Category Archives: Hell

Pat Robertson and Haiti – where angels fear to tread

15 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by in christianity, Hell, media, orthodoxy, religion and politics, Theodicy

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I had a great birthday. January 12 was a happy day for me, all day long. But a couple of days later I discovered what a big tragedy it was… an earthquake hit Haiti, killing maybe 100,000 people.

Aside from the small donation I sent to World Vision, there isn’t much I can do. I can urge you to support Haitian rescue efforts. I can express my thanks to Doctors Without Borders and others who were already there, hard at work. My impact is ridiculously puny.

But perhaps to salve my conscience I’m going to use this as the occasion for my re-entry into the blogosphere, a year and a day after my last post here on HappyGod.

Since my topics are God and what’s wrong with the world, let’s talk about Pat Robertson. Not the man, but his ideas. OK, alright, let’s talk about the guy too, and his habit of rushing in where angels fear to tread. (Thanks, Alexander Pope, for helping me break the spirit of Matthew 5:22 without disobeying the letter!)

Sometimes we’re confronted with foolishness that is so laughably evil, so hatefully dumb, that all we can do is gape in amazement. Where do I begin?

Keith Olberman was articulate and strummed some chords I wanted to hear:

Whoopi Goldberg and friends were similarly indignant and equally articulate about Dr. Robertson…

Other worthy comments are all over the web:

Atheists weigh in (and the Atheists.org site links to an excellent Salon.com article)

Ambassador from Haiti weighs in

Even God weighs in (humorous press release, via Andy Borowitz, in which God distances himself from the Christian right)

I’m going to leave Pat Robertson squirming in the discomfort of his own religious hotsauce, and come back tomorrow with some historic perspective on the real cause of Haiti’s disproportionate suffering.

Benjamin Button – more about death than life

27 Saturday Dec 2008

Posted by in a happy God, eschatology, Hell, love of God, movies, prophecy, religion, Theodicy, universalism

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I took my wife to see the Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas day. We both enjoyed it a great deal.

It’s a love story, and an adventure story. Someone compared it to Forest Gump, but it’s never as emotional as that masterpiece, nor as funny. But it’s got some humor, I’d give it it a thumbs up for the quality of the writing, acting, cinematography, and directorial artistry. And I love the way sunrises over the water are like a character in the film … somehow Benjamin is attracted to them, and watches them regularly by himself, with family members, etc.

As I stated yesterday, what makes me resonate with the movie the most is the way it presents human growth backwards from the norms we see every day…. aging, failing, dying. Here, a person emerges from the womb as from the grave, in decrepitude, and then grows toward youthful vigor. The “youthful” Benjamin writes in his diary at one point (perhaps at 15 biological years, now with the body of perhaps a 60 year old) “Some days I feel different than the day before…” His wrinkles are disappearing, his hair is sprouting “like weeds”, his hormones are catching fire.

Does the Bible really support the idea that such a miracle is possible? That it will happen to the masses of humanity? Yes and Yes!

Jesus himself states the case as emphatically as words can say: “Don’t be amazed…. All in the graves will come forth.” Unfortunately the fog of neo-Platonic concepts like immortal soul and hellfire make it difficult for most Christians to really see what Jesus is saying here. It’s quite simple, though. The ones who enter into a relationship with God during this age, and continue walking in grace and faith, emerge in the resurrection of Life, what Jesus calls the First Resurrection in the book of Revelation. For such, their resurrection is instantaneous, glorious, and in heaven. The entire rest of mankind, who remain in their sins, emerge from the grave still in their sins, but experience a gradual resurrection, through a process of judgment or trial and testing. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul states that God gives each a body as it pleases him. This is tremendously reasuring, because it means that disfigured, disabled, distorted folks in this life can look forward to being whole upon emerging from the grave. Then, their education will begin and it will take most of the Millennium for each person to build the finegrained righteous character that is going to be their birthright and their ticket into everlasting life as a member of the human community.

Isaiah describes the scene in several places, including chapter 35. He defines its scope as “the ransomed of the Lord” (which by the authority of 1 Tim 2:4-6 I claim means “all the human race”). He states that they return (come back). That is, they don’t go to a place they never were before, they come back to where they were before.. planet Earth. They come back joyfully, and yet they have some travelling still to do. Isaiah calls it a highway of holiness. He describes it as a place that you can’t travel if you’re unclean (dirty or sinful) … and yet he says that it exists FOR the unclean. He says that the wayfaring man (Joe Sixpack), though they be but fools, won’t err therein. They will figure out how to navigate that highway to holiness, and with the help God has provided with his powerful Son and his patient Bride they will get to that place of moral excellence, of wisdom, of forgiveness, of victory over doubt and selfishness and fear. I envision the Bride or spiritual government of that age as all the great and saintly Christians of ages past; myriads of powerful spiritual mediators working overtime to help everyone with a cloud of supernatural help and faithbuilding efforts. The result of all this effort is the process of age-reversal that Job described in the verse I quoted yesterday… returning to the days of youth.

Isaiah hints at the remarkable reversal of all that we think about in this new living (un-dying) process. He says in 65:20, “”No longer will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his days; For the youth will die at the age of one hundred and the one who does not reach the age of one hundred will be thought accursed.”

What an odd verse! I think the normative experience during the Millennium will be to awaken from the grave near the beginning of the Millennium and live under the authority of Christ and his “Bride”. Joe Sixpack will be living, learning, getting the occasional rebuke but mostly lots of great instruction and encouragement, for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Then comes the end, when Christ turns over the Kingdom to the Father, and there is one last final test, known in the book of Revelation as the “little season” when one more time an evil deceptive intelligence (Satan) is allowed to try and organize opposition to God. This will finally settle who really has love in their heart and really wants to live eternally on the earth…(see Matthew 25:31 to 46)

So I think the Isaiah 65:20 text is saying that since every person can expect the better part of a Millennium to be their minimum opportunity,  anyone who dies at, say, 100 years old in that Messianic Age will be like a child in comparison to the 700, 800, 900-year lifespans that the vast majority will experience. And all those who die before the end of the Millennium would do so only as a final judgment… so after a 100 or so years of the most patient and thorough tough love imaginable, those who are executed will be truly sinners, truly deserving of the curse of death. They’ll be the few, the occasional incorrigible folks who simply refuse to buckle down to the righteous authority of the Lamb and his Bride. They will be recognized as accursed sinners by their fellow men.

The Button story isn’t remotely about any of these things. It explores the challenges and unique tragedies that would face a man whose 70 years of experiencing the hereditary fall of man if his growth pattern were reversed. So in the end his life is still a process of dying, not a real life as the Bible envisions it for all people in the future.

It’s tough for us to shake the perception that this life is LIFE. It ain’t folks. It’s death. Cradle to grave, dying we die. That’s why Jesus said weird things like “let the dead bury the dead.” Even the people he resurrected remained firmly dead … that is, dead in trespasses and sins, not released from the condemnation upon all who get their life from Adam.

Those who receive new life from Christ are indeed alive, however. Christians in this age are truly set free from death, and though their outer man appears to die, inwardly they are being renewed with an inner spiritual life that is the spark of an immortal, spiritual existence beyond the grave.

But those who do not receive Christ in this life remain in their sins, and will have to be dealt with in the next age. And of course, that’s where I differ from the main stream of the Christian community… in seeing a second age of grace for all the rest of mankind.

So enjoy a good love story… but also try to put your mind around the incredible love story of a happy God for ALL the human race. Not one that falls flat because most folks don’t respond… [SPOILER ALERT] not one in which the leading lady gets old and dies, and the leading man gets young and dies … but a love story that is reasonable, fair, and yet results in everyone who wants to living happily ever after!

Happy Heretic, meet Happy God

28 Saturday Jun 2008

Posted by in a happy God, barna, George Barna, Hell, love of God, orthodoxy, revolution, Theodicy

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I’m happy to rediscover Judith Hayes, the Happy Heretic. I’m a happy heretic myself, being convinced that most of Christianity is dead wrong about the end game God has planned. 

In her most recent post, Judith points her incisive wit at the 7 visions of Hell described in an article she reviews. All the views, though nominally Christian, are not only illogical and wrongheaded, but unbiblical.

In the Bible view, Hell is always 52 degrees … a little chilly but you won’t care because when you go there, you can’t feel anything anyway. And everyone goes there — including Jesus. And no, it’s not the body that goes there, it’s the soul — the existence or conscious life, which is clearly said to die, not live immortally. (Jesus’ soul went to hell — hades, oblivion — while his body lay in a tomb). 

And in the Bible view, Hell (oblivion — the condition of death inhabited by the children of Adam) is cast into the “Lake of Fire” — eternal oblivion, absolute destruction. How does one absolutely destroy the condition of death for all the souls who have died since Adam? Well, the Bible makes that clear, too: you resurrect them out of death — all of them.

In the Bible view, Death also gets cast into the Lake of Fire. Are we tormenting Death here? No, we’re also obliterating the process of Death, and the sentence of Death that was given to all human beings way back in Genesis. That whole dying process, that whole engine of despair and pain, of what God told Adam would be “dying though shalt die” will go out of existence… along with all the things that were invented to make it either easier (guns, ammo, bombs) or less painful (doctors, hospitals, clergymen). All gone. Foof.

Oh, and Judith, don’t worry.  I’m not saying you have to do anything about meeting God right now. When he’s ready, he promises to introduce himself to everyone, and at that point participating in his pleasant society will be strictly voluntary and with no strings attached (other than the kind of rational interactions and mutuality that I can tell you would find appealing, according to Revelation 22:17.)

Judith is asking the same questions that I think God is asking the Christian church today. He is poking them in the chest, demanding that they answer the questions that Judith so eloquently articulates:

Will we ever stop this nonsense? Will the day come when we stop screaming threats at each other about some outlandish place of torture in some invisible, unknowable afterworld? When will we cease to believe in this maliciously cruel myth called Hell? When are we going to learn to appreciate our wonderful world and our all-too-brief visit here? When will love and tolerance finally dominate hate? When will….oh, the hell with it.

The answer of “will the day come…?” is found in Isaiah 28:15-18

“When…?” is a little bit trickier. I’ll give my 2 cents another day, but Barna clearly documents the fact that Isaiah 25:18 and Revelation 18 (comeuppance for Xtianism) are well under way.

By the way, you might also like to meet Josh Brown, who after his own exodus calls the corruption of Christianity “the religious industrial complex.”

Atrocities from Absurdities

01 Tuesday Nov 2005

Posted by in a happy God, Hell, love of God, salvation, Theodicy, universalism

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“If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.”

“Let us therefore reject all superstition in order to become more human; but in speaking against fanaticism, let us not imitate the fanatics: they are sick men in delirium who want to chastise their doctors. Let us assuage their ills, and never embitter them, and let us pour drop by drop into their souls the divine balm of toleration, which they would reject with horror if it were offered to them all at once.”

Voltaire

It’s almost like a joke, for a Christian like me to use Voltaire to correct other Christians who I consider to be believing absurdities. But this is what I am doing. Bright and godly men are telling the world that eternal hell awaits everyone who does not receive Christ as their savior before “this life” is over. If the only thing in the Bible were messages which seemed to teach this idea, I would leave it alone. But the Bible is equally strong, indeed much stronger, in saying that God is merciful and loving and has planned the redemption of all people. The bright and godly men whose works are listed on the above site are consistently willing to attack and degrade anyone who presumes to draw hope from the loving and optimistic promises of scripture.

At times like this, a Christian needs to learn from a good atheist, like Voltaire. (Or was he a deist? — see Thomas S. Vernon) We need to speak to our Christian brothers who still believe in the notion of eternal hell, with all its absurdities, with the divine balm of toleration.

This is all the more important to me as I discover from Howard Dorgan that often the Calvinists of today turn on a dime and become the Universalists of tomorrow. In his book In the hands of a Happy God: the “No-Hellers” of Central Appalachia, Dorgan points out that the Baptist leaders who adopted a “salvation for all” belief did so by clinging to the concept of predestination, and simply allowing for the idea that God chose to save all rather than some.

Now, I’m not a Universalist. But I think the golden key that unlocks the Bible is this: that Christ died in exchange for Adam. What man lost by Adam’s sin, through heredity, Christ restored. The children of Adam lost a relationship with God, and the opportunity to truly choose for themselves how they would live, before they were born. They were born dead, so to speak, “without God and without hope in the world”, as Paul puts it. What Jesus provided was a voluntary “righteous act” that offset the single act of disobedience of Adam.

This is reciprocity at its simplest. One man sins, and dies. Another man does a noble sacrificial good deed, choosing to pay the penalty of that first man’s sin, thus releasing the first man and making a second chance possible for him.

And this act of free grace also benefits the children of the first man, by giving to them something they never had: a first chance to be sinless, in a garden paradise, where they could decide whether to obey God or not.

That is what Jesus brings by his act of reciprocity.

And it frees Christian believers from the absurdity of administering Eternal Torment for folks who under God’s sovereign arrangement simply do what they are inclined to do by virtue of their heredity and environment.

I’ve been traveling but when I return I hope to write about some of the atrocities that the above absurdities have generated.

The Fairness of a Father

21 Friday Oct 2005

Posted by in a happy God, Calvinism, Hell, John MacArthur, love of God, orthodoxy, Theodicy

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One of the toughest lessons I had to learn as a father was trying to find ways of making consequences “fit”. To feel corrected rather than abused, a child must sense proportionality.

Punishment is a loving thing for a father to concern himself with, because if a father does not correct a child early and often, the child will suffer greatly throughout his life, as his inability to say “no” to himself brings a cascade of disasters from the world around him and the rebel within him. Immediate response by their parents is especially helpful in the early years — children benefit from consistent results, arriving predictably and soon from their experiments with disobedience. Sam Stalos, of Denison University, has lectured effectively on the importance of consistent parental response to their children. Reb Bradley has a slightly too-terse but incisive view of this in “Child Training Tips.”

The trouble is, immediate response for a hothead like me is apt to be angry. It took me a number of years to learn to manage my own emotions to the point where I could teach my children lovingly without over-correcting. Of course, now I’m the master of that… right kids?!

The other potential extreme, lethargy or equanimity, is equally or even more dangerous. Children sometimes act up to get attention, and if a parent disengages out of fear of over-reacting, that hurts the child, too.

I mention these points as a backdrop to the concept of God’s wrath espoused by Calvinist evangelicals such as John Piper or John MacArthur, Jr. I consider these fellows my brothers in Christ, though I presume that attitude would not be reciprocated, in view of my multiple heresies.

I am still working on an answer to the first of 4 thesis statements Piper makes about God’s wrath — that it is eternal — that is, never ending.

Yesterday I argued that the scriptures balance the view by stating that God’s wrath is indeed momentary in the scope of cosmic time, and even in the scope of promised human experience. God stated that he did not create the earth in vain — to be burned up. Rather, he made it “to be inhabited”. As Jesus said, God is not the God of the dead, but the living. He intends to have a living creation, in fellowship with him, a family on earth as well as in heaven.

Today I will simply state that the punishment chosen by God must, by his own definition, fit the crime.

Consider murder. That’s a simple one. Genesis 9 states God’s view, that if a man sheds the blood of another, his own blood is forfeited. Exodus 22 repeats the concept: “An eye for an eye.”

Property crimes are also fairly simple: make restitution, with an added penalty attached. And if you couldn’t pay, you became the indentured servant of the person you stole from for up to 7 years. Here’s an excellent summary of Old Testament and New Testament laws against stealing.

Reciprocity, or tailoring the punishment to the crime, was thus an important part of God’s law.

Augustine said, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”

I agree with that, but the conventional Christian view of redemption doesn’t bring an adequate good out of the permission of evil. It doesn’t bring proportional good to most of the Jews, most of the East, most of the West.

Romans 1 and 2 are pivotal to an understanding of how God views human sin. A careful reading of these passages reveals proportionality, not the mainstream notion of infinite payback for finite sin. The ultimate penalty is cited clearly: death. Nothing about hell, nothing about torment. Just death. Those who commit sin are worthy of death.

And death would be eternal if God were not to interrupt it with a resurrection — so that’s where the “everlasting” or eternal idea comes from, Biblically.

Jesus said the same thing in his clear words about “eternal hell” — Gehenna — in Matthew 10. There he said,

Don’t be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. 

Check out the word for “destroy” and you will find that it does not mean “preserve alive in torment.” It means obliterate, annihilate. Both the soul, the conscious existence, and the body, the form and structure, are terminated in the condition he calls “Gehenna.” It is permanent death, not eternal torment, which the Bible sets out as the consequence of sin.

It’s very important to me to understand why God would be happy. I don’t suppose most readers are all that familiar with the Calvinist teachings on this, but Calvin (and Augustine before him) claimed that God’s people would be sitting on the edge of heaven, looking down at hell where they could hear the cries of pain and agony of sinners for all eternity, and they would praise God for this. Their, and God’s happiness, would be magnified by the realization that bad people were getting what they deserved. But I agree heartily with atheists such as Chad Docterman who say infinite payback for finite sin is unfair.

God says that the death of a sinner doesn’t make him happy. Jesus says that the repentance of a sinner makes him and everybody in heaven happy.

So if God is a happy God, a happy Father, I’m looking for Biblical perspectives that maximize the number of sinners who repent, and minimize the number of sinners who ultimately fail to “get it.”

While death would be a reciprocal penalty for sin, God is not reciprocal with man. Where sin (and therefore death) abound, God’s grace abounds even more. We just haven’t seen it all yet.

I’ll have more on reciprocity tomorrow.

Yet more wrath?

20 Thursday Oct 2005

Posted by in a happy God, Calvinism, eschatology, Hell, John MacArthur, John Piper, love of God, orthodoxy, Theodicy

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I love the premise of “Desiring God” — that our chief end is to delight in God, enjoying Him forever. It can and should be “all joy” to know, and be loved by, the great and good God of the Universe. But when John Piper gets to describing what God is doing, and how the heavenly Father is treating the people he created, I see a disturbing picture that fails to find a balanced vantage point, an internally consistent understanding of God that harmonizes all that the Bible says about His attributes of love and justice. Let’s start with the first of brother Piper’s statements about God’s “final” wrath — that it is “eternal — having no end.” He leads with the following statement in support of his proposition:

In Daniel 12:2 God promises that the day is coming when “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” 

Let’s look at Daniel for a minute to see what he is arguing. In verse 1 he talks about the beginning of Messiah’s rule, when it starts to make an impact on the world scene. And he talks about 2 resurrections: those who awake to olam life, and those who awake to olam contempt.
Now, there is no question that olam, a Hebrew word for indefinite time, can and often does mean “everlasting”. There is also no question that the life of the righteous who are awakened at the beginning of Messiah’s rule do indeed live beyond the age of Messiah, into the unlimited future — everlastingly. I would argue, however, that the contempt referred to here is limited by other scriptures to the age of Messiah — the “judgment day”. As such, this scripture is focusing on the experience of 2 classes of people who are awakened and dealt with by God during the day of the Lord: those who were already proven righteous beforehand, and those who arrive without having done “the good deeds”, as John 5 describes it. For them, the age of Messiah will be an age in which abhorring or contempt will be their experience.

Take a look, for example, at another use of olam with regard to God’s wrath: Isaiah 57:16. There God says that he will not be always angry. How long is he angry? a long and indefinite period of time (olam in the sense it is apparently being used in Daniel 12:2); but not FOREVER (olam in the sense it is apparently being used in Isaiah 57:16). How long will he be angry and exert pressure on the sinners? Apparently, until the heart becomes contrite, and humility appears. Until that time, there will be no rest for the wicked. Or as the Psalm I quoted yesterday puts it, “call his wickedness to account till you find none.” (I think a number of passages make it clear that God has set aside one day of 1000 years to do all this — it won’t go on longer than that.) At the end, there will still be some who are incorrigible in their wickedness, as Revelation 20 makes clear. Their fate? Revelation 20 calls it the “second death”. The next verse here in the Psalms states, “the strangers are perished out of his land.” He will judge the fatherless and the oppressed, so that the man of the earth may no more oppress. (Psalm 10:18) He is trying to teach as many as become willing to learn. Those who refuse after God’s amazing grace has attempted with sweetness and fury to reach them, will perish — vanish, die, be exterminated according to Strong’s.

The problem God has with sinners is their sin. His hand is not shortened, it can save. But God is working with people in a way that is respectful of the condition he created them with — free moral agency. Unlike Satan, who dominates and enslaves, God allows even sinners the individuality of their will, such that they are able to choose not to be contrite, not to submit to God. Granted, as long as they remain in sin, in one sense they are not “children” of God until they come back to him in the only way he has appointed — repentance from sin and faith/obedience in the Son. But all people, including those still rebellious, are God’s creation, and God has promised some things for all of them.

Some nuts are really tough for even God to crack. Human fathers find this, too. Some of my kids were so responsive that I could catch their eye and melt them. Others needed direct, vigorous confrontation and the imposition of consequences to turn their behavior and, more importantly, their attitudes.

This variety of the tools of love needed for different folks is described in Isaiah 59.
Again, it is talking about the same group of people Daniel refers to, those whose sins have kept them from having a familial relationship with God. In 59:18, 19, God spells out the principle he uses in meting out vengeance — according to their deeds, he will repay. There is reciprocity there, and the penalty is appropriate to the sin. More on that tomorrow.

Still, hope is held out because of the power and commitment of God: (Isaiah 59:20)

And come to Zion hath a redeemer, Even to captives of transgression in Jacob, An affirmation of Jehovah. (Young’s Literal translation) 

This is the verse which Paul quotes in Romans 11:26, to support his conclusion that “all Israel shall be saved.” Paul reads it as meaning, not that the Redeemer will only benefit the repentant, but that he will succeed in turning the “captives of transgression” toward righteousness. He will be a victorious Redeemer.

The Redeemer that is referred to, in the context of Isaiah 59, is Christ, of course, but I believe that Christ in the full, composite sense is meant. The entire body of Christ, the church and its Head, is what both Paul and Isaiah have reference to. For example, in Isaiah 59 God muses that there is no man that can accomplish this redemptive work, this intercessory work, on behalf of the rebellious of Israel. So he sends “his right arm” — a reference to Jesus. And this man puts on a helmet of salvation, covers himself with a breastplate of righteousness, and wears the garments of zeal, of vengeance. (See Isaiah 63 for further description of how Jesus is the agent of vengeance, paying for the sins of the world with his own blood).

All studious Christians will recognize these elements of the Redeemer’s clothing, the breastplate etc., as being descriptive of the soldier’s garb that is also given to Christians who follow in Jesus’ steps. (Although in this life Christians are told vengeance is not appropriate to them, it is promised as a reward in Revelation 2:27, and it is spoken of as what we are being prepared for in 2 Corinthians 10:4-6).

No question, the Bible is difficult to understand. And it doesn’t work to try and erect competing lists of “proof texts” to see whose list is longer. Let’s roll up our sleeves and earnestly try to catch the spirit of God, what the attitude of God is toward human beings.
I believe the harmony is found in recognizing that God’s anger is “for a moment“, and his mercy or undeserved kindness will indeed “endure forever.”

(Psalm 30:5, Psalm 136)

Remember. The Daniel text, and other seemingly harsh texts, must be harmonized with the picture of a father that Jesus gave us in the parable of the prodigal son. The father is willing to let the son squander his inheritance until he comes to his senses — and then he is ready to meet him more than halfway, helping restore and welcome him back to the fold.

Tomorrow — more on trying to understand God’s anger, its appropriateness, and its fairness and redemptive impact.

Father Provides

19 Wednesday Oct 2005

Posted by in a happy God, Calvinism, Hell, John Piper, love of God, Theodicy

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My son-in-law passed the first day of his new role in promising fashion. He stayed up with the baby to let Mom sleep. As with the human creation, night came first, and as in one of my favorite texts, there was a lot of weeping.

Like a good father, my son-in-law met the needs of his child, and also the needs of the others who were dependent on him. That’s not always easy, as any father knows. And it always involves a strong emotional investment and sacrificial commitment by the father.

So as I plug those reflections into my quest to understand the heavenly Father, and how he is viewing the human race, I am confident that when the record is complete and everyone can see clearly what He was doing all these thousands of years of the “night of weeping”, we’ll be very amazed at his loving concern and commitment. Though I’m glad for brothers like John Piper to tell me that everything is fine, God is sovereign and can’t make any mistakes, I am not reassured by him — he just seems a bit insensitive to the real situation, the real impact of things on God’s creatures. Here, for example, is what my brother Piper says about the wrath of God toward those humans who do not come into the fold before they die:

If we focus on the wrath of God that falls on human beings at the final judgment, we can say at least these four things about it: 1) It will be eternal—having no end. 2) It will be terrible—indescribable pain. 3) It will be deserved—totally just and right. 4) It will have been escapable—through the curse-bearing death of Christ, if we would have taken refuge in him. (Sermon on God’s Wrath from 2005)

Over the next few days I’ll deconstruct this and, I trust, demonstrate that this sad view is both incorrect Biblically and, from Pastor Piper’s perspective, seriously at odds with his life goal, to praise God and enjoy what God is doing.

This morning, I’m just thinking about what God does to provide for his children. When I read the Bible, there is ample testimony from the scriptures that God had clear goals in mind, and is causing even the bad stuff to work out FOR THE GOOD of everyone.

For example, he wanted to give Jesus some people who could share with him in the governance of the world. (John 17:6-11) So Christians need this “world” of opposition in order to develop the kinds of gracious character, wisdom, trust, patience, and humility that God looks for as good fruitage.

Another example is the desire God has to teach the rebellious. Heaven knows that there are plenty of rebellious folks, going all the way back the beginning of the human race. Well-meaning brothers from Augustine to Luther to Piper have noticed, as I have, the scriptures that explain God’s commitment to the eventual destruction of rebellion. What is less well known is the equally clear message of hope for those who respond to God’s medicines for rebellion. I’ll expand on this in coming days, too, but for now just meditate on this one verse: (Psalm 10:15)

Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer,
Seek out his wickedness until You find none. 

Seek out each person’ wickedness until… until there is no more wickedness there. As a father, I can relate to this. Proverbs tells me that “foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.” But I don’t spend my days beating my kids to get it out of them. I give them experience, put them into situations that will tax their skills, place them under discipline, etc. until their foolishness is gone. Now, my kids feel to me like they’re my friends, my confidantes. I feel like I’m in a family of counselors, because I took the time to work with my children’s needs for correction and encouragement and admonition and love.

This is what I see many, many scriptures describing as the intent of what Pastor Piper calls “the final judgment”. God will have used 6000 years of human history to teach collective lessons about what humans can and cannot do without following his laws. He will also have used each lifetime to teach personal lessons about the pain that comes from disobedience. Then, when the evildoers are resurrected as the Bible plainly says they all will be, they will have some motivation to persevere through the time when God will, through the good offices of Christ and his gentle, loving but righteous Church, “seek out their wickedness” until it there is no more. All the wickedness will be found, exposed, repented of, and healed. As Isaiah 26:9 words it, “when [God’s] judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.”

God has been saving for mankind’s college education. Not that it will be entirely a pleasant experience, any more than the years of self-will and Satanic deception have been fun either. But to prepare for a glorious, unlimited, wonderful future absent ANY pain or suffering, God has been allowing people by their own choices to “build up for themselves a storehouse” in the day of judgment. (Romans 2:5,6) That storehouse of undealt-with, uncorrected sins and character flaws will require some tough medicine. But it will be a benevolent learning experience, not a retributive frenzy the way Piper’s words above describe it. More tomorrow….

I’ll say goodbye with a photo my wife and I took last year of Zion… National Park, that is. But what an inspirational insight into the greatness, and goodness, and beauty, of our Father which is in heaven.

Grand Fatherhood

18 Tuesday Oct 2005

Posted by in eschatology, fatherhood, Hell, John Piper, love of God, salvation, Theodicy, universalism

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First things first. My first daughter had her first baby, my first grandchild, my first male descendant, and his initials are… A.D. It has been a really good year in the Lord, and Adrian is just one of the many reasons. Fatherhood is better than ever, starting with the first day of the year, when my fourth daughter was baptized. Now all of my kids have turned the key to their heart over to the Heavenly Father. They have all received Christ as their Lord and Savior, and all of them are, from my biased perspective, making a positive impact on a lot of people. What I love most about my kids is that they are both humble and independent, both gentle and emphatic, or as Hugh Ross put it in his outstanding book, A Matter of Days, both tolerant and discerning.

Which brings me to the issue of Fatherhood.

As I was waiting for the baby to come last night I was reading Desiring God by John Piper. (he has a nice tribute to his own father at http://www.desiringgod.org/library/sermons/05/061905.html )

As I read John Piper’s words, I can’t help but see a warm and loving man, who delights to do the Heavenly Father’s will, enjoys the manifold grace of God to all believers in this life, and eagerly anticipates the glory and endless joys of an eternity that is promised to all believers. I share those God-directed hopes in my own walk with God, too.

But I think there is an aspect to God’s loving character that is being overlooked by Pastor Piper: he defines the goal of God as being the maximization of his own praise and honor. I don’t think so. I agree that God is honorable, praiseworthy, and deserving of all praise. I agree that he is sovereign and works all things according to his own plans and will, and I agree that what he says, he will do. He will not be disappointed or frustrated.

But God is love, and love means a commitment to give of oneself in every area for the good of another. God saw the world he had created, and whom he had allowed to become enslaved by that sin, and whom he had placed under judicial restraint, a curse of “dying though shalt die.” That is the anger and wrath of God, and it will not last forever.

Piper quotes Ephesians 1:5-6: {God] predestined us in love to be his sons . . . to the praise of the glory of his grace.” And his emphasis is on the fact that God will get praise and glory as a result of his grace toward his sons. I get a different emphasis from this. In Ephesians 1:10 the apostle goes on to say that there will be one family, in heaven and earth, and it will all be in God’s name — that is, God’s character. There are sons now, and I’m happy that this makes me the brother of a John Piper, even if for now we don’t agree on what God’s goals are.

The reason why God is working at this project is so that he will have a family — not a group of people who automatically do what he says, and praise him no matter how many people seem to be going, going, gone, lost forever without hope, without God. Because in John Piper’s, Jonathan Edwards’, John MacArthur’s view of the world, many more people are lost than are saved. That’s OK with them because they trust God knows what he is doing, and they’re convinced that is the way God says it will be. I read the Bible differently, and I see God saying he’s going to save EVERY soul from Adamic condemnation, and bring them to an accurate knowledge of the Truth – Christ.

According to Paul in Ephesians 1, God is the Father, the originator. We are sons, and brothers to each other. And when we see other brothers who are perishing, succumbing to sin, terribly beset by seemingly random acts of violence, what father could fault us for going to him and saying, “Dad, this brother or potential brother of ours just got hurt. This one just died. What can we do about this? What are you going to do about this?”

I could look at the 14-year-old Palestinian who recently told Israeli police that he was told to blow himself up or his fellows would kill him. And I say, “His friend who blew himself up last week — a Palestinian who does not know Jesus, does not know the God of Abraham — where is he now? How has God’s love and plan affected him?” And I turn to God’s word for answers, and I am very happy with the answers I read there. And I can see why God is happy, God is OK with the trouble in the world, because he really does have a plan in place that will deal effectually and wonderfully with that one boy, or the millions that died in the Iran/Iraq war, or the earthquake in Pakistan or Katrina or whatever the disaster-du-jour might be.

So, punch-drunk as all sensitive people are by the trouble and disaster in the world, it’s great to be able to turn to Ephesians 1, 2, and 3 and be told there is indeed a family under development, a very very large family, of both people and spirit beings, in heaven and earth, who will all, from top to bottom, consider God their Father, and actually obey his principles, and actually have his character. (his Name). (Ephesians 3:15). Character is everything. Bad character is why the world is such a mess. To contemplate a world where every single person has learned the hard way, through experience, what is good, and has chosen to, with God’s help, do what is good … well that almost seems to good to be true. If I didn’t read emphatic statements in a trustworthy source that this indeed will happen, I would think it was impossible. As a father who worked hard to develop good character in his children, I’m really happy to believe that God has planned from the beginning how to impart good character to all the people who are willing to learn it — a character of love, unselfishness, willingness to serve others even when it is painful, willingness to delay gratification, and to be merciful — to go as far as is possible, be as gracious as possible, to reclaim, correct, recover an erring soul.

This is what God is doing, setting us all an example of grace, humility, patience, kindness even to the arrogant and unholy.

God is a father, and as I become a grandfather, I see more clearly that the goal of a father is to bless his children, to see them grow and respond and learn what he knows is best. The role of a grandfather is to watch his children provide the discipline and correction, so that he can provide the fun and the candy. That’s how I see God working, through Christ, to bless the world. Praise in the end will not only be spontaneous, it will be universal, because all who are alive will delight to give God all the praise for his great plan of grace and salvation.

Me and Mark Twain

14 Thursday Nov 2002

Posted by in a happy God, Hell

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Last week I had the rare great privilege of attending Hal Holbrook’s performance of Mark Twain Tonight. It had been 19 years since the last time I heard it. I noticed that Hal has become Mark Twain, and his choice of material reflected a man who is mellow and profoundly touched by the fear and hypocrisy of a world gone mad. He was especially poignant in his jokes about religious extremism, and one 10-minute monologue addressed the press, the entertainment industry, the political world, and the religious establishment without any jokes at all. Very powerful… I wish I could reconstruct what he said. One of his memorable humorous lines: “Man is the only animal with the true religion… several of ’em.”

I find myself identifying with Mark Twain in at least 3 ways: we both were blessed with 4 wonderful daughters; we both love to write, though I’m late in getting started on my book-writing; and we both have been iconoclasts who see the humor and the hutzpah in all brands of human belief and unbelief. Religion is dangerous; lack of religion is equally dangerous*. Politics is prone to corruption; cynicism and withdrawal is the ground and fertilizer of demagoguery. And there’s a fourth way I identify with Mark, come to think of it: we both struggled with severe economic hard times in our families. Mark went bankrupt, and I’ve come close. Both of us had to dig ourselves out by reinventing ourselves, and letting go of some of our pet ideas and projects. Now if I can only write something worth reading….

* A wonderful web commentary that articulates an honest view of the pitfalls of skepticism is by Judith Hayes, the “happy heretic”, in her April 2001 post: http://www.thehappyheretic.com/04-01.htm “Humorless Humanists”. She, like Mark Twain, exemplifies the wonderful qualitiies which reveal the shameful poverty of mainstream Christianity’s notion of a hell for unbelievers….

Revised Genesis

14 Thursday Nov 2002

Posted by in a happy God, Calvinism, gnosticism, Hell, love of God, orthodoxy

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I’m glad God didn’t have to revise his first chapter. But not knowing the end from the beginning, I’ve had to evolve in my blog creations. I’m an evolved person since I started blogging 6 years ago, and what I care about has shifted slightly as well.

So here’s what this blog is about. Why is God described by the Apostle Paul with the Greek adjective, makarios — best translated, “happy”?

Well, Paul was countering, and teaching Timothy how to counter, the heavy influence of Gnosticism. The foundational attitude behind Gnosticism is the view that the Creator of Earth is not a happy guy at all, but a sort of male chauvinist who grumbles whenever anyone else is not in pain. Twice in his descriptions of God in the epistles to Timothy, Paul calls him, not “the Blessed” which means we praise him, but “the Happy” which means he’s cool whether we bless him or not.

So this blog explores that view of God and that attitude. How to be happy though not blessed. How to be aware of what makes God happy. How to understand that God is not happy with current events but he’s happy because of where they’re leading… to the place where all people are humble, alive, thankful, and in love with God and each other. Hard to see that just now, but that’s where we’re headed, as I read the Bible.

So I’ll be arguing with the Hell viewpoint among my Christian brothers. I’ll be arguing against Calvinism, and against Arminianism, too. I’ll be having a conversation with anyone who’s willing to question a Christian orthodoxy which views the human race as a failure, a nice creative exercise that got screwed by the Devil and human self-will.

Let me just quote Solomon: “God has made everything beautiful in his time.” Hard to believe but I hope to convince you!