God loves us. Love is the beginning and the ending of the story. And love is everything in between. God created us in the beginning for love.
He gave us choice, because love does not coerce. All the misery in the world, all the pain and suffering, is because God gave us freedom of will and allowed us to go our own way. He released us to our own choices in hope that we would choose Him because we want to, because we love Him.
God sustains the world on a delicate edge, finely-tuned from the moment of creation to sustain life, and He holds it in balance to give humanity the opportunity to enter into relationship with God our creator. His handiwork is obvious if we want to see it, not so obvious if we don’t, because love does not coerce. Continue reading “Looking Back and Looking Forward, From the Beginning to the End”→
Imagine a survivor of the Holocaust, living life out quietly, suffering the residual emotional, mental and spiritual pain of the atrocities she witnessed and experienced. She harmed no one and was a decent mother, grandmother wife and citizen. Someone preaches the Gospel to her on her death bed, and she rejects it. Will God send her to heaven or hell?
This question is compelling, suggesting that no God would send anyone who suffered so much to hell. But, the question really isn’t a good one. Not that the circumstance isn’t compelling. The question is loaded, and it’s intended to negate the the Christian idea that the only way to God is through faith and belief in him.
Jesus said that he is the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but through Him.[1] Peter, who walked with Jesus, ate meals with Him and sat at His feet as he was mentored by Jesus, proclaimed that there is salvation in no one else.[2]
If Jesus is God’s Son, sent to bring the world to the Father, and there is no other name by which men must be saved, then a person who rejects rejects Jesus is not going to heaven. according to these words that Jesus spoke. So, doesn’t that mean God sends people who don’t believe to hell, like the good citizen who suffered in Auschwitz?
God is love.[3] Right? Many people believe, based on that proposition, that God would not send people to hell, especially people who suffered in this life. I think they are right, but for different reasons. I believe that love is the reason God will not send someone to heaven!
Why should any living man complain?[i] You are alive! Therefore, you have hope.
Your life, no doubt, has not gone the way you hoped it would. Looking back, there may be many regrets. You may deeply wish that you had known then what you know now, and if only you had some foresight, some sheer luck perhaps, things would be much different.
But things are what they are, and no amount of wishful thinking will change the course of events that have happened to this point.
Have you made mistakes? Be honest! We all make mistakes, and not just mistakes of choice – we all do things we should not have done. We have all done things that we knew we should not have done because they were not right.
We try to “redeem” those mistakes. Sometimes, we try to redeem them by re-characterizing our actions, thoughts and decisions, owning them as if they were right because they are who we are.
That is the temptation of modern life. “Be who you are” – whatever that may be. “Never apologize for who you are”.
As Christians, we need to be honest about the weaknesses of our claims so that we can deal with them effectively. We sometimes allow ourselves to be painted into corners that we should be able to avoid if we are honest about those weaknesses. I am reminded of the biblical idea that God is strong in our weakness.
So, what am I talking about? I am talking about the “fundamentalist” positions that we allow skeptics to pin on us. I say that these positions have been pinned on us because fundamentalism is a product of a word war, in my assessment, and one which we have lost to the definition of the word that comes largely from those who seek to discredit us.
Liberal, progressive types are masters at word wars and reinventing words. They know how important words and meanings of words are in manipulating culture. While a fundamentalist was once someone who subscribed to the fundamentals of faith, a fundamentalist is now a dogmatic, backwards, literalist who denies obvious evidence against a strained and rigid view of the Bible – according to the naysayers.
To be fair, however, some Christians prove the point. Some Christians have swallowed the hook, believing that we fight an all or nothing battle. That the battle lines have been drawn on the “literal” interpretation of the Bible, rather than something else (like Christ and him crucified) is extremely unfortunate.
Interestingly, the “new atheists” and modern skeptics exhibit the same fundamentalism that they have tried to pin on Christians who take the Bible seriously, and that has decidedly turned the battleground in our favor. If we would only seize the opportunity and get ourselves out of the corners into which we have allowed ourselves to be painted. Continue reading “The Bible: All or Nothing?”→
One of the nagging problems that people have with the Bible is the notion that God will judge people that we might consider good (as in better than me). That does not sit well with me, of course. Because we do not fully understand the issue, we fire off the accusatory question: if God is good and loving, how can He condemn good people to hell?
Part of the problem with the question is that we may not accurately understand the problem. The Law (morality) was not given to us so that we might measure up to it; the Law was given to us to show us that we do not measure up! In fact, the very point is that we do not measure up, and we cannot measure up.
Goodness and badness are not really the point; moral standards, the Law, only expose the problem. A moral standard is completely incapable of accomplishing what we need; it only reveals that we need help.
Thus, when the Pharisees boasted of their good actions, Jesus raised the ante: He said that even thinking bad thoughts is sin! When the rich young ruler asked what he needed to do to be saved, Jesus told him to go sell everything – something Jesus knew he could (would not be willing) to do. The point of the Law is to bring us to the realization that we cannot measure up on our own.
If we are trying to measure up and “be good” in order to get to Heaven, we have failed to understand the problem. We cannot even begin to understand the solution if we fail to understand the problem.
The problem is that we are set against God in our sinfulness. Our nature is set against God’s nature. While everything else in the universe was created to be finely-tuned as God intended, by the choice God gave us, we deviated from plan. This choice gave us the possibility of having a relationship with God, our Creator, but it also set us up for corruption as we inevitably would go our own way, being imperfect creatures, and not gods (let alone God).
We wanted to be like God and, so, became opposed to Him. In this way, we introduced corruption (sin) into the world that resulted in death (and all that leads to death – decay, degeneration, disease, etc.)
Transformation is what we require to be able to have fellowship with God and to enter in to His Heaven. But, we cannot achieve that transformation ourselves. In fact, we are completely incapable of it on our own.
