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If you want a picture of God’s unconditional, sacrificial love, watch parents care for an infant in the first weeks of life. A baby boy does not, cannot, do anything for his parents. He can’t even give them a smile. A baby girl is a bundle of needs, demands, and interruptions that obliterate normal life. Yet as we watch the parents’ eyes, we see the look of unconditional love. They feed, change, hold, and comfort a baby who has done nothing, and will do nothing, for them. But how they love him! There is no better image of God’s unmerited favor, freely given. John says, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).

If the infant cries or grows ill, do good parents become angry at her? No, they grieve at their child’s tears and long to help her. In this we resemble our Father in heaven. But he constantly demonstrates the love we show fitfully. Psalm 103 says, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him” (Psa. 103:13). In this way, God has written hints of his gospel and grace in our hearts.

But there is more. Genesis 1:27-28 says, “God created man in his own image. . . . And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over [it].’”

Many theologians believe that filling and subduing the earth is an element of our life in God’s image. He rules all and we reflect that—we live as his image—when we rule the world as he would. In Genesis 1, the Lord began to fill the earth with plants and animals, then passed the task to us. Animals fill the earth through a blind instinct to reproduce. But God made us in his image, and our world-filling activity is rational, moral, and creative. We can (partially) imitate God’s holy, ordered fruitfulness. The Lord chose to give life to humanity, and in a limited way, we can too. To be sure, God speaks and it is so, while we act and wait to see what happens. Nonetheless, couples can say, “Let’s have a baby” and act on their resolve. More often than not, within a year or two, a young couple does indeed have a baby.

We realize that God could have designed humans to reproduce impersonally, like amoeba or fish or ferns. He chose to give us the capacity to say, “Let us make,” that is, “Let us bring a life into this world, together.” So he granted us God-like capacity. At best, we pray and plan to start a life that lasts forever. Like the Father, we intend to shower that life with love, guidance, and grace. At our best, we, like Jesus, give of ourselves, empty ourselves, and watch our children grow to maturity. In all this we reflect the character of God. Sometimes I suspect that this is the most God-like thing a married couple can do: to have a baby, by design, and to care for that baby, with pleasure, when (especially in the beginning) the baby can give nothing back.

Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness.” We can apply this teaching to parents too. Like God, we rejoice over the children “in our midst” even when they trouble and grieve us. As our Father rejoices over us, we rejoice when our infant begins to smile. We give thanks as our baby discovers the world, as he sees his first puppy, as the first snow-flake or Christmas tree dances in her eyes. The slightest progress pleases us—their earnest but stumbling acrobatics, the lisping of family names. Similarly, our Father takes pleasure over us, in our relationship with him and in the small steps we take toward maturity.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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