We mentioned back a few weeks ago about what people think about the Bible. Then we said that the Bible is “the revelation of God’s will and purpose for mankind in the context of history and in relation to four doctrinal themes: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration”. We used a passage in the Bible to discuss how it is based on actual historical settings. We discussed why the Bible is historically trustworthy in our latest posts afterwards.
We talked so much about the historical part of the Bible, but what about the four doctrinal themes?
Creation points to what the Bible claims at the very first verse of the entire Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. God creates the Universe. He brings the Universe into existence.
God created the Universe and everything in it, including people. Among all the living beings, people are special in that they were created in the “image of God”. However, people were rebellious against God. We lost our harmonious and satisfying relationship with God. Instead, we chose the path of running away from the Creator and so entering into lives filled with emptiness and unsatisfiable desires. That is the Fall.
The righteous and merciful God reaches out to humans to give us a way out of the sinful and unsatisfying lives. Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human, died on the cross as a sacrifice to pay our debt of sins. The famous Bible verse at John 3:16 says it all: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. This is the Redemption.
But Jesus did not just die on the cross. He rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion. As fully God, He cannot be locked up by death. Moreover, Jesus’ resurrection tells us that this life on earth is not our final destination. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ will return in the future. Whoever receives Jesus as his or her personal savior will enter into the new heaven and new earth to eternity. Death and sorrow will be no more. Creation is restored to what it had always been meant to be. This is the Restoration.
Friends, do these four doctrinal themes – Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration – sound a little too much to take in? “Creation” is something we focus on for a long time. We did not mention much about the "Fall", "Redemption", and "Restoration". These are important elements of the Christian faith. My posts do not dig much into these tenets of Christianity except an early post that describes what “belief” means in my posts.
Dear readers, you may have recognized that there is one crucial link out of these four doctrinal themes – the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible plainly admits that if Jesus did not resurrect, then preaching of the gospel is useless, the faith of the Christians is futile, and Christians are the most pitiful people in this world.
But did Jesus really resurrect? Can a dead man come back to life? Isn’t it just sound crazy?
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