And then again, in that sermon, He says, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: ²⁸ But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” Matthew 5:27-28. What He’s saying is, you not only don’t commit adultery, you just don’t think about it! Get it out of your mind.

Well, there are other things that He taught us likewise. He looked around, and He saw people who were marrying and divorcing and, according to some of the writers about that period of time, even some of the religious leaders were marrying and divorcing, and marrying and divorcing, and they wouldn’t stay married to one woman more that two weeks, sometimes. This would be happening among some of the leaders! But Jesus said, “It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement…” But I have a better Way, He is saying. “But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery,” Matthew 5:31-32. And so, He says, just don’t behave that way; don’t entertain it in your heart.

Well, Jesus looked around and He saw people who were greedy. They were constantly pursuing the things of this world. He said to them this good Message: A man’s life consists not of the abundance of the things which he possesses. [Luke 12:15: “And He said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.”] Don’t get carried away with the possession of the things of this world. That’s one of our problems today, isn’t it?—greed. That’s one of the problems that man has always had, and so the Lord says, I have a better Way.

He tells us, in that same connection, that a good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things. And an evil man out of the evil in his heart brings forth evil things, Matthew 12, verse 35. [“A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things.”] Now, what He is saying is, My Way is better because it controls the life of a person from the inside outwardly. Jesus Christ is the only religious leader in all the world, in all of history, Who has sought to control the person’s life from the inside outwardly. Everybody else puts the rules on the outside; you conform to the rules. And Jesus says, I have a better Way.

You see, really, Christ IS Good News to us! He gives us a better Way to live! You can’t put enough policemen on the streets; you can’t build enough prisons; you can’t appoint enough judges to control the behavior of a world like ours. People just need to be able to control themselves from the inside outwardly. That’s what makes the Lord’s Way the best Way to live. So, my second reason for saying that the Message of Christ is really Good News is for that reason.

I’ll explain my third reason why the Message of Christ is really Good News. One of the greatest questions that has every burdened the heart of man is the oldest question, perhaps, that’s ever burdened his heart. Going way back to the book of Job, perhaps the oldest piece of literature that we have—it antedates anything else that we have—in the book of Job, we read the question, “If a man die, shall he live again?” [Job 14:14a] That’s an important question that every one of us wonder about. We come to the time to die—is that the end of us?

Well, of course, we could go to science and ask the scientists, What do you think about it? Well, they can’t answer because it’s beyond the Scientific Method. The Scientific Method does not deal in values and in philosophies of that kind. These things can’t be put in a test tube in the laboratory and proven to be right or wrong. And so, we go to the wrong source.

If we go to philosophy, well, philosophers have been troubled by this question from time immemorial. They really don’t have the answer to the question, “‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ Is this the end of all when we come to the grave?” Some people have tried to give us an answer to that, but they’ve never given us a satisfactory one.

The humanist says to us today that, there is not sufficient evidence to believe that life survives the death of the body. Well, that doesn’t give us much hope, does it? And we could go on and list a lot of others.

Well, you say, let’s turn to religion and see what we can find. If we look at Buddhism or Hinduism and most of those, well, they deal with life after death. It’s called “reincarnation.” They say, yes, there is life beyond the grave, and you’ll be reincarnated when your spirit leaves this body, and it goes over yonder, and then it will come back and live the life of some other creature. It may be human, or it may be an animal of some kind.

I was preaching one time on television about this immortality of the life of man, and I mentioned this idea of reincarnation, and how erroneous it was—that instead of that, we believe in the resurrection. A lady from Oregon wrote me a letter. She said, “You’re mistaken about it” [reincarnation], and she gave me some Scriptures, which she interpreted to teach reincarnation—the Scriptures didn’t teach that, but she interpreted it in that way. And she said, “You know, I’m a lover of cats; I love cats.” She said, “In fact, I have about 34 cats in my house now.” Well, bless her heart, she must love cats to have that many in the house. And she said, “And when I die, I want to come back reincarnated in the life of a cat.” Well, I don’t have to tell you, without being disrespectful at all to her, that I have higher ambitions than that for life after death than to live the life of a cat. Don’t you? That just is not satisfactory, do you think?