Faith: God 'knows the way out of the grave'

“Christendom has had a series of revolutions,” writes G. K. Chesterton, “and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

Oh, yes, and a God who “so loved the world” that he truly did “give his only Son” both to pardon and to empower.

The pardon had to be real. The power had to be real. Why? Because humanity’s problem was real. Put simply, our problem is that none of us measures up. We all foul up, and we must deal with the reality that not one of us lives up to his or her own standards, much less to the standard of right and wrong woven into the fabric of the universe.

Oh, and it is. Pick a modern philosopher or guru — they’re a dime a dozen — confidently proclaiming that right and wrong are just human constructs and he or she is above all of that. Then watch his reaction as his new car gets stolen or keyed, or if she becomes convinced that her publisher is cheating her out of the royalties promised to come from her trendy book in which she declares that absolute right and wrong do not exist.

Almost any kid on any playground knows better. Fair’s fair, right’s right, and the converse is true, and kids know it.

So do we. And we are often far from right in attitude and behavior. How do we deal with the dissonance when we fall short? We can probably find any number of folks to comfort us with the idea that we just need to get comfortable with the “fact” that good and truth, right and wrong, are easily adjusted to fit our need.

If on this Wednesday, we prefer two plus two to equal five, we can just conveniently pronounce it to be so. But deep down, we know that up is up, no matter how we feel about it, and down is down, even if we’d prefer it otherwise.

We don’t fall up, we fall down. We fail, and, yes, we might as well use the word, we need forgiveness. We need it from those our failures have hurt. But we also have a lurking feeling that our failures and sins cut into this world’s moral fabric more deeply than we might like to think. Our sins are more than locally consequential.

Our attempts at changing truth and reality fail. Granite is not malleable. Our struggles to forgive ourselves fall flat. We make lousy gods.

Just at the birth of this new year, I saw these words on a sign near a busy street. I’d not have been surprised to see them elsewhere, but this was on the sign of a church purporting to point people to Christ: “A new year. Another chance to get it right.”

Were they completely unaware of how idolatrous and anti-gospel those words actually are? Did they not know that they’d just relegated Christianity to the self-help section of a bookstore chain, shoved the Gospel into a shelf beside a bunch of fad diet books?

Many are the schemes and the religions of the self-help variety peddling the moonshine that we humans can eventually work hard enough, smart enough, efficiently enough that through our own effort, we’ll “get it right.”

But this sort of self-delusion is nothing new. Our ancestors sought a way to “appease” a violated universe and its “gods.” Render worship “to whom it may concern.” Offer sacrifices of all sorts. Do some sort of penance. But the focus of your “religion” is ultimately on you. Pick a god who agrees with you that digging out of your grave is all up to you.

There is a genuine way out of the grave. Real pardon. Real power. But it comes completely from outside of ourselves.

The fully human Son of God could literally suffer and die and completely identify with us, knowing real hunger and thirst and pain. The fully divine Son of God could literally take all of our sin and guilt on himself and truly away, as only the truly divine could do.

Fully human. Fully divine. And completely loving. For real pardon. For real power. Nothing less is enough to get us out of our graves and raised with genuine joy and life-giving grace and hope. The cross matters. Easter matters.

So, we have exactly what we need. Not self-help and self-centered snake oil. Not human-centered “faith” that just helps us redecorate our graves and tries to teach us to be content with the stench and decay. We actually have a God who “knows the way out of the grave.”

Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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