1 Thessalonians 1.10 promises, Jesus is the one Who has rescued us from the terrors of the coming judgment.

Recently I was listening to a man describe why he rejected his Christian upbringing. He served as a soldier in Vietnam and couldn’t understand how a good God could allow so much suffering. He has since become a Muslim. I didn’t understand how switching ‘gods’ helped him especially to one who doesn’t describe himself as love.

Another man who was born and raised in China shared with me that the government there is reinstating the teachings of Confucius into the schools. Apparently immorality is rampant. He feels Confucius and Jesus are essentially the same, good religious teachers, since Jesus taught similar things to Confucius who lived hundreds of years before Him.

People see the world is broken. People want God to prove His existence by fixing the broken world. Religion is a means for teaching morality but its adherents universally struggle to obey. God’s solution to the world’s problems is His people doing what He commands.

In Vietnam, China or anywhere else in the world, the pain people suffer is nearly always the result of choices other people have made affecting them. People are responsible for the brokenness the world suffers either by the choices we make or the choices others make that impact our lives.

Few if any of us want God to eliminate our power to choose but we wouldn’t mind if He took away the power of our neighbor to choose!

The problem with religion and law is that unless there are immediate consequences to our actions we tend to continue taking the same actions. The One True God, Jesus, allows us to continue to make bad decisions in hopes that we and others learn from those poor decisions and repent or turn from them to Him for forgiveness and restoration.

Neither Mohammad nor Confucius are purported to judge the behavior of humanity after we die. Only Jesus is purported to be the Judge of all humanity.

Jesus is the Judge because He is the only one Who lived as a human, died as a sacrifice, rose from the dead as a Savior and lives eternally as God who will judge the earthly deeds of humanity.

Every person will be judged but not all people will be condemned for their actions. Those who exchanged their evil deeds with Jesus by repentance and faith will be pardoned because they have become children of God.

Those who ignored Jesus to follow some other religion, even if that religion was their own thinking, will be left judged and condemned for they have not lived the perfect life God requires to earn a pardon.

Only Jesus lived perfectly, so only Jesus can pardon disobedience. We know this because only Jesus rose from the dead.

Unless we want to be judged in comparison to Jesus we would do well to throw ourselves upon His mercy now and receive His pardon for all the bad things we have already done.