“If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)
What I like most about the Gospel is its simplicity. It’s not hard to understand, although for some, it is hard to believe. For example, there are two prerequisites for salvation: You must “confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead”. If you believe both of these as fact, the Bible says “you will be saved”.
What does it mean to “confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth”? Since the brain instructs the mouth on what to say, I believe that you must have reasoned that Jesus really was the Son of God. In other words, He was virgin born. Interestingly, surveys indicate that the majority of Americans believe in the virgin birth. In a 2003 poll conducted by the Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University, 60% of Americans “absolutely” believe in the virgin birth. But since a 2007 Barna Group Survey revealed that 83% of all Americans consider themselves Christians, it would stand to reason that some Christians do not believe in the virgin birth.
There’s no reason for Christians to question the virgin birth. I wrote a column several years ago in which I quoted 17th Century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Paschal, who when asked about belief in the chance of a virgin birth said, “A hen doesn’t need a cock to make an egg.” Pascal pointed to a simple example that we all can believe because we know it’s true. Indeed, the eggs we see served at breakfast every day should remind us of that Jesus birth through a virgin can be believed.
Apparently, belief in resurrection is a much bigger pill to swallow. The Scripps Howard News Service also found in a 2006 survey that only 36% of survey respondents believed they would experience a bodily resurrection after they died.
Again, nothing could be farther from the truth, and there is another simple example than can be used to strengthen its believability. One of the churches the Apostle Paul planted also had trouble believing the resurrection. In his letter to the Church at Corinth, Paul, like Blaise Pascal, used an everyday occurrence in nature to point out that death can bring resurrection. He analogized the death and resurrection of the body to the planting of a seed and its subsequent birth. “But someone will say, “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?” Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain – perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to each seed its own body.” (1 Corinthians 15:35-38) The seed must die before the plant can be raised.
Belief in both the virgin birth and the resurrection doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand. But it does take the mustard seed faith that Jesus mentioned in Matthew 17:20 – the kind that can move a mountain of doubt.
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