The opposite of faith is… doubt… or certainty?

What makes our faith strong? Can you have faith and still have doubts?

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. [Hebrews 11:1]

 Jesus said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” [Matthew 14:29-31]

While the author of Hebrews uses “assurance” and “conviction” when describing faith, many more passages in the Bible suggest that even the most faithful of those called by God stepped out more tentatively than boldly and struggled with doubt just as Peter did. Abraham left his homeland to follow God, but he still struggled with God’s promise for an offspring because he and Sarah were so old. Jacob feared encountering Esau after so many years because he worried more about whether Esau held a grudge than about whether God had also blessed Esau. Moses made excuses to try to get out of leading the Israelites out of Egypt. The history of Israel in the Old Testament is filled with times of humility that often followed missteps and misplaced faith in things other than God. 

Even in the Gospels, the disciples struggled to understand the assurance and conviction that called them to Jesus. Their struggle to understand who Jesus was came not so much from a lack of faith but from a certainty that the messiah must be something that was much different than what Jesus was. When Jesus called his disciples, he didn't hand them a scroll filled with requirements for discipleship. He helped them wrestle with their questions, often using questions and parables that challenged what they thought they knew. 

Maybe the thing that holds us back isn't doubt but certainty – in particular, an insistence on holding on to our particular concepts with a stubborn conviction that dismisses the idea that we may not have everything right. Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk recently wrote about Mistakes We Make about Faith:

We mistakenly understand faith when we…

Confuse having faith with having certainty….

Fail to recognize how much our fears shape our faith.

Think that having a hearty or mature faith means I have strong opinions about lots of different issues.

Trust in our faith rather than in the One who is the object of our faith….

Imagine that having faith will give us “answers” to life’s perplexing questions.

Forget that Jesus helped the one who said, “I believe; help my unbelief.”

Fail to recognize how much our personalities, experiences, and relationships affect the way we think about faith and exercise it….

Think that faith is only an individual thing and that I cannot ever be carried by the faith of others….

Presume that faith can only grow in religious soil, through influences that are specifically pious or devotional in nature.

Doubt is often equated with losing faith, perhaps wrongly so. Scot McKnight, reviewing a book called The Skeptical Believer by Daniel Taylor, suggests that doubt may be an element of faith. 

The Skeptical Believer. No, it’s not a contradiction in terms. It’s a simple, everyday reality for many people of faith….  Doubt happens to faith and to believers, not so much to unbelievers. It’s struggling with faith and in the midst of faith, not denying faith. It’s seeking to make sense of faith…. Doubt is misgivings about truth claims, in this case about Christian truth claims. 

Doubt may not be a sign that we don’t believe in God, but that we are struggling with someone else’s claims about God, or with our current concept of God. Doubt may mean that we care enough about our faith to wrestle with it. In examining what we believe and stripping away the fluff from the heart, we can come away with a better understanding of God and a stronger faith. 

Samantha Field, who writes about surviving spiritual abuse on her blog Defeating the Dragons, describes the dangers of not asking questions in an interview on the her.meneutics blog.

[Spiritual abuse] also happens when people stop asking why. Being handed a list of “this is what you should believe” is so very easy, especially when that list is handed to you by someone you respect. But when we stop asking questions, when we even begin to accept that asking questions is in itself a problem, that's when we can surrender our faith into the hands of someone who could misuse it.

…We seem to confuse "having faith" with "being certain." I'm no longer comfortable with feeling certain about anything; certainty, I've found, is dangerous territory. It also bothers me when we frequently resort to statements like "the Bible is very clear on this issue," or that a specific interpretation of a passage is "plain" or "obvious." This type of language seems almost designed to shut down conversation, or to dismiss the speaker's opposition.

I think it's important for us to stay receptive to new and challenging ideas. To honestly engage with a concept we don't agree with, and see where it takes us. Instead of digging in even deeper when our faith system gets confronted, if we took a second to empathetically understand their perspective, we could have a change of heart and a change of mind.

I know people who mistake their understanding about God or Jesus or their denomination’s declarations for the word of God. They make emphatic proclamations and, when challenged, say, “You’re disagreeing with God.” Samantha Field is right – that becomes a conversation stopper. It often reflects more about the person making the statements than it does about God, and it stifles more than it illuminates. 

Do you agree with the writers mentioned above that we confuse faith with certainty? Does faith guarantee certainty or does certainty undermine faith? Is there room for doubt in a strong faith? Can you have a strong, vibrant faith without wrestling with doubt? Which do you think is more dangerous to our faith – doubt, complacency, or certainty? 

Is social justice part of the gospel?

“In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’"

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

This week marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. It’s an illustration of how Christians, based on their understanding of the gospel, can argue such different interpretations, and a reminder that politics and ideology strongly influence those differences. While this country has made progress since then, the debate about social justice continues. 

Some Christians say the gospel is only about redeeming sinners and not about social justice issues. But, if Jesus came to set into motion God’s kingdom on earth, aren't social issues part of that? Can we be "redeemed" while ignoring the plight of those who are poor or persecuted?

A debate two years ago between Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, and Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the role of the church in social issues highlighted different perspectives within the Christian faith. 

Both agreed there’s a Biblical basis for social justice:

• Justice is an attribute of God and therefore God's people must work for justice.
• True justice is not just individual but always has social implications. Therefore, a true definition of justice must include "social justice."
• In order for Christians to be faithful to the Great Commission they must make disciples and teach what Jesus taught, and that means teaching Christians to be workers for justice.

However, they disagreed on whether it is an integral part of the gospel.

Al Mohler argued that, while justice is a good work that Christians should do, it is not the church’s mission. 

"There are many things that the church is involved with that are not essentially its mission but are nonetheless what Christ's people do precisely because they belong to Christ…."The Gospel is about how sinners who rightly deserve nothing but the eternal condemnation of God nonetheless are redeemed by His decisive act in Jesus Christ to redeemed sinners." 

Jim Wallis said that the gospel is about both personal salvation and social justice and they can’t be separated:

"Justice is integral to the Gospel itself," Wallis said.Conservatives and liberals each have gotten the Gospel wrong, Wallis added."Too many liberals have a social cause but have dropped the altar call -- no more conversion. … Too many conservatives have an altar call but no more mission to the world. We must move away from an either/or Gospel. It's time for both/and biblical thinking."

Does it make a difference whether we believe that social justice is just as integral to the gospel as personal salvation or that the gospel is about personal atonement and social justice is a good work we should do? The folks at Sojourners say it does:

If you say that the Gospel is first and foremost about an individual atonement for personal sins, you are quite likely to end up with a church full of people who don't want to go any farther.If an individual person is told that the Gospel is entirely about what it can do for her, she is quite likely to ignore the subsequent commands to actually do the hard work of following Jesus. It's what Bonhoeffer would call "cheap grace."

Even Dr. Mohler expressed concern that “a lot of Churches are REALLY bad at making disciples who actually do the things Jesus told us to do.”

If we focus only on personal salvation, I think we not only lose connection to the larger body of Christ in the world, but we also miss an essential part of what Jesus taught us: Not only are we to love God, but we are also to love our neighbors as ourselves. How we reach out to our neighbors in love becomes the light of Jesus’ presence in the world. 

“It’s not our words. Our words are not what’s going to stop the world in its tracks. Our words are not going to change the world. They’ve heard it all. …It’s not typically the music that’s going to stop the world in its tracks…. It’s not our buildings, as grand and beautiful as some of our church buildings are. It’s not the architecture that’s going to change the world. But I believe what will change the world is when we begin to love each other. And when we begin to love the world, and when we begin to reach out to the orphans and the widows, the lower income families in our communities …. When our houses are packed so full of love that we have to open up the back door to let it ooze out into the valleys and the suburbs and the city streets, when the world sees that kind of love, real love, they’re going to stop in their tracks, they’re going to say, ‘…Whatever you people have over there, you Jesus freaks, I want some of that… I want some of that Jesus for me if he’s doing all that.’”

- Toby Mac, intro to Love Is in the House

Is social justice an essential part of the gospel? If not, what is our calling as followers of Christ? Can we be "redeemed" while ignoring the plight of those who are poor, sick, or persecuted? Can you be a disciple of Christ without doing the things Jesus taught us to do? 

As you ponder these questions, here’s the full track of Toby Mac's Love is in the House:

Is Jesus being exclusive or inclusive when he says "I am the way"?

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” [John 14:6, NIV]

This passage and several more like it – John 3:18, 3:36, and 8:23-24; Luke 10:22; Matthew 11:27 – describe Jesus as the light/way/truth that leads us to God. Depending on your perspective and how much you consider them in context of the whole Gospel, Jesus is either the gatekeeper who keeps all but those who believe in him away from God or the guiding light who breaks down the barrier of sin that stands between us and God.

One perspective implies exclusivity; the other inclusiveness. I've seen those passages used like weapons of judgment and condemnation rather than as acts of love. Is that what Jesus intended? If you add context, Jesus also says “I have come into the world as a light” and “I did not come to judge the world but to save it” (John 12:46-47; see also John 3:16-17). 

Jesus’ mission wasn't to condemn, not even those Pharisees who had lost focus on God among all the legal restrictions. Jesus came to do God’s will: to show people a way to live in God’s love and to experience eternal life. 

God knows how hard it is to keep the commandments, so God sent Jesus to show what’s important (loving God and loving others). If we follow him it all falls into place. Jesus provides a revelation of God – one that is all we need to understand about God. 

“Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.” (John 14:10)

There are those who insist that not only is Jesus the ONLY way to God but, in particular, their specific interpretation and doctrine are the ONLY correct ways to follow. I've had people say I’m going to hell because I don’t follow such-and-such doctrine. Sometimes they might use polite terms like “I’m deeply worried about your soul,” but the point was made. I used to think they were narrow-minded, overly-condemning, and probably drive more people away from Jesus than they bring to him. I’m now more inclined to think they have good intentions, but are overly zealous in their interpretation. I’m still not sure they’re bringing in more people than they drive away. 

I believe our restored relationship with God and our salvation (from ourselves) comes through Jesus. But I don't presume to know how Jesus will reach out to everyone; nor do I believe that Jesus' loving act is only limited to the here and now on earth. I don't know how Jesus goes about reaching the millions (billions?) who died without ever hearing about him or who are raised in a culture that blocks him from the children. I have faith that, through ways I can't fathom, Jesus will reach out to all of God's creation and offer them the same gift of salvation he's given us. That, I believe, is in keeping with the Jesus I find in the Gospels.

I started out with the question: When Jesus says, “I am the way,” is he being exclusive (a gatekeeper letting in only a select few) or inclusive (a light who opens the way for us to know God)?

But, as I worked through the thoughts and notes that were mostly trimmed back to make this post short(ish) and sweet, another question keeps coming up: What if we spent more time as Christians emphasizing the inclusiveness of Jesus’ message – ANYONE who really listens to God and learns, will come to Jesus for more? What if we not only focused on that positive message, but had faith to believe it? Would we come across as less overbearing and exclusive in our approach? Would there be as many people alienated from God in the world today?

Is “Jesus is the way” a gate to keep out all but “true believers” or is it the key to opening the barriers we've put between us and God? Are we right in presuming it's the only way for people of all beliefs?

Thoughts?
Opinions?
Alternative interpretations?

The resurrection: now what?

After he was crucified, Jesus appeared alive first to the women who had come to attend his dead body and then to the other disciples. Jesus, who had turned their ideas of a messiah upside down, now shook up their ideas of death. In the 40 days Jesus appeared to his disciples after the resurrection, I suspect there was a lot of rethinking about this kingdom of God Jesus talked about. 

What happens after the resurrection? Are we supposed to wait for the second coming or is this a call to participate in God's work now? What makes the resurrection so key to our Christian faith?

Discuss.

Here’s some more fodder for conversation: I know there are some folks have trouble believing the resurrection actually happened. It’s hard for them to get beyond medical science, biology, and experience, which tells us that someone who was truly dead doesn't just rise up and become alive again. The key question for me isn't whether it happened but what does it mean to those of us who believe it happened.  

What do we do about the resurrection? How do we respond to what seems impossible unless you believe nothing is impossible with God? The early church took Jesus’ teachings on the kingdom of God to heart as they gathered in fellowship and grew (Acts 2-4). But they didn’t really begin fulfilling Jesus’ call to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28) until they were persecuted and scattered (Acts 8). And, even then, they struggled to recognize that, when Jesus said “all nations,” that included the Gentiles as well as Jews (Acts 10-11, 15). It's evident that the early disciples were still learning what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. Even today, we’re still learning and still debating what it means to be a disciple of a risen Lord. 

Some Christians distill the gospel down to accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior and waiting for the second coming to set things straight. For them, everything in the Bible points solely to Jesus’ act of salvation and emphasis on anything else detracts from that. The emphasis is on being prepared (holy, moral) for the second coming. Other Christians see it as a call to action – to reach out to others and do whatever we can to correct injustices in the world. Their emphasis is on continuing Jesus' ministry on earth. Even among those who discount the resurrection, some believe Jesus set an example for living. 

In Christian Piatt's book Banned Questions About Jesus, Mark Van Steenwyk contrasts believing Jesus was a good teacher while discounting the resurrection with believing in the resurrection but minimizing Jesus’ life and teachings:

“Jesus had a lot to say about how to live in the here and now. Without the resurrection, we’d be left with a deeply challenging way to live our lives; a way that calls us to love our enemies, pursue justice, and seek peace. But we’d labor not knowing if we will be vindicated in our struggle. We’d go through life feeling the weight of our sins and the injustices of the world. That would be hard, but we could do far worse.

“It would be worse for us to gain hope in the resurrection of Jesus and use it as an excuse for inaction. Because Jesus has defeated death, he is the true Lord of the whole world. Therefore we, his followers, have a job to do; we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world. Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new world has begun, and therefore we are invited to be not only beneficiaries of that new world but participants in making it happen.” [p. 35]

Elsewhere in the book, R.M. Keelan Downton writes: 

“There is something important in the idea that Jesus came for me, but in a culture that’s already so focused on ‘me,’ we probably need a little more focus on Jesus as the Messiah or Christ who came to challenge the apparent order of the world and invite us to join in the process of revealing the true order of the world by proclaiming and embodying it.” [p. 11]

How does the resurrection shape your faith? How does it frame our call as Christians? Is the resurrection solely about God’s triumph over sin and death or does it include an invitation to participate in Jesus’ ministry on earth now? Where do we get the concept that we’re supposed to wait for the second coming for God to wipe the slate of this world clean?

How Would Spending 3 Years With Jesus Change Your Life?

What if you had just spent the last three years of your life with Jesus, as one of his first disciples? You've spent every day watching Jesus reach out to the outcast sinners and forgive them, heal the sick, teach about the kingdom of God, and challenge your thinking with parable. You've worshiped with him, worried about his clashes with the religious establishment, and wondered just what kind of Rabbi or Messiah he really is. Then, just when you think you have it figured out, Jesus is arrested, tried, and crucified. But before you write off the disappointment as a lost dream, Jesus once again turns everything you thought you knew inside out when he reappears alive – after his dead, battered body had been placed in a tomb.

How would spending those three years with Jesus change your life? How could it not change your life?

The late Michael Spencer asked this question on Internet Monk several years ago. He warned that this might not be for everybody, but it’s a good way of exploring how to incorporate the Gospel into our every-day living. 

“The key to this exercise is the idea of seeing the integration of life, ministry, teaching, priorities, worship and relationships in the life of Jesus…. [It’s] not what conclusions would I draw, but HOW WOULD I BE DIFFERENT? What would I see differently? How would I conceive of life, priorities and the continuing Jesus movement?”

At the time I first wrestled with the question (I revisit it regularly), I was beginning the third year of reading the Bible from beginning to end. It made me pay even more attention to the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels – not a romanticized, sanitized, or otherwise edited Jesus, but the unadulterated Jesus with his acts of love and forgiveness, hard sayings and genuine, non-hypocritical living and all. I realized there were a lot of things I'd grown too comfortable in accepting. 

I'm continually re-discovering the Jesus who attracted me back to church after I had left as a young adult because I thought it was too hypocritical and not particularly relevant to my life. “Continually re-discovering” is a polite way of saying I keep finding myself becoming a little too comfortable with things that should be disturbing me if I’m truly a disciple of Jesus.

In her book Evolving in Monkey Town, Rachel Held Evans described her experiences re-reading the Gospels after struggling with some hard questions she didn't find good answers for:  

The most startling thing I noticed as I grew more acquainted with the Gospels was that Jesus had a very different view of faith than the one to which I was accustomed…. 

I encountered a different Jesus, a Jesus who requires more from me than intellectual assent and emotional allegiance; a Jesus who associated with sinners and infuriated the religious; a Jesus who broke the rules and refused to cast the first stone; a Jesus who gravitated toward sick people and crazy people, homeless people and hopeless people; a Jesus who preferred story to exposition and metaphor to syllogism; a Jesus who answered questions with more questions, and demands for proof with demands for faith…a Jesus who healed each person differently and saved each person differently; a Jesus who had no list of beliefs to check off, no doctrinal statements to sign, no surefire way to tell who was “in” and who was “out”; a Jesus who loved after being betrayed, healed after being hurt, and forgave while being nailed to a tree; a Jesus who asked his disciples to do the same…

This radical Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands, as I fed the hungry, reached out to my enemies, healed the sick, and comforted the lonely. Being a Christian, it seemed, isn't about agreeing to a certain way; it is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. It is about being Jesus. 

Jesus has a way of pulling us out of our complacency, challenging us to live the Gospel, not just acknowledge it or put it up on the wall to save for some future judgment day. 

So, if you had just spent the last three years of your life with Jesus, how would that change your life? How would you be different?

If you had just spent your life witnessing Jesus’ ministry among the marginalized (the sinners) and hearing Jesus speak of the kingdom of God, how would that affect your priorities in life?

How would that change the way you see the political and social hot-button issues of today?

Happy Easter!

Jesus Creed Question for the Week, March 24 (Palm Sunday)

We're moving into the sixth AND FINAL week of our Lenten study based on Scot McKnight's The Jesus Creed. Our middle and high school youth are using The Jesus Creed for Students while the adults are using 40 Days Living the Jesus Creed.

Before we get to the questions to ponder this week, HERE'S A REMINDER FOR NEXT SUNDAY (EASTER):

On Easter Sunday, youth and adults will meet in the Family Room to share breakfast and talk about our experiences in studying the Jesus Creed. 

Here are some questions we might talk about:
What did you enjoy most in this study?
What did you find the most challenging?
What does it mean to you to love God with ALL your mind, heart, soul, strength?
What does it mean to love our neighbors? Who are they?
What do you want to take from this study into your everyday life?

We hope you can all make it on Sunday. But if you can't, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

And now, here are This Week’s Questions for Discussion:
(Things to talk about with your family)

• How does it feel to know that you are what others see of Jesus in this world?
• How does that affect the way you live each day?

This Week’s Suggested Follow-up Activities: 
(Additional actions you can try if you feel led)

• Recite the Jesus Creed and the Lord’s prayer daily.
• Make a list of ways you can be a part of God’s work on earth (ministry) right now. 
• Pick something from that list and talk about how you can start doing that now.

Why would God send Jesus as a sacrifice to die for our sins?

This begins Holy Week. Many of us would prefer to fast forward from Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) to his resurrection on Easter Sunday, skipping the parts in between where Jesus is captured, mocked, whipped, brutalized, and nailed to a cross. But if we stop and linger, some tough questions arise, the kind that tend to pop up the first time someone really stops to think about the events leading up to Easter. 

Why would God send Jesus as a sacrifice to die for our sins? If God is indeed all-loving and all-powerful, why not just offer grace and forgiveness without the sacrifice? Why would God choose to sacrifice the one who embodied God among us, the one who led a sinless life?

The answer often falls along these lines: We all have sinned – every human from Adam and Eve on down. On our own, we fall short of God’s holiness and righteousness. In order to overcome the barrier of sin that separates us from God, we need either a sacrifice (pointing to the laws in Leviticus that call for sacrifices for various sins) or a mediator (the priest who offers the sacrifice). God sent Jesus to be the ultimate sacrifice for all of our sins. Jesus carried all of our sins with him on the cross in his death. And then he defeated the forces of sin and death in his resurrection. 

There’s a theological term for that: substitutionary atonement. There are variations on the theme (which you can find by searching the term or the question “why did Jesus have to die for our sins”), but they all boil down to the same thing: Jesus had to die for our sins if we are to escape the righteous judgment of God.  

I didn’t know the term “substitutionary atonement” existed until a couple of years ago, even though I’ve heard “Jesus died for our sins” for as long as I can remember. Many branches of Christianity see it as the central meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross. 

Key passages used to support the theology that Jesus died for our sins include:

• Isaiah 52:13-53:12 – Isaiah talks of the suffering servant who died because “it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer… [to make] his life an offering for sin.”
• 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 – Paul writes that Jesus “died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” and that “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
• Luke 4:16-22 – Jesus says the prophesies of Isaiah are fulfilled in him, although the passage he reads here is about proclaiming the good news to the poor, healing the blind, and freeing the oppressed, not dying for our sins.
• 1 Peter 2:21-25 and 1 Peter 3:13-22 – Peter writes that Jesus died for our sins so we might die from sins, be healed, and live in righteousness.

This theology is not without controversy because it emphasizes the demand for reparation or punishment for violating the law (sin), rather than love, as driving force in Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. It also raises questions about our view of God as all-loving and all-powerful. Does a loving God really insist on the sacrifice of an innocent person (albeit God in the flesh) to fulfill the laws God made? Why is an all-powerful God tied to the laws God created? 

I found another perspective in Christian Piatt’s book Banned Questions About Jesus, a follow-up to Banned Questions About the Bible. The responses to three related questions(1) contend that Jesus died because of human sins, not to take the place of our sins. 

Jarrod McKenna suggests that the question has it backwards. 

“The gospel is not that some deity takes out its rage on an innocent victim so he doesn’t have to take it out on all of us eternally…. God doesn’t need blood. God doesn’t need a mediator. We do!”

“…The lamb of God is NOT offered to God by humanity but is God offered to us to enable a new humanity. God is reconciling the world… through Christ by knowingly becoming our victim, exposing this idolatrous system that promises order, safety, peace, and protection in exchange for victims.” [p. 4]

The argument is that God seeks repentance, not reparation or punishment, from us. “Thus the loving example of Jesus effects a change in the heart of humankind, bringing about such repentance.” [Lee Camp, p. 3]

Jesus’ ministry was about more than becoming a sacrifice on the cross. Jesus forgave people for their sins while he was still alive and he preached the gospel while he was still alive. Rather than dying as “some kind of punishment or restitution”, David Lose says “Jesus suffered because the love and forgiveness he offered was just too comprehensible and terrifying for us to accept.” He concludes:

“From this point of view, Jesus didn’t ‘have to’ suffer and die, but he did so anyway in order to show us just how much God loves us. He suffered because he proclaimed God’s mercy, love, and forgiveness, and until you’ve lost everything, there’s nothing more terrifying to hear.” [p. 21]

Here are some questions, based on Banned Questions About Jesus, to ponder:
Do you believe God required Jesus' sacrifice in order for God to forgive sin?
Which do you think is more consistent with the gospel as you know it: a system of justice, where every sin must be counted and punished, or a system of love, where God forgives us because God loves us and we forgive each other because we love each other?
Is it possible to have love without justice?


(1) Why would God send Jesus as the sacrificial lamb…? [p. 2-8]
Why did Jesus have to suffer so much before he died? [p. 21-24]
How could Jesus forgive people for their sins before he died if he had to die for our sins? [p. 156-158]