I guess I celebrated the return of my blog yesterday with a bang, writing about such a place as hell. It certainly is a controversial topic, and there are people who no doubt think my take is bunk. God is a God of love, and maybe you’re thinking that if I come at you with the Bible and what it says about hell, I’m bringing in material that just isn’t true. I hear this all the time: “The Bible is just a collection of writings and letters written by the men of the time – their take on things. It’s the way they saw it. But we certainly can’t take their word for it. After all, they were just men.”
Now, my response is usually along the lines of, “you wouldn’t even know that God is a ‘God of love’ if you hadn’t put your own spin on what the Bible told you in the first place.” You can’t say “the Bible is wholly unreliable,” then appeal to it to make your case.
But I suppose you think you can – that is, if you don’t really believe all of its stories about Jesus anyway. “Yeah, Jesus was this great guy that came along and taught his followers a lot of cool stuff, but he was only that. There were times he was wrong.” In this view, he can just be lumped in with all of the other great religious and political leaders of their times. Listen to him when he talks about love. Ignore him when he talks about hell. I mean, even Gandhi did some pretty freaky stuff sometimes, right?
But for this one thing:
Paul pretty much tells us Christianity’s greatest weakness (as Tom Schrader would have said – gives the playbook to the opposing team) – if there was no resurrection, there is no living Christ. Without the resurrection, he says, “your faith is in vain…[and] we are of all people most to be pitied.” Now, we can submit that, even if the resurrection were true, that doesn’t prove that the Bible is actually accurate in everything else it says. But the evidence piles up pretty high from there. We can take the word of those who wrote it, especially if we remember that they were generally just a group of poor fishermen who ran away when Jesus was crucified – only to come back and produce some of the most astounding literature making such fantastical claims…claims for which they were willing to die. Why? These guys were not prosperity preachers. What they were saying wasn’t making them rich and famous. It was getting them tortured and killed. Who dies for something they know is a lie? Who can get away with making these claims within the lifetimes of people who were actually there if the claims were not true?
Chuck Colson was Richard Nixon’s lawyer, so he did a bit of jail time. While he was in prison, he became a Christian, and he goes to his own experience to demonstrate the point:
“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world – and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”
So what do we do with this? If the resurrection is true, we would do well to listen to what the Bible says about the one who was raised. And one of the things it says is this: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” [my emphasis].
A day of judgement will come, and it turns out that the very Jesus that people want to portray as so gentle and loving is actually the one who will come to “judge the world in righteousness.” Let’s not downplay the foundation of this statement – we just read that God at one time overlooked our ignorance but now commands all people everywhere to repent. The first recorded words of Jesus come in Mark’s telling of the gospel: “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Repent and believe! Don’t live in your self-enforced ignorance. Contrary to what so many want to believe, God won’t overlook this to let you have heaven. You can’t get there by saying the very one who set the bar doesn’t even exist. You certainly can’t get there by calling him a monster, mocking him, or turning your back on him. You get there by turning away from your own sinfulness and turning to the one whom he appointed as judge; not to fall at his feet begging for mercy — that will do you no good — but rather to accept what he offers. And this really is the good news — that “for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus, the judge himself, made that trade. He took the penalty for the wrongs you committed against him, and paid for them on your behalf so you could stand before a perfect and righteous God without the stain of your sin standing in the way of acceptance. “For the wages of sin is death [that is, we earn our way to the hell about which I wrote yesterday] but the free gift [not something earned, but given] of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
This sounds like such a good deal to me. I hope it’s the same for you.
