Human beings are supposed to be the highest life form on this planet, right? We are supposed to know all about things like Love. Certainly, more than mere animals, who are said not to have the ability to self-reflect, to make value judgments, etc.
Yes, well, don’t be so sure…
Watch this. And if this doesn’t tear you wide open with joy and smiles from ear to ear, then you are among the Walking Dead.
Believe me….I would not put this before you if I did not think it was worth every second your time. You GOTTA WATCH THIS. You HAVE TO. Period. End of sentence.
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yea, okay. Now.
You understand what love is about? What would it take for us to show that kind of love to every human being on the face of the earth? And what kind of planet do you think we would have if we did?
What IS love, anyway, except remembering who we really are? Isn’t that all that is happening here? Isn’t that what this video is all about?
When I see things like this I wonder again out loud about a violent, angry, and vindictive God — the God that is talked about by so many people in our world who claim to have an Inside Track on who and what God is, and about What God Wants.
This Sunday I am going to run another excerpt here from the book What God Wants. I hope you will take the time to read it. In the meantime, I would like to respond here in dialogue form to the generous contribution made here yesterday at a person posting as Turk182. Here is that post, along with my dialogued comments in bold…
Neale,
You have asked the question: How can a God of love send anybody to Hell? Well, there are several answers to that.
One of course is that God doesn’t send anyone to Hell. You send yourself there.
Turk, nothing happens against God’s Will. That is impossible, even by your understanding of God. Therefore, if God did not want you in hell, you would not go to hell, you could not even ‘send yourself’ there — isn’t that right?
If your own child did something ‘wrong,’ and then stood in the kitchen next to you and began beating himself endlessly and mercilessly with a switch until he was bleeding–and even then continued…you would stop him at once. You would say, “Okay, okay! You did something that you call ‘bad.’ But you don’t have to punish yourself endlessly and eternally and unremittingly forever and ever. STOP IT. I love you! You just made a mistake! STOP IT.”
Would not the God of your understanding do the same thing? Would not “Our Father, which art in heaven” be at least as loving as our father who is on earth?
God has done everything He possibly can to keep you out of Hell and still leave you as a person with free will and not just a robot.
Turk, this feels inaccurate. God does not seem to have done “everything He possibly can.” (By the way, who said God is a “he”?) God could forgive the offender and stop the offender from going to hell, could He not?
That’s the way He made us–after His image, after His likeness, the power to say “yes” or the power to say “no,” the power to reject our own Creator, and of course to take the consequences.
Why do there have to be ‘consequences’, Turk? And why do those ‘consequences’ have to be so dire? That is the question that the world needs to be answered, Turk. Why does God care so much about people coming to him in the ONE AND ONLY RIGHT WAY that He will punish you with everlasting and indescribable torture for the rest of all Eternity if you do not do with your “free will” what God commands you to do?
Oh, and by the way, Kurt….just out of idle curiosity…why kind of will is “free” when to exercise it in one way, as opposed to another, brings on everlasting torture? Gosh, where I come from, Turk, that is not called Free Will. That is called Coercion. Extortion. Intimidation. Terror. But certainly not “free will”. If someone in your life on this planet offered you such a choice, I do not believe tht you would call it “free will.” In fact, I believe you would scoff at such a claim. You would call it hypocrisy.
In one sense you can say He doesn’t send anybody to Hell, because across the road to Hell he has placed the cross of Christ.
How wonderful, but what if you do not know who Christ is? Or what if you were born before Christ lived? Or what if you are a sentient being of “free will” living on another planet?
There are also the prayers of parents, pastors and Sunday school teachers, and all the other things that God brings into our lives to stop us on our selfish way and to bring us to the Savior. We have to go wandering on past it all and put ourselves in Hell.
Why does God not simply say, “There is more than one way to be saved?” Why does God insist on offering us only one path back to Him? Shouldn’t a real and honest desire to get back to Him be enough? Must it be along a certain path? And must others, who do not take that path, actually be condemned to unending, everlasting torture for their “free” choice?
Sometimes you hear people say, “God wouldn’t send His children to Hell.” God certainly doesn’t send His children to Hell because when we’re His children we’re in the family of God. We’re born again and part of our salvation includes deliverance from judgment. We’re not all children of God except through faith in Christ Jesus.
I see. So people who were born before Christ lived, or who were born into cultures which have not even heard of Christ, or people who have heard of Christ but embrace other religions, or people who embrace no religion at all, are all going to hell, is that it? They have all “sent themselves” to hell, do I have this right?
Oh, and Kurt…if God does not “send” people to hell, but, rather, they “send themselves,” then what is Judgment Day all about?
Can a God of love send anyone to Hell? You might as well ask some other question to make just as much sense. Does God allow disease in the world? Does God allow jails and prisons for some people? Does God allow the electric chair sometimes? Does God allow sin to break homes and hearts? Does God allow war?
Yes. God “allows” humanity to create the earthly world that it chooses. This is a process called Evolution. “Allowing” souls to send themselves to everlasting damnation and eternal torture in hell — which must be a place that God created — would not be part of a process called Evolution. It would be part of a process called Extreme Ego Exerting Itself As Power Over Incredibly Interior Creatures That You YOURSELF Created.
Picture this: You give birth to a child. Then you put the child in a playpen and throw in some matches, telling the child not to touch them. The child, infinitely less wise than You, picks up the matches out of curiosity and starts playing with them anyway. The child starts a fire and burns down the house. You torture the child for the rest of eternity for picking up the matches that you placed there.
Hmmm…
This is a wonderful God that we have here…first He creates the conditions that make it possible to tempt us, then He punishes us for giving in to the temptation. Wow.
All of these things are the consequences of sin entering into the world, and in some cases the direct result of man’s rebellion, and the result of greed and pride and egotism and hunger for power that doesn’t have any use for people–only the desire to get ahead.
I agree with you on the causes of disease, jails and prisons, the electric chair, the breaking of homes and hearts, and war. These ARE, just as you say, the result of “greed and pride and egotism and hunger for power that doesn’t have any use for people–only the desire to get ahead.” I could not agree with you more.
This is the incredible fruit of sin. Sin brings suffering into the world. There’s no way of getting around it. And the greatest sin in the world is to reject the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior.
Why? Why is this the “greatest sin in the world?” And who said so? And who SAID it was said? And why does it matter at all? If a person is good and caring, compassionate and generous, understanding and forgiving (which the God of your understanding apparently is not), why would that not be ‘enough’ to ‘get into heaven’? Why, Turk, why? I ask again, why does God insist on One Right Path, One Right Way, and reject all others who do not take that path, no matter how wonderful they are as people? Why,Turk?
We have our catalog of sins. We have rape and incest and murder ; and we have them all cataloged and classified–but there isn’t one of them (or even put them all together in one big hunk) that comes close to the sin of keeping Jesus Christ out of your life. Did Jesus say, “I’m going to send the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin because they rob banks”– or, “because they believe not on me”?
Whoa. WAIT a minute! I thought you just said that it it NOT God who sends us to hell, but we who send ourselves. Now you are asking if it was not God’s Son who sent the Holy Spirit “to convict the world of sin” because they did not believe in him…Whoa….you can’t have it both ways, Turk. Either it is Jesus (and thus, God) who is ‘convicting’ us, or it is not. Which way do you want it?
It is folly to expect that you or I can trifle with the Lord Jesus and not have a penalty attached to it. What ridiculous thinking people have in this area! We expect penalties for doing much less. Life is just built that way.
By whom, Turk? By whom? Who “built life that way?” If your idea of God is accurate, it is GOD who made life to be “just built that way.” Hmmm….
You jump off a high building, the law of gravity will take care of you. You might say, “God is love,” all the way down, but you’re still going to get splattered when you hit the bottom! You break the law of gravity, and it breaks you! You may love your little child, but if he puts his finger up on that hot burner on the gas stove or the electric stove, he’s going to get burned!
Fire burns. Gravity kills. Water drowns. And you can say, “God is love, God is love, God is love,” until you’re blue in the face. But water will still drown you, fire will burn you, and gravity will kill you, and sin will damn you no matter how much you say about a loving God.
Turk, you are right about fire, gravity, and water. But “sin” feels like something that we made up, something that we conjured. The proof of this is that we have changed our minds about what “sin” is from time to time and from place to place and from religion to religion, across the span of human history. When I was a child, Turk, I was told that it was a sin — albeit a minor one — to eat meat on Fridays. Then the Pope changed his mind and announced that meat could be eaten on Fridays. When I was a child, Turk, I was told that if a baby died before being baptized, it would have to spend eternity in Limbo. Then, a year and a half ago, the Pope changed his mind and announced that the 700-year-old teaching about Limbo was a mistake, and that no such place existed. A few years ago, Turk, the man who was then Pope announced that there was no such place as “hell.” He said the idea of “hell” as a physical location, with fire and brimstone and torture, was a myth. When that Pope died, the new Pope declared that the old Pope had been wrong, and that there was such a location as “hell.”
You see, Turk? We are making it all up. We’re making it up as we go along…
God just set up life that way. He set up the rules. He set up the laws by which we are to live. And if we break those laws, they break us, and we pay the consequences.
God does not set up the rules, Turk, as I have just demonstrated. We do. We set up the rules. We imagine that we know the Mind of God, and we then tell other people What God Wants. But what if we are mistaken about all that? What if God’s message to the world is, “You’ve got me all wrong…” ?
Here are some quotes from Christian leaders past and present that may help you understand more fully:
I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
Wow, now you are talking my language, Turk. Now this makes sense. Yes, there can be a “hell like” experience after death…Home with God says exactly that. But it is an experience of our own creation. Home with God says that, too! And, startlingly, Turk, Home with God also says — almost in these exact same words — that “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” So, you and the writing in my book resoundingly agree. Yikes!
And yourself, in a dark hour, may will [a grumbling] mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood…
–excerpted from The Problem of Pain and The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), included in The Quotable Lewis, 1989 Tyndale
The only thing I disagree with here is the notion that there will come a day when you can no longer do it; no longer “repent.” Why would God do that, Turk? Tell me why God would put a time limit on being good, and doing what’s right? Why, Turk?
In a sense, the concept of hell gives meaning to our lives. It tells us that the moral choices we make day by day have eternal significance, that our behavior has consequences lasting to eternity, that God Himself takes our choices seriously.
The meaning in life comes not from threats of everlasting damnation, Turk, but from the deep sense of well being, inner peace, and true joy that comes from expressing our Selves while on earth in ways that reflect and demonstrate Who We Really Are — and in ways that allow that demonstration to continually grow, thus serving the real agenda of God and Life: to evolve, and to become greater in the next moment than we were in the last. The purpose and the process of life is called Growth, Turk, not Run Scared.
The doctrine of hell is not just some dusty theological holdover from the Middle Ages. It has significant social consequences. Without a conviction of ultimate justice, people’s sense of moral obligation dissolves, and social bonds are broke.
I disagree emphatically. Human beings do not need the overlay of regulations and the threat of punishment in order to act in their own best interests, or in order to be “good.” People are inherently good.
Around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris there are no traffic signals, no traffic cops, no lane markings, and no traffic control signs of any kind. In other words, drive around that circle — or try to enter it from any one of several streets, and you enter what I laughingly call Suicide Circle. Yet, in fact, there are fewer traffic accidents and far few traffic deaths at that location than nearly anywhere else in Paris. Why? Because human beings are self-regulating, Turk. They know what is best for themselves, and they have an innate sense, as well, of the fact that what is best for others is also best for themselves. This reveals itself in how they drive around that crazy circle!
Wherever there are “rules,” there is someone who will break them. Where there are no rules, people work cooperatively just as well as they do when there are rules. They act no worse, in the main — and often, in fact, act better. Isn’t that interesting…?
Our “sense of moral obligation” comes from our basic sense of ourselves, Kurt, not from threats from God.
Of course, these considerations are not the most important reason to believe in hell. Jesus repeatedly issued warnings that if we turn away from God in this life, we will be alienated from God eternally.
Nobody said anything about turning away from God, Turk. But what about those who actually SEEK God…though not through one particular pathway? What about them, Turk?
And yet, although “the wages of sin is death,” Paul also says that “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). While breath remains, it is never too late to turn to God in repentance, and when we ask for forgiveness, God eagerly grants it. –excerpted from Answers to Your Kids’ Questions, by Chuck Colson, 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries.
We may rest assured that no one will suffer in hell who could by any means have been won to Christ in this life. God leaves no stone unturned to rescue all who would respond to the convicting and wooing of the Holy Spirit.
As for the fate of [the damned] being eternal, it could not be otherwise. Death is not the cessation of existence but the continuation of the eternal being with which God lovingly endowed man–but now in painful separation from God and all else in utter darkness and loneliness.
–excerpted from In Defense of the Faith, by Dave Hunt, 1996 Harvest House Publishers
The Bible says that God prepared hell for the devil and his demonic cohorts (Matthew 25:41), that He is “…not wishing for any [person] to perish but for all to come to repentance.” (II Peter 3:9), and that He has done everything possible to save us from that terrible, terrible place. Yet in the end God will not violate or overrule the deliberate choice of those who consciously and willfully turn away from Him.
–Daryl E. Witmer of AIIA Institute
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil.”
–Jesus Christ, John 3:16-19, NASV Bible
Neale, you say what about the devout Buddhist, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Taoist, or whatever? Would God send them to hell just for believing in the “wrong” religion? There is no right and wrong religion, simply truth and falsehood. God put the truth out there for us in three ways: Through his sovereign creation, through the testimony of the Bible, and through the life, death, and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ. He has also sent us prophets, apostles, ministers, missionaries, sunday school teachers, youth counselors, camp counselors, and a host of other faithful witnesses to tell us what we need to know.
The reason your views are not trustworthy, Neale, is the lack of empirical evidence. To believe what you believe, we have to take your word for it. There is no revelation from past believers, no eyewitnesses here to corraborate your testimony, no outside sources that affirm that what you say is true.
Gosh, Turk, is it obvious only to me that the same is true of those who wrote the Bible? What makes their writing somehow more sacred and more valid than the writing in the Koran? Or the Upanishads? Or the Book of Mormon? Or the Talmud? Or the sacred texts of any other religion or sacred wisdom tradition? Or, for that matter, of Conversations with God?
The same can be said for a number of religious texts. However, the Bible has been proven trustworthy time and again. The New Testament has over 8,500 manuscripts still in existence, the most for any ancient book (by comparison, Homer’s Ilyiad has 160, Alexander the Great’s autobiography just 1). The people, places, and events described in the Bible have been verified through archaelogical and extrabiblical findings and writings – the people, including Jesus of Nazareth, are real people; the places described actually exist and are real places, and the historical events pictured in the Bible really happened. It is not just a bunch of myths or made-up stories, it is living history. And there were hundreds of eyewitnesses to both the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ himself.
Oh, my. Surely you are not saying that everything is the Bible is therefore without error, are you? Do I have to go over, once again, what I wrote here just a few days ago about the Book of Deuteronomy? Is that Book of the Bible verified and without error, Kurt? Just wondering here, because it says to kill your children if they are rebellious and disobey…it says to stone and kill women who marry when they are not virgins…
As to your philosophies, the apostle Paul spoke of such things to his friend Timothy in 1 Timothy 4: 1-4, which reads,
[In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: 2Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage–with great patience and careful instruction. 3For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.]
People don’t want to hear about punishment and hell because it makes them accountable to a higher power for their deeds here on earth. Therefore, when someone like you comes along with a system that conveniently skirts around the sin issue, some people can’t fall over themselves fast enough to grab hold of it. You are saying exactly what their itching ears want to hear – NO JUDGMENT, ONLY LOVE! Only that is a lie, and by teaching it you are leading others away from the true path of righteousness which is found only in the person of Jesus. I will pray for your repentance, Neale, because if you continue down the way you are going, may God have mercy on your soul.
James 3:1 [Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.]
Turk182
Okay, Turk, more on all this on Monday. I want to give my blog readers here a chance to use the weekend to read all this and offer their own replies. Thanks, Turk, for sharing your point of view!
Love and hugs….Neale.
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