God can be known because He has revealed himself. Some of God’s character can be seen in the beauty of our surrounding environment and nature, but God’s fullest revealing is found in God’s written Word (i.e. the Bible or Scripture). The Bible teaches all that is necessary for faith and godly living. It challenges us even as it offers good news to our deepest longings. At its core, the Bible was written to announce what God has done for us, not what we do for God.

One of the central mysteries of Christianity is that the Bible shows us there is only one true God and this singular God exists as three persons — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God is the source of all life, truth, righteousness, holiness, beauty, goodness, justice, and mercy. Because of this mysterious three-in-one nature, Christianity can uniquely say God has always existed as a loving community within himself. He is love at his very core.

Out of the overflow of his love, God created the universe to be good, and beautiful. God created people — guiding the whatever the processes were behind our formation — to be both physical and spiritual beings. We are uniquely made to trust God, follow God, and reflect God to the world in perfect community, loving harmony, and shameless relationship with each other, nature, and with God himself. In other words, we are made out of God’s love to enjoy God’s love and reflect God’s love to the world.

People are worshippers at our core. We get our sense of worth and value from someone or something we sacrifice for and prioritize above all else. The brokenness we experience in our world comes down to the human instinct to replace God with anything else as the ultimate object of worship. Inevitably, those things will disappoint us because they cannot fill the space designed for relationship with a living, loving God.

This core instinct to replace God is called sin. As sinful people, we want to be our own gods and determine what is right and wrong for ourselves. That means sin is more than “breaking rules.” It is directly rejecting God.

The result of sin in our relationship with others is that we are surrounded by inescapable brokenness and separation. Selfishness, corrupt desire, abuse of power, gender and racial oppression, etc. plague us.

The result of sin in our relationship with God is spiritual and physical death. Hell is not a punishment for basically good people who made a few religious mistakes. It is a description of the eternal lives of people who are increasingly separated from God and are given over to their increasingly selfish trajectories. The seed of sin, left to its own devices, will become a living hell without divine intervention.

No loving God could overlook the evil and suffering in our world. We crave justice and expect a loving God to bring it. Yet, if we’re honest, the heart-corruption that causes evil and injustice out in the world is also present in our hearts. In other words, we long for justice “out there,” and we long for mercy for us. 

How can God rightly bring justice while overlooking sin & evil? He can’t. The debt of sin and evil must be paid in order for God to be just. The good news of the Bible is that God doesn't ask us to pay that debt. He himself pays it in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is mysteriously a human being and yet also God. As a human being, Jesus is our substitute. He lived the life we were supposed to live. He owed no debt to God. As God, Jesus offers forgiveness. He willingly pays the debt we owe God so that God’s justice may be satisfied and God’s mercy might be shown.

All of this took place on the cross. Jesus substitutionary death is the climax of history. On the cross, all the consequences of our sin were placed on him. Jesus willingly traded places with us. He accepted the guilt, shame, and wrath that our sins deserved. He experienced physical and spiritual death in our place. At the same time, he gives us the right standing with God that he earned.

More than that, Jesus rose from the dead to show that our debt was paid in full and to inaugurate a divine rescue mission called the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom will bring an end to all suffering, bring justice to all the oppressed, restore all broken relationships, and bring renewal to the very universe itself.

On the cross, Jesus accomplishes our individual salvation from our own sin and liberates the universe from corruption.

The Gospel is news not advice. Christianity is not primarily a philosophy that may or may not “work”. It is a faith built on a historical event that either did or did not happen. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, none of his teachings about the Kingdom of God matter. If he did rise from the dead, we rightly pay attention to what he said and did. Jesus invites us to respond to his life, death, and resurrection in two ways.

First, we repent and believe. Jesus invites all of us to turn from our selfishness and sin and receive this gift of forgiveness and promise of new life. We trust that Jesus lived, died, and rose…for us. We rely on Jesus as the only way we can be restored to right relationship with God. We commit to serving him as Lord and resting with him as Savior.

Second, we follow Jesus on the mission he started but has not yet finished. Sin will still be present in the world (including in believers) until Jesus returns to the earth and completes the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Given our place in the Gospel story, followers of Jesus strive to be a gracious family of faith that enjoys a restored relationship with God, connects with fellow Christians for growth and encouragement, and partners together to sacrificially serve others as Jesus did for us.