This blog in ninth in a series entitled "The Top Ten Questions People Ask Pastors." Over the last year or two, these are the queries which have most frequently reached my desk in one form or another.
The 3rd most frequent question is this: "How can a loving God justify sending people he created to a place like Hell?" This hot topic has become particulary searing over the last two decades as Americans have become so averse to discomfort that even animals like pigeons and mice are commonly granted civil rights status. In his recent book Love Wins, emergent author Rob Bell acknowledges the tension and, tragically, manages to abandon biblical truth and completely surrender to 21st Century emotionalism and prejudice.
Nevertheless, even serious Christians who affirm everything in the Bible will admit this is a prickly subject. At first blush, sending men and women to a place of eternal suffering doesn't sound very loving by our standards, does it? And therein lies the rub: by our standards.
Although Christians have understood the doctrine of eternal judgment for 2,000 years, it has only been in recent memory that the notion has become so abhorrent. In fact, judgment does not seem to mesh with the idea of "love" for us because we have oversimplified the ideal of love to something Scripture does not recognize. According to the standards of 21st Century love, loving parents cannot discipline their children. Love can coddle boys and girls, indulge them, spoil them, leave them unattended, or entrust their care and upbringing to strangers, but love cannot cause a child to suffer discomfort, experience frustration, or eat spinach! Modern day love cannot compel a child to do his homework, but it can call his teacher irresponsible and lazy.
Likewise, this generation has a different notion of marital love. Married love can make all kinds of demands, but married love cannot be expected to endure discomfort, undergo sacrifice, surrender personal rights, or offer unconditional commitment. Love wants everything to be smooth and easy, and when things become rough and demanding, 21st Century love wants out. In all honesty, what passes for love today doesn't actually want to get "in" in the first place unless we are talking about somebody else's bed for a couple of hours. "In love" is not the compelling concept it once was.
In religious life, contemporary love is such a flimsy ideal that people have trouble staying in churches where people they love don't share the same opinions. We find it almost impossible to tolerate people we love when they are immature or insensitive to us. We find it exceedingly difficult to forgive Christians we love even when they offend us unintentionally. In fact, we can actually enjoy savaging the reputations of other church members we love as long as we invoke the spiritual exception clause of "Bless her heart,...!"
That's the kind of love we have in mind when we wonder if a God of Love could also be a God of Judgment. On the basis of that highly evolved love, we reject God's concept of personal accountability. But in his eternal wisdom and truth, God rejects now and forever the rotting corpse we call love. In fact, not only God but most of the saints throughout the history of his church rise to denounce the form of self indulgence that we have recently labeled "love." Like the people of Laodecea who thought they were rich when they were in fact poor, our blind generation has failed to recognize that we know little about love; that we have confused "agape" with "apathy."
It's sad but true that most church people in our age are not qualified to take a position on Hell. Not only have we abandoned that biblical ideal, the Love of God. We are mostly ignorant of the Word of God as well.
My time is up for this week. Let's continue this discussion next week.
Selah!
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