Why doesn't God simply bring happiness to everyone? Well, the answer is simple, because we're against him, because we are rebels against him and we've sinned against him and we don't deserve it. If God would make the world happy and full of plenty, and make it impossible for us to kill one another, so that nobody ever gets hurt, and what would we do in exchange? We would go on saying, ‘We don't want you, get out of the way. We would go on choosing our sin, living as we want, giving him no homage. God will not do that. The more he makes life easy for us in this world, the less we are chastised, the less we are ever likely to turn to him.
‘Blessed are they’, says the Lord, ‘who are not offended by this.’ Literally the Greek says, ‘scandalised by this’; blessed are those who are not insulted by this message. If we speak about a Saviour for the soul does that offend you? If we speak about your need of forgiveness and the sin within you, and the fact that you are to be condemned one day, does that offend you? Well sadly it does offend many, because we human beings are very proud. Blessed are they who are not offended, who say, ‘It is true. I need such a Saviour. I need to be converted; I need to be given a new life. This is the very kind of Saviour that I need.’ It's a great tragedy that in the last few years we have had a number of very popular public figures or stars of stage and screen die, and when you have the funerals or the memorial services, people seem at great pains to tell us that these individuals have gone to heaven. Why do you think they have necessarily gone to heaven? Just because somebody is popular with the general public, do we then have the right to say that that person has gone to heaven? Supposing that person had no time for the living God, supposing that person laughed at God, scorned him, didn't believe in him or derided him. Supposing that person never sought him, never worshipped him, never loved him, never thought about him. Do you think that person is to be found in heaven, simply because they may have been popular with the general public? The teaching of the Bible is that if it was the case that they never walked with God or loved him, then without any doubt that soul is eternally lost. When the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘I have come to save souls, to save sinners, or else they will be condemned eternally’, do we fail to take him seriously? We want human beings to be applauded, whatever their attitude to God, we feel that we are alright and God should approve of us, so, yes, it does offend us if the Bible says to us that isn't true. Does it offend us to hear that we need new lives? Does it offend us to hear that we've got to leave all our pride behind and come to Jesus Christ and fall at his feet and say, ‘Lord I am a sinner and I am lost. Save me, I repent of my sins and I yield my life to thee’? Does it offend us to hear that there is absolutely nothing we can possibly do to earn even a little bit of salvation? Do we say, ‘There must be something in me that will get me some favour with God. Maybe I need a bit of help, but I'm not that bad?’ No, if you are offended by this message, you cannot come to Christ, you cannot repent. Happy are they, says the Lord, who are not offended at the kind of Saviour that I am.
Do we have doubts? ‘Most people today don't believe in Christ, therefore it cannot be true.’ That is just what we expect: that nobody will believe in him until in kindness he works in our hearts, because we are against him. We don't want God. ‘Why doesn't God heal everybody if he is a God of love?’ Because Christ has come to save our souls and to bring us to repentance, not to spoil us with blessings that we don't deserve, and which will only harden us in our refusal to feel our need of him. ‘Why are there so many religions?’ It is just what we should expect, that if people are against the true God and they won't come to Christ for forgiveness, then of course they are going to invent their own religions, religions that flatter man and tell him how good he is. They still want a sense of peace about the afterlife, but they are not willing to come to God on his terms. They will invent their own moral code instead of God’s Ten Commandments. Only the Christian religion is true because only the Christian faith has God coming into the human race. God incarnate, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, took human nature and came to be our representative and our sin bearer, our scapegoat, to take our punishment, the eternal weight of punishment, impossibly compressed into the space of six hours as he died on Calvary. Only Christianity has such a wonderful God, such a merciful Saviour, such kindness and compassion. Only Christianity has free salvation.