God is an uncreated, eternal being. He is all-knowing, all-powerful, and present everywhere. He is perfect, holy, righteous, just, merciful and loving. For all eternity He has existed in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
God first created the spirit realm, including spirit beings that we call angels. The greatest of these, Lucifer, rose up in rebellion and tried to make himself greater than God. As a result Lucifer was thrown out of heaven and became Satan.
Then God created the physical universe, including the earth. After He had created the earth, He created mankind in His own image and likeness and gave them dominion over the earth. He placed the first man and woman in a garden with instructions to tend it, and freedom to eat any of the fruit of the garden except that from one tree, the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told them that the penalty for eating that tree would be death.
Satan, who had taken on the form of a serpent, came and tempted the woman, telling her that the fruit of the forbidden tree would make her wise. She ate some of the fruit, and gave some to the man who also ate it. In doing this they were rebelling against God, just as Satan himself had. They did not physically die immediately, but they died spiritually and lost their immediate connection with God. They were expelled from the garden, and from that time forward every human being born was born with a tendency toward sin that we know as the sin nature.
After their expulsion from the garden, and through the succeeding generations, people had a longing in their hearts to reconnect with God, and in their efforts to do so invented all kinds of religions, but none of these were able to connect them with God because of their sin nature. Every person was born spiritually dead, every person throughout his or her life would go on the sin many times over, and every person would eventually die physically and be eternally separated from God.
In time, God began to raise up a special family, starting with Abraham, who would be His representatives on earth. That family grew into the nation of Israel, and God gave them many commandments of how He wanted them to live. He also gave them the promise of a Messiah who would bring them back to Him. However, the people were still not able to live the way God wanted them to.
God, however, did not want man to be separated from Him. His justice demanded that the sentence of death for rebellion be carried out, but His love caused Him to seek a way to do this that would not see people eternally separated from Him. His answer for this was that God the Son would become man and die to pay the penalty of sin for all mankind.
For this to happen, He had to be born supernaturally, in such a way that He would be perfectly human (because only a true human being could represent mankind) whilst remaining fully God (because only God was big enough to pay the penalty for every person who had ever lived or would ever live) and would be untouched by the sin nature (because if He was himself a sinner, He would not have been able to pay the penalty for other sinners.) This was achieved by the Holy Spirit overshadowing the virgin, Mary, and causing her to miraculously conceive a Son.
That Son was Jesus, the Messiah (Christ.) He lived a life that was sinless, but in all other respects normal, until He was around 30 years old. Then He began his ministry, preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven and calling people to follow Him, and performing many miracles.
Three and a half years after He began His ministry, the religious authorities of the day rose up against Jesus and pressured the Roman authorities to crucify Him. However, this was not just the unjust death of a good man, nor even the death of a martyr. This was part of God’s plan, as when Jesus died He bore the guilt of all mankind, and paid the death penalty for our sin, satisfying God’s justice and making it possible for God to bring man back into relationship with Himself.
In His death, Jesus counteracted both the rebellion of Satan and the rebellion of Adam, and won the victory over Satan and death. Three days later He rose from the dead. He then spent 40 days meeting with and teaching His disciples before ascending back to the Father.
Because of Jesus’ death, we can be restored to relationship with God. We do this by admitting that we are sinners (every one of us has fallen short of God’s standards many times) and turning away from sin; believing that Jesus died for us personally, and accepting His death on our behalf; and surrendering our lives to Him as our Lord and Saviour. When we do that sincerely, the Holy Spirit comes into our hearts and we are “born again.”
We then need to build that relationship by talking to God in prayer, reading the Bible, and finding a good, Bible-believing fellowship where we can be nurtured in the faith.
If you believe this, and want to come to Christ, here is a simple prayer you can use:
“Lord Jesus Christ, I acknowledge that many times I have fallen short of Your standards. I am sorry for my sin, and want to turn away from it. I believe that You died to pay the penalty for my sin, and I thank You for that. I now surrender my life to You, forsaking all other gods. You alone are my Saviour and Lord. Please send Your Holy Spirit into my heart to transform me and enable me to live as you want me to. Amen.”