BIG Questions for Jesus Followers

If you are looking for a recent book that captures the state of historical Jesus research, check out Jesus the Purifier by New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg.

After 380 pages tracing the history of Jesus scholarship, and highlighting current issues, Dr. Blomberg concludes with a small section entitled: “For Christian Living.” While the whole book was helpful, this small section jumped out to me because I didn’t anticipate it. I expected him to end with a word about the future of scholarship. Rather, he ended with a personal challenge to Christians today.

While the questions below appear in a lengthy paragraph, I broke them up individually for emphasis:

• What if Christians became known not for being the most tolerant of all people, for that would mean tolerating even egregious sin–child abuse, rape, human trafficking, gang killings and other forms of mass slaughter, and so on–but rather for being the most loving of all people, especially for the victims of those horrible sins.
• What if on an interpersonal level, even as they sought to bring perpetrators to justice, they did so without any hint of vindictiveness, because they knew that they were the recipients of a loving God’s forgiveness of all their injustices?
• What if the thoughtfulness and kindness of everyone who bore Jesus’s name became legendary on social media, in political campaigns, in every sector of the public arena?
• What if the Christian response to the so-called aggressive atheists of our world was to present more persuasive and better-thought out arguments given calmly and even happily in reply?
• What if God’s people thought about what kinds of words and actions were most likely to bring others to human flourishing?
• What if Christians were known for having the most fulfilling sexual lives, either by being monogamously, heterosexually married or happily celibate?
• What if they commended every good thing that remains in a fallen world, thanks to general revelation or natural theology, more than denouncing evil? (380-381).

Blomberg asks many more questions that I skipped over. But this should do it for now.

Will you join me in wrestling with these and asking what we can do better in following Jesus today?

I hope so.