In Jesus’ day…and by modern standards…there was no dignity, there was no fairness, and there was no justice. But there was a lotta pain and suffering and injustice. And into that world stepped Jesus who claimed that every single person had dignity and that God loved every single person in the world (not just the Jews).
Jesus’ first century followers paid dearly for their faith, and they were treated incredibly unjustly with pain and suffering. They were persecuted for essentially believing something. And Jesus’ first century followers embraced a God that was good and loving and just ~ in a culture that was characterized by pain and suffering and injustice.
If the Christian God had been so fragile as to be able to be argued out of existence based on pain and suffering and injustice, the Christian God would’ve never made it out of the first century because for the first 100, 200, almost 300 years, the followers of the Christian God were persecuted. So Christianity is not so fragile as many think, and as many claim.
The fact that 2,000 years later there are Christians all around the world speaks to the strength of the theology that surrounds what the God that Jesus presented to the world is like.
At a time when the apostle John and his friends were being treated unjustly with pain and suffering…after spending between 3 and 3.5 years with Jesus…he asserted that “God is love.” This concept was introduced in the world at a time of extraordinary pain and suffering and injustice.
