Fire and Brimstone

At this point, if you've been following along all week, you might be thinking that this is a far departure from the type of thing I normally write. It is. You might be thinking how harsh it sounds to be so firm in my conclusion that not all gods are the same. It probably does. You might be thinking that it's even harsher to accuse Christians, who are just trying to get it right, of being good only at the very thing that the pagans have always been good at. It is. But there's nothing wrong with harshing a few mellows every now and then.

You might also be thinking that perhaps what I'm actually suggesting is that we go back to being a church that preaches fire and brimstone. Go back to Bible-thumping. Go back to hanging Hell over people's heads until they get that they've got nothing if they don't got God. 

I'm not. 

What I am suggesting is that these fundamental truths about the very nature of our God ought to guide us to do better the thing that we seek to do. Specifically, we've got to start loving people like they're lost. 

That's all, really. It's not popular. It's not what Christians today think that people need. We want to be known for our tolerance, for our open arms and for welcoming in all the people who disagree with us. We want to be known for not ruffling any feathers, for not demanding things be our way or the highway (to Hell), for letting people just be themselves for once without having God and the Bible shoved down their throats. We want to be known for loving people without ulterior motives, without evangelism lurking in the background, without having to always make that awkward transition between 'hey, man, great barbecue' and 'can I tell you about Jesus?'

But perhaps that's why Christianity is suffering so much in our modern world. Because God never said they would know us by our tolerance. 

He said that they would know us by our love. And our love is failing our world. 

Our love is failing our world because it doesn't speak truth any more. It's afraid to. It's afraid to look at the fallen world and declare that things are the way they are. People are hurting. People are scared. People are wondering and wandering and wounded and lost. And somehow, we've come to the conclusion that the best thing we can do for them, as an act of mercy and grace, is to not tell them about Jesus. To stop talking about God. Because, you know, they'll probably figure things out for themselves if we just give them time. 

What kind of love is that?

What kind of love looks at the hurting and doesn't tell them about a Healer? What kind of love looks at the fearful and doesn't tell them about the spirit of Peace? What kind of love looks at the wondering and doesn't show them the Answer, looks at the wandering and doesn't show them the Way, looks at the wounded and doesn't show them the scars of Calvary, looks at the lost and doesn't help them be found? This thing we're doing where we don't think the answer is Jesus any more is no kind of love at all.

It's no wonder the world doesn't know us. 

It's no wonder the world doesn't know Him.

And no, it's not about fire and brimstone. It's not even about Heaven and Hell. It's about the fundamental reality that our God is the only one who sufficiently answers these questions. It's about us taking our God at His word and knowing that faith is the foundation of all of these things. God doesn't just heal because you're a human and He has to; He heals because you are His child and He loves you. If we can't wrap our minds around the fact that what God requires most of us is faith, then none of the rest of it matters. And if His greatest promise - Heaven - even fails to require faith, if we all just go there because we're "good" and "not murderers," then none of the rest of it matters. If our God is just the same as all the other gods out there, then none of the rest of it matters. If all roads lead to same place, then none of the rest of it matters.

But it matters. Because none of these things are true. Our God requires faith, more than anything else He requires of us. Our God has promised Heaven on the basis of our faith. (Not on the works of it, mind you, but on the basis of it.) Our God is not just the same as all the other gods out there. All roads don't lead to the same place. Any argument that says otherwise started with the pagans, and they've always been good at this.

But you never hear the pagans talk about hope. Or grace. Or mercy. Or love. 

They will know us by our love. 

And listen, you don't have to preach it. This world has heard enough of our preaching. You just have to live it. You have to love people well. You have to love them like they're dying. You have to love them like they're lost. 

So would you love somebody already? For real, love them? 

Heaven and the Real World

The great catastrophe for Christians who do not want to preach that our God not only has created a Hell, but that He uses it (and uses it for those who do not believe), is that we have watered down Heaven, as well. 

No longer is Heaven the great reward, the place of the faithful, the promise of God. No. For many of us, Heaven has become just the natural next step, the thing that automatically happens to us after we die. And either one of two things is true about this Heaven - either you don't have to be faithful to get there (because the God who does not punish unbelief also does not reward belief) or it does not require God at all (it has become an outshoot of our own expectation and is no longer rooted in a solid theology). 

You may not have to be faithful to get to our Heaven. This is the reverse of the argument we looked at yesterday that God does not use His Hell for the unbeliever. If we believe, and most do, that Hell is reserved for murderers and rapists and child abusers, then it's only natural that we also believe that Heaven is for "good" people - or at least, people who don't do these despicable things. It's a nice thought, but it's not a godly one. 

Yes, God says to be nice to one another. Yes, God says to do good in this world. Yes, God condemns the evil acts that we commit against one another. But God's fundamental concern, the foundation of His very relation to creation, is not how we relate to one another; it's how we relate to Him. Do we believe, trust, hope, and love in the name of Jesus? Do we rely on what God has told us about Himself? Do we believe it? Are our hearts oriented toward Him? This is what God is looking for. Not good things, but holy things.

But when we say that He is only in search of the good, it's just one more small step in the same direction before we encounter a Heaven that does not require a God at all. If Heaven is just about good and bad, we can do that ourselves. We have communities and we have prisons - good and bad. We have friends and we have enemies - good and bad. We have right and we have wrong - good and bad. Even if you relate your concept of good and bad back to the covenant of God, He is not overall necessary for you to make these judgments. 

And then we're right back where we started - with the pagan argument that one god is as good as another, that it's okay to have whatever god you choose to have, that what works for you works for you, as long as you don't impose it on me. 

And we call that "love" or something, but it's no such thing. 

Not only has Heaven become a muddy water for us, falling generally into one of these two categories, but it has become more distant. The church has always drawn near to Heaven, but not any longer. Today's church draws closer to the world. Heaven is too far away to be relevant, too much tomorrow to be powerful today. We spend almost all of our time, if not actually all of it, trying to make our world a better place, and we've forgotten entirely that we were not made for this world. 

It's a tragedy.

And it is a tragedy born of a failure of both truth and imagination. 

Reconciliation with the promise of Heaven starts with recapturing the truth of the promise. It's not just a good place, and it's not just a place for the good. It's a place for the believer, for the person whose heart is turned fundamentally toward God. It is a place for those who ache for the Garden, who long to go back to a time when they walked freely, unashamed in the presence of a God who walked freely, faithfully among them. It is a place for those who breathe the very spirit of God, just as He intended when He leaned down and breathed life into Adam's nostrils. It's a place for those who cry out after the living God, the God who made this all in the first place. We have to put Him back in His Heaven before His Heaven becomes our Hell. And we're dangerously close. Dangerously close. 

Because the path we're on right now leads us to a place where Heaven is good, but it gets us nowhere near a Heaven that is holy. 

Condemned

Why should it matter to us whether the god that someone else serves is real or not? Whether that god is fundamentally different than our god or not? Because our God is the only one who declares, unequivocally, what happens to such people:

They are dying. 

They are dying without the hope of heaven. And I know it's popular for us to look at them, knowing how much we love them in our own hearts, and decide that God could never really condemn them. Decide that God doesn't really send anyone to a lake of fire, to a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

We've told ourselves all kinds of things to put our minds at ease on this. We've asked a thousand difficult questions to try to write God out of His own Word, His own promises. What if someone never hears about Jesus and therefore never has the opportunity to believe in Him? Would God really damn such a person forever just because of the unfortunate situation into which he was born? Well, what if someone faithfully gives their whole life to what they believe is the real God? Would God really condemn such a person for being wrong about who He is, when that person honestly didn't know they were wrong?

We don't want to believe that our loving God, although clearly having a place like Hell, would never use it. Except, of course, for those people that we think condemnable (and that's where our grace stops). But just for God issues? Nah. 

Do you understand this? Do you see how far we have come? God says without any buffer that He is the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus says, no one comes to the Father except through Him. God makes clear that He is a jealous God; He does not tolerate rivals. Those who do not know Him, He will not know in the final days. 

And here we are saying that the only way you really go to Hell is if you do something deplorable like rape a woman or kill a child.

Hear this: a rapist, a child molester, a murderer who turns his heart toward God has more of a promise of Heaven than the most generous, kind, loving man who knows Him not. 

I'm not saying it's up to us to figure out who God redeems and who God condemns, how He makes those decisions, how His heart aches or breaks or mends over these kinds of things. What I am saying is that God has been very clear about what He requires of His people. And even if we don't want to think that our God, who created the Heavens and the Earth, also has a Hell and He's not afraid to use it, we do have a responsibility, as faithful children of our God, to take Him at His Word. 

And His Word, on this, is clear.

It's not popular. It's not politically correct. It's not without its social awkwardness. We live in a world that wants to accept everybody, that wants to embrace everyone. We live in a world where it's rude, arrogant, or worse to dare to tell someone that what they believe isn't actually working for them. We don't want to offend anyone. We don't want to rattle any chains. 

But let me tell you this - prisoners need their chains rattled! That's the only way they come free. 

And you may not want to offend anyone, but are you willing to lose them? Those who live outside of the Word of God are perishing. They're dying. And you - we - have life. We have life to offer to the dying. And we settle for tolerance. We settle for relativity. We settle for selling out, saying that our God, who spoke so clearly on this issue, didn't really mean it.

If He didn't mean this, how can we know that He ever meant anything?

By Any Other Name

As I continue to lay out this argument about this religious tolerance that has taken hold of us Christians (and specifically, that it's more of a pagan thing than a God thing), one of the best places to start is simply to look at some of the fundamental differences between the gods of the various religions in our world and demonstrate that, no, they are not the same god with simply another name; they are vastly different gods.

There is much to love about the peace, the tranquility, and the centeredness of the Buddhist religion. Many of us look at our Buddhist neighbors and say, man, I wish my faith could be like that. I want my devotion to God to lead me to that kind of life. But it's no god that got Buddhists here; they have no god. In the Buddhist idea, all is god, and god is all, and the entire aim of life is to live peacefully and attain a transcendence whereby one becomes one with all. The devotion is led by those who have gone before who have attained this status, those who have succeeded and done it, who are not gods, but who are guides. The "gods" of Buddhism do not claim to be gods; this is vastly different from the Christian God, who boldly declares, "I Am the Lord." Additionally, the central idea of Buddhism is the emptying of oneself. For Christianity, the central idea is fullness - fullness of life, fullness of grace, fullness of Spirit. 

Hinduism is known for its plethora of gods. For any wish, want, desire, or need you could possibly have, Hinduism has a god for that. There are a few principle deities, which tend to be worshiped by larger numbers of the faithful, but the sheer number of possible deities in this religion is staggering. The faithful know more about these gods than I can ever even pretend to, so I won't, but contrast this idea with the Christian God who is "One." He is "the way, the truth, and the life." He is everything. And He is "a jealous God." There is a fundamental difference between having a god for everything and having a God who is everything. 

One of the popular ideas in the modern world is to say something like, "I'm spiritual, but not religious." This is true for a lot of people, and it should be - we are spiritual beings. (Someone once said we are spiritual beings on a human journey.) But what this does is acknowledge the hunger, the ache, the connectedness that the Spirit feels and longs for without having any real outlet for it. In the absence of a "religion," the spiritual have settled for the absence of a God, and this has left them without anything in this world bigger than themselves. They are eaten alive by the hunger that grows inside of them. Contrast this with the Christian God who breaks bread with His friends and feeds His faithful. 

A stone's throw from the "spiritual, but not religious" crowd is the "religion" of humanism, which worships the self. There are a bunch of different manifestations of this, but it all boils down to the same thing - I am my own god. I decide what is right and wrong. I decide what works for me. I decide how I want to live, how I want to die, whether I want to love. The problem here is that when you are your own standard, there is no standard at all. When you let yourself down, you just change your expectation so that, hey, it's okay. When you do wrong, you just redefine wrong as right because, hey, it works for me. There's no inspiration, no inclination to do better because you're doing just fine. There is nothing in this world bigger than you and so nothing to hold yourself accountable to. You just are what you are. But the Christian God says you are what He created you to be. You're special not just because but because you are created in the image of God. Even in your very being, there is something bigger than you, something that inspires you to grow, to mature, to be better than you are today. And God creates not just you, but the standards, as well, so that there is no question what is right and wrong. No question what works or doesn't work. No question about how you ought to live, how you ought to die, how you ought to love. The Christian God provides a concrete way to live; the god of self is always trying to figure it out anew.

Things start to get a little more muddled when we come to the religions closest to Christianity. Islam, for example, actually does start in somewhat the same place - with Abraham. If you remember your Bible, Abraham had two sons - Ishmael with the servant Hagar and Isaac with the wife Sarah. Ishmael, the illegitimate child, was sent away after Isaac comes on the scene, and Islam is the religion of Ishmael. Often, this leads the uneducated to say that Allah and God are really the same god, just with a different name. But both Christians and Muslims would reject this idea. (For the record, the Muslim argument is that the Bible is corrupt and therefore cannot accurately convey the character/nature/reality of this God of ours.) Allah has no intimate relation with his people the way that the Christian God does. He holds out no promise of heaven; heaven must be earned. There is no grace. There is constant strife. And I think, fundamentally, this comes from the story of Ishmael vs. the story of Isaac - Allah never brought his people home. They're still wandering. They're still searching. They're still living the life of the cast-out. The Christian God creates a place for His people. He brings them home. He ends their wandering. He is found. And He welcomes in the outcast. So while it's tempting to say this must be the same god with just a different name, since both religions start with Abraham, it's not accurate. And the implication is the difference between living life as a wanderer and living life as a prodigal. 

Finally, most closely related to the Christian God is the g-d of Judaism. (Jews do not utter the name of their g-d, which is why I have omitted the middle letter, per their custom.) This is super-muddled because they actually are the same deity, to some degree. The g-d of the Jews is the God of the Old Testament. We know the story of this g-d intimately, and we say, of course these are the same gods - we just have two versions of the story that end in different places. But that's what creates the dramatic difference here. The g-d of the Jews leaves them living under the law. He is a g-d who has made the promise, but has not delivered on it; they are still waiting on the Messiah (and some have even said that the time for the Messiah has passed, so he is not coming; others believe in Jesus as the Messiah, in addition to continuing the law-based religion of Judaism). For the Christian, God has both promised and delivered, and He has promised again, which is why we can have any hope at all in Heaven. He's already delivered on one promise, so we can trust Him to deliver on another. And we live not under the law, but under grace. Which means that even though Jews and Christians can legitimately claim to serve the same Lord, there are still fundamental differences here, as well, which have serious implications for both theology and for living.

So we say that whatever god a person serves is the same God with a different name, but it's just not the truth. There are fundamental differences at every juncture that set the Christian God apart from these others. (And it is true that it sets them apart from Him, as well.) Claiming anything else is either foolishness or ignorance. The Christian has a God who fills His people, who is One, who feeds His people, who holds them to a higher standard, who brings them home, who delivers on His promises, and who extends His grace. No other religion can say that. None.

There is something special about our God. And that's why we need to stop selling Him out in the name of religious tolerance. 

Because God's people aren't supposed to be good at that; that's for the pagans. 

Other Gods

Today's Christians prides itself on its embrace of other religions in the world, an idea we popularly call "tolerance" and that seems to dictate our lives in many arenas, not just religion. But we call ourselves brothers and sisters, all of us, regardless of the god we serve because, hey, God is God, right?

Eh....

What I'm about to say is not popular, but I hope you'll hear me out as I work through some of these ideas. Let's start here:

This "tolerance" we speak of? It's no special thing. 

The pagans have been really good at it for thousands of years. Since the beginning, really.

Yes, that's right. The pagans. The idol-worshippers. The peoples of other gods and the peoples with no gods at all have been quite tolerant of gods in general, and their stories are written throughout the pages of the Bible, even.

The Scriptures talk about the gods of the nations, the gods of the peoples that Israel will encounter as they work their way into the Promised Land. They talk about the poles of Asherah, the altars of Baal, the ritual human sacrifice for Molech. Even as far back as Abraham, we get a sense of this when Abram chooses to follow this particular God, as opposed to any of the others that may be competing for his loyalty. 

And it works the other way around, too. In the early chapters of Ezra, we see the king issue a decree that the exiles of Jerusalem should be released to return to their city and rebuild the temple of their God, since He is the God of Jerusalem. Not because He is the God of Gods. Not because He is the Lord of Lords. But because He is the God of Jerusalem, and the God of the Jews, and all people, the king reasons, ought to have a place for their God. They ought to be able to worship their God as they see fit. 

Nobody's worried about any of this. Nobody's concerned about what other gods have to offer or don't have to offer. Everybody's just content that everybody has their own god, and they're even willing to make provision for the worship of those gods because, hey, God is God, right?

In fact, there are only a handful of times in Scripture that even God's people are willing to speak out on this, only a few times that they go full-bore and start destroying the worship sites of other gods, or, in one dramatic scene, challenge the prophets of not-our-God on the mountain. 

Yet here we are, thousands of years later, boasting that we're doing a new thing. Boasting in our tolerance of other religions. Holding out our arms and embracing the worshipers of other gods as "brothers and sisters." Confident and comfortable in doing so. 

And I get it - I really do. The church has this terrible history of fire and brimstone, of preaching damnation to unbelievers, of holding our Bibles high and our fists higher without regard for the very real hearts, the very real souls, the very real lives that have been on the receiving end of our condemnation. We are trying to make up for the mistakes of our past by distancing ourselves to some degree from that message, by joining hands with the world to say that it's okay. 

But is it okay? 

God's been very clear on this point from day one. Not only is He the only God who legitimately has anything to offer, but He is the only God who actually offers it. He is the only God who can both promise and deliver. He is the way, the truth, and the life. These other religions, these other gods - maybe they have a way to live for now, but how about forever? 

It's messy. I'll say that right up front. It's a tough line to walk - loving people and exposing their gods as worthless. And yes, both are possible. It doesn't have to be Mt. Carmel, where the people of the losing god are exposed and then destroyed. They can be exposed and embraced. But if we take our God seriously, we must be willing to expose them first. 

Otherwise, I say, it's no new thing we're doing. 

The pagans have always been good at this.