Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical by Timothy Keller

Author:Timothy Keller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-19T21:00:00+00:00

The Christian Hope Is Assured

Most religious systems teach an afterlife, but ordinarily it is conditioned on your living a morally good and religiously observant life. Christianity, as we have seen, on the contrary offers salvation as a gift. It does not belong to the good people but to the people who will admit that they are not good enough and that they need a savior. And so Christians do not approach death uncertain whether they will be found worthy of eternal life. They believe in Jesus, who alone has a record worthy of eternal life, and they are secure in him.

And how can we be sure that faith in Christ will usher us into this future? One ground of our assurance is the Resurrection of Christ himself, the historical evidence for which is formidable, as demonstrated by scholars such as Wolfhart Pannenberg, N. T. Wright, and others.79 (We will look further at this evidence in chapter 12.) Another ground of our hope is the foretaste of the future we get now, as we receive intoxicating if fleeting experiences of God’s love through prayer. “And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

These are the reasons that from his prison cell, awaiting his execution for plotting against Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was able to call the death of a Christian “the supreme festival on the road to freedom.”80 Likewise, fifty years earlier an American minister wrote his own epitaph: “Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. At that moment I will be more alive than I am now.”81 This is no fist of defiance, shaken at the unending darkness. This is hearing Christ say, as did the thief on the cross when all seemed lost, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). There is a joy that sorrow can only enrich and deepen until it completely gives way to it. This is hope indeed.

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