Douglas Axe), published Nov. 26, 2016 by Apologetics Academy on You Tube.

Before Damascus, Saul/Paul could not conceivably have imagined a way that God could extend to the undeserving, totally misguided, polytheistic and idol-worshipping Gentiles, of reachable salvation by grace through faith…through lives previously exhibiting the most unmerited works as viewed by a Jewish Pharisee at that time.

But a well-educated young Pharisee erroneously persecuting the early Christians could appreciate the overwhelming grace of God needed to commence the Great Commission, through the loving outreach of forbearance rather than condescending derision.

This brilliant creativity of imaginative insight in crafting this life-script for the apostle Paul to enable him through super-humility to become the missionary evangelist to the larger Greco-Roman world at this time-period of the start of the Great Commission (Mt. 28:19-20), to my thinking is uncannily similar to the brilliance of the Big Bang creation of the universe, the origin of life, the nanotechnology inside living cells, and human conscious thought that we examine through science.

The revelation on the road to Damascus that Jesus was the Christ was a priceless gift to Paul that was beyond the human perception of one of Jerusalem’s young rising stars within its tight rabbinical group.

This need for God’s light in this critical area of discernment was not lost upon Saul/Paul as he took the gospel message out to the Greco-Roman world in the first-century, that Jesus as the truth active in our lives will set us free beyond our wildest imagination.

Paul the apostle is the epitome of the Christian salvation by grace-through-faith message to the world, because he more than anybody recognized that he should have known better, but missed it.

This revelation on the road to Damascus eliminates forever for Paul the program of self-salvation through the misguided effort of performing good-works, because with all of his education and knowledge about the Law of Moses, he lacked the needed, upfront discernment to see that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Christ (Mt. 5:17).

But here Paul is in good company.

The prophet Samuel similarly cannot discern amongst the sons of Jesse a suitable future king for Israel, using outward appearances as the criteria for selection (1 Sam. 16:6-12).

John the Baptist displays discernment that falls short of divine perfection in doubting from prison the messianic identity of Jesus of Nazareth (Mt. 11:1-3).

At the Lord’s Supper, the other eleven apostles had no idea that Judas would be the traitor who betrays Jesus to the authorities (Mt. 26:20-25).

Finally, the fundamental question having eternally cosmic implications is why isn’t reaching the truth much easier than it is?

This is why Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (Jn. 3:3).

This is why modern science is a search for truth regarding phenomena in the natural world.

This is why God-composed, adventure of faith life-scripts displace our ways with God’s higher ways and thoughts (Is. 55:8-9), a concept that is anathema to the philosophical worldview of secular humanism.

This is why, to be able to adjudicate the question of the competence of either Satan or God to be the King and Ruler for an eternity of time to come, God has given to the believer the indwelling of His Spirit as a personally accessible PhD theology and life-coach professor, guiding believers through our research program into the knowledge of good and evil (Jn. 16:13; Rev. 3:20; Heb. 11:6).

This is why there must be a fallen, broken world that contains evil and suffering, that with tragically unavoidable consequences is nonetheless necessary to separate-out the outcomes between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty, being the fundamental, primary issue within the broad array of moral concepts, first introduced at the temptation in the Garden of Eden.

This is consistent with a vertical continuum-line that contains light and darkness, and good and evil as a real-world reality in a cognitive, sentient, intellectual and moral reasoning heaven and earth.

Redemptive salvation by grace through faith in Christ, provides the impunity of being able to enter into a research program into the knowledge of good and evil, utilizing the lens of an imperfect yet redeemed earthen vessel to comprehend the subtle nuances contained within the broad array of moral concepts.

To my thinking this is the epitome of the concept of being an inference to the best explanation, based upon the evidence currently on the earth today.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ enables believers to surgically investigate the knowledge of good and evil without ruining ourselves or the world.

This is a spiritual engineering feat by God of remarkable insight, precision, and the daring boldness of confident leadership to open-up a way through the inviolability of our free-will, to willingly choose to follow Him into a higher journey in this life.

Jesus Christ with His arms opened wide on the cross and spilling His life’s blood on our behalf, is telling us that He is also willing to do His part in the painful process of researching the knowledge of good and evil in which from time-to-time we are bound to fall and skin our knees.

But this will produce our ability to discern virtue and righteousness through the unavoidable route of first-hand field research.

The bottom-line in the Bible is that we need God to craft life-scripts for us to lead and guide us into all truth (Jn. 16:13), assisted by spiritually born-again, new hearts and minds that have eyes to see and ears to hear (Jn. 3:3; Mt. 11:15).

Satan’s insurrection in heaven and as exhibited by the continuous and repetitive chaos on earth in the affairs of mankind, is by definition the exact opposite of God-sovereignty.

From the Christian viewpoint, this is one of the reasons why God created the universe. 

This is one of the seemingly inexplicable mysteries within human intellectual and moral reasoning for why some people succumb to the deceptive appeal of personality cult leaders (2 Sam. 15:6; Rev. 12:9), that must be resolved here and now for the benefit of eternity, time without end. 

God-Sovereignty at the Cross

One area where we can clearly and unambiguously authenticate the divine nature of Jesus Christ is in His perfect compliance with the biblical concept of God-sovereignty, in His life-script and actual performance.

On the cross, Jesus is demonstrating God-sovereignty actualized to absolute perfection in staying within His God-composed life-script calling to become the Savior of the world (Jn. 17:4).

On the cross, Jesus exemplifies purely consistent, non-rebellious, sinless unity-of-purpose within the Godhead of the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The divinely brilliant, creative originality of the cross is that Jesus is experiencing the most acute outward display of worldly failure, while at the same time achieving the greatest single accomplishment for mankind in all of history as the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin.

God combines on the cross two contrasting elements: extreme worldly failure and brilliantly divine success, on the broadest possible range of human experience because the cross at Calvary involves the divine Son of God in a human body (Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7) the breadth of which no human literary writer could ever imagine or invent.

Jesus Christ on the cross as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for mankind’s sins in perfect demonstration of God-sovereignty, is such a brilliantly divisive yet subtle issuesurgically separating truth from error, that many modern Jews even today use this perceived failure of Jesus to be the expected Moses, Joshua, or King David type Messiah ushering-in world peace…as still serving as the main reason for why they reject Jesus Christ as Messiah, disqualifying Him on these grounds alone.

Many Jews in the first-century and today would say that their Messiah would never suffer the indignity of being crucified by the Romans, of being a curse “hanged on a tree.” (Dt. 21:23; Gal. 3:13).

As we ourselves stand at the cross looking up at Jesus, we either see the Passover Lamb of God performing His God-composed life-script in perfect God-sovereignty, or we see the worst failure of a person that can be imagined in life, the utter humiliation of first being scourged, then afterwards ending their lives through the shame and defeat of Roman crucifixion.

As we look up at Jesus hanging on the cross, we either see a life-script that was perfectly written to match the unique capacity of the God/man Jesus Christ to take upon Himself the sins of the world.

Or we see a life-script that falls so far outside of the positive ideals and aspirations of the American Dream ancient or modern, that our best option then is to choose to go our own way in a journeyof self, according to the tenets of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking, and reject Jesus Christ altogether.

Redemptive salvation by grace through faith in Christ creates the singular brilliance of a joint-venture with God into the exploration of the knowledge of good and evil, utilizing the research vehicle of our fallen yet redeemed imperfect nature.

God-composed journey of faith life-scripts starting with Abraham anticipate by roughly 3,500 years the scientific method of basic field research inaugurated at the start of the Scientific Revolution.

This is the most modern, up-to-date, sophisticated use of the broad array of moral concepts at the outer edge of their real-world, practical utility.

The insightfully piercing dichotomy between the perfect God-sovereignty of Jesus Christ, and the self-sovereignty of going our own way of the religious elites and political rulers in Jerusalem, at the cross is exposed by God alone as no human literary genius could, of being as wide apart as the Grand Canyon.

God alone has the ability to highlight on that one day atop Calvary Hill, the huge contrast between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty…to perfection.

This is a key element that separates-out for us amidst the sea of multiple competing narratives the singularly unique, divine quality of the biblical narrative in today’s modern world.

Moral Concepts are On-Time

In Galatians 5:22-23, Paul lists some of the positive fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”

Earlier in Galatians 5:19-21, Paul lists some of the negative “works of the flesh”: “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.”

To these two lists of moral attributes and characteristics we could add the concepts of truth, honesty, dignity, loyalty, friendliness, honor, humility, dedication, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, humor, flexibility, empathy, forbearance, consideration, self-sacrifice, gratitude, persistence, commitment, discernment, rationality, logical thinking, being organized, being a peace-maker, fairness, generosity, passion…and a number of other distinct and precise words that describe finely differentiated moral characteristics.

This list could be expanded further by adding their negative counterparts.

Why is this important?

When anyone who is a born-again Christian, Bible college student, Christian theologian, atheist, skeptic, or curious truth-seeker begins an examination of the perfect and sinless life of Jesus Christ, they are acknowledging the existence of the very tools of the sophisticated and varied concepts available that precisely define moral characteristics, that make such an examination possible.

Without this complete and exhaustive tool-kit of concepts by which to judge moral characteristics, a personal decision for or against accepting Christ as Savior would fall short of being meaningful, would not have all of the richly differentiated criteria to support a valid decision, one way or the other.

The three complimentary categories: the existence of the broad array of moral concepts, our capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning, and the divinely composed life-script for Jesus Christ, must all be fully developed and fully functional in-time for the appearance of Jesus Christ into this world in the first-half of the first-century A.D.

This discussion opens the door into a better and fuller understanding of the uniqueness of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, validating the life of Jesus to be at the top-most point of moral perfection.

God-Composed Life-Scripts

The recent modern recognition in philosophy is that the human mind when reduced down to only a materialistic “brain” alone, made up of circuits and neurons, devolves into nonsensical relativism.

The radical reduction into materialism undermines confidence in the reliability of all human thought, and thereby destroys rationality, scientific investigation, and even worldview philosophies such as atheism itself.

Yet by simply asking the question and examining the evidence, this in and of itself declares at the outset that Jesus Christ the person we are investigating, is in fact within the zone of moral perfection and sinless virtue by reason of the question being seriously entertained at all. 

We would not even open such an investigation into the life of any other exceptional person past or present, because we already correctly acknowledge that only one person in all of history has made a credible, serious claim to have lived a perfect life, and that one person is Jesus Christ.  

No sane person in all of recorded history has made a viable and well-substantiated claim to embody and demonstrate the moral attributes of brilliant pure light, absolute goodness, and perfect virtue…of being, speaking, and acting like a deity.

Jesus Christ as Messiah is proactively anticipated for centuries in the biblical Old Testament messianic prophecies fulfilled in the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus Christ recorded in the New Testament gospels.

This raises the probing apologetics question into the divine origin of the composition of the Bible, Old Testament Judaism, and New Testament Christianity, of how in the first-place we would “come by” the capacity to accurately judge whether the life and ministry of Jesus Christ exhausts the extent of the possible outer-limits of moral perfection.

How would we determine that our current tool-kit of known virtuous characteristics, of well-defined moral attributes, is absolutely exhaustive, adequate, and complete enough for the in-depth moral reasoning needed to evaluate the life of Jesus Christ? 

How would we know whether there are not some additional, outstanding moral characteristics that we are unaware of, in this current earthly context, above and beyond those demonstrated and exemplified in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ that would raise the bar higher?

How would we know there are not some missing moral attributes in our reality that might call into question the impeccable qualifications of Jesus to be the blemish-free and sinless atoning sacrifice for our sins?

The point here is not whether God has some additional, divine characteristics applicable in heaven that would not concern us presently, that are not relevant here on earth, but whether or not Jesus the Son of God in a human body (Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7) exhausts the limits of moral perfection as the God/man in order to qualify as the Passover Lamb of God, one-time atoning sacrifice for sin.

The question is how this full and varied palette of moral concepts had an origin and came into existence within the reality of thought-filled human life, to be able to make this assessment.

The important point in this discussion is the fantastic notion that we would have the moral reasoning tools in terms of human mental capacity, but also in the complementary existence of the broad array of abstract moral concepts defined through the language of discrete and distinctive words, to be able to make a valid decision for or against salvation faith in Jesus Christ at this highly advanced level.

The connection between the human capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning, with an external array of independent moral concepts is similar to what is called prior fitness in the scientific study of how biodiverse living species fit-in, in-the-moment to complex, pre-existing, environmental ecosystems.

This connection that we so easily take for granted, argues compellingly for a human mind capable of recognizing and parsing the subtleties of informational concepts, that transcend above a mere, materialistic brain.

But this well-timed connection in history between human capacity and an external array of independent moral concepts, also argues compelling for the presence of intelligent designing agency having the foresight to bring these two realities into existence at the same moment in time.

The mental capacity to technologically problem-solve at the advanced level to take us to the moon in 1969, and the moral reasoning capacity to differentiate and comprehend complex moral concepts, are two realities that define the essence of human beings.

Human beings possess a complete and exhaustive array of tools within the broad assortment of moral concepts from which to make an intelligent and reasoned judgment as to the divine quality of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

Just as orderliness and intelligibility are indispensably coordinated with our human capacity to conduct successful scientific investigations of the natural world, it would be pointless to be presented with the decision-making imperative regarding the truth-claims of Jesus Christ regarding His qualifications as Savior, King, and eternal Ruler if humans did not possess the incredible capacity to make an informed decision.

The origin of the entire array of moral characteristics appears suddenly and fully defined in scope.

This recognition represents a sharp, near-instant vertical upward spike on any conceivable graph-line for the time-duration of the human race.

 This is not anything remotely like incrementally gradual, small-step, evolutionary cultural development.

Like the force of gravity, the qualities of liquid water, or this special planet that is our habitat, the broad array of moral concepts cannot be the product of human invention.