My background is that I was born in Israel of a Danish mother and Scottish father, settling in Ibrox from age 4 to 17. This time forms the bulk of my childhood experiences.
I was taught that Jesus was a good man who came to give us guidelines on how to live, and as long as we tried to live a good life we might get into heaven. Otherwise – well, that wasn’t spoken about. A Christian was someone who went to church and tried to be ‘good’.
I was sent to Sunday school where I was taught the same – the Bible was purely a guide book with some history, much of which was metaphorical.
Church didn’t play a large part in our lives other than attendance on a Sunday morning, and I didn’t think much about life, the universe and everything. I believed there was a God but beyond that I had no idea.
Then in 2nd year at school I met a girl, Beatrice, who went to the Baptist church and talked about being ‘saved’ and ‘born again’. I became friends with her because she lived in Ibrox too so we travelled together to school (Glasgow High on the north side of the city). To my shame I mocked her for her beliefs even though she was always good to me.
I constantly questioned her in a mocking and critical way, but in reality I was fascinated by the strength of her faith and by the way she never retaliated in the manner I deserved, and I secretly wanted to know more and understand what being saved meant.
I didn’t understand when she said ‘Jesus died for our sins’. How could someone die for my sin? I wasn’t that bad anyway, was I?
Over the next four/five years my arguing turned to real questioning as I tried to understand, and I started to read the Bible for myself. I learned that the Jews were given the law which they constantly failed at. I learned that God is righteous and just and cannot tolerate sin. I learned that ‘the wages of sin is death’. To atone for their sin the Jews would sacrifice a perfect lamb, and the shed blood of the lamb was accepted in place of their own death for sin, thereby atoning for their sin. This had to be done regularly because the people kept sinning.
But Jesus was the Son of God and was without sin. He sacrificed himself as the ‘Lamb of God’ to atone for our sin. This only needed to be done once because he was perfect and he rose from the dead which proved he was the Son of God and had conquered death. The sacrifice was final – we just had to accept it for ourselves.
I was still trying to get my head around this when Beatrice took me along to a youth cafe ‘Alpha Scene’ which was linked to the Tron in the City centre. There were two talks I heard there which I still remember and which had a huge impact on me:
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- A painter and decorator uses a plumb line to get wallpaper to hang vertically straight. Without the plumb line it would be squint. God’s plumb line was his measurement for us and it was perfection. Therefore when we are measured against it we are always ‘squint’. This taught me that I fell far short of God’s perfect standard.
- A man had a car which wouldn’t go. He replaced the doors, the lights and had it re-sprayed until it was gleaming. It looked brand new but it still wouldn’t go. What it really needed was a new engine. That was the only solution, and it needed an expert to replace it. I learned that what I needed was a new heart, I needed changed from the inside and I couldn’t do that myself.
I finally understood it after reading John chapter 10 repeatedly. Jesus is the door, the gate, the way. The only way. By this time, I was in 6th year and running out of excuses. One night on my own I asked God to forgive me and to make me a new person through what Jesus had done. I asked him to save me. It was as if I could see outstretched arms welcoming me and I received an assurance and peace that I now belonged to Him.
What happened over the next few months was extraordinary – I watched myself change, but from the inside. I no longer had a hatred for ‘horrible’ people (as young girls can do), instead I began to love them as I saw them as people like myself that Jesus had died for. I had been unable to do this myself before.
Although I had argued with Beatrice about Adam and Eve (after all, we all knew that we were descended from ape-like creatures!) it didn’t seem important anymore. Then in my first year at Glasgow Uni I studied Geology as one of my subjects. I was always fascinated by rock formations, glacial action on the landscape, and the effects of erosion and volcanic activity. But when they started on the geological column and fossils as an explanation of evolution, I realised this was contrary to what the Bible taught and I began to examine this whole area. I read everything I could find including my geology textbooks and came to the conclusion that evolution was as man-made as the books I was reading. Although the evidence was there, to me it was evidence for a creator God, not a random sequence of unlikely events. I became totally convinced that evolution (as in from simple to complex) is not a true science, but a hypothesis. I have watched as the theories surrounding evolution and origins have changed with each new discovery, while a biblical interpretation of these discoveries shows the unchanging message of the Bible.
I am still good friends with Beatrice and her husband John, and will always be grateful to her.
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