How Can You Believe in a God Who Sends People to Hell?

I want to start off with a question of my own as we jump into this big, tough issue:

Why is a belief in hell—an eternity of horrendous torture mandated by God—the litmus test for true Christianity?

I was born into and raised in the Church. And like the overwhelming majority of Christians, I believed in heaven and hell: That those who believe in Jesus, no matter what kind of people they are, will go to heaven; and that those who reject Jesus, no matter what kind of people they are, will fry in hell.

Admittedly, it seemed to make sense. God, in Jesus, has made it possible for us to live in relationship with God. That relationship is one of grace and forgiveness. If we choose to reject that overture of love we’ll live with the consequences—forever.

But as I began to wrestle with my understanding of the character of God, I realized that my starting point was wrong. I recognized that the starting point for God’s character is not that of an angry judge but that of a radically gracious parent. And if that’s the true character of God, the issue of hell becomes increasingly problematic. If God truly is lavishly and recklessly gracious, then how can that same God be capable of creating such a horrific eternity for those who might reject that grace?

For a while I tried to say that hell is, in essence, an act of love. Love forced is not love but abuse. A loving God will not force God’s self on us. If we chose to reject God’s act of love in Jesus, God will love us enough to respect that choice. God, out of love, would not want to force us to spend eternity with him.

But still… it didn’t answer all the questions:

• Is my rejection of God’s love stronger than God’s love for me?

• Does my free will usurp God’s grace?

• Will the God who goes to the cross for us finally give up on us?

• Is God’s grace bound by human time and space?

Or, as my friend, the late BJ Thomas, put it in one of his songs: I wonder why the pure in heart… they have to have a judgment day. I wonder what the Lord has made… that he plans to throw away.

 One blog post will not solve the problem of hell.

 But I want to suggest a starting point by going back to the story of the Prodigal Son which I referred to in another post.

 The Context: Jesus is caught red handed in the act of eating with the wrong kinds of people: sinners and tax collectors—those the religious leaders had written off because they believed God had written them off. No self-respecting Jewish Rabbi would debase himself in such a way. By eating with these people Jesus was in essence treating them as friends and equals. And in the process, ceremonially defiling himself. In response to criticism from the religious elite, Jesus tells the story of a father of radical, reckless grace.

 A quick summary:

1)    The younger son asks for his father for his inheritance early bringing shame onto the father, his family, and his village. Strike one.

2)    The younger son takes his money to a non-Jewish (unclean) land and wastes it all there on wild living. Strike two.

3)    The younger son ends up feeding pigs (unclean animals) for a gentile (an unclean person) in order to survive. Strike three.

Culturally, this younger son has gone beyond the point of no return. He is now considered dead to the village and his family with no way of redemption. Story over!

A major point: When the son decides to head home, he does not go home, as we often assume, repentant. He goes home defiant. He goes home with a scheme in place to manipulate his dad. He wants his dad to hire him in the hope that he can work off his debt, weasel himself back into the family, and receive his inheritance all over again when dad dies. This young man is still dead! He still rejects his dad’s love.

What does this have to do with hell?

Should the villagers catch the son walking into the village they will beat him up and banish him (to hell) from the community once and for all.

But notice what the dad does. And remember, this son is defiant. This son still rejects his father’s love!

The father (representing God) runs to this son who deserves only punishment and condemnation—and rescues him with grace.

• He throws his arms around his son to protect him from the mob.

• He puts the family robe around his shoulders.

• He puts the ring of sonship on his finger.

• He puts shoes on his feet.

• Then he throws a party for him!

All this for a son who, to that point, has rejected his father’s love!

As the father says to the older brother later: This son of mine was lost, but I found him. He was dead. But I made him alive again.

The grace of the father proved stronger than the rejection by his son.

The picture Jesus paints of God in this story is not one of a God who condemns people to hell but who runs to hell-condemned people and graces them with life. God runs to dead people—people who can neither reject or accept love—and raises them to life!

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann says it this way: According to this Christian view, neither God nor human beings decide about hell, but Christ alone: ‘I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and hell’ (Rev. 1:18). What is Christ going to do with ‘the keys of hell’? ‘Christ hath burst the gates of hell,’ says Charles Wesley in his Easter hymn. So all its gates are open. Hell is no longer inescapable…  (In the End, the Beginning—the Life of Hope. 2004)

Or as John says it in his Gospel: For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. (John 3:16)

Does God send people to hell?

The Cross says:  For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. (2 Corinthians 5:19)

The Cross says:

You were lost but God found you.

You were dead but God through Christ raised you to life.

You are the one clothed in the robes of grace.

You are the one wearing the ring of sonship/daughterhood.

You are the one wearing the shoes of forgiveness.

Because God’s grace will always have the final word…

And that word is life.

More next time.

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

The Patent Unfairness of God

Jesus’ primary way for answering the question: What is God like?—apart from the cross—was through the telling of provocative, compelling, jaw-dropping stories; stories that shocked and delighted his audiences again and again.

Take, for example, this story:

Imagine…You’re an employee of a small business consisting of 60 full and part time workers. You’ve been there since the beginning: investing blood, sweat, and tears into making the company go; enjoying the fruits of success; and taking pay cuts when times were tough. Over the years you’ve seen employees come and go but a few of you have been the foundation of the company from the start.

One day the boss calls you all together. You have no idea why. Without saying anything, he has you line up in order of years served beginning with the newest employees. He explains that it has been a very good year and he wants to say thanks through a bonus.

He starts with the newest of the part time people and hands each of them a check for $1000. Your heart starts pounding as you think to yourself: If the new part timers get that amount, what am I going to get? 

He continues to make his way through the line handing out checks but the amount is always the same.

Then he comes to you and the three others who have been there from the beginning. The boss takes a moment to thank you publicly for your support and hard work and says that without you the company would not exist.

And then he hands each of you a check for $1000.

How would you feel?

On the one hand… grateful for the surprise bonus?

On the other hand… miffed? Angry? Hacked off by the obvious unfairness of it all? Like you’ve just received a slap across the face?

That second response is the one some workers had in Jesus’ story about the Vineyard Owner (Matthew 20:1-16). They’d put in a full day’s work, having been promised a full day’s wage. But throughout the day more and more workers were hired to join them in the fields, with the final batch starting work one hour before quitting time.

At the end of the work day, 6 pm, the foreman called all of the workers together to pay them. Starting with the last ones hired—those who had only worked an hour!—he handed out the same pay to all of the workers: a full days wage, no matter how many hours the laborers had worked!

The men who had put in a twelve-hour shift were livid. They said to the foreman: These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat!

I’m guessing most of us would side with these guys in their anger and sense of outrage. It’s patently unfair to be treated that way.

And that’s precisely Jesus’ point. He uses this maddening story to say something radical about God.

What we think we want is a God who is fair. However, a fair God has to weigh us in the balance, judging our every action and motive. That makes God judgmental, condemning, and angry, having to treat us as we deserve. And we end up mimicking that kind of God, nitpicking over who deserves what from God’s hand.

But Jesus tells us that God is nothing like that. God is patently unfair. God is a God who dispenses grace to all of us recklessly and lavishly—and equally unfairly.

No matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done, no matter when it happens in the scheme of things, God’s grace is given to all of us free of charge. In patently unfair amounts. And that’s radically good news… for all of us!

Jesus says that God is a God of radically unfair grace who recklessly and lavishly throws that grace around to anyone and everyone! That God only and always treat us with that kind of grace.

For those of us wondering if God’s grace includes us, this story serves as God’s great big yes!

And that picture of God changes everything when it comes to how we see God.

Connect with me if you’d like at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

The Relentlessness of God

This is a blog for those wrestling with Christianity, and more specifically, wrestling with many of the beliefs about God many Christians hold.

Too often God is presented as mean, vindictive, condemning, and hell bent on sending us to hell.

Jesus, however, paints a far different picture. And his primary way for painting that picture is through story-telling: telling stories that turn our perceptions of God upside down.

Like this story about a rejected invitation:

The scene:

Jesus was the guest of honor at a Sabbath meal hosted by a Pharisee. It’s an interesting invitation in that many of the Pharisees were Jesus’ fiercest critics. They didn’t feel he obeyed the rules enough. They were scandalized by his penchant for hanging out with the wrong kinds of people.

Yet this particular Pharisee invited Jesus to be his guest of honor. Was he curious about Jesus? Did he want to catch Jesus out? Did he want to join his team of followers?

Almost immediately Jesus proves to be a pain-in-the-butt guest.

First, during the meal, he heals a man—on the Sabbath Day, the day of rest. Some of the guests would have seen that as a provocative breaking of the Sabbath rules.

Next, he criticizes those who fought for the most prestigious spots around the table as they sat down for the meal.

Then, he criticizes his host for inviting friends, telling him that he should instead be inviting the outsiders to a meal—those whom God has seemingly abandoned: the crippled, the lame, and the blind.

You get the sense that Jesus probably didn’t get invited back to parties often.

The story trigger:

Then, perhaps to change the subject or lower the room temperature, one of the guests said: Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God!

It was a brilliant move. Immediately the minds of all the guests turned to the long-awaited promise of God—the promise of a day when all of Israel’s enemies would be vanquished and Israel would live in peace.

It was a promise made in Isaiah 25. On that day God will spread out a banquet feast where death will be at an end and tears will be wiped away.

One small problem: Isaiah said that this banquet would include Gentiles—non-Jewish people. But by the time of Jesus, Biblical interpreters added commentary to that passage saying that while the Gentiles will be invited, it will not be an honor for them but a meal of shame and plagues. Others said that the Gentiles would be slaughtered at that meal by the angel of death.

For some of the Jewish elite in Jesus’ day, the inclusive feast of Isaiah had become an exclusive feast for the chosen Jews only. There was no way outsiders would be invited in.

When the guest threw out that feast as a topic of conversation, he was hoping Jesus would turn from his somewhat cantankerous mood to a more upbeat, celebratory mood. But Jesus saw it as an opening to rock their view of God with a story of outrageous, relentless grace.

The Story:

A man wanted to host a feast and invited many from the community. In Jesus’ day the invitations would be sent out without a specific date because all the food was prepared fresh. A servant would bring word of a soon-coming banquet, get RSVP’s from the guests, and then the process for gathering and preparing the food would begin.

Once all was ready the servant went out immediately to say: The party is on! Come quickly. And the guests would stop what they were doing and head to the party.

But in this story, rather than keeping their commitment to the party, many of the guests began to make excuses for why they couldn’t come.

• One had purchased a piece of land he needed to inspect

• One had purchased five oxen and needed to test drive them

• One had just gotten married

These all seem like appropriate excuses but those listening to Jesus would know that none of those excuses were valid in that culture. They instantly understood that the invited guests in this story were intentionally dissing the man who invited them to the party. In an honor/shame culture, such behavior was scandalous.

Imagine you had planned a big banquet. You invite your friends. They all turn up. You put the food in front of them. And then, rather than eating, one by one they make some kind of excuse.

Oh, I just forgot, I need to:

• Mow the lawn

• Feed the cat

• Catch the next episode of the latest binge-worthy show

And then leave.

How would you feel? Angry? Hurt? Bitter? Dissed?

And what would you do or want to do? Drop them from your Facebook friends list? Diss them on Twitter? Delete their contact information from your phone? Never speak to them again?

The party host has the same response. Jesus says that he was angry. But notice what he does next: Rather than taking vengeance on those who hurt him he extends his grace even further. This man’s natural expression of anger is remarkably more grace!

He tells his servant to go out and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame—all those seemingly abandoned by God

Then, when there’s still room for more, he instructs his servant to go out onto the streets and compel people to come in—because he wants his house full. He has a bountiful feast and he wants to share it with as many people as possible.

This well-known socialite, so to speak, hosts a banquet for:

• People sleeping in the doorways of Macy’s

• People used to eating scraps from the trash bins behind swank hotels

• People who haven’t bathed in a summer of Sundays

And it costs them absolutely nothing. It is undeserved, unexpected, unearned.

This party host proves to be relentless in his desire to share his abundance with as many people as possible.

The Point: This is what God is like!

Jesus shows us that:

God is relentless when it comes to grace! Grace abhors a vacuum. God will not rest until heaven is filled. God is a gracious heavenly father who’s prepared a feast for all humankind and he will not stop until the banquet table is full—pursuing us through the cross.

God’s grace always includes those we think are beyond God’s grace. Whoever it is we think is unworthy of God’s grace, Jesus says, “Surprise! God loves them, too!” As the Reformer Martin Luther reminds us, grace is always for and only for sinners.

Or, to quote Episcopal priest Robert Capon, Grace says: All you have to be is a certifiable loser and God will send his servant Jesus to positively drag you into his house!

The God of Jesus will not stop surprising you with that unexpected, relentless grace!

You can contact me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org