Why the God of this Scripture?

In yesterday's post I briefly referenced a student's very good question which could be summed up thusly: how can anyone know if the God of the Bible is the real God?

There are literally thousands of different religions throughout history all over the globe. All of them claim to have inside knowledge about a deity (or deities) or insight into the truth about human existence and human flourishing. Why this Scripture over and above any other? Why the Christian "take" on God over any other of the buffet of options out there?

And why choose at all given that we might like a little bit of this and a little bit of that--and given that there are certainly things in Christianity that offend our modern (or post-modern) sensibilities?

I think, like most things in Christianity, the answer to this question lies in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus made some fairly audacious claims. Even if you were to quibble with some of the specifics of the reliability of the four accounts of Jesus' life, there's simply no doubt that he taught and did some extraordinary things.

Among the crazy things he taught in conjunction with what he did was at least some claim of representing God, acting on his behalf, and perhaps even identifying himself with God. The gospel writer John records him as saying, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father."

And there's little doubt that he was crucified by the Roman authorities under charges that were trumped up by the Jewish religious elite.

Three days later, everyone who knew him says that he was raised from the dead. And nearly all of them died nasty, brutish deaths rather than recant that claim. And from a small Jewish splinter group led by an uneducated fisherman has come 2,000 years of church history and the most sweeping, global faith tradition the world has ever known.

And one of the guys who met the resurrected Jesus used an interesting and important word in describing Jesus' resurrection: vindication (see 1 Timothy 3). God "vindicated" him by the Spirit--that is, through the resurrection of Jesus, God declared all that Jesus said not only about himself but also the God he claimed to bear witness to, was true.

God put his seal of approval, his stamp of endorsement on the person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus by raising him up from the dead. No other religion even claims this. Only Christianity claims that the dude who started this thing died once but isn't dead any more.

If God raised Jesus from the dead, then God has vindicated him once and for all as the true messenger sent from the true God and all of us must bow before him, his work, and his message about who God is. God himself has declared in this raising-up that this one named Jesus has represented him rightly.

If God hasn't raised Jesus from the dead, this whole thing is the largest and most colossal sham the world has ever known.

All the evidence actually points to the former. But I gladly confess to being extremely biased.