What is Christianity?: What God did about it

In the last post, we spent a good bit of time talking about the weakness of man and how we will inevitably fall short of the righteousness of God.

However, I don’t want to just leave us feeling discouraged and helpless. More importantly, God didn’t want to leave us discouraged and helpless. So he sent His son for us and established a way for us to come to Him in grace (Rom 5:6).

Before we get into the physical life of Jesus, though, I first want to point out some characteristics of Jesus that were established before he was even born on this earth.

You may have heard of Jesus as being “the Son of God.” This can be confusing without any kind of background, so let’s talk about what that means. We, as Christians, serve one God (Deut 6:4). We don’t serve a pantheon of gods, we don’t believe in gods over certain parts of nature, but we believe that God in heaven created everything (Gen 1:1).

So how can we say that we worship one God when we also worship Jesus? The answer is a challenging one, and one that people have thought about for centuries. Jesus is a part of God. He is the Son of God and he was with God since the beginning (Gen 1:26, John 1:1).

The Son of God was not born of a heavenly bride of God, but is called the Son because of his submissive relationship to the Father (John 6:38).

While we’re at it, there is a third part of what is called the “Godhead,” the Holy Spirit. We see all 3 aspects of God present at the baptism of Christ (Mat 3:16-17). The Holy Spirit is also called the Spirit of Truth and the Helper (Jn 14:26, 16:7-15). The Holy Spirit is received by followers of Jesus at the time of baptism (Acts 2:38).

We will be focusing on Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God as we continue through our study. As we read about his physical life, it is also important for us to remember the fact that he existed as part of God, he chose to come to earth in order that he might create a way for mankind to find salvation.

Though we are sometimes weak in our sin, we have a Savior who understands. God sent Jesus to shed his blood so that we can be adopted as sons and daughters and receive the inheritance, a home in heaven with God (Heb 9:15).