You know, if we are honest, a lot of the stories of the Bible are simply hard to believe. Bodies of water that split in half so that people can walk on dry land, city walls that fall down because people scream and yell and blow trumpets and bust clay pots, a woman’s flour jar that never empties no matter how much bread she makes . . . these things run up against our logic. Water that comes from rocks upon demand, a child’s lunch made to feed over 5000 people, a man walking on top of the water . . . things like this seem less like fact and more like fiction. Lame people walking, blind people seeing, people being raised from the dead . . . these things seem like they should come from a child’s bedtime story book rather than from the Bible. The Bible doesn’t begin with the words, “Once upon a time in a land far, far away,” but with stories like these, it seems like it could.

The hardest story for me to get my arms around is the story of Lucifer, the angel (maybe even an archangel), sinning against God and being cast out of heaven. As best we can tell, from a combination of passages in the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel and Revelation, at some point in the pre-Genesis past, Lucifer, or Satan, was a high-ranking angel. The passage in Isaiah (14:12-15) seems to refer to him as the “Day Star,” or the “son of Dawn,” and the Ezekiel passage (28:12-19) refers to him as “an anointed cherub.” And both indicate that pride was the sin that caused his fall from heaven. And when he succumbed to pride, a third of the angels sinned with him and were also cast out of heaven and became demons, part of Satan’s horde.

So, there you have it. Evil didn’t begin with Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden, but with a high-ranking angel who became proud (for what reason, we don’t know) and was kicked out of heaven, along with a bunch of other angels. And I think to myself, “Really!?” That seems so fanciful, so far-fetched. It sounds like the tales of the gods fighting each other from the stories of Greek or Roman mythology. I can more easily see mankind not trusting God, disobeying, and thus needing a Savior. But the whole presence of the underworld and how it came about and its involvement in the fall of mankind pushes things for me.

All of that is to say this. What do we do when it is hard to believe the Bible? Well, this is where the gospel helps us. We believe the Bible when it is hard to believe the Bible because we have been saved. We believe the Bible when it is hard to believe the Bible because of who it is that is speaking to us in the Bible. In other words, we believe the Bible when it is hard to believe the Bible because we trust God. And we trust God because he has sent his Son to die a cruel death, the death that we deserved, in order to reconcile us to God. We believe the Bible because we trust its Author.

When our kids were young we told them wonderful lies, great stories of how life worked. When one of their baby teeth came out, we put it under their pillow when they went to bed and when they woke up the next morning there was a quarter in its place. (For some of you, that could have been two quarters or even a dollar, but not us. Our kids’ teeth were only worth a quarter.) The tooth fairy had come in the middle of the night and swapped tooth for coin. (I’m just glad that they never asked what she did with all of the teeth.) When the pet hamster died, we performed an appropriate funeral ceremony and assured them that they would most certainly see that dear rodent on the other side of Jordan, despite the fact that we had no Biblical reason to say this. (This is not to say that there will not be animals in heaven; we just don’t know. I personally believe that all dogs go to heaven; cats, however, go to hell.) And we have always believed in Santa Claus (and still do). A man in a red suit enters every house in the world on the same night and delivers gifts? And our children believed us. Why? They believed us because they trusted us.

You see, they had experienced our love for them and our provision of them and our grace toward them. I’m sure if we had abused them in horrific ways, they would have been wary of the things we said, and for good reason. But we didn’t. We loved them, and they knew that, so they trusted us. And we were human, fallible parents, unlike God. Jesus said it like this. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him (Mt. 7:11)!”

Let me make my point. The cross makes everything about God worth believing. The apostle Paul alludes to it like this. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things (Rom. 8: 32)?” If God would give up his own Son for us, then we can trust him with everything else in life. We can trust him when he says things that are difficult to believe. We can trust him when he says things that go against our culture or against what seems right and fair. We can trust him when he brings difficult circumstances into our life.

We don’t have to muster up the faith to believe things that are hard or that we don’t like. We simply must look at the cross. Our relationship with God is not based on blind faith. It is based on love. If you find your faith to be weak, look at the cross and experience the love of God for you.