One sometimes hears the complaint that if God really wanted people to worship Him in a specific way He would have made His desires more obviously known than He apparently has. The idea here is that the death and resurrection of a relatively insignificant Jew living in some backwater of the Roman Empire in the 1st century seems like a silly way for God to initiate some worldwide plan of conversion. Certainly God could have done better than that, says the skeptic.
But to quote Jesus: “wisdom is vindicated by all her children.” (Luke 7:35) However bizarre and counter-intuitive the incarnation and atonement seem to us, strangely, bafflingly even, it seems that God knew what He was doing in Christ. As the British physicist and priest, John Polkinghorne, has said, “Perhaps the most surprising thing about Jesus Christ is that we have all heard of Him. Of course He had an impressive public ministry, saying wise things and doing compassionate deeds. But then it all seemed to collapse and fall apart. He was arrested, deserted by His disillusioned followers, painfully and shamefully executed, suffering a death that any pious 1st-century Jew would have seen as a sign of God’s rejection… Yet we have all heard of Jesus, and He has been a powerfully influential figure for 2,000 years.”
From an obscure cult centering on an executed criminal in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. to the single most numerous and ethnically diverse faith in all of human history with a substantial presence on all seven continents today (including Antarctica!)—it would seem that Christianity has done a very good job of “getting the word out.” To apply Jesus’ words, the wisdom of God’s choice to work in and through Jesus and His followers has been vindicated by Christianity’s unimaginable subsequent cross-cultural evangelistic success.