Fredericka Matthews-Green, a Christian writer, received an email from a friend who was struggling with the question of how it is that Jesus died for our sins.  The friend briefly summarized his life in his note.

Raised in a nominally Jewish home, he moved first to atheism and then to non-theistic Eastern religion before he came to consider the Christian faith.  He wanted to believe the claims of the Christian faith, but it just didn’t make much sense to him. He wrote: “How could the Father send the Son, if they are one?  How could God the Son die?  Why was it necessary that his body be resurrected?  Please don’t take this as being argumentative: I would really like to find some way to understand.  As much as I love Jesus’ teaching and person, no matter how I turn it around in my mind, no matter how much I read, I cannot understand what it means to say that Jesus died for our Sins.”

Matthews-Green answered his email letter graciously and honestly.  She wrote, “It seems that what happened (and continues to happen) is that people somehow began to sense that Jesus Christ is still alive and in some inexplicable way present to them; along with this, they find that their burden of sin is lifted, and that this is somehow because of his death on the cross and Resurrection.  Plenty of ‘somehows’ in that sentence; we’re dealing with something rudimentary, but nevertheless insistent.”

Matthews-Green then makes a helpful comparison in her response to her friend.  She remarks that farmers have always known that light makes plants grow.  They knew this many millennia before the complicated processes of photosynthesis were discovered by scientists.  Similarly, even though Christians struggle and stammer to give precise explanations of how salvation works through Jesus’ death, they still know it.  Somehow.

C.S. Lewis once described this ‘somehow’ of Christian accounts of salvation.  He said, “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.  Theories as to how it did this are another matter.  A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.”

(Leanne Van Dyke, Believing in Jesus, Geneva Press, in conjunction with the Office of Theology and Worship, Presbytery Church, pp60-61).  Taken from Mediacom Pulpit Resource used with permission

Your friend,