It's easier to believe Bad News because we're born to do so.
Let's state our thesis up front, so our gentle reader may move on if he wants to read another book instead:
- Our idea is striking and controversial: what people have thought is "the gospel" turns out to be much better Good News than most have dared to believe.
- An infiltration of half-concealed Bad News has plagued the Christian church for the better part of two millennia. It paralyzes people spiritually, but they can't figure out why they're so "lukewarm" in their devotion.
- Therefore we must rediscover the original "Good News" idea that permeates the New Testament.
When the gospel took off originally, Christ's apostles were accused of "turning the world upside down" (Acts 1 7:6). It wasn't their personality or PR savvy; they had gotten hold of a big idea that was itself revolutionary.
People who heard it reacted in ways that could only be called violence—Jesus Himself said that those who liked it were taking "the kingdom of heaven by violence, by force" (see Matthew 11:12). That is, when they believed what they heard, they believed explosively— they grabbed it with all the energy they had. There was something in the Good News itself that automatically released them from inhibitions and transformed them into joyous (yes, fearless!) capable communicators of the message.
And Those Who Didn't Like the Idea?
They also became violent—in persecuting those who did like it. Thus you read of Christians being fed to lions in the Roman amphitheaters.
Humanity was catalyzed by this apparently wild idea that the gospel is better good news than humanity could dream up on their own. The Bible was seen as Heaven's up-to-the-minute newspaper, and those who liked the Good News in it couldn't get enough. Their enthusiasm for the "TV" and "videos" of their day vanished overnight (yes, they had their amusements, more powerful than our "sports"—genuine chariot races, gladiator fights, all with free admission). These believers had discovered that God's Good News idea was so intensely interesting that what they had thought was "fun" now became boring, repulsive.
What made the Good News so amazingly good was the discovery of what Christ had accomplished for the human race. It was emphatically not what He had tried to accomplish, but what He actually had done. They shouted from the housetops: Christ has saved the world! He has redeemed humanity! He has given the gift of salvation to every human soul! "Now, believe it," they said.
But then immediately a problem surfaced: it wasn't easy for people to believe. They were so used to believing Bad News that it hurt to start believing Good News. And this problem is what brings us to a look at our thesis.
Although Jesus said that His "yoke is easy, and My burden is light," He didn't mean that it's easy for us human beings to believe that His yoke is easy. As we shall see later, it is easy to be saved and hard to be lost if we understand and believe how good this Good News is; yet learning to believe it is the only difficult step in following Him.
The reason is that we human beings have been born and nurtured in unbelief. This again is why we are so prone to fear. It's natural for us to dis-believe. That's why when He came to save us, Jesus met with such massive unbelief that it led people to crucify Him (if He were to come back again today as He was, the world would crucify Him again). That deep-seated unbelief leads to what is called sin.
Simon and Schuster of New York once published a bestseller by Ben J. Wattenberg entitled, The Good News Is The Bad News is Wrong. It hit a sensitive nerve, for it assured millions that their pessimistic forebodings about our economic, political, and moral pulse were wrong. The "good news" about our nation was much better than they had thought, so the book said.
The news about God's will for your future is far more important. Money and political clout cannot buy a moment's genuine happiness, and happiness is the name of the game. (You remember the Enron executive who had sold his stock for $35 million, yet locked himself in his new Mercedes and shot himself?) The "Good News" we are talking about concerns our personal happiness for now and forever. It fills the heart with joy even if we have to live in poverty, sickness, or loneliness. It's what millionaires want but almost never get.
If we face reality, most of us have nearly given up hope that such happiness is attainable. We expect to live out our days with a nagging undertow of frustration and disappointment, even though a fleeting taste of pleasure at times makes life seem worth living. But the undercurrent surfaces again, and indefinable feelings of depression like a riptide sweep us into despair. Even many youth who never won $35 million try to take their own lives. We need something better than we have heard.
The word "gospel" has the built-in meaning of "good news." "Jesus came ... proclaiming God's Good News" (Mark 1:13, Barclay). His message majored in paths to happiness. Nine sure-cure prescriptions for it glisten in His Sermon on the Mount, each one beginning, "Blessed are those who ..." (Matthew 5:3-12, GNB). You may be surprised to discover that not one tells us what to do in order to be "happy," but what to believe.
If happiness depends on my doing the right thing, I always run into the snag of not being able to do it right. There is always an element of non-attainment. If God promises me something good dependent on the condition that I first do something right, His promises are sure to fail because I can't perform. God may promise me the sky, but it's a cruel trick if His promises are nullified by an impossible pre-condition.
Have you ever received an official-looking junk-mail letter telling you that you are on the way to winning the jackpot? If God's "good news" is a similar hoax, then He turns out to be the Chief Deceiver on earth. Teen suicides would not be what they are if the kids hadn't inherited from somewhere such an idea.
Why Is It So Difficult for Us to Believe God's Good News?
It's fantastic, phenomenal, the wonder of heavenly angels who watch—how the great bulk of humanity prefer Bad News to Good. When Someone came into our midst bringing us Good News, "we" were so upset that "we" rose up and crucified Him. (Maybe you say, Ah yes, but that was 2000 years ago and those were bad people; we are different. We would never do that.)
And here's the root of our problem: we don't understand ourselves. The Bible says we are all the same—by nature. The New English Bible renders Romans 3:23 as, "All alike have sinned," and that is clearly what Paul says for in 8:7 he adds, "The carnal mind is enmity against God." That "carnal mind" is standard DNA equipment for "all" of us, none "exempted" from that universal inheritance, not even the Virgin Mary. All humans are born in a state of separation from God; we have to learn how to believe Good News (Mary learned!). We can claim no superiority of virtue over those people of 2000 years ago. In a corporate sense, "they" were "we."
We cannot believe what Jesus says unless we believe that His "yoke is easy" and His "burden is light." But for sure, honest common sense tells us that believing that Good News is not "easy." Continually we human beings, in the church or outside, slide into that groove of unbelief like the Israel who couldn't "enter into" their Promised Land "because of unbelief" (Hebrews 4:6, KJV). Unbelief is still our corporate sin.
Since God has nothing for us but Good News, it's obvious that our proclivity for Bad News must be the result of our being "alienated [from God] and ... enemies in your mind," so that our sinful "mind is enmity against God" (Colossians 1:21; Romans 8:7, KJV). We are all "like the rest" "in our natural condition" (Ephesians 2:3, NEB). Until we learn to know who He is, this alienation from God results in "having their understanding darkened ... because of the blindness of their heart" (Ephesians 4:18). It's due to a wrong idea of God's character. We inherited it ultimately from our pagan forefathers. It weaseled its way into the church—the feeling that God is an enemy to be placated. We must do something to be shielded from His "wrath."
Today we say we are safely past that global state of adolescence, but that innate state of fear keeps surfacing. After our terrible "September 11" our modern inventions and comforts seemed powerless to assuage our inner fears. Bad News has us all pretty well hyped. We still wrestle with our fears of cancer, poverty, accidents, terrorism. Surveys have indicated that most American youth think they must die someday in nuclear war just as many youth in the 1930s feared dying in a war with German Nazism (and many did). All this negative angst is in proportion to our emotional distance away from God, which means we are born believing Bad News.
An Enemy Called Satan Is the Source.
A stalking cobra can paralyze its fear-crazed, hypnotized victim until it strikes. Believing Bad News paralyzes the human soul. It is a fact that witch doctors in Africa have succeeded in "cursing" helpless victims who then lie down and die for no organic reason. But the Greek of Hebrews 2:14 says that the Savior came to paralyze that enemy of our souls "and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." When Christ was crucified, the devil was not killed, much to the disappointment of many; but he was paralyzed.
An example of how a strong man was paralyzed cobra-like by believing Bad News is King Saul of ancient Israel. Admittedly, he had rebelled against God and done practically everything wrong. His kingdom was in jeopardy and his army dispirited while facing a hostile force of Philistines, far outnumbered. The king had cut off every means by which God wanted to help him, yet God sent him no message of doom. Saul still had the option of repentance.
He chose not to take it, but went to a spiritist medium seeking some idea of what to do. The witch was controlled by Satan and told the horror-stricken king a string of calamities that "the Lord" would inflict upon him to bring him and the nation to ruin. But God Himself sent the king no such message; Saul believed her Bad News. Her message crushed out of his soul the last tiny spark of hope. He ended his life by a suicide totally unnecessary (1 Samuel 28, 31).
God has never driven any soul to suicide, no matter how many mistakes he or she may have made. Saul could have repented, acknowledged his many sins, and called the nation to prayer for deliverance. A gracious God would have answered as He has often done. Such humbling of his soul would have been infinitely better than suicide.
No matter how bad you may feel or how hopeless your outlook, the Lord has some good news for you: "Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me." "Whatever you ask in My name, that I will do. ... If you ask anything in My name, I will do it." "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:1,13, 14, 27).
Jesus recognized here a profound principle of psychiatry—you cannot be paralyzed by Bad News unless you choose to dis-believe Good News. Bad News may come knocking on your door, but it can never get inside your soul until you say, "Come in." "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid," He urges. To "let" means to give your consent. So, to "let... your heart be troubled" means to consent to believe Satan's Bad News. It's your volition.
Genuine truth is always full of hope. For example, we are afraid for the doctor to tell us the dreaded news that we have inoperable cancer, and we want to avoid facing the fact. But we forget so easily that death "in Christ" is far better than living without Him. Losing one's soul is far worse than mere dying. If the Lord permits us to sleep in death, the fact remains that He is still what He has always been—"God is love" (1 John 4:8).
For a person lying on a death-bed, God has nothing but good news. What He wants him or her to understand is the truth of a Savior who died to redeem us from eternal death, and whose resurrection after three days is the pledge that we too will be resurrected to endless life in Him. There is no situation so bad where God has no good news for us. (Even the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit is a final, irrevocable choice to dis-believe God's Good News, a determined, conclusive resistance of the Holy Spirit. Matthew 12:24-35; Hebrews 6:4-10.)
The Most Common Sin of All Mankind.
Not believing, dis-believing, is what the Bible calls unbelief. It has been the number one sin of the ages. Israel could not enter into their Promised Land "because of unbelief" (Hebrews 4:6, KJV). When Jesus the Great Healer visited His hometown Nazareth, "He did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief" (Matthew 13:58). Their massive unbelief deprived them of great blessings. It was uncanny how the multitude could stand in the presence of the Son of God Himself, and still choose to cherish their Bad News. Jesus "marveled because of their unbelief" (Mark 6:6).
Jesus told His disciples who were stymied in their efforts to heal a desperately sick child that their "unbelief" was the problem (Matthew 17:20). Even after His resurrection, His disciples for a time preferred Bad News to Good, refusing to believe the testimony of eyewitnesses who knew He had risen from the dead. "He rebuked their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they did not believe those who had seen Him after He had risen" (Mark 16:14). Yes, those eleven disciples faced the stiffest test of believing that human beings have ever faced—the Good News was so fantastically "impossible" that it seemed more than they could do to believe "He is risen!"
Put yourself in their place. Here you are in the deepest trough of despair you have ever known, your Savior is dead, buried in a tomb; your hopes have been crushed by the most giant bulldozer of all time—the crucifixion. There seems not the faintest glimmer of a ray of light at the end of your tunnel. Now, can you believe the reports of some excitable women like Mary Magdalene who say they saw Him risen from the dead? Think it through. Maybe you will want to kneel down with those "rebuked" disciples and take your share for not believing Good News!
No wonder the writer of Hebrews pleads with us: "Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; but exhort one another daily, while it is called 'Today,' lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin" (3:12, 13).
The best Good News that a confused or despair-battered human being can hear is that this moral and spiritual paralysis is a disease, a sin, that has already been healed in the person of the Son of God—healed in our fallen, sinful flesh. He became one of us, took on Himself our nature, actually identified Himself with our root problem of alienation from God, and He abolished our sin right there.
Thus He established for all humanity a new identity in Himself, irrespective of how bad our sins may be. He has made alienation, sin, and fear, more outmoded than caveman living. Darkness of mind is now passé, something unnecessary. In what Christ accomplished (not just tried to do) human despair has become an anachronism. God and His entire universe of light welcome us as "accepted in the Beloved" Son of God (Ephesians 1:6). It staggers the mind to realize what He has done.
"You, who once were alienated and enemies in your minds by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight" (Colossians 1:21, 22).
"But," you say, "I'm very reproachable. I feel in my deepest self all kinds of reasons why I deserve 'reproach.'"
Yes, the blemishes and the blame are still there (as they are for the vast billions of human beings everywhere). Nonetheless, Christ's sacrifice in our behalf gives Him the astounding right to "present" us before the Father and His universe as holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation. The grand point of this tremendous Good News is simply this: all the sin and darkness and pollution that still oppress us are kept going only by our continued unbelief of His Good News!
When we begin to stretch our soul to believe it, His deliverance begins immediately to be operative in our heart, to produce changes we never thought possible.