Did the witers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - EYEWITNESS

THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

Common grace

Before looking at the grace of God which is available to those who, in repentance and faith, put their trust in him through Christ, it is worth looking briefly at what theologians have tended to call “common grace”, that grace which is given to all people, regardless of their attitude to God. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45—declared in a hot climate!). John, speaking of Jesus, says, “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people” (John 1:4). All that we have and are, our physical life, our mental and spiritual life, our conscience and ability to discern right and wrong are all given us by the grace of God, as are our gifts and abilities.

If we believe in God as Creator, then we are fully dependent beings. Karl Marx, when barely twenty-six, recognised this in a text that was unpublished during his lifetime, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

A being only counts itself as independent when it stands on its own two feet and it stands on its own two feet as long as it owes its existence to itself. A man who lives by grace of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by grace of another when I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but when he also created my life, when he is the source of my life. And my life necessarily has such a ground outside itself if it is not my own creation.

Marx held firmly to human independence and so denied the existence of God. It is perhaps the prime characteristic of our rebellion against God that we deny this dependence.

Jeff Lucas likens God’s second-by-second play with the earth to the work of a passionate artist. In How not to Pray he says:

He is very much here, and not only when he is acknowledged or noticed. That helps us to understand why a piece of gloriously inventive music may be written by someone who doesn’t know God; we can admire the masterful use of colour and shade on canvas, the work of an artist whose heart is in the far country, and yet who has been kissed, though they don’t know it, by the touch of the Creator. Shall we ascribe the source of their creativity to Satan? We must not, because we are living in a God-bathed world.

One of the ways in which the grace of God works is in the restraining of evil. A news report in Christianity Today in July 2004, after the exposure of the torture of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, describes two social experiments. In the summer of 1971, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a now-famous prison simulation experiment. Volunteers were recruited and randomly assigned to be “guards” and “prisoners.” In a matter of hours the abuse began. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks, but Zimbardo cut it short at six days. Not only were the volunteers getting out of hand, but Zimbardo also saw himself changing. He wrote, “I began to talk, walk, and act like a rigid institutional authority figure, more concerned about the security of ‘my prison’ than the needs of the young men entrusted to my care.”

When Youth Direct president Don Smarto taught criminal justice at Wheaton College from 1985 to 1992, he tried to introduce his students to the prison experience by using a simulation like Zimbardo’s. To avoid abuse, he and his colleagues built safeguards into the programme, but they hardly expected they would need them. He said, “Keep in mind that the students were evangelicals from good homes, supposedly all Christians,” but “within the first hour the expletives and the foul language would start.” Then came the spitting and other vulgar actions. And in the middle of the night, when supervision was at its lightest, student “guards” stripped student “inmates” of their clothes, used handcuffs to pull their ankles into a painful position behind their backs, and made them eat their cold food on the floor.”

Like Zimbardo, Smarto concluded, “Anyone is capable of doing anything under the right circumstances.” What surprised him most was that the group was not self-policing. If one or two behaved badly, they expected that the rest would exercise some control. That did not happen. “Instead we found groupthink.” He said, “I can’t explain that one. There is no answer for it.”

No doubt, given the right circumstances, we would all sink into moral degradation. It is only by the grace of God that we don’t. And there is much good done in the world by those who make no claim to be Christians, which is all the result of this common grace. This is different, however, from the grace that saves us and brings us into a relationship with the living God.