Why Should I Believe in Christianity?

Not because it is comforting.

Plenty of comforting things are false.

Christianity stakes everything on one event.

Most belief systems are built so that nothing can knock them over.

Paul built Christianity the opposite way, on purpose.

And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

If the tomb was not empty, the whole thing collapses — and the man who wrote the largest part of the New Testament said so himself.

That is not the sentence of someone protecting a myth.

The claim was made where it could most easily have been destroyed.

Jesus of Nazareth lived. He taught in public. He gathered followers. He was executed under Roman authority.

Weeks later, His followers began announcing that He had been raised bodily from the dead.

They said it in Jerusalem — the same city, within walking distance of the grave, in front of the officials who had arranged the execution.

Paul named the witnesses and invited people to go and check.

After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present…

Most of them are still alive, he says. Ask them.

Then those same followers held that claim through beatings, prison, and execution, with nothing to gain by holding it.

It also explains the world you actually live in.

Ask why human beings are so obviously valuable and so obviously capable of horror.

Why we cannot stop talking about justice, and cannot manage it.

Why beauty moves us, why guilt is real, why we hold each other to standards nobody agreed to.

Christianity's answer is that humanity was made in God's image and then corrupted by rebellion against Him.

Magnificent and broken, both at once, for a reason.

That is not proof. But an explanation that fits what you already know about yourself is worth something.

Its answer is not "try harder."

This is where Christianity stops resembling every other religion and most self-improvement.

It does not hand you a standard and wish you luck.

But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested… Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe

God entered His own creation, took the judgment human sin deserved onto Himself, broke death, and offers reconciliation as a gift.

You are not asked to earn it. You are asked to receive it.

It makes a demand as well as an offer.

now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness…

A day is appointed. That is not a threat added to soften people up; it is part of the claim being made.

If it is true, indifference is not a neutral position.

So why should you believe it?

Not because it is pleasant.

Not because it explains everything to your satisfaction.

Because it rests on something that either happened or did not, and you can go and look at the case.

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me

Christianity rises or falls with one man.

The real question was never whether you like it.

It is who Jesus Christ was — and what happened to Him after He was crucified.