“I have a really boring, ordinary testimony”.

Have you ever heard that? Have you ever thought that? It is an all too common refrain in churches. But underlying it is a set of of faulty assumptions. Here are some of them.

There is such a thing as an ordinary resurrection

The Bible is quite clear that every person is born dead in sin. All of us inherit a sinful nature and, as a result, have no spiritual life in us whatsoever. There is nothing in us that would, by nature, reach out to God or seek after him.

This means that every testimony is a spiritual resurrection. You don’t get much more miraculous than dead people coming to life, and every testimony is a matter of spiritually dead people receiving new life. If the raising of dead people is always miraculous, whoever they are and whatever their background happened to be, there are no ordinary testimonies.

The sins we judge most serious are most serious

We need to be careful that we don’t fall for the (fairly obviously) untruth that all sins are equally serious. Clearly they are not. But we need also to be careful that we don’t fall for the (less obvious) untruth that the sins we think are most serious and necessarily the ones God considers most serious. It is not always so.

In Proverbs 6:16-19, God lists six sins that he absolutely hates and seven that are detestable to him. Granted, ‘hands that shed innocent blood’ i.e. murder is probably one that most of us manage to avoid. The rest of them are, however, incredibly ordinary inasmuch as all of us do them quite a lot. Loads of things we might consider quite serious sins, whilst they are unquestionably things God abhors, simply aren’t listed. Six of the seven things in the list are pretty universal and whilst some of them may lie behind those we might consider ‘serious sinners’, most of us have them in common.

Then there is the sin of most significant consequence. Jesus says there is only one unforgivable sin and there does seem to be one thing that, above all else, fundamentally angers God. The unforgivable sin is a settled, arrogant denial of the the Lord Jesus. It is a subset of the sin that arrogantly refuses to glorify God at all, rejecting him and his rule, and is the sin that most seriously peeves the Lord. It is also the one that all of us, before we become believers, commit most fulsomely. All that is to say, the serious of our ‘ordinary’ sin from which we need saving are not all that different to those we might deem extremely serious.

Those saved later live with the worse sin before knowing Jesus

It is certainly true that those saved later in life do live with the consequences and memory of their serious sins. Of course they do. And they now praise God that though they sinned greatly without the Holy Spirit, they are now fully accepted sons of God in Christ by the Spirit.

Those who were saved at a young age, who have those apparently boring testimonies, don’t have to live with the consequences of their serious before they knew Christ. They didn’t have a great deal of time to sin that seriously before they knew him. Unfortunately for some of them, they now have to live with the knowledge of the serious sin they committed when they knew Christ. Sometimes they commit the same order of sin as those “trophies of grace” saved from hard backgrounds only they don’t have the excuse that they didn’t know Jesus or believe the gospel when they did it. Which, by my reckoning, is considerably worse – isn’t that the essence of Romans 2?

And think about the scriptural witness. Abraham committed all the sins we read about in scripture after God supernaturally called him. King David committed his most gross acts of sin whilst he was King of Israel, the anointed of God, the man after God’s own heart. Peter denied the Lord Jesus altogether well after he had been called. Whilst Paul had to live with the regrets of his sin before he knew the Lord, these others had to contend with their sin when they knew him. Who does the Lord hold more accountable? Who, therefore, actually needs the more grace?

The greater the individual sin the greater the miracle

I think we can make an analogy to evolution in respect to which testimony is the more miraculous. Barrow & Tipler, in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, note that for evolution to result in human-level intelligence, a species must cross numerous major biological thresholds. Barrow and Tipler famously outlined ten crucial, highly improbable evolutionary steps that were required to reach human-level intelligence. They argued that because these evolutionary milestones (such as the development of DNA, photosynthesis, and complex eyes) occurred only once in Earth’s history, they are inherently improbable. They calculated that the probability of human evolution occurring purely by random mutation and natural selection is astonishingly low, with estimates often cited between 1 in 10^1,200,000 and 1 in 10^2,400,000.

One of the arguments often advanced for the Christian understanding of origins is that God can, of course, have created the world in whichever way he wishes. He could have created in six 24-hour days if he wished, he could have worked over billions of years if he wanted and he could use evolutionary processes if that’s what he wanted to do. But it bears saying, it is pretty obvious that any form of what is called ‘special creation’ necessitates a God to specially create. However, it is often ignored that if he used evolutionary processes, the chances of their natural occurrence are so slim, and require such frequency, that what is typically cast as using ‘natural processes’ couldn’t be anything other than a significant miracle. The heaping up of less and less likely scenarios to the point of impossibility makes supernatural involvement utterly necessary.¹ As far as arguments for God’s existence go, no theory of creation gets away from the need for God.

But I am minded to think this apologetic argument has some legs when we consider the miracle of new birth. It is often consider more miraculous when one person with a background of serious sin and criminality comes to faith. And, without doubt, this is a miraculous move from death to life (see the first point above). But surely it is all the more miraculous when – as in my story – a grandfather comes to miraculously believe in Jesus and moves from death to life and, because of that, his son comes to believe in Jesus and, because of that, his grandson comes to believe in Jesus and, because of that, his great-grandson comes to believe in Jesus. What is more evidently miraculous than one person who is dead coming to life? Presumably four (or more) persons coming to life! If it is utterly improbable for one dead person to become alive, how much more improbable and miraculous is it when four generations of the same family all come to life because of the power of the gospel? You tell me which is the more miraculous, unlikely story of redemption!

1. For the record, I am not arguing this is what God did. ↩︎