Simple

Is it really that simple? Can anything so amazing, so all-consuming, so destiny-determining really be that simple?

I don't know about you, but I've put together a few household items. You know what I'm talking about: the "easy to assemble" furniture that usually does not come with written instructions but rather with poorly-drawn pictures, telling you when to put this piece where? Easy, we're told. Simple, we believe. Until we're sitting in a pile of pieces with no idea which screw goes into which hole. Maybe we used that piece a few steps back by accident...? I've had to (more than once) take the whole thing apart and start again. Don't laugh like you don't know what I'm talking about.

So then we come to something as life-changing as faith, and obviously we think it must be hard to do, hard to put the pieces together, impossible perhaps to accomplish. Surely there is a long list of steps we must check off. Do this, do that, don't fail at any of them of your faith will end up looking like this chair.

And yet, John—John the disciple, John the beloved, John who walked with Jesus—says it's pretty simple. He puts it this way: "If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God" (1 John 4:15). If that isn't clear enough, listen to the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in The Message: "Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God’s Son participates continuously in an intimate relationship with God."

We are the ones who try to make it complicated, but John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, says if we can acknowledge Jesus is the Son of God, we are in a relationship with God. We want to make it more complicated because, honestly, it sounds too simple. It sounds like Jesus will let just about anyone in. And that's the point: he will. Anyone who will acknowledge that he is the genuine Son of God. It's not meant to be complicated.

However, there have been and continue to be those who want to claim the name of "Christian" and yet deny exactly what John says here. There are those who want to make Jesus into "just a good man," someone who did good works and said nice things. They want to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus without having to acknowledge that he is fully God. According to John, they've made the simple complicated. They've missed the very point of Jesus' life, death and resurrection—which all came about to prove he is the Son of God and that he wants to save as many as possible. He is not a good man. He is the God-man.

And that brings me to one of my favorite statements by C. S. Lewis. With his words, I'll close this blog before it gets too complicated...

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”  (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)