Now the Choice Is Yours

We have come a long way from the first essay's simple plea to prefer truth over comfort. We followed the existence of the universe to a necessary ground, the order of the cosmos to a Mind, the moral law to a Lawgiver, the strange weight of being a person to our origin in God, and the fracture in every human heart to our need. We tested the great alternatives and watched them fall short. And we arrived at a man who claimed to be God, backed the claim with his own empty tomb, and offered the one thing no other door offers: not a ladder to climb but a rescue to receive. This essay is about what to do with all of that — because a case like this cannot honestly be left in the "interesting" file. It asks for a verdict.

Faith is not the opposite of thinking

First, let me clear away the caricature one last time, because it stops more people than any argument. Faith, in the Christian sense, is not believing things without evidence, or against it. That is not faith; that is gullibility, and the Bible never once commends it. The word we translate as "faith" means something much closer to trust — the kind of trust you place in a friend, a surgeon, a bridge. It is not credulity in the absence of grounds; it is commitment in the presence of grounds that fall short of mathematical proof — which, as we saw at the very start, is the situation of nearly every important decision a human being ever makes.

You have trusted a surgeon with your life on far less evidence than has been laid out in these twelve essays. You married, chose a career, crossed a bridge, all on warranted trust rather than proof. Faith is not a leap in the dark. It is a step into the light — walking forward on what you have good reason to believe is solid, precisely because you have good reason to believe it.

The wager you are already making

Three and a half centuries ago Blaise Pascal — a mathematical genius, not a wishful thinker — pointed out something we would rather not hear: on the question of God there is no neutral option. You cannot abstain. To live as though God is not there is to have wagered that he is not, and to stake your one life on it. Not deciding is itself a decision, quietly made, with everything on the table.

Pascal is often read cynically, as though he recommended a bet placed for gain. But his deeper point was simpler and more honest: given what is at stake — given that if this is true it is the truest and most important thing there is — the one irrational response is the one most people actually choose, which is not to look into it at all. To shrug at a question of this magnitude is not sophistication. It is the single position no thoughtful person can afford. If the case in these essays is even possibly right, then indifference is the one clearly foolish answer.

What accepting Christ actually means

So suppose the evidence has done its work, and you find the door more credible than you expected. What is being asked of you? Not, first of all, to sign a list of doctrines, or to clean yourself up, or to become religious. Those get the order backwards. The gospel we traced was not "improve, and God will accept you." It was "God has already done what you could not; receive it."

To accept Christ is really three plain motions of the whole self. It is to admit the fracture — to stop performing and say honestly that you are not what you should be, and cannot fix it. It is to believe that Jesus is who he said, and did what the witnesses reported: lived the life you could not, died the death you had earned, and rose. And it is to entrust yourself to him — to step off your own treadmill and rest your whole weight on what he has done, the way you finally sit down in a chair instead of merely believing it would hold you. Admit, believe, entrust. It is less a transaction than a homecoming — the prodigal turning around on the road, and finding the Father already running toward him.

The step

I said in the first essay that I would ask you for something small and demanding: to want the truth more than to be right. If you have come this far honestly, you may find you are no longer at an intellectual crossroads but a personal one — the point where the mind has done what it can and the will must move. And here a strange thing is true that is true nowhere else in inquiry: this is a door that opens partly from the inside. Jesus said that anyone willing to do God's will, will know whether the teaching is true. There is a knowledge here that comes only to those willing to take the step — not proof forced on a spectator, but light given to a traveller who starts walking.

That step can be as simple as the most honest sentence you have ever spoken, said to a God you are not yet sure is listening: If you are there — I have looked, and I am willing. Here I am. No formula is magic; God reads the heart, not the wording. People have begun exactly there — with an honest, half-trembling word into what felt like silence — and found, to their surprise, that the silence was not empty, that the running Father had been closer all along than their doubt.

This is where twelve essays have been leading, and where I have to hand it over, because no one can take this step for you and no one can take it from you. The case, I believe, is strong; but a case is only a signpost, and a signpost is not the destination. At some point you have to stop studying the map and walk. The reason for the hope is real, and it has a name, and he is not far. The only question left is the one you have been circling since the very first page: not is it comfortable, but is it true — and if it is, will you come?