Category: Bible

Lured by Buddha but Taken by Christ

It wasn’t in reading books, listening to my professor or considering what other people said about the Bible and God; it was reading the Bible myself that led me to my enlightenment.

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I have reflected and written about the fact that I was enamored by Buddhism in college, especially after a world religion class my freshman year but Buddhism is not where I found my enlightenment. I found enlightenment in reading the Bible.

I didn’t find enlightenment in reading what other people said about the Bible. I found enlightenment in reading the Bible myself.

I have written about the facial similarities of Christianity, Buddhism and oneness. They both place some emphasis on losing or denying one’s self and achieving oneness, but that is where the similarities end. In Buddhism, oneness with the cosmic essence of the universe is something we achieve. In Christianity, oneness with God is achieved in us as we submit to God and allow Him to take His rightful place in the center of our lives.

Whereas, Buddhism encouraged me to ignore myself, look past myself and to escape myself and all of my feeling, ambitions and ego into a cosmic forgetfulness of self, the Bible confronted me with myself. Reading the Bible was like having a one-on-one soul-searching conversation with a stern but loving Father who knew me more intimately and fully than I knew myself.

And then I met Jesus in the Gospels. I can only describe him as divine love incarnate. He is a figure like no other. Bold, daring, fearless, loving, brotherly, piercing, healing. He is everything we would expect a God, a father, a brother, a friend to be. (It wasn’t right away that I was introduced to and experienced the person of the Holy Spirit.)
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A Remedy for the Utter Loneliness of the Human Condition

Even our closest friends do not really, really know us in our innermost being.

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Have you ever felt like nobody gets you? Have you ever felt that no one understands who you really are? Not even your family or your closest friends?

First of all, congratulations, because you are being honest. It’s uncomfortable to be that honest.

I could be wrong. Maybe it’s only me, but I think many of us would rather pretend people know us better than they really do. We connect on the surface. We connect the best we can, but there are parts of us few people know or understand… if we are honest.

I sometimes feel as if everyone else “gets it” (this thing we philosophically call life) but me. Perhaps, everyone else is connected in a way that I am not. Nothing feels more isolating or lonely than feeling disconnected and alone.

I don’t think I am alone in feeling this way, though. This is the human condition. If we are being brutally honest about it. This is reality.

If this is the reality, what do we do with it? How do we live with the brutal honesty of it? We yearn for connection deep down, but many of us feel utterly disconnected and isolated from others at the core of our being.

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Prayer That Is Not Over Matched by Every Buzzing Fly

The only remedy for the condition of our hearts is God. We have to go continually to God.

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John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, said this about prayer in a letter to a friend:

Our ability to pray is so weak that, if we are sitting in a room trying to pray, we are over matched by the buzzing of a fly.

Tim Keller says that prayer is hard for us for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that we have “distance” from God is the due to the fact that we live in a physical world, while God does not. We are absorbed by the physicality of the world in such a way that is hard for us to contact to a non-physical God. What, then, is prayer that we can engage in it, engage God and overcome the obstacles that get in the way?

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Accepting God’s Invitation: The Narrow Door

We need to pay attention to the terms and conditions of God’s invitation to us.

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In previous articles I have explored the idea that God Does Not Send People to Hell and that God’s Invitation is made to everyone to open the door at which He knocks. Not everyone, however, will enter in. God gives us a real choice, and our fate rests on that choice.

God desires that we all enter in, but whether we do enter in is up to us. We can chose to reject the invitation, or simply fail to respond, and God will let us go.

Because God is love, He doesn’t force us in against our will. Love does not coerce, and it doesn’t impose itself on another person who is unwilling, so (Who is Love) will let us go our own way if we are unwilling to accept His invitation.

God’s invitation is compared to the parable told by Jesus of the great banquet. In that parable, a man sent out invitations, but the people he invited were too busy to come. So he sent invitations out to the people in the streets and alleys and country roads and filled up the banquet table with all who were willing to come.

The story may seem puzzling on the surface. Why didn’t people just accept the invitation? If you knew God was inviting you to a banquet, wouldn’t you go? It’s a fair question, but life isn’t so simple. We instinctively know that there is a catch. The door into which we are invited to enter is a narrow one.

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God’s Invitation

Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

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The question, “How can a loving God send people to hell?” reveals a misunderstanding of at least three things: 1) what love is, 2) what hell is and 3) how people end up in hell. What we are talking about are the words Jesus spoke to these points, to which this question is directed. The question packs assumptions that load the question in the wrong way.

Let me explain.

I previously wrote a piece making the point that God Doesn’t Send People to Hell. In that piece, I addressed the question, but I addressed it primarily from a philosophical view. Below we will examine where these philosophical points come from.

The philosophical view is pretty simple, and flows from the proposition that God is Love.[1] Love doesn’t coerce people against their wills. Therefore, God will not compel anyone to be with Him who chooses not to be with Him because love doesn’t coerce people against their wills.

If heaven is eternal life with God, hell is eternal life without God. If God doesn’t coerce us, He leaves the determination up to us. God doesn’t send people to hell; people choose to go there because they don’t want to be with God.

God invites us to choose Him, but he doesn’t require, coerce or compel us to choose him against our wills.

This proof holds together well philosophically, but does it line up with the teachings of Jesus?

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