What is Christianity?

Hello everyone, I hope you’re all having a fine (day of the week) evening. My name is John DelBene, and I have the honor and privilege to be able to share God’s word with you. Today, we’re going to talk about what Christianity even is, what being a Christian means, and why this topic is incredibly important for our everyday lives.

Now let’s get something out of the way first, I am no pastor, no priest, no elder, no PHD, I am just some guy on the internet presenting to you the facts that I have. If at any point I should say something incorrect or miss something important, please correct me in the comments or shoot me an email. I would love to correct myself.

With that being said, the topic for today’s discussion is “what is Christianity?”, and in order to answer that, we need to actually answer a completely different question first, “what is Judaism?”

Approximately 3,569 to 3,248 years ago, (These are the early and late dates according to mainstream archaeological and historical evidence, for more information check the description)

the people of Israel fled the country of Egypt in what is widely known today as The Exodus. This mass migration of people eventually settled in what is now Modern day Israel. These people followed a single God they called This : (YHWH). We still don’t exactly know how to pronounce it which is a whole video for it’s own day but most scholars today think it’s pronounced Yahweh.

Suffice to say, in an age of pantheons and polytheism, following one God was very strange and un-ordinary. Stranger still, these Israelites proclaimed that their single God was actually the one true God, and that all of the other religions practiced by all of the other nations were false. They claimed that their God created everything, and not by battling other Gods, which was the common method of creation for most religions at the time, but by just speaking it into existence. He didn’t even need to lift a finger, he simply told everything to be, and it was, no effort required. You can see how this might upset some people.

Now I’m summing all of this up and paraphrasing like crazy, so if you’d like to learn more about the full history of the Israelites click here, but skipping to the point of their religion, they claimed that this God YHWH was personal, meaning he is able to be spoken to and communicated with like a person. He has personage. This implies that God can speak to, and reveal information to people, and indeed he has throughout history, and one of the many things God reveled to the Israelites was that he wants a relationship with his creation: with them, with you and I, with everyone and everything. Like a parent, he wants his children to follow him, and also like a parent, he wants his children to follow him because he loves them. He knows all things, including what is best for each and every one of his children. Heres the issue however; like children, we think that WE know better than our parents, which is sometimes true of earthly parents but never God, because again, God knows everything. And He loves you. And wants whats best for you. And yet somehow, we think that we will get ahead by going against what God thinks we should do. This is what the Israelites referred to as “Sin”. Which in Hebrew meant “To miss the mark”, which pretty accurately describes what is happening.