Many of the people I know are always looking for some inside information.  And mostly, they want to know how to save money, how to get more money, how to best get this task done or how to avoid that problem.

People like to be in the know.  No one wants to pay more than they really need to, and nobody wants to face a problem that can be avoided with a little know-how.  I suppose most of us are like that.

That’s why I’m always surprised when folks reject the good news about Jesus Christ without even bothering to see for themselves if there is any truth to it.  Why would anyone want to wait until they are beyond the point of no return to find out if they are really prepared to meet God and to face eternity?

I want to know what death means and what waits for me on the other side.  That’s why I appreciate the fact that God sent His own Son into the world to tell us what we need to know.

Jesus came and told us what to expect on the other side.  Faithful men of God wrote down all that God has revealed by His Son, and by the Spirit through the prophets before Jesus. In the Bible (both the Old and the New Testament) God provides the human race with a complete record of what we need to know to be spiritually prepared for physical death.

Moses wrote down the facts of God’s holy and righteous nature, and provided the people of his day with a Teaching (a Torah) of all that God wants and expects of people in our day-to-day living.  In the days of that first covenant (the Old Testament) nations and individuals were judged on the basis of their compliance with God’s revelation and commands.  Many faithful prophets in those days wrote down predictions and warnings and instruction to help flesh out our understanding of God’s ways.

Then God sent His very own Son into the world.  Jesus Christ came into the world as the living Word of God, the perfect revelation of God’s will and God’s nature.  Where Moses had given us a set of commandments, Jesus Christ came to bring us mercy and truth.

We need mercy, God’s grace, to help us escape the trouble caused by our own failure to do what God really wants of us.  And, as the Bible says, we have all failed at some point to meet God’s perfect standard of righteousness.  Only Jesus Himself has not failed.  He was a perfect human being.  And thankfully, He was more than that.

Jesus bought us grace in God’s eyes by taking all the penalty for our failures.  He became sin for us so that we can become God’s own perfect righteousness in Christ.  It’s a case of trading places.

The Bible has a lot more to say about all these things.  It is the inside information we need to understand what God has done for us through Jesus Christ.  And the Bible tells us how to be sure we are ready to face God.

In a nut shell Jesus summed it up like this: “I tell you truthfully that whoever who hears My message and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.”  (Read this for yourself in John 5:24, in the New Testament of the Holy Bible.)

What Jesus is saying is that if we pay attention to what He says, and if we believe God who sent Him, then we will not be judged with the rest of the world for our failures in this life.  We will have passed beyond judgment, on into eternal life.  That, my friend, is very good news.

God is not interested in destroying human lives.  We do too good a job of that on our own.  God wants everyone to be saved, to be rescued from eternal ruin.  He wants us to live with Him in eternity.  That’s why Jesus came to earth.

And Jesus made it possible for everyone and anyone to be forgiven, saved, and rescued from sin when He died on the cross.  He is called in Scripture, “the Lamb of God” that takes away the sins of the world.  That’s what He did.  He took away the sin that would otherwise keep us from God forever.

So now God is free to make His offer to everyone.  We can become His children by faith in Jesus Christ.  We can be ready to die and ready to truly live.  In Jesus Christ we can become right with God and we can even have His Holy Spirit inside to make us truly children of God forever.

That’s the inside information God has given us.  We can accept God’s offer or reject it.  To accept it is to be made clean inside.  To reject it is to continue on in our own self-imposed darkness, and to die in our sins.  That would be a bad way to go into eternity.  The better way to get right with God here and now, and to face death someday with Christ as our Savior.

Anyway, the whole story is found in the Bible.  The part you need to read first is in the New Testament.  That’s the part that tells us all about Jesus and what it means to believe in Him.  But all of the Bible is very valuable information.  The Old Testament shows us just how bad things can be without God, and gives practical examples of how to walk everyday with the Lord.  You will really like the Psalms and Proverbs, as well as the prophets.

There you go.  Now you know.  The rest is up to you.

Jim