A wager to believe

John 16:9 (NLT)
9 The world’s sin is that it refuses to believe in me.

These are the spoken words of Jesus. Jesus speaking to the disciples about His impending death Jesus knows they are grieved; but he encourages them it is for the best so that the Holy Spirit may come. The sin Jesus refers to in the verse above is the disbelief in His Holy Salvation through His death on the cross and His resurrection from the grave to follow. He tells them the Holy Spirit will convict the world of its sin, and of God’s righteousness, and of the coming judgment.

The world has a wide host of people with various beliefs. Some do not believe God exists. Some are so strongly opposed to God they have created their own belief system to prove God does not exist. Some just do not care one way or the other, while some may not have even pondered the question of God’s existence. There are those who believe in various gods while others believe they are part of a universal god. There are many beliefs, but Jesus said the world’s sin is that it refuses to believe He is God. The mathematician, philosopher, and physicist Blaise Pascal suggested even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose. Pascal formulated his suggestion uniquely on the God of Jesus Christ as implied by the greater context of his Pensées, a posthumously published collection of notes made by Pascal in his last years as he worked on a treatise on Christian apologetics. This theorem is often referred to as Pascal’s Gambit. Pascal believed why ignore the possibility there is a God when there is so much to gain than to ignore God and loose what he has to offer. And what does God have to offer, eternal salvation through His son Jesus Christ, along with his mercy, love and grace!