Taking The Plunge

Imagine that you are standing on a diving board on a hot day. It's a high dive. You look down and see fog beneath you. A reliable person who you know is trustworthy tells you that a refreshing pool of water is below. He assures you that you will enjoy the water tremendously if you jump into it.

You jump and you hit the water. It was just as you had been told. Wonderful.

Think about that scenario a moment. Was it your decision to jump that caused the water to be real? Did it come into being when you jumped? The fact is that the water was there whether you jumped or not. You didn't make it materialize by believing it was there and by throwing yourself off the diving board. Your action only allowed you to experience it. The water was real all along, but it became real to you when you jumped into it.

Here's the comparison: What Jesus Christ did for humanity is real. It isn't a person's faith that makes it become real. It was real before you and I believed and would have been real if we had never believed. Believing enables us to experience the reality of His finished work. It doesn't make His work real.

Existential thought in the Christian world suggests that our sins are forgiven when we believe; that we are reconciled to God when we believe; that all the things associated with our salvation happen because we believe. The problem is that this view puts the cart before the horse. We believe because it is already true. It doesn't become true when we believe! Our faith simply allows us to experience a reality that already exists.

With all our talk about the centrality of the cross, the way we often teach the gospel suggests that what is really central in our understanding is our profession of faith. The truth is that it all happened at the cross. When Jesus said, "It is finished," He meant it. He didn't mean He was waiting for us to finish it by anything we do.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Until we jump we won't ever get wet. But the water is there. We don't create by our faith. We just get to enjoy it when we take the plunge.