By “God” we mean an intelligent creator, and by “real” we mean existing at some point in time. So right away we should take a small step back and talk about “truth”. The Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, famously asked Jesus, “What is Truth?” But the Greek philosopher Aristotle had already answered him in words of one syllable: “If a man says of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, he speaks truth. If he says of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, he does not speak truth.” Children and ancient philosophers tend to agree that Truth exists, and that it is the same for everyone. Sophisticated thinkers of later history have called into question whether “absolute” Truth exists, or if we should instead talk about “your truth” and “my truth”. But it is hard to live in a world with no objective truth: intellectually it leaves us adrift and tends toward madness. Practically, it leaves us isolated and estranged from one another. So, let’s continue this conversation with the people who (unlike Pilate) are willing to say that Truth exists and is true for everyone.

So, then, is God – some intelligent creator of us and our world – part of Truth or fiction? That question is impossible to universally prove or disprove. But people do arrive at certainty on the question in their own way. Let us state with certainty that at least some “gods” are fictional: i.e. deities have been worshiped that did not create us or our world. So many deities have been worshiped in earth’s past, and in such different ways, that this cannot help but be true. But the existence of some fictional gods does not in itself prove all gods fictional, any more than the existence of “fake news” proves all news fake.

Some people conclude that there is a divine creator from the breathtaking order, beauty, and complexity of the cosmos. Many scientists have discovered “God” at the end of their microscopes and telescopes. Their counterparts in the scientific community who claim that all this order and beauty can be accounted for by the operations of a few simple scientific processes over a very long time vastly overstate their case. And with every passing year, new discoveries continue to make that case weaker. The Creator is still very much there to be discovered in his creation.

Other people discover “God” through personal interaction in prayer, or in the way he answers their prayers in miraculous ways. Or they witness him at work in other people’s lives. Or they discover him through the pages of a holy book. Or in a breathtakingly beautiful experience. They arrive at a personal certainty that is not easily communicated. But they are certain nonetheless. Concluding that God is real is still the majority experience of the human race, and that, coupled with the lack of contrary evidence, should suffice to render the conclusion reasonable.

The claim of the first disciples of Jesus is that he was our creator God born as a man. Now, to pretty much anyone, that sounds so outrageous that our first response is either anger or laughter. But then, if we stop and patiently evaluate that claim, we might reason it this way:

First, if God is real (and we just said so) then pretty much anything is possible. If an intelligent Being deliberately designed photosynthesis and metamorphosis then he is pretty clever. Pretty astonishingly mind-blowingly unimaginably clever. Possibly cleverer than every human genius ever born put together. So, can we categorically say there is anything he cannot do? It puts all possibilities on the table.

Second, if God is real (and we just said so), and he made us (that’s part of the definition of being God), then it would stand to reason that he might want to talk to us. We find ourselves to be relational beings who like a chat, and we credit ourselves with being quite loving. Where did we get that from, if not from our Maker? If he is also relational, and loving, and he made us, then it makes a certain amount of sense that he might want to talk to us.

Imagine for a second that God did try to talk to us, at some point in history. Would his words have been written down? Probably. Would they still survive today? Probably. He’s God – he would want his words written down and kept safe and shared widely. He’d want people to know about him. So, out of all the many many deities that people have worshiped as god (and there have been more than 30,000), which are the good candidates? I would propose a few simple common-sense tests to filter out the pretenders: let’s rule out any god who is no longer worshiped anywhere, whose worshipers have not reached a million people, or who did not appear on the scene until recent history (500 years is pretty recent). If one of these ‘gods’ is actually True, then he’s pretty much a failure at making himself known. And it would be very strange for the creator of the human brain to fail at basic communication.

The filters are highly effective: almost all of history’s 30,000 religions have now perished from the earth, so we rule those out as false. When we also ignore the tiny and the novel religions, we’re left with the basic Big Six: Judaism, Islam, Sikhism (a branch of Islam), Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Buddhism we immediately cross off the list, because it nowhere claims to be a conversation with the Creator of the earth – so it contradicts the starting point of this thought exercise. Hinduism, with its hundreds of sparring deities, also holds no interest. It has no single coherent message or morality, and if God had spoken to humanity that way, it would be the same as not speaking. This simple, common-sense elimination process yields only three reasonable candidates for the true way God has spoken to humanity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Here we arrive at the striking realization that these three faiths have some strong commonalities. Not only are they all monotheistic, but all three claim the same man, Abraham, as the great father of their faith. And they claim essentially the same history of God’s dealings with Abraham in the book of Genesis (although Islam claims that some of the details have been corrupted). Of the 8.2 billion people alive today, more than half are followers of either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It is more than reasonable to conclude that IF our creator has spoken to humanity THEN he spoke to Abraham.

We have now made significant forward progress from merely a theoretical unknown God to a speaking God who has successfully made himself known to men and women. But we still have not resolved the question of Jesus. There are many points of agreement between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such as God’s eternal and holy nature, his loving and merciful character, and his commands against theft and murder. But their most significant point of disagreement is over the identity of Jesus, and this has been enough to set the three in violent opposition to one other. Christians call Jesus the Son of God – meaning the eternal creator himself born into time as a man. Jewish consensus is that Jesus was a liar and blasphemer, a dangerous false messiah, and they will not speak his name. Muslims take a middle position that Jesus was a great prophet, less than Mohammed, and certainly not divine, but a servant of Allah. How are we to weigh these contradictory claims?

So much could be said on the identity of Jesus, and has been. It might be the most important and long-running conversation in the world. We could talk about his remarkable life and the way it fulfilled hundreds of prophecies, his wisdom, his unique miracles, his astounding ethical teaching, his profound influence on western thought and culture, and the ways he embodied the ways God’s character is revealed in the Old Testament. But, for the sake of brevity, I merely want to focus here on a single point: the question of how people are saved. The three Abrahamic religions agree that humanity has a problem: the problem that we have rebelled against our creator God and have become estranged from him. From this evil root comes all death, mourning, pain, toil, and suffering. And unless we are saved out of this problem, we all face the fearsome prospect of God’s judgment and condemnation after we die. But starting with Abraham (and even with Noah and others before him), God has set to work on this problem. God is loving and merciful, and unwilling that any of the people he made should perish. But this alone is not enough to save us. There must also be a reckoning – a balancing of the books. Forgiveness is not free; someone must shoulder the cost. And Psalm 49 declares, “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit.” In other words, what could anybody possibly do to save himself, to pay for his own sin?

God has answers. First, he credits Abraham with righteousness on the strength of his faith (Genesis 15:6), next he makes a covenant with Abraham signed by circumcision (Genesis 17:1). The covenant was a binding promise that God would save Abraham and his descendants. Later, through Moses, God gave the children of Abraham a sacrificial system designed to atone for their sins. It centered on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16), which focused on fasting and animal sacrifice.

How did all this help with our problem? The Christian answer is that it was all pointing forward to the death of Jesus. He was the true “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The blood of lambs and goats was never a sufficient payment for human sins (Hebrews 10:4). But the blood of the God-man, Jesus, was precious enough not only to pay for one person’s sin, but the sin of everyone in the world ever (Hebrews chapter 10 is an extended argument on this, using the Hebrew Scriptures). Thus, all the patterns of forgiveness that are established in the Hebrew Bible from Abraham on find a pleasing and logical fulfilment in the life and death of Jesus. He makes sense of the whole show, and he’s the only thing that can.

What do modern Judaism and Islam offer instead? Both of them now root our salvation in human works of righteousness. Since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70, Judaism has had nowhere to offer animal sacrifices, and has stopped doing it. The official teaching of Judaism now is that people are saved by “prayer and good works”. So, what do they think was the purpose of the whole elaborate, costly sacrificial system established by the Law of Moses if all that was really needed was prayer and good works? That is a question I cannot answer. For Islam, the answer is very similar: people are saved through the five pillars of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. That is similarly unsatisfying. Where is the holiness of Mount Sinai (Exodus 19)? If merely these trivial things are sufficient to pay for sin, why the ancient rigmarole of priests and fire and so much blood?

So I, and the two billion other Christians around the world, have come to the conclusion that the Christian answer to the problem of sin is the correct one. The Jewish and Muslim answer, which rejects Jesus and substitutes works of righteousness, is clearly incorrect. It is incorrect for being inadequate. The price of our soul is not low, it is high (Psalm 49). It is incorrect for being unsatisfying. It consigns most everything God has to say about holiness in the book of Leviticus to the dumpster of history. It is incorrect for being incomplete: no Jew or Muslim can ever know for sure that he is saved, for if it depends on our good works, who can ever know that he has done enough? It is incorrect because it misses the key ingredient of love: if God is as loving as they claim, where is that demonstrated in his plan that we save ourselves by our own endless striving? And it is incorrect because the Christian answer is demonstrably the prettier, cleverer, cleaner, and more cohesive answer. The Christian answer alone takes every word the Hebrew Bible seriously without changing any of it or calling any of it corrupt or out of date. Are we to imagine that God sat down in his study and pondered how men should be saved, and came up with “love and good works”, and men undertaking the same project came up with the cross of Jesus?

This is a question to consider carefully. Jesus encouraged anyone who might come after him to seriously count the cost (Luke 14:28). A person who wants to seriously follow Jesus should be ready to humble themselves, prefer the needs of others, attend and serve a church community, give away at least ten per cent of their income to his Kingdom, lay aside all forms of sexual immorality and pursue celibacy outside of marriage, and lifelong faithfulness within it. The service of Jesus might attract scorn and ridicule from friends and family who don’t understand your decision, and even persecution in some cases. It is not a cost-free decision, and those costs should be carefully weighed.

But, on the other side of the balance sheet are some pretty serious benefits, which should also be considered. Paul’s letter to the Romans, in the New Testament, is a great place to find a long list of these benefits. He mentions God’s love, which has been poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5). Followers of Jesus know for sure that they are loved by God, with an eternal, unshakable, unconditional love – and who can put a price on that? We know we are forgiven, completely – we confess and repent all the time and walk around every day with clean consciences. We know for sure that we’re going to heaven when we die, because our salvation never depended on us and always rested on Jesus. We experience a family-like love with our church community. We forgive each other, and receive forgiveness. Our lives are full of purpose because we know what the world is about, what it’s for, where it’s going, and what we’re supposed to be doing. There is no kind of arrogance behind saying this, just the humility that we have stopped ignoring or fighting what God has been telling people all along. We also experience personal transformation; we are not forever stuck in bad patterns or habits. We believe in real freedom, real change – and we see it all the time. God the Holy Spirit comes to live inside us, bringing love, joy, and peace.

If you are unsatisfied with your life as it is now, then we beg you to try Jesus. We believe and have experienced that he is the only real answer to any problem, but has at least some answer to every problem. So many people are wondering around in the world today depressed, confused, anxious, unhappy, purposeless, hopeless, and disappointed. We watch them trying every kind of man-made solution to fix it: work, money, sports, sex, drugs, alcohol, fame, success. Nothing ever works. These things only make it worse. Some people give up and end their lives in despair. Will you please try Jesus? Will you bow your knee and yield rather than harm yourself? There is a way that works. You can be a happy, purposeful, peaceful person. We promise. Just not ever by the ways you are currently trying.

Or, if you are satisfied with your life as it is now, will you have a care for your eternal future? Jesus told this parable to warn self-satisfied and comfortable people. He said, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:16-21). You have a certain number of days allotted to your life, and none of us knows how many there will be. The main task of those days is to discover God and reconcile with him so that we can be saved and live forever. Any other self-serving task will turn out to be a total waste of time, and a fatal distraction when it comes time for final judgment. Do not be a fool.