A few years ago when I began high school, I was an atheist. I thought religion was superstition that religious people ignored the world’s complexity to fit it into a manageable mental box. I thought religion might serve a positive function for some, but it could never give a comprehensive or consistent worldview; after all, religion’s nature and purpose were to reduce and oversimplify.
I developed this tidy understanding of religion through my early teen years, and for a while, it went unchallenged. But when I was a high school sophomore, I moved in with my dad and he began taking me to church. There, for the first time, I heard the gospel: the news of who Jesus is and what he’s done. I’d heard phrases like “Jesus died for your sins” before, but I’d never taken the time to understand what they meant.
After going to church, I realized I’d done to Christianity exactly what I’d accused religion of doing to the world. I oversimplified and misrepresented it because I missed a key piece of data: “There is salvation in no one else” but Jesus (Acts 4:12).
The most controversial yet fundamental claim in the Christian faith is that Jesus alone has accomplished everything necessary for the salvation of all who believe in him. For this reason, he must be trusted. This doctrine separates Christianity from every other worldview, and it unites every other doctrine within our faith.
What’s the Ground for Morality?
Before I became a Christian, I had a strictly physicalist worldview that left no room for objective moral principles. My biggest objection to such principles was that they’d require some absolute standard that transcended the physical universe.
In conversations with people who believed in transcendence, I found no one who had a sufficient basis for believing in objective moral standards. Among the few religious friends I had, none could give a good reason why some people go to hell and others go to heaven. I concluded that the reason they drew the line between “good” and “evil” where they did was to convince themselves they were on the “good” side.
I was convinced my friends were wrong, but I wasn’t nearly as convinced I was right.
I was convinced my friends were wrong, but I wasn’t nearly as convinced I was right.
I knew my understanding of reality negated objective morality, but I couldn’t bring myself to think or act consistently with my own worldview. I couldn’t fathom any objective basis for morality, but I also couldn’t bring myself to believe morality is merely a construct. I couldn’t get rid of my notions of goodness and justice, but I also couldn’t find a place to put them intellectually.
Christ Provided the Link
When I began to grapple with the gospel, I discovered how Christ’s cross both affirms and revolutionizes the concept of objective morality. It alone provided the tools I needed to address the problem. Christianity affirms the reality of an absolute moral standard, but it denies this standard is set by some arbitrary measure. Rather, it’s based in God’s own objective moral perfection as demonstrated through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
God’s standard doesn’t merely require someone to meet a quantifiable measure of goodness. It says, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). The Bible shows us the only place to hang an objective and transcendent moral standard is on the objective reality of a God who’s also transcendent.
As I wrestled with these truths intellectually, I became convinced God himself was the standard by which I’d be judged. I needed Jesus Christ, “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb. 1:3). I needed his life and death on my behalf. I needed him to be my righteousness and substitute. I came to believe that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forth as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:23–25). These words commanded my life and worship.
His People Made It Compelling
But there was more. I was also confronted with the practical, lived reality of the gospel in my friends’ lives. For the first time in my life, I developed deep, meaningful relationships with genuine Christians, and the testimony of their lives validated the Bible’s testimony. In many ways, there was nothing extraordinary about them. In fact, their faith often seemed superficial to me. But even so they showed me a radically different way of understanding morality.
The only place to hang an objective and transcendent moral standard is on the objective reality of a God who’s also transcendent.
For them, the Bible’s commands weren’t a way to justify themselves before God and others. Instead, these commands directed them to worship the One who had already secured their justification. My friends never explicitly tried to share the gospel with me—mostly because they assumed everyone they met in church was already a Christian—but they validated the gospel for me with their lives. Even the inconsistencies in their faith bore witness to a gracious God who patiently works in and through the lives of redeemed sinners.
And this imperfect witness was ultimately how God convinced me of the truth of the gospel. Seeing the justified lives of my friends brought the doctrine of “Christ alone” to life. At first, justification by faith was an interesting but abstract theory to me, but through my friends God made the gospel a compelling and inescapable reality.
The Gospel Coalition