On Our Belief In Christ

One of the great things about our religion is that it doesn’t offer “God” as some sort of abstract idea. God is something to us, not just anything. Even in the Old Testament, God did things, said things, and even expected men to do things in return. In the New Testament, the idea of one God materializes before us in a way that doesn’t happen in other religions.

The common cop-out “my god wouldn’t do this” just doesn’t work anymore. We know who God is, and we know what He wants. But this only makes sense when we accept Jesus’ divinity. If we lose sight of the fact that Jesus is God, we lose everything. We don’t just get some of the teachings wrong, or misinterpret parts of the Bible. We lose all direction, and the entire Christian religion becomes one huge bag of contradiction.

Several nights ago, some Jehovah Witnesses came to my door. They left me with some literature (you know—the Watch Tower pamphlets that they like to hand out) and I had the chance to look over some of it. The thing that really caught my eye, was not the misinterpretation of Scripture—it was the misinterpretation of life. It posed such questions as, “Why did miracles stop?” This question alone tells you exactly how dark the life they’re living is.

The real problem with such cults is NOT that they believe fantastic and unrealistic lies. The problem with these cults is that they CAN’T believe the fantastic and realistic truth. **The idea of God becoming man is just too much, so they deny Christ’s divinity and reduce Him to an angel. The idea of a paradise large enough to hold all of God’s children is beyond them, because the magnitude of God’s mercy is beyond them. They would rather limit God and heaven to something with room for only 144,000 people than simply accept something too large for us to understand. And in that small state of understanding that they’ve reserved for themselves, there is no room for miracles…hence they miss out on the beauty that we can even now see within our worldly existence.

But here we are, Catholics who believe that God really did become man, that heaven is granted to all who believe and repent, and that a miracle is small and ordinary in comparison to the more spectacular works of God. We believe this because we believe in the Man who is God. The man who would NOT remain a simple idea, but who manifested Himself in the world in a clear and tangible way.

This is what belief in Jesus does for us. And it’s a shame not everyone can see it.

**I’m speaking here of specific doctrines believed by the Jehovah Witnesses: Jesus was an Angel, not God, and only 144,000 people will go to heaven.