The Good News for Bahá'ís
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News. Not good advice. Not a spiritual perspective among many. Not the Christian contribution to the world's religious conversation. News - the announcement of something that has happened, that changes everything, and that is offered freely to every human being who will receive it.
This book is written for the Bah ' reader. It is written with genuine respect for the sincerity with which Bah ' s seek God and pursue a better world. But it is not written to find common ground, or to suggest that Christianity and the Bah ' Faith are different expressions of the same truth. It is written because Jesus Christ is Lord - the eternal Son of God, who entered human history, bore the sin of the world on a Roman cross, rose bodily from the dead, and now offers to every person the gift that no teacher, no religion, and no spiritual vision can offer: forgiveness of sins, the indwelling presence of God by His Holy Spirit, and eternal life.
The Bah ' Faith teaches that God has sent a series of divine Messengers - Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Bah 'u'll h - each one suited to his age, each one superseding the one before. Within this framework, Jesus is honored as a great Messenger whose dispensation has now been completed and whose role has been taken up by Bah 'u'll h's fuller revelation.
This book presents a different claim entirely. Jesus Christ is not one Messenger in a series. He is the eternal Word of God - "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature" (Hebrews 1:3) - who took on human flesh, accomplished in His death and resurrection what no subsequent teacher could add to or subtract from, and whose words stand forever: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away" (Matthew 24:35).
That claim is either true or it is not. If it is true, its implications reach into every dimension of human existence - including the spiritual commitments of the Bah ' reader who holds this book. It is therefore presented here not softened, not adapted to make it easier to receive, but as Jesus Himself proclaimed it: with the directness of a God who loves too much to leave His creatures with anything less than the truth.
Every chapter that follows is grounded in the Holy Scriptures - the Old and New Testaments - which are the Word of the living God and the only reliable source of knowledge about who Jesus is, what He accomplished, and what He offers. The arguments made in these pages are not the arguments of human reasoning about spiritual things. They are the testimony of the prophets and apostles, who wrote as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), and whose witness to Jesus Christ is not one religious perspective among many but the very Word of God addressed to every human heart.
The Bah ' reader who opens these pages is not asked to abandon sincerity, or reverence, or the desire to know God. Those are gifts. But they are not yet the Gospel. The Gospel is not a call to be more sincere, more reverent, or more spiritually serious. It is the announcement that the God who created you has come to you - in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, by the power of the Holy Spirit - and that He is, at this very moment, closer to you than you know.
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 3:20). He is not a Messenger suited to a past age. He is the risen Lord, knocking now.
Hegumen Abraam Sleman
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