Edgework

In 1965, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade was looking for a tool to assist his organization carry out evangelism on college campuses and beyond. He came up with a little booklet, entitled Four Spiritual Laws which articulated his understanding of the gospel distilled down to four main points.

The Four Spiritual Laws were:

1. God loves you and created you to know Him personally (John 3:16, John 17:3).
2. Man is sinful and separated from God, so we cannot know Him personally or experience His love (Romans 3:23). A great gulf separates God from sinful humankind. Those separated from God will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord (2Thessalonians1:8-9).
3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through Him alone we can know God personally and experience God’s love (Romans 5:8, I Corinthians 15:3-6, John14:6). God has bridged the gulf that separates us from God by sending Jesus to die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.
4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know God personally and experience His love. We must receive Christ by faith (Ephesians 2:8-9), and personally invite Him in (Revelation 3:20).

For the rest of the 20th century, many evangelicals considered a presentation of these Four Spiritual Laws to be the best way to present the gospel in a nutshell. Millions of booklets were distributed around the world which resulted in many conversions to Christianity. Any critique of this booklet was countered with the observation that it was an effective tool to bring people to faith in Jesus.

But over the years I began to notice some cracks in this telling of the story. I began to wonder who had created the great gulf. Had God created it because God couldn’t stand getting up close to God’s own creation? Why was the gulf there between God and me before I had even sinned consciously? Did God have to be paid off by the cruel death of Jesus so God could undergo a mind change about sinful people? Or was the penalty paid to the Devil, as some thought? What would really happen to those who never got their hands on one of these booklets so they could do what it recommended? Other than getting oneself across that wide gulf and then handing out more booklets, what else did this experience call us to?

It has been a long journey for me personally to come to the realization that there is a better way to tell the biblical story of salvation. Through study, reflection, listening and learning I have discovered and adopted a new set of Four Spiritual Laws. I call them laws to contrast the story they tell to the one Bill Bright had us hooked on for many decades. It would perhaps be better to refer to them as chapters, pillars of truth or major movements in the gospel drama.

1. Everyone starts with an original blessing. Genesis 1 affirms that everything that was created was good and it was all inter-connected. God declared that humankind was created in “our” image, letting us in on the reality that God dwells in relationship and that we are created to live in relationship with God and one another. Through this lens we perceive that we are all “Children of God.” We belong together with God and one another and this is good. What God has brought together no one should try to separate.
2. We live with the illusion of separation from God because wrong choices we make obscure the original blessing. The story of Cain and Abel reminds us that sin is always crouching at the door tempting us to think and act in ways that blur the fact that we are children of God. The more we yield to this temptation, the more we begin to believe the illusion that we are separated from God. The debris left behind by wrong choices covers the greater truth of our original blessing. Such a default illusion makes sin a much more serious matter than simple disobedience.
3. Jesus becomes one of us to help us re-imagine our original blessing and re-connect us consciously to God, others and all of creation. This allows us to become children of God in the true depth and intimacy that comes with a re-discovered original blessing. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection open up the way for us to become our true selves, our children-of-God selves. Jesus helps us change our mind about God. God’s mind about us never needed changing because God is Love. When we truly experience this deep connection with God and all creation, we begin acting in ways that bring all things together.
4. The end of the story happens when God has reconciled all of God’s creation back to the conscious state of original blessing. Revelation 21 and 22 picture this grand coming together as a bride and bridegroom consummating their marriage. All of heaven and earth are brought together, as it was in the beginning. Our role throughout this story is to remember the togetherness from which we come and lean into the togetherness that God is moving all creation toward in the end.

This version of Four Spiritual Laws is Good News from start to finish. It is the story of a good God always at work to re-member whatever has been dis-membered in life. And we are called to be open to allowing God to bring some of the end God has in store into the world in which we live. “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Some think this story is too good to be true. But I find it to be a life-giving story and more believable than the earlier version which has a petty god consigning to eternal, conscious torment all those who don’t believe and act on Bill Bright’s four spiritual laws.