Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1 Corinthians 1:22–24 (NIV)
When you trace Christianity back to its roots in each country, you can see how people tended to mix their cultural beliefs with Christianity. You can even find examples where very
strange beliefs were mixed in—beliefs
that go directly against Jesus’ teachings.
In the Western world, we mix the beliefs of our culture with Christianity all the time. People pick and choose what they like from popular ideas or other religions to create a sort of pseudo-Christianity.
Meanwhile, if people fully understood what Jesus accomplished for us, they would never want to change a thing about it because it’s so phenomenal. In fact, Paul said in 1 Corinthians 1:23 that the full message of what Jesus has done is so amazing that people think it can’t be true!
The religious leaders of Jesus’ time
certainly thought it was too good to be true. They thought there was no way God could be that generous, and they wanted this message of grace, love and unearned acceptance stopped because they believed it would cause sin to explode among the Jews.
These people believed that you had to do all sorts of things to try to please God and, if you didn’t, He would make sure that bad things would happen to you. What’s sad is that this is still taught in churches today!
We need to get back to the original, full message of Jesus’ finished work.
Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension answers every need we have. It is the ultimate good news!