Our friend Dr. Rick Davis offers some thoughts on the message of Resurrection. This piece attracted the attention of the New York Times.
Tomorrow is Resurrection Sunday. I guess you know that if you are a
preacher or a tie salesperson. People are going to places of worship
tomorrow. Those of us who go every week need to be on our best behavior
when others show up to see us.
Here is an evangelism program to begin and end with a heavy emphasis on salvation and very little schmaltz. Ready?
God created humanity. God likes people. In fact, God told people
to be fruitful and make more people. This may be the only commandment
of God gleefully kept to excess. Still, God loves people. God even
loves the natural process of making people, apparently, since there is
plenty of dirt from which God might have made more supernaturally, had
the Deity so chosen.
Since God created people out of love, it might follow people will
be most happy when in a proper love relationship with God. That is, we
might have the most happiness we can possibly possess when we do the
things that make God happy with us.
God gives us work to do. Sin frustrates the work but there is
nothing in Scripture indicating frustration is God's will. In fact,
there is every reason to believe God wants any frustration we
experience to be temporary. God refuses to let catastrophe overwhelm
the human race. The Divine Parent cuddles up the human family in times
of disaster, repeatedly protecting the human seed from disappearance,
even in the times when humanity stresses the earth.
Repeatedly calling for human progress the God of the Bible
overcomes even the stubborness plainly exhibited by religious
followers. The faithful speakers of God's voice portray the end of
hatefulness and murder in exchange for a new living world of love.
When time is full, God sends into it Jesus, called the Christ.
God protects the Christ from evil persons intent to defend their own
positions at the expense of others. The Christ grows to maturity in a
godly kind of home with self-sacrificing parents. When His time comes,
Jesus the Christ sets out on a three year long traveling ministry
during which He reaches out to all classes of persons, heals, feeds,
even raises the dead, as a personal testimony of the kind of world God
will one day remake this world to be.
