The humanity we share in common with Christ means that we cannot encounter this story of salvation from the outside looking in. Whether we like it or not, we are already players in this drama. When Jesus suffered and died on the cross, he didn’t just suffer and die for sin in an abstract sense. He suffered and died for the sins that you and I have personally committed. When Jesus gave himself up to death, it wasn’t for an anonymous “humanity,” it was a concrete act of love for you and me. And when Jesus rose from the dead, offering the divine life to those who followed him, it wasn’t merely to a collective body of believers. It was an invitation to you and me.
This is the good news of salvation, what the early Church called the euangelion (literally, “good message”), which in turn was translated into Old English as gōd-spell (“gospel” in modern English). Of this gospel, Paul wrote, “It is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16), and it is this gospel, this story of salvation, which you will encounter in these pages.
Why This Book?
There is a desperate need for men and women within the Church to experience the life-changing power of the Gospel—to know the Person of Jesus Christ, not as a glorified abstraction or an edifying idea, but as the foundational relationship in their lives. We need to live lives radically transformed, released from the power of sin and rooted in the freedom of God’s kingdom. Over the past twenty years of speaking and offering workshops and retreats in parishes all across North America, I have encountered thousands of people, many of them cradle Catholics, who hunger for something more in their lives—who long to be healed and set free by an intimate and loving God from the wounds (mental, physical, and spiritual), suffering, and existential fallout that come from living in this world. Some of them would be considered “good” and faithful Catholics, some of them are even daily communicants, yet they struggle with a God who seems distant and a relationship with him that bears little or no fruit.
To be clear, this urgent need for a new emphasis on proclaiming the gospel of Christ (what St. John Paul II called the New Evangelization) didn’t arise out of some deficiency in the Church’s teaching or sacramental life. Jesus Christ stood at the heart of the apostles’ preaching, and it is this very same Jesus who lives at the center of the Church today. In addition, the whole of the Great Story of Salvation is “written” across the Church’s sacred art and architecture, in our liturgies and devotional life, and in the writings of the saints.
If we take an honest look at ourselves over the past fifty years or so, however, we have to admit that on a cultural and lived level (what the theologians would call the level of praxis), we have not been so successful at telling all of the Great Story in a way that wins people’s hearts and minds. As a result, generations of baptized Catholics have grown up ignorant of the power of the gospel to change them. They are largely illiterate—unable to “read” the whole of the Great Story from within the Christian community.
If you hunger for healing, then this book is for you.
If you long for peace with yourself and in your relationships with others, then this book is for you.
If you are searching for fulfillment, lasting transformation, and freedom from a nagging restlessness that keeps you constantly dissatisfied, but you have no idea how to experience these things, then this book is for you.
Here you will be invited to encounter the gospel of Jesus Christ in a radical new way. Maybe you have heard these biblical stories since your childhood. Maybe they are completely new to you. Whatever your experience, I pray you will meet Jesus in a profound and personal way as you read this book. May the God who fashioned you for love give you the grace to open your heart to the transforming power of this gospel.
chapter 1
The Kingdom: God’s Gift to Us
God is love.
Perhaps you first heard that from your parents, or from a religious education teacher. We talk about this reality over and over again in the Church. God is love. We sing songs about it, create banners, read about it in the Bible, and celebrate it at Mass. We surround ourselves with this message.
God is love.
There is a danger, however, in living so closely to something so profound. We can start taking it for granted, growing blind to its beauty and deaf to the radical power of its message. There is an old adage: Familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps those of us in the Church have not grown contemptuous of this message so much as indifferent. We have reduced one of the key truths about God and our place in the universe to a three-word internet meme, and we scroll through our news-feeds looking for other things to fill up our uncertainty and emptiness, or to make us forget our problems. The truth that God is love no longer captures our attention, or speaks to us of who we are.
God is love.
Perhaps you’ve never really heard that phrase before. Maybe you didn’t grow up in the Church, or you came from a family that never talked about such things. Maybe you’ve lived your life actively separating yourself from religion and religious groups. Looking at the world today—with global poverty, terrorism, senseless violence, the persecution and attempted genocide of religious and ethnic groups, the prevalence of war and other armed conflicts—it would be very difficult to arrive at the conclusion that there is a God and that this God would be loving, let alone love itself.
But just imagine.
Imagine that there is an all-powerful Someone who loves perfectly—and this Someone created the universe, and you and me, for a reason. What would have to change about how we looked at ourselves? About how we looked at other people? The world around us?
It would change everything!
And it is here that our story begins, with the radical truth that we are not accidents or instances of random collections of molecules. There is a plan and a purpose to who we are.
In the Beginning
Our God who is love wants to communicate with his creation, and he does so in various ways. One of the ways God communicates with us is through the universe and the world we inhabit. Think of a brilliant sunset over the ocean, or the stars in the night sky. Recall a majestic mountain towering over the landscape, snowcapped and rough-shouldered, and the shimmering complexity of a spider’s web, dew-dappled and dazzling in the morning light. Our world is filled with beauty, with experiences that take us outside of ourselves and help us to know that there is something beyond our narrowly defined selves.
God also works through the natural processes of the universe to reveal himself. As science and technology deepen and grow their ability to explore, measure, and quantify, scientists are discovering, in the midst of the seeming chaos and complexity that exist at subatomic levels, a precision to the makeup of the universe, particularly at the molecular level. Just a slightly different molecule, or the same molecule in a slightly different position, and the earth would be a lifeless rock hurtling through space. This precision, some scientists say, points to the reality of a designer, a Creator, or an “intelligence” through which the universe came to be. Theologians call the revelation of God through the world and the physical properties of the universe “natural” revelation. Through the use of our natural human faculties, we can come to the reasonable conclusion that there is a Creator. If we only had natural revelation to go on, however, we would miss out on the utterly revolutionary meaning behind our whole existence.
Thankfully, God isn’t limited to natural revelation. God’s desire to communicate with us is so strong that he breaks into our natural world and provides supernatural revelation, literally revelation that comes from “above” the natural world. One of the ways we receive this revelation is through the Bible, and it is from the pages of Scripture that we launch into the Great