On the Gun Control Discourse

            Hi Everyone! I hope your Christmas was joyful and peaceful. Here it is, New Year’s Eve, eve, so to speak. The week since Christmas was quiet and mostly uneventful. There were a couple of exceptions. Aren’t there usually? One of our packages, sent by Nicole’s family, won’t be delivered until January thanks to UPS’s high degree of logistical competence. It contains a lot of homemade Christmas candy and what not, so we hope it’s still good by the time it arrives. Meanwhile, I came down with a minor something or other a few days ago after eating a philli-cheesesteak sandwich, which I’ll never be having again. That’s alright. A sleeve of saltine crackers and a two liter of ginger ale saw me through. I’ve never appreciated how good the real Canada Dry actually is until now. It’s now the Sunday before the conference, and while I do have a special post planned for New Year’s Eve, I wanted to take a few minutes and weigh in, finally, on one of the issues facing us today.

 

            In light of the recent massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, we’ve embarked on a nationwide discussion about guns in America, who should have them, who should not have them, and so on and so forth. In the main, this discourse is a good thing. I see nothing wrong with a healthy airing of divergent views that might lead to positive legislative changes. To that end I commend the NRA for at least taking part in the national conversation. What interests me is that a lot of folks who are in my age bracket and who are university-related are advocating a total ban on the ownership of handguns or, at least, bans so restrictive as to amount to the same such as the existing bans in the United Kingdom and Japan, or the controls found in countries like Germany. Such ban advocates argue, reasonably enough, that the number of handgun incidents per capita is much lower in those countries than here. In fact, in Britain it’s 40 times lower. Japanese firearm possession is extremely heavily regulated and has been since the seventeenth-century, and without a license, a Japanese citizen may not even hold a firearm in his or her hands. In Germany, gun ownership is restricted to those who can prove a valid reason for ownership, not including self-defense, and licenses are forbidden to those who don’t meet the eligibility criteria including mental competency. In addition, the ‘Waffengesetz’ or Weapons Act, bans automatic weapons in German civilians’ hands altogether. So that being said, why not ban them here, some ask? Why indeed.

 

            I learned to target shoot on a farm outside Clarksville, Tennessee. The man who taught me, who I call my godfather, had a hard time figuring out a teaching method as you can imagine. A friend of his suggested he stand next to the target and strike it with a wrench. Somehow, my godfather just didn’t think that one was a good idea. Ultimately, we developed a method whereby he would peg a stone at the upright metal target and I would aim and shoot. We eventually developed such a streamlined technique that I was ultimately able to go off the sound of the stone striking the first target and to hit all five in the line of standup targets from my knowledge of their positions alone. It was neat to watch it happen from what I’m told. As a totally blind guy, I’m here to tell you it was even neater to pull it off.

            I have no problem with responsible folks owning firearms. America is, and has always been, a gun culture. The first colonists bore muskets for hunting and self-defense. That they also sometimes used them to perpetrate slaughters of their own against the various Native American tribes they encountered is a fact I won’t ignore, so I mention it lest I be accused of lacking a balanced view of our history. Every period of our history has been replete with the image of the gun. Like it or not, Americans are people of the firearm. Unlike countries like Great Britain, the firearm wasn’t something we developed here and then regulated. We brought it here and then developed it further. It has always been with us. Some guns, such as the Colt pistols of the late nineteenth-century, are historical symbols of our past. The settling of the West comes to mind.

            While I don’t own firearms myself and likely never will, I recognize the role they have played in our cultural history. Then there’s the perennial question of Second Amendment rights. Regardless of the volumes of case law surrounding it, the best place to look for an interpretation of the thing is the text itself. The amendment, as it was ratified by the states and approved by Jefferson, reads, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

            A militia unit was made of civilians who bore arms on occasion for local defense. They were by no means a standing army, and militia units were essential in the days before standing armies were both large enough and logistically worthwhile enough to have in the U.S. The rough equivalent today would be our various states’ national guard units, which can be called up by the governor. So, I have to remind two groups of people of something here. To the gun nuts, the Second Amendment was never intended to be a license for rampant gun hoarding. To the “Ban Most or All Guns” crowd, you will find that the Second Amendment will prevent this from happening unless we amend the Constitution yet again. While the drafters of the Constitution didn’t see any reason people should own forty or fifty guns at a time for giggles, they certainly didn’t intend to have a disarmed populace.

 

            The biggest problem I have with these proposals of total bans or near-total bans is this:  they won’t work. This isn’t Britain or Japan. If we swept in and tried to relieve most folks of their guns, we’d have a second revolution on our hands. More practically, however, is the fact of the black market. Remember prohibition? Ok, so maybe you weren’t as geeky as me and you didn’t pay attention in high school or college history classes. That’s alright. The bottom-line is prohibition failed. It failed utterly, and part of its results were rings of gangsters and profiteering bootleggers smuggling booze across the borders into the United States. Ultimately, the prohibition amendment was overturned. The same and worse would happen with guns. Do you think most of the street gangs and organized crime syndicates are walking around carrying legally registered handguns? If you think they are, stop a member and ask for his permit to carry or PC. Let me know how that goes. So to conclude, I’m all for responsible ownership and responsible oversight of purchase. I could even understand banning certain types of military-grade hardware. I see no reason for Joe Smith to own an AK47 or an H and K submachine gun. In fact, for quite a while, those items were illegal. They may still be in some areas. But I am very cautious about this enthusiasm I’m seeing for banning all or most guns or trying to turn America into a gun-free society. Guns are part of the American identity much like the dollar or the flag or, though I’m only somewhat certain about this anymore, the bible. So I think that whatever we do, we should take our cultural heritage into account and act sensibly with respect towards the future.

My Christmas Day Contemplations

            Good Morning Everybody, and Merry Christmas to all. Just as I posted a short blog entry back on Thanksgiving, I want to put up a short one today. Today of all days. First a bit of catch-up. Since I last posted anything, three of the places I applied to have contacted me for initial job interviews, the University of Georgia, Kansas State, and Grinnell College, a small, highly selective liberal arts college in eastern Iowa. That last isn’t a professor position. It’s a two-year postdoc for teaching and research. All of these interviews happen next week starting on Thursday in Boston. I have one final week to prepare, and I like to think I will use the time wisely. However, yesterday and today, I’ve resolutely stayed away from university-related things, because it is Christmas! It’s also my guide dog’s birthday today, and that’s just convenient. She’s a Christmas puppy, and this guarantees I can’t ever forget her birthday.

 

            Today what’s on my mind are the Christmas haters. I’m talking about the relatively small and very vocal minority of folks who think that Christmas should be done away with or at least that all public displays of Christmas that have any religious overtones whatever should be banned in case anyone, like themselves, gets offended. This would be laughable if it weren’t for the fact that many places across the country have banned everything from the singing of Christmas carols to displays of Christmas colors or nativity scenes, and the usual rout to use when taking away such things is the civil court. Here’s one example,  http://www.wnd.com/2004/12/28047/. That’s an old case, but things like it still go on. Just read that article and see what you think.

            Now, before I go on, let me pause to acknowledge one fact. I know that there are groups of people who, either collectively or individually, don’t celebrate Christmas in America. That’s fine. There have always been groups of people in this country who don’t celebrate it, and I don’t think they should have to if they don’t want to. I’m not going to go into their houses and make them exchange gifts or sing “O Come All Ye Faithful.” What I object to, vehemently and passionately, is this:  I can’t stand it when I see people trying to use the First Amendment as a weapon to take away my own First Amendment liberties.

            The First Amendment, in so far as it concerns freedom of religion, only guarantees two things. First, it guarantees that the government won’t impose a church on you. There will never be a First American Church with the president as its religious leader in the same way that the British monarch has headed the head of the Anglican church since Henry VIII. That won’t happen. It also guarantees that you can celebrate your religion in your own way as long as your religion doesn’t involve human sacrifice or other generally disruptive practices. I’m happy to say most don’t. So, you’ll never see the government banning the practice of Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy or Wicca. Leastways if a government makes that attempt, and there have been times when I wonder about Obama, anyone challenging the law based on the First Amendment would have an irrefutable case. That’s it! That’s all the First Amendment guarantees as far as religion is concerned. I’ve read it.

            So having said that, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, that’s fine. I celebrate it. My family celebrates it. Everyone I know personally celebrates it, and most of the people I’m only nodding acquaintances with (including quite a number of visitors from other countries) celebrate it. In fact, over 70% of people in this country celebrate it in some way, and I’m not even talking about the religious observances. My point is this:  we have that right. If I choose to wish someone a Merry Christmas, so be it. It’s on them to tell me they don’t celebrate it. My experience with this has been, however, that most ordinary folks who don’t observe Christmas, that is, most people not inclined to rush to court because you have a nativity painting on your door, will either return your ‘Merry Christmas’ in the spirit it was offered or they’ll tell you very nicely that they don’t celebrate Christmas, but they wish you a great holiday anyway. Either approach is just fine. As I said, I’m not trying to make anyone celebrate Christmas who doesn’t want to.

            Having said that, my patience with political correctness is limited in the extreme. The fact of the matter is that most folks in America celebrate Christmas in one way or another. That’s our right and we’ll continue to insist on it, but my question to Christmas haters is this:  what are you really objecting to? What exactly is wrong with a holiday that commemorates peace and good will towards one’s fellow human beings? The answer, of course, is nothing. So if I choose, as some professors of mine in the past have done, to have pictures of Christmas scenes on my desk or my office door, what of it? If my Jewish colleague across the way has a small menorah in their desk, is that supposed to offend me? Should I insist that that person not celebrate Chanukah because it imposes their morality on me? Should we German teachers, for example, not teach our students about German Christmas celebrations because someone in the classroom may not celebrate it? Of course not! This feels like common sense to me. But if there is one thing I have learned, it’s that common sense isn’t common at all.

            My one piece of advice to the Christmas haters in America is this. To quote Ebenezer Scrooge, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.” The difference here is that unlike the Christmas haters, I’ll actually leave you alone if you don’t celebrate it. God forbid that my home or neighborhood or town should celebrate it though. Then all hell breaks loose. I’m put in mind of the last line of James Finn Garner’s satirical poem “’Twas the Night Before Solstice.” Santa’s amused and exasperated parting words sum up my feelings about these people quite nicely, “Happy Christmas to all, but get over yourselves.”

A Short Thanksgiving Day Post

            Happy Thanksgiving Day! I’m sitting here on a leather (or maybe it’s a pleather) sofa in the Donnellson part of Nashville Tennessee. The cooking will start in a while. Thankfully, it’s not one of those Thanksgivings where you have to get up at 4:00 in the morning to start the turkey, dressing and crescent rolls. Actually, we’re doing up a 9.5 lb. boneless smoked ham. I have high expectations for it. This year is a team effort. Nick’s doing the ham, I’m doing the mashed potatoes, Nick’s doing the green bean casserole and Ashley’s doing squash casserole. Dessert was supplied by our friend Jen who won’t be here for most of today. So between the four of us, it’s set.

 

I decided, this being the 22^nd day of the gratitude tradition that’s been taking place on Facebook, to make this Thanksgiving Day posting a bit more substantial even if no one reads it. It’s interesting to me that Thanksgiving falls on November 22 this year. In fact, this is the earliest possible date it could fall on, because Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November, and November began on a Thursday this year. Today I’ll start by looking back to 1963. Most people know 11/22/63 as the day Kennedy was assassinated. Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 has definitely brought that back to public awareness. What fewer people know is that on that same day, 11/22/63, the authors C. S. Lewis, known for his Narnia Chronicles among other things, and Aldous Huxley, known for Brave New World among other things, also died, three very influential men. Peter Kreeft, a Catholic theologian and author wrote the novel Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, where the three men gather and chat in purgatory. I mean to read that book at some point.

            Today is a day to count your blessings. We should do this every day, but if we never do it any other day of the year, Thanksgiving Day seems to be the right one to do it on. I am grateful for so many things: for a great fiancé who will soon be a great wife, for friends who really are quality friends e.g. the people I’m here with today, for family that is supportive (not something many people have), for job opportunities whose applications are in hand, for an advisor that continues to coach me towards the end of that dissertation and the start of that first job, for access to books, something that used to be exceptionally limited for the blind and something many blind now seem to take for granted, and, lastly, for my own health which is a lot better than it otherwise might be. Today, my friend Ashley’s father is spending his Thanksgiving in the hospital with a tracheotomy tube in his throat. So if anyone out there is complaining about their lower back pain or their diabetes or what have you, I can personally attest that it can always be worse.

            This is going to be a short blog post, and it’s time to wrap it up. I thank God for all of the blessings listed above, and I hope you take a moment to thank him as well. I’ll leave you with this blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26). Be good to each other.

 

 

God, Humanity, and Hell, Part 3: A Blind Believer Concludes His Discussion About Hell

Introduction:

            What a week! It’s been busy, stressful, and at times scary. Still I wouldn’t trade it in. My dissertation is humming along, and I’m leaving for Tennessee in just a few hours. First though, I have to finish this. This week was so hectic that I wasn’t sure I would meet my self-imposed deadline. You see, I wanted to post each essay in this cycle on Fridays starting with the first Friday in November. It looks like I made it, if only just.

 

            As I wrap up this series of essays on hell, I am reminded not only of what the bible says about it but what people say about it. Mark Twain once wrote, “it’s heaven for atmosphere and hell for company.” A popular rock song from the 1980’s refers to hell as “the promised land.” There’s a pervasive image out there in popular culture that us “narrow-minded Christians” will go to heaven, but they, seemingly all the really likable and interesting people, will be off in hell recounting their exploits and sipping cocktails. This imagery of hell, in one form or another, is everywhere, and it is in need of the same corrective discussion as the thinking that would dismiss hell altogether. It’s also a shame that we Christians have somehow developed this reputation as unloving and unlikable in many circles, but that is a whole other discussion. Imagining hell as a pleasant place and imagining it as a non-existent place are both so beyond the realm of truth that I for my part see little to distinguish between them from the perspective of truth. So as I write, I will be refuting both hell’s non-existence in terms of God’s attributes which I covered in post 1 [http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/11/god-humanity-and-hell-part-1-blind.html] and our sinful nature in post 2 [http://brad-lifesnippets.blogspot.com/2012/11/god-humanity-and-hell-part-2-blind.html], but I will also attempt to correct, however insignificant my contribution may be, misconceptions about the actual nature and purpose of the place in hope that we may stop being so cavalier about it. As always, my scriptural quotations will be from the NIV and will be as thorough as I have tried to make them all along.

 

All Roads Lead to Heaven?

In his massive book Heaven, Randy Alcorn writes of a certain Indiana tombstone with this inscription:

Pause, stranger, when you pass me by:

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so you will be.

So prepare for death and follow me.

It seems that someone else came along and added this:

To follow you I'm not content,

Until I know which way you went.

            I would love to be able to say, “all will be saved.” The truth is that I can’t say that. I can’t say it because the Lord himself does not say that. I have met many folks who think that hell is just something the Christians invented, maybe something those medieval churchmen came out with to scare supposedly ignorant and illiterate peasants into giving them money. I’ve met folks who dismiss hell as something Paul invented, because Paul is the favored whipping boy for many. Such thinkers will charge Paul and people after him with hell’s invention, while in the next breath they go on to depict Jesus as the great sage, the wise and gentle teacher, the one whose example we should follow instead of those “greedy churchmen.” Lastly, I’ve met Christian universalists who simply do not believe that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross will fail to reconcile anyone’s sin. So, they argue, you will go to heaven in the end one way or the other because with what Jesus did on the cross, you can’t help but end up there. Yes, I have met all of these and more.

            The problem is that Jesus, gentle Jesus, says more about hell than anyone else in the bible. The Jesus Seminar would no doubt step in at this point and try to tell me that all of Jesus’s utterances about hell are inauthentic, thereby taking those words out of his mouth. I don’t buy it. If we take the biblical record as being accurate, and I do, then he talked about hell, and he had a great deal to say. Jesus tells us in very plain language that not only are some people not going to make it into heaven, most won’t get there: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13-14). Later in that same chapter Jesus goes on to say this: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you” (Matthew 7:21-23). So not only will most people not make it to heaven, some folks who think they are headed there because of all the great works they have done will be terribly surprised on that final day. There are other passages like these, but the important point is this: heaven is not a one-size fits all place. Not everyone is going there. In fact, most people won’t be going there, and that is one of the hardest truths. “Why wouldn’t he just let me in,” you might be asking? The answer is this: it’s not that Jesus doesn’t let people go through the doorway to heaven. The truth is simply that many won’t let him open the door for them.

If you are imprisoned for a crime, it may be that the governor or the president will pardon you. A pardon wipes away any and all punishment. There is just one catch. You have to accept a pardon for it to be valid. You can legally refuse to be pardoned, though why anyone would refuse a pardon is a whole other question. Jesus is not out to make things hard. But he does make it clear that many will not accept his pardon. The terms of that pardon are that we seek reconciliation and salvation through Christ alone. The pardon is indiscriminately available to you no matter your list of offenses. You need only accept it. How to do that is its own discussion, and I recommend seeking out local Christians or even me if you want to know more. The point I’m driving home right here is this: Jesus’s own words make it crystal clear that, whatever means of making it to heaven he sets up, many will choose to go their own way. That way lies hell. It is very tempting to get sidetracked into such questions as, “what about other religions,” or, “what about children who die,” but that way lies a whole set of other discussions, and I am only presenting the Christian arguments for hell with responsible readers in mind, that is, readers old enough to know right from wrong and to make principled choices. Jesus also said of himself: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6). If he really did say those words i.e. if the bible is an accurate account of what he said, then they either are or they are not true. That’s the funny thing about truth. So-called fuzzy logic systems aside,  it admits exactly two possibilities, true and not true. Since we Christians hold the bible to be an accurate record of Jesus’s words, it follows for us that those words are true. And being true, he excludes all other “ways” as leading to heaven. So if any method of getting to heaven fails to recognize Jesus as the doorway into heaven, it is false, a one-way street, a dead end. Not all roads lead to the same place. Even when it’s said that all roads used to lead to Rome, it must be added that while that was true, you still had to travel in the proper direction to get there. All roads do not lead to heaven.

 

The Ultimate Sentence:

            When not making fun of hell or disavowing its existence altogether, most people who take issue with God and Christianity on the basis of hell have in their minds a picture of some poor trembling soul, begging and pleading, who is cast shrieking into hell by an unforgiving deity. This is an understandable picture of judgment even if it, thankfully, isn’t quite accurate. I used to imagine that going to hell happened in just that way myself. Such a picture of hell overlooks God’s mercy, however, and the price he paid to be able to extend that mercy. By ‘price’ I mean His death once for all on the cross. In any case, that conception of judgment as a sentence handed down from on high may embody holiness or righteousness, but it is hard to find God’s mercy in such a picture.

            So let us consider what the son of God says about those who go to hell. In the twelfth chapter of John, Jesus says this: “If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day” (John 12:47-48). This passage takes some careful teasing to pick it apart accurately. Jesus almost sounds as though he says he doesn’t judge anyone, and yet he says that he does? It can be confusing. The key to understanding this passage lies in the second half of verse 48: “the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day.” When Jesus speaks of ‘my word’ or my words,’ we understand him to mean his teachings. When he speaks of ‘accepting’ those words, He doesn’t just mean that there is an expectation that someone believes them, but that they uphold and practice those teachings as well. So then, our eternal reward or punishment, he says here, isn’t based on how he personally feels towards us. That is already certain. He loves us with an everlasting love. The measuring stick that will be used is the extent to which we accepted, i.e. upheld, his teachings, or else the extent to which we did not do so. Now then, I realize, and Jesus certainly realizes too, that we are imperfect and will, even on our best days, be but imperfect followers of Him who are in need of his grace and mercy. Let us assume that Omniscience knows this and has taken it into account. If you know an examination is coming and you do not prepare for it by study and careful application of the principles and concepts involved, you will not pass, and it doesn’t matter how much the teacher likes you. You would still fail. So, we know that those who fail to gain heaven have failed, not because God is arbitrary and whimsical, but because they failed to accept and follow the teachings of Christ, the standard of measure by which we will all be judged. He says in verse 47 above that his purpose is to save. Not all will be saved. That is abundantly clear. He claims he is the only way to heaven, and if so, it follows that many will not believe him and will elect to find their own ways. Nevertheless, His purpose is to save, and he will discern among us based on who accepted His words and who rejected them. In the end, those who go to hell choose it, because they choose their own paths. They choose paths apart from Christ. Hell is heaven refused, not damnation imposed.

 

Hell as Mere Nothingness:

Why is it that many people I have met believe that hell means an end to all existence? I don’t mean folks who believe there’s nothing at all after death. I have met people who talk about heaven in vague and nebulous ways, but in ways that tell the listener they believe they’ll be conscious and have some sort of existence in heaven. Yet when they speak of hell, they have this notion that hell simply means a cessation of everything. No consciousness, no experience, no nothing. Annihilation. In one way this is a comforting notion. If we think of death as a never-ending sleep, it sounds rather restful. More to the point, if we think of hell as obliteration, a reduction to nothingness, this may comfort some people. You can’t object to being nothing, because you will feel no pain and non-existence won’t bother you once you achieve it. The terrible truth is that the biblical picture of hell is a bit different.

Jesus describes hell in graphic terms. Was he trying to be frightening? I find hell frightening. It’s heartbreaking. As Randy Alcorn once wrote in Heaven, “The reality of Hell should break our hearts and take us to our knees and to the doors of those without Christ.” The story of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31) is most revealing. It is not a parable, and Jesus doesn’t start the story with “Hell is like,” or, “Hell is like unto.” He narrates the story in a straightforward, “this is how it really is,” fashion. Let me quote the story here and note a few things about it:

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire. But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.“ He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’’

 

            Keep in mind that Jesus was telling this story before his own death and resurrection, before there was Christianity. So he very obviously believed in a hell and that people went there. In this story, “Moses and the Prophets” is understood by Jesus’s hearers to refer to the scriptures. At that time the bible would have been the Torah or what Christians call the Old Testament. So what the figure of Abraham is saying is that if Lazarus’s brothers won’t heed the words of the bible, sending Lazarus back from the dead won’t do any good either.

            There are several things to note about hell and about the rich man. First, he is conscious and in possession of his powers of reason. He is not a mindless zombie. He is a reasoning being with a will and desires that he wants fulfilled. He is going to keep on wanting, I’m afraid, for the hell of hell, so to speak, is desire that can never be fulfilled. Miserable as that picture is, it remains a far cry from nothingness. Secondly, hell is a physical place. The rich man speaks of Abraham’s sending Lazarus across the chasm between heaven and hell to comfort him. Abraham also mentions the chasm, telling the rich man  that it cannot be crossed in either direction. So then, however other worldly hell is, it is depicted as having a physical dimension.

            To take it a step further, perhaps you also noticed that Lazarus is still called Lazarus, but the rich man isn’t given a name. This suggests to me that whatever we retain of self-awareness and of mind in hell, we lose our essential identities. Jesus didn’t forget the rich man’s name; he left it out to make a point. The significance of that soul had dwindled to such a vanishingly small proportion that even his name was no longer relevant. In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis envisioned it this way, “To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity.” Finally, a point so obvious it hardly needs to be stated, the rich man is suffering. Hell is not a party, not a place where people will go and knock back drinks and reminisce about life on earth. Jesus talks about hell being a place of endless torment (Matthew 25:46). Finally, the rich man in our story is alone. This lonely rich man is juxtaposed with Lazarus who is shown as being with Abraham. What do we make of this? In heaven there is company, the best company and forever more. Hell is solitary confinement. Some will say, “at least we’ll be together there.” Maybe so, but the man in hell is forever alone, isolated in suffering. There is no upside to hell. There is no hope and no reprieve. There is no good in hell, no nobility in suffering. Sometimes people express the wish that God would just leave them alone. Hell is, alas, the place where he does that. But there is no good there without the creator of good. As a character in Randy Alcorn’s novel Deadline once understood it, “No God. No good. Forever.”

 

Sentenced to Eternity:

            The final objection to hell that I am choosing to confront is the notion of an eternal punishment. How, the objection runs, can we posit a deity who would leave you to suffer in hell forever and ever, no matter what sins you may have committed in your brief lifetime? From a human standpoint, it is a good question. The underlying accusation against God seems to be that if we wouldn’t countenance such a thing, surely God, if he has any morals at all, wouldn’t do such a thing either and if he would, well, he must not be God.

            This is perhaps the hardest question about hell I have confronted. The first thing to remember is that we cannot stack our sense of morality and justice up against God’s and expect ours to look better. It just doesn’t work that way. If he indeed is absolutely holy and absolutely just, and we are not, presumably he has some inside information about morality and justice that we don’t happen to have. Yet, we reason because God reasons, and we have a rudimentary notion of justice because God is just. So I think we may come a bit nearer to the answer than to stop at, “God knows best. Leave it alone.” Though often times that is the answer we’re stuck with.

            If we think of hell as the continuation of the human story, as heaven continues our story in God’s presence, then the injustice of hell becomes an unsolvable problem. I don’t think that it is any sort of continuation, however. Hell is spoken of as a place of finality. We often speak of heaven and hell as though we might one day sit in heaven and say, “people are suffering in hell right now.” But I am not convinced that the sufferings of hell run in parallel to the joys of heaven. Hell is the final and tragic end of a story, not a bad sequel to that story. Finally, hell endures forever because in it, our sin endures forever. If you never cure the cancer, the cancer never goes away. If our sin is never forgiven, because we don’t accept the forgiveness i.e. the pardon I mentioned earlier, than our sin continues to separate us from God in hell. The difference is that in hell there is no more opportunity to receive the pardon. This life is the life of second chances, the era of choice. Heaven and hell represent the era of consequence that stems from the choices we made here. I’ll close this discussion with a final question that stems from this notion of an unjust eternal punishment. Why are there no second chances? The truth is that there are. Every day you live on earth is yet another day filled with endless opportunity to seek the truth, to knock on the door as it were. Death stops the game clock. There are no more shots allowed after the final buzzer. Lastly, to take a metaphor from C. S. Lewis, often times a teacher knows it is no good letting someone retake an exam for the third or fourth or fifth time even if the student or their parents think otherwise. If second chances after death would do us good, I believe they would be given. But finality has to come sometime, and it is not too great a stretch to suppose that the omniscient God knows when that should be. We must all face death and receive our reward, good or bad, for what we have done and how we have lived in life, “for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2). A related passage is found in Hebrews 9:27 which tells us that people are destined to die once (no second chances) and to face their judgment. Be ready for that day, because its coming is inevitable.

 

Conclusion:

            I have not been trying to prove the doctrine of hell as tolerable or enjoyable. It is neither. It is terrible, and if I myself could remove it from Christian doctrine, I would probably do so. Then again, I am not holy and not just in the ways that God is holy and just. So, it’s probably a good thing I don’t make cosmic decisions. To those who would disavow hell because it seems unpleasant, I would remind them that truth, contrary to what relativists like to believe, is as it is, and was always as it was, regardless of how we feel about it. You can argue with it, reject it, put your own spin on it, or you can accept it, but you cannot change it. It is what it is and will be what it will be long after you and I are gone.

            While hell remains a terrible and frightening consequence, I think I have demonstrated that on the Christian view it is moral and has the support of reason. When we properly understand God’s holiness and his justice in combination with his love and mercy, what is startling is not that some go to hell. Where else would sinners go? Rather, it becomes amazing that anyone gets to heaven. So I would encourage you to seek out a bible and read what it says about how to take care of your sin problem. That book contains the cure, and seek out a local church that teaches the bible as truth. I was originally going to close this post with the plan of salvation as it is presented in the bible, but that discussion deserves its own separate forum. I don’t expect to tackle it any time soon. My blog is not a religious blog, and I have come to the end of what I set out to do, explain why Christians believe in hell. That much, at least, I have done. Strictly speaking, I haven’t been attempting to persuade anyone of anything. You are as free to argue with what I have said as with any other information presented to you, but my job here has been to answer, as completely as I was able, the question of why there has to be a hell in a universe created and sustained by a loving and merciful God. For further discussion on the issue of hell, I recommend the eighth chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain. In addition, I recommend chapter 3 of Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven as well as chapter 29 of his book If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil, which discusses the subject as well. Those references should get you started, and from there I hope you go on to try and understand heaven, the home of humanity. Next time I will return to much lighter fare.

 

 

God, Humanity, and Hell, Part 2: A Blind Believer answers Objections to Christianity's Doctrine About Hell

Introduction:

I have to be honest. This essay was the hardest to write. It took me all of the week between the last post and this one to get this at all right. So let me be clear when I say I didn’t find it easy by any means. The first essay is far less controversial, because in it I say things that most people who believe in at least some version of God, however inaccurate or one-dimensional that perception of God really is, will usually agree with. We want to believe that God, assuming we believe there is one, is a God of love because as I said last time. Everyone loves love. We want to believe in a merciful God because we like to think that, whatever our foibles, such a god will let us off, that being mercy’s function in our thinking. Lastly, no one likes to disagree with the idea of God as a just God. We like to think of people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin getting “what’s coming to them” or “getting their just desserts.”

The third essay, the one that covers Hell itself, is more controversial than the first because it states some are actually going there. This makes people uneasy. Here again though, many would sit still for that essay because however much we think we’re not going there, we’re perfectly ready to consign child molesters and ax murderers and the aforementioned world leaders to hell. So we often times agree to some vague idea that there is a hell for those sorts of people who justly deserve it.

What makes this essay so hard is my knowing how many will react to it. It is my job, before I can give anyone any good news, to first convince you that all the bad news is actually true. I have to convince you that no one on earth is actually good or actually deserves mercy. That includes you. It also very much includes me. So know this: I am not excluding myself from anything I say here. Just as in the last essay, I would remind the reader that I am only talking about hell as being an objection to Christianity in today’s America. I am not dealing with any other objections here. Lastly, for everything I say, I will quote plenty of scripture (again from the New International Version or NIV) so as to put everything into one place for the Christian and the non-Christian alike.

Natural Kindness:

For about two hundred years now, we’ve valued kindness above all other virtues. This is at least partly understandable. Kindness is magnificent. It has no perceptible downside. Over seventy years ago, C. S. Lewis also noticed this preferential treatment of kindness, and in The Problem of Pain he suggests that we actually mix up the ideas of love and kindness. We think that love and kindness are the same thing, so as long as a person can say that “his heart’s in the right place,” it is well enough and we should leave the situation alone.

There are two problems with our notion of love equaling kindness as this idea relates to God. The first is that when it comes to God, we drop the aspect of love that involves discipline or correction. If you are a parent, do you discipline your child or do you allow them to do as they like. If you’re a parent who loves your child and wants them to get as far in life as they can, you discipline. You teach them right from wrong, you praise them for doing what is good and honorable and you punish them for doing what is wrong and hateful. In saying this, I don’t even mean particularly Christian parents. I think it likely that most parents everywhere at most times throughout history would agree readily enough that letting children do whatever they please just so long as the children are happy and the parents are thought of as loving and kind makes for a terrible outcome. In today’s America we would call such parents enablers, and we would say that in displaying such kindness, they are neglecting their parental duties. So my question becomes this: if we have this more complex view of parental love, one involving discipline and correction, why then do we have such a simplistic view of God’s love, such that we think—when we give it any thought at all—that God’s love should (or at least that it ought to) boil down essentially to kindness? Indeed, the more we actually care about our children, the more unwilling we are to let discipline go for the sake of just being agreeable or nice or kind. I don’t mean to imply that all loving parents are harsh disciplinarians. Indeed, that would be the other extreme. Discipline without love and grace is cruel, but to say that love consists only of kindness is simply untrue. If it is true of human parental love that it requires discipline and correction to enforce right behavior, why wouldn’t it be equally true of God’s love and for much the same reasons?

The second major problem with our view of kindness involves something we forget about its nature. Namely, kindness is learned. Again using children as an example, what happens if a parent never steps in to correct a child’s behavior? We have to teach children to share or not to hit, and we have to make them understand that not everything around them is “mine” all the time. If you think I’m being overly harsh, think about what happened the last time you saw a toddler who was never taught these limits on behavior, the kind that screams and throws stuff around the isles at Wallmart because mommy and daddy won’t get that toy or trinket. Pretty bad, isn’t it? This isn’t to say that children are at fault when they don’t learn these things; the parents are the ones we single out and rightly so. But the fact remains: children have to be taught civilized behavior. Otherwise, their normal unchecked impulses, which are the same natural inclinations all of us have in full measure, would tend towards selfishness and savage behavior. Ours would too, the only difference being a greater cognitive capacity. My question is, if all of that is true, and if it is as true of adults as it is of children, what does that say about our true natures versus the behaviors that we learn? Are we inherently good? Is goodness inborn? If it is true that good behavior and kindness are learned skills, then the evidence suggests that we are not inherently good and that goodness is not just naturally found within us.

Sin:

‘Sin’ is another of those church words like ‘holy’ or ‘righteous.’ Its meaning is one that people usually misunderstand. When I talk to people about sin, they usually like to list actions.

“Well,” people tell me all the time, “I know I’m no sinner. I don’t steal or cheat on my wife or refuse to pay my taxes, and I’ve never killed anybody. So where do you get off calling me a sinner?”

This perception of sin is right up to a certain point. The person is right when they associate all those actions with sin or as being sinful. Having said that, if you are doing those things and you feel you shouldn’t, by all means stop doing them. Still, just as the note on a sheet of music is not, in and of itself, that music, neither too are all those things the whole of what we mean when we say sin. TO be sure, they are sins in every way, but if sin was limited to just a list of things I should and shouldn’t do, imagine the consequences. We would be perfectly free to compare ourselves to each other and to say things like, “Well I’m certainly no better or worse than A, and I’m a whole lot better than B over there.” As things stand, I say don’t be so sure. Why did you choose to compare yourself to A, and are you so sure you’re so much better than B?

This act of comparison is, in fact, often what we slip into when we talk about sin, because it is the definition of sin that has come down to us in our culture. To the average person in America today, sin equals bad things, and if my list is shorter than most people’s lists of bad things, I must be doing alright and who is Brad Blair to say different? The trouble is, Brad Blair didn’t invent it.

On one level, part of me wouldn’t mind if the universe was run along those lines and if sin could be defined like that. However, it is clear to me that I don’t live in such a universe and that the bible has something very different to say about sin, what it is and who does it. And if I at all want to find my way to God, I had better wrestle with what He Himself says about sin. So let’s examine what the bible says, shall we?

Let’s start with something easy. We can agree with Isaiah when he says of some people: “Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands. Their feet rush into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood. They pursue evil schemes; acts of violence mark their ways. The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths” (Isaiah 59:6-8). There are many passages like these describing evildoers throughout the old and new testaments, so let’s take that one as representative. There are people out there who are reprehensible by almost any definition. No question that such people are sinners. Are they the only ones that the bible talks about when it speaks of sins and sinners?

If those people in Isaiah are the only ones the bible means, and if our definitions of ‘sin’ and ‘sinner’ today are correspondingly true, then what should we make of Paul’s comments in his letter to the church in Rome: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)? Earlier in that same chapter of Romans, Paul quotes the writer of Ecclesiastes. Solomon writes: “Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). The prophet Isaiah adds this in a later century: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isaiah 64:6).

There are many more passages like these as well. What are we to make of them? The bible makes it abundantly clear that on our own, every one of us is trapped in sin. We will inevitably do what is wrong, because sin is not just what we do, it’s natural. It’s who we are. Sin is both our immoral actions and the environment into which we were born. That’s what Christians mean when they talk about children being born into sin. They don’t mean that babies are evil and sinning. What they do mean is that the world into which we are born is itself twisted out of shape by sin. That is not to say that God made us to be sinners or that he made the world to be an environment of sin. Not by any means. But that raises a whole other discussion that we haven’t got time for in this more focused post. We don’t have time, for example, to go into the fall of Man and the entrée of sin into the world. Though I must add that the bible is quite clear on these points too. The key thing to remember right now is this: the Christian world view sees the world as one in which sin separates us from God, not only because of things we do once we’re able to choose right from wrong, but also because of our innate natures and the world into which we are born and in which we live.

To take it a step further, our economy of sin is also wholly different from God’s economy of sin. Our laws classify transgression. We have misdemeanors, felonies and first, second and third degrees of this and that. We have to, because as humans, we must differentiate between degrees of guilt. None of us is holy and pure in deed and truth, so we distinguish and we assign relative degrees of guilt. Now then, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that God, being completely holy and just as we said in the last post, might see things differently? Isn’t it even likely that to a God who is utterly without sin, all sin is equally bad? And if he is the ultimate dispenser of both mercy and justice, wouldn’t it be wise to conform to his standards? Once we have even started trying to conform to those standards (and we will never come even close to true conformity here on Earth), we have to acknowledge that however good and upright and moral we think we are, we don’t even come close to being as upright and moral as God.

Consider a limited analogy. If I’m taking a German class and writing an essay for it, I can compare my essay with all the others in the class. Maybe mine has plenty of mistakes, but surely not as many as John’s or Jill’s, right? I could end up feeling pretty good about it on these terms. So maybe the teacher should give me an A+ on it and have done with it, given all my hard work. Then supposing the teacher gives me a B, what do I do now? I have a couple of options. I can curse the teacher for being such a hard taskmaster and being so unfair, for failing to take my frailties into account. And who is he to give me a B? German is easy for him! He needs to cut me some slack! This is the option many of us take with God. The other option, the harder one by far, is to admit that our essay wasn’t as good as we had supposed and to take the teacher’s corrective measures into account. In the case of a German teacher, that means improving the writing. In God’s case, it means acknowledging who and what we really are and going on from there. Only when we have acknowledged this fact, that we are bad, that we will always be bad if left to ourselves, and that there’s nothing we can do to remake ourselves as good, can the cure be introduced. More on the cure in the final post.

What he Deserves:

Just after midnight at the Washington State Penitentiary, a man approaches the gallows. He has confessed to multiple child molestations and murders. He is, so far as the viewer can tell, a perfect example of Isaiah 59 above. He is a violent killer, a defiler of children who would do it again if let go as he admits. His hanging will be the first in U.S. history since 1965, and if anyone deserves death, we naturally think, it is this man. We hope and pray there won’t be any last minute stays of execution, no phone call from the governor, no clemency. When he drops through the trap, we feel that justice has been served and that the man has gotten “what he deserves.” And if there is a hell, we’re quite sure that he’s there enduring every possible torment, and glad we are of it.

The man I’m talking about is Westley Allan Dodd, executed on January 5, 1993. If I said no more on the subject, we could sit back and nod, and even those of us least willing to admit to a hell’s existence might allow that if there was one, he’s surely in it. The trouble with that picture is this: it seems that at some point during his final imprisonment, Westley Allan Dodd became a Christian. I know there are many who would say at this point that he naturally claimed to have become a Christian in hopes of having his sentence commuted or something to that effect. I will only say that I am in no position to say anything about the authenticity of his (or anyone else’s) conversion with any degree of certainty. That is between him and God. If he became a Christian and no one on Earth had believed it, he would still be in heaven. If everyone believed him a Christian and he actually was not, then he is not in heaven. So for our purposes, let’s take him at face value. His final words from the gallows were: “I was once asked by somebody, I don’t remember who, if there was any way sex offenders could be stopped. I said ‘no.’ I was wrong. I was wrong when I said there was no hope, no peace. There is hope. There is peace. I found both in the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to the Lord, and you will find peace.”

Our contradictory attitude about hell lies in the fact that we want to both deny its existence at some times and to hope it’s there for certain especially bad people at other times. If we allow for a God, we think he certainly ought not to send us there, but that he ought to send Westley Dodd there. Lastly, again if we allow the possibility of a God, we can’t possibly understand a God who allows us to wind up in Hell, but who, most incomprehensibly of all, allows Westley Allan Dodd into heaven. The problem with the attitude (and hence with us) rests on our failure to understand sin. In human terms, none of us is as guilty as Dodd and none of us deserves what we do. We see the distance between ourselves and Dodd as being a distance of miles, of light years even. God, who sees things as they are, sees us as much in our own sin as Dodd was in his, and he reckons the real distance as being measured in millimeters. One of my favorite authors once wrote of this case and said that we ought to be careful when wishing upon someone exactly what they deserve, because we should then be ready, in our turn, to accept just what we deserve. There’s a word for that. Hell.

Conclusion: “So Negative!”

It isn’t just because of hell that Christianity is accused of being so negative. It’s because of the outlook on the world that it espouses. It’s popular these days to think of people as being mainly good. That people can do right and behave admirably, Christianity would not deny. Where Christianity is attacked is this idea of the basic goodness of all people. Again, we are not talking about politeness or good cheer or even kindly dispositions here. We mean the human being in his entirety, as he is or as he would be if only he could get away with it. If we were half so good as we like to think ourselves to be, we would have far fewer laws. Of that I’m quite sure. As things stand, we are desperately ill, and we either do not know it, or we are in the deepest denial about it. In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis, a man trained in the classic writings of antiquity, described the problem like this. He said the men and women of old new themselves to be worthy of the divine punishment. They knew themselves to be bad, and the good news of the gospel came and was often received as though it were a cure for a desperate illness, and that, of course, was just what it was. Today, Christianity must first convince people that they are ill with sin, itself very bad news, before it can win a hearing for the cure.

            There is a cure though, and that cure is God’s plan of salvation. I’m not going to lay it out step by step in this or the last post, because it deserves its own separate discussion. But if you are curious, seek out a bible study or a local church. My very specific focus has been to discuss hell as an objection to the Christian faith and that alone. Heaven warrants its own separate discourse.

 

God, Humanity, and Hell, Part 1: A Blind Believer Answers Objections to Christianity's Doctrine About Hell

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”

C.S. Lewis

 

Introduction:

            I was going to wait until after the elections to post this, but I just don’t see a good reason to. Happily, this post is totally apolitical. So, whoever you voted for or will vote for, in this blog, on we go! I said recently that it seems to me that Hell has to be the most popular objection to Christianity. I hear it over and over again. On many occasions I’ve found myself talking to someone about Christianity and someone says something like this, “I just can’t believe God (if there is such a being) would send anyone to never ending torment, no matter what they did in their lifetimes,” or, “I believe in a God of love. So Hell can’t possibly be real,” or, “If I wouldn’t send anyone to Hell, well, God surely wouldn’t.” There are countless ways of saying this, and what all these people mean is that Hell seems terrible, unfair, unjust, barbaric and quite irrational if God is supposedly this wise and loving God.

            Yet, I am a Christian who believes what the bible says about Heaven and Hell. So how can I believe in Hell or that anyone goes there and still claim that I’m a civilized, decent human being and so on and so forth? The reasoning seems to be that no civilized person would really believe in Hell. As a result, I decided to take on the subject of Hell here in this blog. This is going to be a three-part series on the topic. Our modern beliefs about Hell are based on three misconceptions or if you like, three sets of misconceptions. These misunderstandings combine together to raise these questions again and again. They are:  first, a false understanding of who God is, second, a false understanding of who we are, and third, a misunderstanding of what Hell is. So, each of these three blog posts will take on one of those misunderstandings. So if I don’t answer your questions in this essay, give me the benefit of waiting out the next two. Better yet, post your questions and I’ll make sure to address them! This first essay is about God and who he is. It discusses some of his attributes and tries to paint a more detailed picture of him, laying the groundwork so to speak before going on to the other pressing issues about humans and Hell. I don’t mean to imply that anyone will be overjoyed at the notion of Hell by the time I’m done. People are right to think that it is absolutely terrible. But I think, in the end, it can be shown to be both moral and rational. That is, we can understand Hell much better if we try to understand who God is, who we are and what Hell really is and what it is not.

            It might be reasonable to ask why I have any right to say anything about Hell or anything else. I’m not a bible scholar or a pastor. I am, however, a Christian who is asked these questions over and over again. This set of postings is my attempt, however inadequate, to answer those questions. I know that venerable writers have already spilled a good bit of ink about the subject of Hell, and I don’t want to take away from what people like C.S. Lewis, Randy Alcorn and John Piper have written. The questions are still being asked, though, and they still need to be answered.

            One last thing, keep in mind that this set of blog posts is meant to answer only one objection to Christianity. I’m not dealing with other objections:  Christian claims of exclusivity, the historical basis of the bible, the bible and science, none of those. It’s not that I can’t deal with them, but for now Hell is what I am discussing. It may be that I’ll deal with those questions later on, but my focus is narrower at the moment. Finally, these posts are meant for two groups of people. The first are my non-Christian friends out there. I love each and every one of you. It’s not because I don’t love you that I’m going to say all this, but because  I do. So I ask only that you give me the benefit of the doubt when reading what is to come. The second group is that of my Christian friends. Many churches are silent about Hell or teach things about it that simply aren’t true, and I’d ask you to grant me the same benefit of the doubt as you read and your thinking is perhaps corrected in the light of scripture throughout the coming pages. I mention a lot of bible verses, and when I do, I’ll actually quote them in full. This is more for the benefit of those who don’t have a bible. I want, so far as possible, to put everything right here in one place. So, let’s begin.

 

A God of Love:

            I chose to tackle the complex discussion of God’s nature by looking at a few of his attributes. Love comes first because everybody loves love, and love is the quality we like most to ascribe to God. The oft-quoted phrase, “God is love,” is found in 1 John 4:8:  “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” In one important way, those who take away the first part of the verse and just say that, “God is love,” are still absolutely right. God loves us beyond words. The word ‘love’ in its various forms and contexts shows up 442 times in the King James Bible and 686 times in the New International Version that I’ll be quoting from. It’s obviously important, and to be fair, I know many professing Christians who forget from time to time how much God loves and how strong and powerful that love truly is.

            Here are some examples. In Jeremiah 31:2, God is speaking and he says in part:  “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” The Psalms contain some of the deepest and most poetic expressions of God’s love. Consider these words of God:  “I will maintain my love to him forever, and my covenant with him will never fail” (Psalm 89:28). Or consider this, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good and his love endures forever” (Psalm 118:29(. The phrase, “his love endures forever,” appears in each of the 26 verses of the 136^th Psalm. Obviously, the writer of that psalm was making a powerful point.

            The New Testament overflows with references (like the one above from the letter of 1 John) to God as a loving God and to love as something we are to do. The most famous verse that comes to mind is this one: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). I could go on and quote those verses that tell us to love God and how great a virtue love is, but that would miss the point. The point right now is God’s love, not our love. John is telling us, in essence, that we have no idea how truly loved we are.

Imagine being in a courtroom when someone you loved who has been convicted for a terrible crime is standing before the bench and about to hear his sentence. It is a death sentence. He has no appeals to make, but you do. Supposing, in this legal system we’re talking about, that you yourself had a means to take away your friend’s or loved one’s sentence. If you would sacrifice your child to the court and let your child die in your friend’s place, your friend would be let go. Honestly, how many of us would do that? The answer? No one would. After all, we might be willing to stand up and give our lives for a friend, but sacrifice our child’s life? No way. John is telling us that, in effect, that is just the court system we live under, that was the sentence handed down, and that was exactly what God had to do to lift our sentence. If you can at all imagine this kind of trial and that kind of court, you might just begin to get a glimmering, the faintest glimpse, of how much God really does love you. A God of love? If only you knew how much love.

 

A Holy God:

The word ‘holy’ is one of those church words. A church is about the only place you’ll hear it. People spout phrases like, ‘God is holy,’ as though it’s obvious what that word means. It’s not obvious, though. People overlook this most important aspect of God because they don’t understand this word. We just hear it on Sunday mornings or we use it in profanity. So what does it mean to say that someone or something is holy?

Our English  word ‘holy’ comes down to us from the Germanic languages including Old English ‘halig’. It’s one of the oldest words in the English language, and it’s meaning has stayed the same over the centuries. The problem with trying to define it is that most dictionaries like to use other religious words to describe it. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example,  is most unhelpful because it uses ‘sacred’ or ‘consecrated,’ and those two words don’t get us much further, themselves being religious terms that have little meaning in common speech. The problem is that ‘holy’ cannot be separated from its religious meaning. After staring at the Oxford English Dictionary for a long time, I settled on the Free Online Dictionary [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/holy], which gives seven definitions. Among them are:

(1). Belonging to, derived from, or associated with a divine power;

(2). Regarded with or worthy of worship or veneration;

(6). Regarded as deserving special respect or reverence.

Alright. So we know that for something or someone to be holy, it or he has to be quite different from everyone or everything else. If God is holy, he must be very different from us at many points. He is so different and so much better than we (because goodness is also strongly implied in the word) that he deserves our worship. If we think of the purest good, we may come close to grasping what it means to say that something or someone is holy. Something very apart i.e. different, and most purely good. The best of the best. Let’s proceed with that explanation in mind to answer a question. Given these definitions and how we’ve explained them, are you holy? If not, why not? Is God holy? To answer the question, let us now look at how this word is used about things, about people and about God in the bible.

The first time the word ‘holy’ is used in the bible is found in Genesis 2:4: “Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” It was a day set apart, a different and exceptionally good and blessed day, a holy day. In Exodus 3:5, we find this: “’’’ Take off your sandals for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Different ground, not common ground, completely unlike any other plot of ground, and why? Because God was inhabiting it.

Where the bible speaks of holy people, we find verses like this one: “You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Similarly we find this: “I am the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45). What did it mean, “Be holy?” What do you think of when you think of a priest. Someone who lives differently, acts differently, talks differently and thinks differently. Someone focused on God. We might say that he lives a godly life or at the very least, that he ought to. So then, God was telling the Israelites that they were not to live like those around them. They were to eat, drink, talk, think, behave and live in ways that were completely different from the cultures that surrounded them. Here again we have this notion of holy as being something very different.

One point before I go on to talk about God’s holiness. Don’t confuse this holiness of the people with God’s holiness. This command to the people to be holy didn’t mean that God expected them to be sinless and perfect or that others should bow down and worship them. Rather, he expected them to be different, as different as they could be, and the laws he gave them were the standards they were to use when figuring out how to be that different, that holy, people.

So then, what does God mean right there in that same verse when he says, “I am holy?” He says, “I am holy,” five times by the way. The difference, I think, between God and the people was that they needed guideposts to show them how to be holy, and they weren’t very good at being so. God needs no guidepost. He is one. He doesn’t fail at it. He is absolutely holy all of the time, because he cannot be anything else. If he tried to be less than perfectly holy, he’d no longer be who and what he is, God. Put another way, holiness is something we try for. It is something that God simply is. A basic analogy would be something like this: think of taking music lessons from one of those people gifted with naturally perfect pitch. If you’re anything like me, you don’t have this. You’re lucky if you stay in the right key, and if you sing a whole song without missing a note, you’ve accomplished something great! A person with natural perfect pitch, by contrast, doesn’t have to learn where the notes are. They naturally produce them completely accurately every time. They don’t have to try. Their ability to do this is unfailing an innate, whereas in people like me it has to be trained and we’ll fail all the time. God is holy. We can never be that sort of holy, but we can try.

 

A Just God:

When I took my first college linguistics course, we were assigned a project, writing up a history of a single word. I, poor unknowing soul that I was, chose to write up the history of the word ‘just.’ I still regret it. It has so many meanings and its origins are murky at best. So I’ll just stick to defining it in terms of this discussion, shall I? My trusty free online dictionary yields a myriad number of definitions including ones like these:

(1). Honorable and fair in one’s dealings;

(3). Properly due or merited;

(4). Valid within the law;

(6). Based on fact or sound reason.

So then, if being just means being all of these adjectives in the four definitions above, then failing to be just or being unjust must mean that there are people who are unfair or dishonorable. There must be acts that are invalid, unmerited, and undue. Finally, where there is fact and reason, there exists the possibility of lies and unreason. This isn’t something on which you have to work very hard to convince most people. We readily admit there is injustice in the world. The mistake, and it is one I will address at length in the next post, comes when we start thinking of ourselves as really just. Let’s say for now that if God is perfectly just, and we’re not God, we can at least admit to being imperfect in our justice. Looking at our legal system this admission becomes much easier to make, doesn’t it?

Yet, there’s something deep within us that loves and longs for justice. Why do we love Westerns? Is it because the bad guys win and John Wane gets killed all the time? Of course not. Haven’t you ever noticed that Captain Picard always outthinks the Romulans? We star trek fans loved the Dominion War because in the end, after many setbacks and not a few heartbreaking losses, what happened? The evil, unjust Dominion was crushed. We love seeing good triumph in the end. We’re not the only ones, because God loves it when good wins too. And since he is God, holy and loving, he always wins in the end.

The bible verses in both testaments that expound on  God’s being a just and righteous God are too many for me to number. Entire books of the bible, Job and Habakkuk, deal with the subject of God’s justice. The Book of Revelation tells the story of the final victory of justice and good over injustice and evil. The whole bible is the story of good versus evil from the beginning until the end of time, and evil will finally lose.

Consider a few verses like these: “They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them of their inheritance. Therefore, the Lord says: “I am planning disaster against this people, from which you cannot save yourselves. You will no longer walk proudly, for it will be a time of calamity” (Micah 2:2-3). In that passage we see both that there are unjust and evil people around, and that God will bring justice. God himself is just, the source of all justice: “My righteousness draws near speedily, my salvation is on the way, and my arm will bring justice to the nations. The islands will look to me and wait in hope for my arm” (Isaiah 51:5). God also commands us to do what is just and right in his sight: “’’’’ Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place” (Jeremiah 22:3).

The New Testament continues the theme of God as a lover of what is just and a hater of what is unjust: ““Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Think about this picture of the triumph of justice: “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The last mention of the word ‘justice’ in the bible is found here: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war” (Revelation 19:11).

So, God is just and the source of pure justice. We know that whatever wrongs or injuries we have endured, he will settle the accounts in the end. We can count on it. Good and justice will win, because God is holy and the source of goodness and justice both. A comfort, isn’t it? We’ll be coming back to this theme soon.

 

A Merciful God:

This is the last of God’s attributes I will consider, his mercy. Mercy makes for a good endpoint for this post as well as a Segway into the start of the next post. The Free Online Dictionary defines ‘mercy’ as being: “compassionate treatment, especially of those under one’s power;” and also as, “a disposition to be kind and forgiving.” Mercy is one of those things we love to ask for and to receive. It’s a bit harder for us to be merciful, though. There always seems to be some extenuating circumstance that lets us off being nice to the guy who wronged us, but if someone whose toes we stepped on lets us off, then we think him quite a splendid fellow. That’s both an honest assessment and hard to own up to.

Where God is involved, mercy is the other major basis apart from love by which people today deny the possibility of Hell. “If God is so merciful,” the argument runs, “then surely he will realize that I could never have measured up to him and he’ll let me off any punishment.” The conclusion seems to follow that either God is not merciful or that because he is merciful, Hell cannot reasonably be said to exist.

So then, is God truly merciful? This is the question we must try and answer. Evidently, King David believed he is: “David said to Gad, “I am in deep distress. Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into human hands” (2 Samuel 24:14). It seems David didn’t think much of the mercy of human beings. Consider this picture of mercy: “Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon” (Isaiah 55:7). Mercy is a virtue God cherishes in his people: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6).

In the New Testament, Jesus quotes this last passage from Hosea, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” in Matthew 9:13 and again in Matthew 12:7. He also says: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown  mercy” (Matthew 5:7). Finally, the apostle James writes this in his letter: “because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13).

Evidently, God is not only capable of mercy, he requires that we extend it too. So now we run into what seems to be a paradox. As C.S. Lewis once put it: “So much mercy, yet still there is Hell.” How can that possibly be?

 

Conclusion:

I have not yet painted the full picture, so you may not be any closer to understanding the reasons why there is a Hell. All I have done is to flesh out our portrait of God if only by a little. He is love and mercy. He is more loving and more merciful than we could ever be even in our noblest moments. Yet he is also holy and just, and hopefully now you have some idea of what those words mean in relation to God. Who can be completely just, yet completely merciful? Completely loving, yet completely holy? No human being, to be sure. Often times we are merciful, and we let some just penalty go, or we come down hard and emphasize justice, and mercy and love seem to be lacking in our judgment. God doesn’t have this problem, this moral balancing act to contend with as it were. Only God can ever be all of these things in equal and full measure. So then if that is how God is, perfect and holy, unmatched in justice and mercy, what does that make us? To carry our discussion forward, my next essay will attempt to grapple with human nature, a sticky subject if there ever was one.