Aren’t all religions just different ways to the same God?

I was asked for a response to the question,

Aren’t all religions just different ways to the same God?

There is a sense in which I think this is true. Nearly all religions tell people to be good. God delights in goodness. The Bible says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8).

People who commit to true humble goodness make the heart of God rejoice, and he responds favorably to them. Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6). When people were uncertain about whether Jesus was teaching the truth, he simply challenged them to be obedient to what they knew to be right and good. He said, “Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own” (John 17:7).

C. S. Lewis (British scholar and author of The Chronicles of Narnia) was an atheist who became a reluctant Christian in his 30’s. He had not been looking for God at all. But he was looking for goodness. Later he came to believe that there was a connection between the two. He wrote, "[I]t is significant that this long-evaded encounter [with God] happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience. No doubt it was far less serious than I supposed, but it was the most serious I had made for a long time.”

I think that true goodness leads to God, and so we can applaud any religion’s attempt to urge people to be good, honest, kind, faithful, generous, courteous, selfless, and fair.

That does not mean, however, that every aspect of every religion is good and true and praiseworthy. That is just not the case. For example, I think most tender-hearted people who study the life of Mohamed will find it very disturbing that he married a six-year-old girl and consummated the relationship with her when she was nine.

If you say to a devout Buddhist, “We’re all worshipping the same God,” he or she will disagree with you. Buddhism does not believe in a personal, Creator God. Buddhism maintains that there is a karmic balance in the universe that evens out good and evil, but denies that there is any God or gods behind it.

Hinduism has many thousands of gods rather than just one. As with any polytheistic religion, I think you will find that some of the stories about those gods would indicate that they are not particularly trustworthy, and have no great love for mankind.

But rather than picking apart the flaws and shortcomings of every other religion in the world (I don’t have the knowledge or time!), I would just note this one thing that they all have in common. None of them tells me what to do about my sins and failures as a person. I know and believe the Bible message that no matter how good I may have tried to be (and honestly, I probably have not tried all that hard), I still have sins that separate me from a holy God and hinder his relationship with me.

The Bible says that Jesus took my sins upon him when he died on the cross (1 Peter 2:24). No other religion or religious figure ever did that for me. Nowhere else have I ever learned just how deep is God’s love for me.

Can A Christian Be Demon-Possessed?

Can a Christian be demon-possessed? I was asked that the other day, and my answer is below.

This is a question the Bible never asks, nor answers. But I think it would be helpful to look at what the Bible actually says about demons and the nature of their work.

First of all, the word “possessed”. Get rid of it. I do not believe it accurately reflects the Greek.

There are two words or phrases the Bible uses to describe a demonic affliction: “demonized” and “have a demon”. They mean the same and are interchangeable. The Greek word I translate “demonized” is simply the noun “demon” turned into a verb and made passive. And “have a demon” looks the same in Greek as it does in English. It is pretty straightforward.

The Bible goes back and forth as to which word or phrase it uses. For example, in Luke 8:26 it says that the man from the Gerasenes “had demons,” and then a few verses later in verse 36 it says that he “was demonized”. In John 10:20 some people accuse Jesus of “having a demon.” In the next verse some people say that he does not sound like somebody who “is demonized.” So there is no difference in the Bible between “having a demon” or “being demonized”.

I have heard some Christians maintain that a believer may be oppressed by demons but never possessed by them. This is not a distinction that the Bible ever makes.

The English Standard Version seems to try to make this distinction in Matthew 8:28 and Matthew 9:32. In Matthew 8:28 it says that Jesus was approached by two “demon-possessed men”. They were crazy and violent: “so fierce that no one could pass that way.” Jesus cast out the demons and the men were fine. Then in Matthew 9 the ESV says that “a demon-oppressed man who was mute” was brought to him. Jesus cast the demon out, and the mute man spoke.

Why does the ESV say that the men in Matthew 8 were demon-possessed but the man in Matthew 9 was only demon-oppressed? Presumably because the second man was not crazy or violent or speaking with other voices. His only problem was that he couldn’t talk. But the Greek text uses the same word of the mute as it does of the psychotic individuals a chapter earlier: “demonized”. And therein, I believe, hangs an important doctrine. Afflictions as distinct as psychosis and muteness were equally labeled demonic.

As I survey the biblical data it seems to me that where Western Christians would tend to separate afflictions into distinct categories (physical, spiritual, psychological), the Bible just smooshes them together. If we think a problem is physical we give it medicine; if psychological, therapy; if spiritual, exorcism. If a man hears voices and speaks in strange ones, that may be demonic. But if he has a curved spine, that’s just scoliosis.

But look at the hunchback in Luke 13. There it says that a woman at the synagogue “had a disabling spirit” (presumably a demon), and had not been able to straighten up for 18 years (verse 11). We might regard a bad back as something that results merely from injury or congenital defect. Can the devil curve a spine? According to Jesus he can. After Jesus straightened the woman out, he noted that Satan had bound her for 18 years (verse 16).

What about boils on the skin? We see that as an infection of staphylococcal bacteria. We may not see anything there of a spiritual origin or anything requiring a spiritual response. Just give it some warm compresses, antibacterial soap and maybe an antibiotic. But consider Job 2:7: “So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” The devil did it, and he did it to a good man. Bacteria were just the means that the devil used to afflict Job.

But could the devil get into the mind or body of an apostle? As a matter of fact he did. It seems that St. Peter had himself a demon when he rebuked Jesus, telling him there was no way he would ever go to the cross. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus replied (Matthew 16:22-23). And St. Paul had an unspecified “thorn in the side” - presumably some physical affliction - that he said was “a messenger of Satan to torment me” (2 Corinthians 12:8).

The Bible also says that Satan entered Judas (Luke 22:3). But Judas appeared to welcome that.

It seems to me that the Bible indicates that the devil can do all kinds of things to us. He can curve our backs, irritate our skin, deprive us of speech, afflict us with seizures, give us really bad ideas (betray Jesus, keep Jesus away from the cross), put thorns in our sides, or turn us into flat-out raving lunatics. That is the world we live in, a world C. S. Lewis famously called “enemy-occupied territory”.

But that does not mean we have to cooperate with or willingly submit to any demon that wants to afflict us. The Bible says “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). A good example occurs in the lives of the disciples mentioned above. Peter resisted and Judas did not.

So back to the question, “Can a Christian be demon-possessed?” Get rid of the word “possessed” and go with the more biblical “have a demon”, and I think the answer becomes clear. Can a Christian have a demon? Sure. On any given day, God may give some demon permission to afflict your skin with boils, your back with curvature, your vocal cords with silence, your will with temptation, your mood with discouragement, or your synapses with incompetent neurotransmitters. Why should you be immune? You’re not immune, unless God chooses to give you the special grace of immunity in some particular area. I’m sorry if I’m bursting your bubble, but the fact is, people much better than you have been more sorely afflicted.

I don’t know how a demon might go after you. My demon gave me a bad knee for a year and a half. A friend’s demon told her that she was Jesus and that she should sacrifice herself. We’re both better now. But whether your demon is giving you a toothache or causing you to believe that you can control the weather, your basic response should look pretty much the same. Do these things:

Pray. Jesus told his disciples to pray, “Deliver us from evil,” and many scholars think that means, “Deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13).

Endure. Sometimes that is what you will have to do. Poor St. Paul got left with his thorn from the devil even though he prayed against it (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).

Get medical help. Paul told Timothy to take some wine for his stomach and frequent illnesses (1 Timothy 5:23). Maybe for you that “wine” is depakote or risperdal.

Get counseling. Proverbs 24:6: “You should wage war with sound guidance—victory comes with many counselors.”

Don’t sin. This is important. Demons love sin and God hates it. Isaiah 1:16-17: "Stop doing wrong, learn to do right."

Trust Jesus Christ. In John 16:33 he told his followers, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."

Is The Gospel A Sales Pitch?

At church we were discussing reasons why Christians are reluctant to tell people the good news of Jesus Christ. One man said, "Sharing the gospel makes me feel like a salesman." We all knew what he meant - even the professional salesman in the room who responded by clearing his throat loudly. Of course, there is nothing wrong with sales as long as it is carried out with integrity and good will. But somehow, salesmanship at its purest, noblest, and most necessary seems to be an unworthy model for presenting Jesus. Sensitive Christians rightly recoil from it when trying to persuade people to follow Christ. We feel a check in our spirit when we find ourselves slipping into a mode which suggests that Jesus is a product and the potential convert is a customer. Why does that mode bother us?

One straightforward answer is to say that Jesus is a Person, not a commodity. He is King of kings and Lord of lords. To put him - however unintentionally, and even if only implicitly - in the same category as a diet plan that will help you shed unwanted inches is to diminish and blaspheme him.

But another objection to the sales model has occurred to me, and it has to do with the fundamental nature of gospel proclamation. I would like to introduce it with the following device:

You are walking down a sidewalk and you see a wallet flip out the back pocket of the person ahead of you and land on the pavement. The person walks on completely unaware that he has lost his wallet. What should you do?

A classmate informs you that he has a stolen copy of the licensing exam that you will be taking tomorrow, and asks if you want to see it. What should you do?

You see a child being attacked by a savage dog. No one else is around. What should you do?

Note that I did not ask what you would do. Only God knows that. You might be a greedy corrupt coward who would pocket the wallet, cheat on the test, and leave the child to be mauled. Or you might be a decent person and hopefully confident that in each case you would do the right thing - but find that, in the actual pressure of the moment, you become as morally weak as St. Peter on the night before Jesus was crucified. But I'm not asking what you have done or what you think you actually would do in such circumstances. I am making this easier by asking, "What should you do?"

There is another question, in each case, that I did not ask. It is, "What would be in your best interests to do?" That question elicits a different set of answers from the "should" question. In the first instance, it is in your best interests to pocket the wallet and delight in found cash. In the second, it is in your best interests to look at the test beforehand so you can ace it and move forward in your career. In the third, it is in your best interests to let that poor child fend for himself, because if you intervene, you yourself will get hurt, and probably pretty badly.

Let me head off the objection, "But it would still be in my best interests to do good because my selfish behavior might be found out, and then I'd be shamed, held accountable and penalized." I stipulate that, in these hypothetical circumstances, you know for a fact that you won't get caught. "But even if I never get caught, my conscience would trouble me, and since living with that pain would devastate me and leave me unhappy, I can still say that it would be in my best interests to do right." I answer, "Why let the voice of conscience trouble you? Surely by now you have learned how to silence that annoying little bastard. And if you haven't learned, it won't be hard for me to teach you. Here is lesson one: Acknowledge that it is in your best interests to free yourself from the shackles of irrational conscience. Our friend Nietzsche will help you absorb the sweet logic of this liberating truth."

My point is that a great chasm yawns between "I should do X" and "It would benefit me to do X." Sometimes those two things meet or happily coincide, but they never do so out of necessity. That is, they are not equivalent or derivable one from the other. They are not two ways of saying the same thing. Sometimes I should do what is clearly not in my best interests, and sometimes the thing that is in my best interests is something I really should not do.

Now a sales pitch is always an appeal to your best interests. That, at rock bottom, is what a sales pitch is. The salesman has his own interests as well, and they do not necessarily correspond with yours. (Mainly he needs to put food on his family's table.) But his best interests are not the basis upon which he tries to get you to buy his product or service. Only a desperate poor sap of a salesman says, "Come on, buddy, buy this, I gotta make quota here." If he is a good salesman, his focus will be on you and your need. He labors to convince you that whatever he has to offer will benefit you, and therefore well worth the money. If you don't buy it, it will be your loss. A sales pitch goes no deeper than that.

I maintain that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not, at rock bottom, an appeal to one's best interests. Since gospel proclamation has devolved in much of North American evangelicalism to resemble such an appeal, it seems to me the time has come consciously to resist that model. Now please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that there is no benefit to an individual who believes and obeys the gospel of Jesus. There is. Eternal life in the blessed presence of the Creator is a benefit that exceeds all reckoning. I am just saying that the foundation of gospel appeal goes deeper than self-interest - and so, so much deeper that matters pertaining to our benefit might almost be considered an afterthought, an add-on, a "What? Do you mean I get that too?"

The gospel is a statement that is true and a commandment that is right. (I defend at length the idea that this is the Bible's own understanding of the word "gospel" in two essays: "The Gospel's Hard Edge" [June 20, 2014] and "The Gospel Is Something You Obey" [June 22, 2014]). True statements and right commandments have this in common: they don't care (if I may put it that way) whether you benefit by believing or obeying them. They remain just as they are no matter what their effect upon you and no matter what you do with them. Your potential benefit cannot render a false statement true or an evil commandment good. Neither can your potential detriment impeach a truth or invalidate a just command.

Though we who proclaim the gospel must do so as graciously and as winsomely as we can, we must never forget that we proceed from a position of strength. Our gospel stands on the hard, unmoved and unmovable pillars of goodness and truth. Just as we would not feel it necessary to say to someone, "It would be in your best interests to save a child from a savage dog," so we need not say, "It would be in your best interests to bow the knee to Jesus Christ." (Again, it is in the person's best interests, but that is beside the point.) Moral imperatives stand alone and need no buttressing. It's, "Rescue the child!"; "Return the wallet!"; "Don't cheat!"; and, "Submit to Jesus Christ!" Truth likewise requires no support from self-interest. If I want you to believe that the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter yields a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction, I want you to believe that because it is true, not because it will do you any good.

To avoid slipping into the salesman mode that rightly repels all thoughtful communicators of the gospel, remember that - deep down - we are not so much pleading with people to buy as we are commanding them to bow. And we are proclaiming something true: Jesus Christ died on behalf of sinners, he rose again from the dead, and he reigns forever with absolute authority. The chief beneficiary of that truth is Jesus himself.

Both Son And Slave

I write to oppose some rhetoric that seems to be gaining traction in evangelical churches: the assertion that we who trust in Christ are children of God rather than slaves of God. Last week when the guest speaker at our church prayed he gave thanks that "we are sons and not slaves." My former pastor recently printed this rhetorical question from Tim Keller: "In all that I do, am I acting like a slave who is afraid of God, or like a child who is assured of my Father's love?" I have since discovered that quite a few Christians have appropriated and passed along Keller's question, and I think it merits a response.

I believe the source of the doctrine that we ought to regard ourselves as sons and not slaves comes from a misreading of Galatians 4 and Romans 8. Galatians 4:6-7 says:

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

And Romans 8:14-16 says:

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

There it is. The Bible explicitly affirms that we are "no longer slaves" and that we did not receive the "spirit of slavery". Instead, we are offspring: we are children who call God "Abba! Father!" How clear can that be? And who am I to re-introduce the idea of "slavery to God" when Scripture has abolished it?

The answer lies in the context. It is a matter of what (or Whom) you are a slave to.

Romans 8:15 says that we are not to be slaves to fear. Literally in the Greek, "You have not received a spirit of slavery unto fear again." Galatians 4:3 says we are no longer slaves to the elemental spiritual forces of the world. (A few verses later in Galatians 4:9 Paul asks, "Why are you turning back to those weak and miserable spiritual forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?"). And in Romans 6:17-18 Paul writes that we are not to be slaves to sin: "though you used to be slaves to sin...you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness."

So some kinds of slavery are bad: slavery to sin, to fear, and to elemental spiritual forces. But some kinds of slavery are good. Paul speaks highly of slavery to obedience in Romans 8:16 and slavery to righteousness in Romans 8:18.

What about slavery to God? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It is very, very good. In Romans 6:22 Paul writes: "But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life."

Paul called himself a slave of God repeatedly, using the Greek word doulos. See for example Romans 1:1: "Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—". See also Galatians 1:10, Philippians 1:1, and Titus 1:1. (The Greek word doulos is often translated as "servant". But my Greek professor Murray Harris was surely right to insist that the correct translation is "slave". In English, a "servant" is someone who works for hire and is free to quit whenever he pleases and go work for someone else. A doulos had no such freedom. A doulos was bound to his master.)

Paul was not alone describing himself as a slave of Christ. James calls himself "a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" (James 1:1). Jude likewise opens his epistle with, "Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ" (Jude 1:1). John writes that God sent his angel to "his slave John" (Revelation 1:1).

Nor was the term "slave of God" (or "slave of Christ") simply a self-designation. Paul calls Epaphras "a slave of Christ Jesus" in Colossians 4:12. Peter instructs his readers to "live as God's slaves" (1 Peter 2:16). Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 7:22 that a Christian who is politically free is nevertheless "a slave of Christ".

We can go further. Jesus insists that his disciples regard themselves as slaves of God even when they have been perfectly obedient: "So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have only done our duty.’" (Luke 17:10).

In a moving example of submission to God's will, the young virgin Mary responds to Gabriel's message in Luke 1:38 with, "I am the slave [Greek doule, feminine doulos] of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” The angel does not correct her. He does not say, "Mary! You're not a doule of the Lord - you're a thugater [daughter] of the Lord!" Mary had chosen the right word and had the right self-perception. What was right for Mary is right for us. We anticipate the day when, by God's grace, we will hear for ourselves the words he will say to every obedient subject: "Well done, good and faithful slave" (Matthew 25:23).

But how is our status of slavery to be reconciled with our status of sonship? Because indeed there are plenty of Bible verses that affirm us as sons and daughters of God. John 1:11: "To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God." 1 John 3:1: "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God."

The simple answer is that no reconciliation is necessary because we have dual status. We are both sons and slaves. It is comparable to the dual nature of Christ: he is both human and divine, and neither of his two natures negates or nullifies the other. Christian orthodoxy does not permit us to say, "Jesus isn't God, he's human", or, "Jesus isn't human, he's God." He's both, and Christians have been comfortable affirming his two natures for 2000 years.

So also must we be comfortable affirming our two natures as children of God and slaves of God. These two natures manifest themselves in two of the most common biblical words we use for Deity: "Father" and "Lord". We call him Father because we are his offspring, and we call him Lord ("Master") because we are his slaves. The Christian disciple utters no contradiction and feels no tension when he says, "God is my Master and I fear him, and he is my Father and I love him. He commands me as his slave, and he loves me as his son."

The danger of Keller's rhetorical question is that it invites us to smother our identity as slave with the pillow of our identity as son. "Child" and "slave" are set in opposition to each other, and it is urged upon us as a spiritual duty to make sure that "child" wins. I deny that this approach is biblical or helpful. When Keller asks, "In all that I do, am I acting like a slave who is afraid of God, or like a child who is assured of my Father's love?", I answer, "Both!" Jesus commands me to call myself a slave in Luke 17:10, and he commands me to be afraid of God in Luke 12:5 ("But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.") This fearful respect for God and humble self-regard as his slave lives side-by-side in the mind of the mature believer with a shining love for God and an exultant delight in being his child.

I think you will find that circumstances often dictate the appropriate mode of relating to God on any particular day. When life presents you with temptations to defy the will of God - to rebel, in attitude or action, against that which he has ordained - then it is good to think, following the example of the Virgin Mary, "I am the Lord's slave. I will do as he says, and I will accept what he gives." But when life grieves you with doubt and challenges you to despair, then it is good to think, "By his grace alone I am still a child of God. He loves me."

Please Subpoena My Sermons

A great hue and cry has arisen from some people in the Christian community over the fact that "the city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor."

I can't understand the outrage. What in the world is wrong with Christians who complain about this demand for their sermons? Such a subpoena should be a cause of rejoicing, not dismay.

I would to God that someone would subpoena all my sermons. I am not embarrassed about what I have said from the pulpit. As the Apostle Paul wrote, "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ" (Romans 1:16). I preach "Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2), and work hard to present "the whole counsel of God" (Acts 20:27). Nothing I have said in my sermons (there are a couple on YouTube), or written here on this blog, is meant to be private communication that must be shielded by law from nosy people. Good heavens - the whole point of preaching is that it is meant to be public. The more people who hear it, the better. The sorrow of any true servant of God is not that too many people listen to his message, but too few!

A preacher who believes what he says to be important and true wants everyone to hear it - friend and foe alike. I believe that those who feel differently have no business in the pulpit.

"But," someone might ask, "what if turning over my sermons to government authorities results in persecution?"

So much the better! Remember in Whose steps you walk. Jesus' preaching resulted in crucifixion. And his apostles, when they preached his gospel and were beaten for it, "rejoiced that God had counted them worthy to suffer disgrace for the name of Jesus" (Acts 5:41).

Preachers, make your sermons public or do not preach them. If those messages are ever demanded of you, give thanks to God, comply, and rejoice.

Can You Be A Christian If You Don't Want To Be Good?

Can you be a Christian if you don't want to be good?

No. You can't. If you do not want to be good, you will have to pick a different religion. Christianity is not for you.

Recently I heard someone say, "Everyone wants to be good," but I'm not sure I agree. I think most of us prefer satisfaction to goodness. More than anything, we want peace, pleasure, contentment, joy, happiness, and freedom from pain. If being good is compatible with those ends, we can endure it. If being good is a means to those ends, we can positively embrace it. But what if there is a conflict? What if there is a choice between goodness and satisfaction, and we find that we must sacrifice the one to gain the other?

Pastor Stuart Briscoe once asked a little girl, "If you could choose between being happy, being healthy, and being holy, which would you choose?" She said, "I know the answer is 'holy', but I'd really rather be happy." He delighted in her honesty, and thanked her for it.

If we would be as honest with ourselves as that girl was with Briscoe, we would admit that when happiness and holiness contend with each other for supremacy in our hearts, happiness often proves the stronger. Holiness - even the desire for holiness - seems to require a special measure of grace. But though our desire for holiness may be weak, we know that it ought to be strong. Like the little girl, we know what the right answer is.

The other night on Jimmy Kimmel six random men were interviewed and asked whether they had seen the stolen photos of nude celebrities that some hacker had made available. Five said that they had seen them, or planned to. A sixth said no, but his motive was unique. He had tried to take naked photos of his wife, but she had objected, saying that the pictures might become public. If he looked at the celebrity photos, he reasoned, it would justify her objection! Interesting man.

Before showing the video clip of these six interviews, Kimmel made a revealing comment. He said, concerning the photos, "There has been a lot of debate about whether it is even wrong to look at them. It is wrong, by the way..."

It is? It is actually, truly wrong to look at such things? I agree with Kimmel: it is wrong. But note how quickly that parenthetical acknowledgement of right behavior gave way to relieved guffaws as shameless men confessed their indulgence without guilt. Holiness is a hot coal that we may tap briefly, but then we withdraw our hand lest it start to burn.

Because the desire for goodness is rare, fleeting, easily suppressed, and easily confused with the desire to appear to be good, wherever we find a spark of that innocent yearning for goodness we must surround it with tinder, fan it into a flame, and stoke it desperately to keep it alive. Desire goodness. Want to be holy. Or, if you cannot go that far yet, then desire to want to be holy. Take that tiniest first step.

If you do not feel that you have within you a deep desire for goodness, may I try to awaken it in you? Try to imagine what it would be like if you were good. What would it be like if you were always honest, kind, selfless, gracious, pure, and diligent? What if you could respond to every challenge, loss, insult, pain, threat and disappointment with undaunted courage and perfect generosity of spirit? What if you could sympathize with those who suffer and always act in the wisest way to alleviate their pain? What if you could celebrate the happiness of others, and never feel the sting of jealousy or regret that their special joy would be a thing forever beyond your reach? What if you were perfectly reliable? What if you could be that utterly dependable fortress of character to whom the weak fly for refuge and encouragement?

Note that I did not say a word above about being happy, or being loved or respected, or having money or success. I am trying to see if you hunger and thirst (or at least are willing to try to hunger and thirst) for something Christians call "righteousness". Is goodness a delight for you all by itself, a thing to be treasured and hunted down and cherished for its own sake? Or have I only succeeded in provoking you - if somehow you have had the patience to read this far - to shrug your shoulders and say, "Uhh, I don't know. What good would goodness do me?"

Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Matthew 5:6). If you would be good, come to Jesus, believe in him, and say a prayer to him asking for the grace to become his disciple. If you do not want to be good - or, if you think you are good enough already just as you are - then I'm afraid there is little Jesus can do for you. In the Bible, Jesus had an unnerving tendency to dismiss people who felt they were righteous enough without him.

A Gospel Tract of the Christian Religion

We did not make ourselves, and we did not arise from nothing out of random chance. God made us. He made everything, and we are one of the things he made.

Because God made us, he owns us. We belong to him. As a man who makes a machine owns that machine, so God owns us.

But we are not like machines because we have a will. That is because God put something like his spirit into us. The Bible says that we are made in God’s image. We are not God, but we are like God in that we have the ability to think and to choose.

The Bible says that from the very beginning we have chosen badly. That is why the world as a whole and we as individuals are such a mess. God made us in order that he might love us and that we might love him. The Bible says that God is love. But our refusal to love God - our rebellion against him - has broken the relationship between him and us. Though God loves us, our bad behavior has opened up a gulf between him and us that we cannot cross.

But God did not abandon us to our misery and sin. The solution he devised for our wretched condition apart from him is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The Bible says he became one of us. Like a playwright becoming a character in his own play, God in the person of Jesus inhabited a human body and walked among us.

And he did so for an amazing purpose: so that he could die at our hands. The Bible says that Jesus came “to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus died a cruel death by torture on a Roman cross. The Bible describes his death as God’s way of bearing our sins. God himself absorbed our rebellion and hatred and selfishness and experienced the death that results from it.

Then Jesus rose from the dead. As a man, Jesus could die, but as God he could not remain dead. The Bible says he lives forever, and it describes him as the first of all who will some day rise from the dead.

The Bible says that Jesus reigns forever as king and master. It also says that all who believe in him are rescued from their rebellion against God. God saves from their sin all who trust in Jesus and acknowledge him as their king.

Believe in Jesus. Confess your sin to God and he will forgive it. Be baptized as a sign that you believe in Jesus and wish to follow him.

If you have further questions or concerns, please write to me, Paul, at paullundquist7@gmail.com.

Why Contemplate The Cross?

The other day I watched a video of a guy playing a kazookeylele and singing "The Final Countdown" loudly and off-key. (A kazookeylele combines a keyboard, a ukelele, and a kazoo.) I laughed hard and showed it to my wife, who could not understand why I found something so annoying to be so funny. So I sent a link of the video to my son, figuring that since he gets half his DNA from me (a fact he may regret but cannot deny), he would laugh too.

But when I talked to him on the phone he said that he watched the kazookeyleleist right after seeing Team USA member Paul George get his leg gruesomely broken in an exhibition basketball game. The video of that injury was so disturbing that he wasn't in a frame of mind to chortle over some mindless buffoonery. Bad timing, I guess.

I told my son that I had not seen the Paul George injury. I can't watch those things. To this day I've never seen the famous Joe Theismann or Kevin Ware bone-breaks. Whenever a sportscast shows a player twisting his ankle, I look away. Call me a wimp, and I'll agree with you. Mine is a sensitive nature. Though the main reason I've never seen The Passion Of The Christ is because I object to actors portraying Jesus, it is also true that my spirit erupts with profoundest discomfort whenever I see someone getting beaten. The book Unbroken is one of the best I've read in a while, but I won't see the movie version. I can't imagine sitting there watching poor Louie Zamperini get tortured in a Japanese POW camp for an hour or more.

Christians are sometimes accused of morbidity because of our weird obsession with the agonizing death that Jesus suffered on the cross. Why focus on that? Why are we so into pain?

Well, I'm not into pain. My cowardice and extreme sensitivity, though embarrassing to me, serve to deflect suspicion that I might be guilty of sadism or masochism. That can't be it. I'm no voyeur. I cannot bear the thought of experiencing, inflicting, or even observing great physical distress. I'd rather watch a kazookeyleleist any day.

So why think about Jesus on the cross? Two reasons occur to me. The first is the obvious one, that contemplating the cross of Christ reminds me of the wrath of God toward sin and of his love for me, the sinner. On the cross, God took upon God the brutality, ugliness, corruption and outrage of the whole writhing mass of humanity at its most foul. Evil - including my evil - met its match at the cross of Jesus, and was swallowed up in his love.

There is another reason too, and it is kind of related to my son's inability to laugh right after watching Paul George get hurt. Certain scenes temper our spirits and deepen us, and it is good for us to allow those things to affect us that way lest we spend our whole lives splashing about in a shallow pool of fluff and nonsense. I don't think that regular contemplation of the cross of Christ will - or should - diminish our joy or impair our ability to indulge in occasional giddy romps of clowning around. In fact, it has always seemed to me that devout Christians laugh more than anyone else I know.

But contemplating the cross does make it a bit harder to sin. Try being a real jerk to somebody right after, in your mind's eye, spending some time at the foot of the cross of the suffering Lord Jesus. It's like giggling at comedy after watching a brutal injury - you can't do it.

I like to quote a professor of mine who interviewed evangelical scholars and administrators Kenneth Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry shortly before they died. He asked them how they had kept themselves from becoming proud because of their prominent roles in scholarly evangelical witness and influence in the latter half of the 20th century. By what means of grace had God preserved in them the spirit of charity, humility and good will? They sputtered in their embarrassment, till at last Henry answered, "How can anyone be arrogant at the foot of the cross?"

C. S. Lewis On The Conditionality Of Love

In The Horse and His Boy, King Peter asks his sister, Queen Susan, if she plans to marry her boyfriend, Prince Rabadash. She answers, "No, brother, not for all the jewels in Tashbaan." Now that she has gotten to know Rabadash better, she sees that he is a bad person. Peter replies, "Truly, sister, I should have loved you the less if you had taken him." Peter could not figure out why she had ever liked him in the first place.

Most evangelicals today find morally repugnant any sentence that begins with the words, "I should have loved you the less if...". They would regard Peter as a terrible man for letting his love for his sister rise or fall in response to her moral performance. But Peter does not apologize for saying it, and Susan is not offended by it, and C. S. Lewis, who wrote the dialogue, clearly regards the sentiment as valid. All three believe that Peter would not have sinned by loving his sister less if she had knowingly married a bad man. (What might have motivated her to marry that villain? His money and good looks? For shame.) Peter rejoiced to see his sister choosing wisely, and that enabled him to love her more than he could have had she succumbed to baser motivations of wealth and appearance. The degree of his love was frankly conditional. It was set, at least in part, to the gauge of her moral behavior.

Christians in former times understood this principle, and, as best as I have been able to determine, never challenged it. The better the person, the more you can love him. Christians likewise understood that the better person you are yourself, the more you are able to love someone else. In 1649, Richard Lovelace, explaining to his girlfriend Lucasta why he had to leave her to go fight in battle, wrote, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more." That is a profound insight into the nature of love and its degrees. Because Lovelace loved honor more than he loved Lucasta, he was able to love her more than he could have had he been a coward. Righteous behavior increases love in all directions.

Lamentably, leading voices in evangelicalism over the past 30 years have labored to sever this intuitive and long-cherished connection between goodness and love. They have taken rhetorical sledgehammers to the mortar that binds the increase of love to the increase of moral excellence. They have been so successful in dismantling this conditional aspect of love that they have rendered the words of wise King Peter repulsive to the modern Christian ear. This is a bad thing.

Peter is not the only victim. So also is Sarah Smith, the holiest character apart from Aslan that C. S. Lewis ever dreamed up. In The Great Divorce, Sarah is dead on earth but wonderfully alive in heaven, where she meets with her newly arrived husband Frank. Frank is a damned soul and a selfish jerk who is only visiting Paradise so he can rebuke it. He hides behind a false front, a Tragedian actor, who does the talking for him. As Frank resists Sarah's invitation to leave pretense behind and begin an ascent to the higher mountains of heaven, he becomes smaller and smaller until he disappears completely into his spokesman. Sarah then says to this facade:

"Where is Frank? And who are you, Sir? I never knew you. Perhaps you had better leave me. Or stay, if you prefer. If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me."

The Tragedian responds, "You do not love me."

She answers, "I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go."

Sarah's love is conditional. She can only love Frank if he truly is, and he cannot be unless he repents. When he has so identified with corruption as to be subsumed into it then there will be no real person left to love. But if he fulfills the condition of repentance then he will become more solid and more lovable. If he disappears into evil, then her love also, of necessity, will disappear. Neither God nor his saints can love evil.

The notion of becoming more lovable is a constant theme in Lewis. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes that God's love "must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labor to make us more lovable." God, in love, works to expunge from us the things that keep him from loving us even more. Good pet owners do this to their dogs. Lewis writes that a man "interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely." Because the dog is "so nearly lovable...it is worth his while to make it fully lovable." So stand we in relation to God.

Regrettably, the current rhetorical climate in evangelicalism renders it nearly impossible to make this point. Week after week in pulpit after pulpit we are told, "God loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do can make him love you any more or less than he does now." I have witnessed the indoctrination of this profoundly unbiblical teaching firsthand, and have almost despaired of getting Christians to read their Bibles and believe what it actually says - repeatedly! - about the love of God. (For detailed Scriptural documentation, please see the August 30, 2012 post, "God's Conditional Love".) The depth of the problem might be illustrated by a book we're reading at the church I attend. Amazingly, in a book co-authored by a C. S. Lewis scholar(!), there is a barrage of affirmations that God's love is unconditional, including this doozy: "The good news is that [God] loves us, and His love is not conditioned on our behavior. It is not increased by our performance nor diminished by our failures."

Oh well - what can you do? God is not dead, but sometimes I fear that sound theology is.

Listen, this is important. If you choose to become proud, petulant, cowardly, lazy, impure, greedy, unkind, selfish, covetous, undisciplined or dishonest, God will not love you exactly the same as he always has. That is a lie of the devil, and I beg you to oppose it as firmly as our Lord opposed Peter's satanic resistance to his march to the cross. So what if you heard it from your pastor, whom you know to be a good man, and so what if it made you feel really good inside when you heard it. Error is error no matter how captivating it sounds and no matter how worthy is the man who spouts it. C. S. Lewis taught the right thing about God's love - though he did little more than express ordinary biblical truth and the consensus of 19 centuries of Christian tradition. It is in our day that Christian teaching about God's love has gone off the rails. Here is the truth: God so loves us that he longs to remove every impediment that keeps him from loving us more. If you rebel against his will and become morally corrupt, then, though you comfort yourself all day long with the devil's lie, "God loves me just the same as ever!", that will not make it true. Be warned. There exist real-life Frank Smiths who, defying God and loving only themselves, render themselves unlovable.

But it does not have to be that way. Be encouraged: there are also Sarah Smiths, who, holy as they are and holier than you or I will ever be, still have not fully plumbed the depths of the love of God. There remains yet more of it before them - more of it before you and me, and every step of obedience will draw us deeper into it and swell our hearts in joyous celebration of the fact that God's love, great as it was, has grown greater still.

A Christian Welcome To M. Ward's "Chinese Translation"

You are in for a treat if you go to YouTube now and listen to the song Chinese Translation by M. Ward. Spoiler alert: below I talk about how the song turns out. If you have not heard it, it would be better to listen to it first and let its cleverness hit you fresh.

A young man goes searching for answers and winds up at the top of a tall, tall mountain where an old, old man will respond to three questions. He asks the wise man,

What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
How can a man like me remain in the light?
If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

The old man answers:

See I once was a young fool like you, afraid to do the things that I knew I had to do. So I played an escapade just like you. I played an escapade just like you.

He explains that he too had once sailed a wild, wild sea and climbed a tall, tall mountain where he found an old, old man and asked the same three questions. And that old man proceeded to give the same answer he was giving now. When he was a young fool...

One perceives that the same quest had been going on since there were wild seas for young men to sail on and tall mountains for old men to meditate on.

The beauty of the song is that it actually contains an answer, it actually shows the way forward to the bewildered and heartsick youth. The answer is in the old man's prologue to his tale. He explains that what spawned his quest was the fact that he was afraid to do the things that he knew he had to do. Rather than doing his duty, he "played an escapade". That is, he went on a wild and foolish adventure that was - truth be told - nothing more than an escape from the moral obligations that stared him in the face. (The word escapade comes from the word "escape".)

When you flee duty, you'll try to justify your flight as "a search for answers" or a lofty quest to "discover yourself and your purpose." But that is just a cruel joke you're playing on yourself. Small wonder you wind up confused and heartbroken. Instead, do the things that you know you are supposed to do - even if they are troublesome and inconvenient or require the kind of courage that you just don't feel you have. Do what you ought. Repent of your sin. Embrace goodness. Do the simple thing that is right in front of you that you have been putting off. In so doing, you will find that you have already arrived at the goal of the quest you thought you needed to go on. The questions that you had will either be answered or will lose their relevance. Joy and wisdom lie in the path of the one who simply puts down one obedient foot after another.

I myself know very well what to do with the pieces of a broken heart. My own heart has been mashed to bits more than once - more than twice, now that I think about it. I am the last person in the world to say that I have succeeded in re-assembling those broken bits through the shockingly simple expedient of doing the things that I knew I had to do. But I know that is where the answer lies. It is all of a piece with what my Lord Jesus Christ taught when he said, "Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own" (John 7:17). Jesus affirmed that the choice to do God's will would precede the assurance that his own teachings were anything more than the platitudes of an itinerant Jewish carpenter. Do good, and you will know.

A Message To Atheist Friends

Assume that those of you who are atheists are right and there is no God. Let me further assume that you have led a relatively comfortable life. By "relatively" I mean compared to the world population through the history of human existence. You live in America or some other prosperous nation, you have not known famine or plague, you do not experience daily chronic pain, your family was not wiped out in a disaster, you have not spent years in slavery or in prison for a crime you did not commit. The society you call home is closer to Lake Wobegone where "the men are handsome, the women are strong, and the children are above average" than it is to hellholes in the Congo where the men die violently, the women are raped, and the children have AIDS.

I give you a microphone, comfortable and correct atheist. What would you like to say to those who really suffer?

I ask because I have found some of you to be mean-spirited and cruel to people who experience soul-crushing sorrows that you have been spared and can only imagine. I know it is not your intention to be mean. On the contrary, you think you're compassionate. I do not assail your motive, nor accuse you of perverse and deliberate cruelty. I am merely accusing some of you of thoughtless and casual cruelty.

Case in point: the following comments from a former minister, presumably now an atheist, that were recently posted on the website "Humans of New York":

It doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their suffering. And that's just cruel.

Is it? Is it cruel, as this man insists, to say, "there is a purpose to their suffering"?

There is a question I would like to ask him. "Sir, do you actually think it is kinder, instead, to say that there is no purpose to their suffering?" Think about it. I think you're the cruel one here. Telling a sufferer there is no purpose to his pain is like booting a cup of cold water out of the hands of man dying of thirst. Why deny him his only possible hope, his only source of comfort? Is your truth of hopeless despair so important to you that you cannot rest until those who are miserable embrace it as you do, and relinquish their grip on the only thing that might give them joy? Your proselytism for purposelessness does not merely kick a man when he's down - it stomps all over him until his ribs are crushed and he cannot breathe. Do you then walk away with a clean conscience, glad that you disabused the tortured soul of his stupid delusion that someday his life would make sense? Is that kind of you, or cruel?

A commenter piled on. She wrote,

Yesterday a 3 year old child was crushed by a security gate at a Rita's Water Ice here in Philadelphia. And in the comments on the news article, so many people said "its so sad, but it happened for a reason" and I'm like what possible reason could there be to crush a child's skull with a security gate while she was waiting in line to get some ice cream. Bullshit. That's what it is, bullshit.

This commenter and I probably share the good fortune of never having seen one of our children's skulls crushed before our eyes. It is a pain beyond our reckoning. We can only try - and fail - to imagine the devastation. But my question to this commenter is, "Why in the world do you want to compound the parents' misery now? Who gave you the right? Was your child mangled to death in an unspeakably gruesome accident? Did you suffer this loss? How dare you proselytize now and seek to shove your despairing misery down other people's throats! The parents who lost this child in all probability feel a grief that robs every waking moment of its potential for light and joy. And you choose this moment to chip in with your, 'And there was no purpose to it, by the way. Just random pain and grief. No hope. No redemption. The pain your child experienced in the moments before death and the fathomless grief you experience now have no point to them and never will. And any other view is just bullshit.'"

Wow. Thanks, atheist. You've been a tremendous help. If my son had died in this accident, I would find your contribution to be about as welcome as those "God-Hates-Fags" signs carried by sons of hell from Westboro Baptist "Church" at the funerals of military heroes. It seems that some hate-filled people - whether they hate gays or the idea of God - just do not know how to keep their big fat mouths shut.

I find something sinister in the eagerness with which certain atheists seek to dismantle the hope of those who have suffered immeasurably more than they. What could possibly motivate such passionate diatribes? One suspects an underlying current of, "Because I do not believe there is purpose behind suffering, I cannot bear to see others find purpose behind their suffering. No! They must abandon it. When they suffer, they must suffer hopelessly. Their pain must never know the mitigating balm of faith in a purpose that will render meaningful their miserable lives and miserable futures." Do such nihilists gain satisfaction from extinguishing others' hope? Have they really sunk that low?

It's enough to make you think there's a devil after all.

The Gospel Is Something You Obey

Here is my second complaint against the often-repeated evangelical slogan, "The gospel isn't good advice, it's good news."

This slogan strikes me as a deliberate and misguided attempt to strip the gospel message of its imperative force and turn it into something merely indicative. I will first explain these grammatical terms.

The indicative mood is a statement of reality, as in the sentence, "The door is shut." This statement is either true or false, depending on whether the door is really shut. It is "news" - and as news, it is a report that can either be believed or disbelieved. If I say to you, "The door is shut," you can either believe me or disbelieve me.

The imperative mood is a command to do something, as in the sentence, "Shut the door." This statement, as it stands, is neither true nor false. Instead, it is a command that can either be obeyed or disobeyed. If I tell you, "Shut the door," you can either obey me or disobey me.

Now consider a combination of the two. Suppose I say, "Shut that door that is now open." Grammatically the sentence is still an imperative, a command to do something. But I buried an indicative in there too. The relative clause after the word "door" is indicative; I'm affirming that the door is now open, and that is a statement you can either believe or disbelieve.

Here is a question I would like all preachers of the gospel to consider (and answer correctly!): "Is gospel proclamation indicative, imperative, or a combination of both?"

In recent years, I have noticed that many capable and orthodox expositors of the Word have been eager to insist that the gospel is merely indicative, that it is news and only news. In this characterization, the gospel is not a matter of what you should do (imperative) but what has been done (indicative). What has been done is that God has appeased his own wrath and accomplished our salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Complex God. Jesus bore our sins on the cross, died, and rose again on the third day. Now he reigns forever as King and Lord of all.

You will notice that there is not a single imperative in the above paragraph. It is 100% indicative. My question is, "If we proclaim the news in that paragraph, have we preached the gospel as the Bible understands the word "gospel"? Can you call it "gospel" if there is no command to submit, surrender, repent, obey?

I know that many colleagues in the ministry will answer with a resounding "Yes!" The gospel to them is purely what God has done and never something that he commands us to do. To be sure, there are still commandments out there - you ought to be faithful to your spouse, for example - but those are not part of the gospel. Behaving well and shunning evil are things you do in response to the purely indicative gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now I believe I have detected what I regard to be some rhetorical fudging when evangelical teachers of this persuasion gravitate to the word "respond" or the phrase "in response to". Remember that for them the gospel is news, mere news. It is like the sentence, "The door is shut." Now imagine the following interchange:

"The door is shut!"
"Ok, good, the door is shut. Got it."
"Well, don't you think that maybe you should respond to the news that the door is shut by getting up and doing something about it? Like, say, opening a window perhaps?"
"Very well. But why didn't you just tell me in the first place to open the window?"
"Because that's advice, and my message is not advice but news. Everyone else gives advice and commandments about what you have to do. Not me! I don't tell you what you must do but declare to you the news of what has been done. Here is the news of what's been done: 'The door is shut.' And now, maybe, you really ought to consider what would be an appropriate way to respond to that news and live your life in accordance with its truth. Because if you really believed that the door was shut, I'd expect to see a response."
"Like opening the window?"
"Exactly."
"Because if I don't I'll suffocate and die?"
"Right again."
"Ok, look, for clarity's sake, the next time you do this, could you just tell a guy to open the window? Maybe you could say something like, 'The door is shut, but the window is unlocked. Go open it, and you will breathe and live.'"
"Can't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because you included a command regarding what the person has to do in order to live. I insist that my message is not about what people have to do, but what's been done. The door is shut and the window is unlocked. That's the message. And now, well, yeah, of course there really ought to be a response to that message that will just flow naturally out of gratitude and logic."
"You mean like obedience to a command?"
"STOP CALLING IT A COMMAND!"

And that is why I don't like the word "respond". It's much too weasely. It seems to be hiding the imperative that we all know is there but that some are reluctant to acknowledge. The phrase, "respond to the news" is safer for some preachers than the stark, "obey the order." But to those who insist on using the soft term "respond", I would like to ask, "Do you believe that people have to respond to the gospel?" If so, then obviously it's a lot more than news. You never have to respond to news. You only have to obey commands.

And the gospel is, in part, a command. I believe I can prove that from Scripture. Three New Testament texts refer to obedience to the gospel. They are below:

But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?”
(Romans 10:16)

...when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
(2 Thessalonians 1:7b-8)

For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?
(1 Peter 4:17)

There, in a nutshell, is why the gospel necessarily includes an imperative element. You cannot disobey an indicative, you can only disbelieve it. But an imperative - an order, a command - is something you can obey or disobey. An indicative is something you accept or deny, but an imperative is something you submit to or rebel against. In the Bible, the gospel is something you believe and obey, something you accept and submit to. The best way to persuade yourself of this is to do what I have done: get a Greek concordance and read, in context, every occurrence of euangelion (gospel) and euangelizomai (preach the gospel). The thesis that the gospel is news and only news will not survive this scrutiny. The gospel as the New Testament presents it is an imperative-indicative mix, as in the example sentence, "Shut that door that now is open." Gospel news is embedded in gospel imperative. In practical terms, it looks something like, "Bow the knee and surrender your life to the Son of God who died and rose again on your behalf."

When preachers say, "The gospel isn't good advice; it's good news," and, "all other religions give you advice about what to do, but Christianity gives you news about what has already been done", I'm afraid they're making a royal mess of the gospel. The word "advice" in that slogan seems to be an oddly dismissive way of referring to a sober command. Of course we don't "advise". But we do command in the name of the Lord. And if we have not done so, then we have not preached the gospel. The gospel is good news and it is good commandment. The gospel is something you believe and something you obey.

The Gospel's Hard Edge

"The gospel is not good advice - it's good news!"

It seems to me that the above slogan went viral in the evangelical world after Gospel Coalition co-founder Tim Keller expounded upon it at a conference in 2007. Keller referred to a sermon some decades ago where Martyn Lloyd-Jones explained, "Advice is counsel about something to do. It hasn’t happened yet, but you can do it. News is a report about something that has happened. You can’t do anything about it - it’s been done for you and all you can do is respond to it.” Keller went on to illustrate the point with the metaphor of the aftermath of a military victory. He said,

Here is a king and he goes into a battle against an invading army to defend his land. If the king defeats the invading army he sends back to the capital city messengers, very happy messengers. He sends back “good news-ers”. What they come back with is a report. They come back and they say, “It has been defeated! It’s all been done! Therefore respond with joy and conduct your lives in this peace which has been achieved for you.”

But if the invading army breaks through, the king sends back military advisers and says, “Swordsmen over here and marksmen over here and the horsemen over here. We’re going to have to fight for our lives.” Dr. Lloyd-Jones says that every other religion sends military advisers to people. Every other religion says, “You know, if you want your salvation, you’re going to have to fight for your life.” Every other religion is sending advice, saying, “Here are the rites, here are the rituals, and here are the laws and regulations. Earthen works over here, marksmen over here. Fight for your life.”

Not long after Keller gave his message, evangelical pulpits exploded with variations on the theme, "The gospel is not good advice - it's good news!" I heard it dozens of times. Typically the theme is developed this way: "The gospel is not about things you have to do but about what has been done. If you think about what you have to do you'll be motivated by fear rather than gratitude." Fear, then, is usually denounced as an unchristian provocation to goodness. As Keller explained, "one is a response of joy, and one is a response of fear. All other religions give advice, and they drive everything you’re doing on fear."

I find two problems with the Keller/Lloyd-Jones characterization of the gospel. Lord willing I will deal with the second in an upcoming essay.

The first involves a stunningly unreflective assumption about the audience to whom gospel proclamation is made. Note that in the illustration above the victorious king has sent "good news-ers" back to the capital city, that is, back to the side that will certainly win. Happy indeed are the messengers who report victory to the king's loyal subjects in Capital City. These joyful subjects can celebrate the good news and get to work, motivated not by fear of failure but by the assurance that the conflict will end in their favor, that long life will be theirs, and peace will reign. For this audience of gospel proclamation, the Keller/Lloyd-Jones rhetoric works very well.

But my question is, "Is all the world a Capital City filled with the King's loyal subjects?"

No. Not at all. Not in the least. In Philippians 3:18-19 the Apostle Paul writes, "For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things." These are not friends of the King who should have no fear because the forces of evil have suffered a crucial defeat and victory is assured. Though there will be victory, it is not for them. Having allied themselves with evil, their end is destruction.

Now a second question. "When you read the Bible and you see the gospel being proclaimed, who is being addressed - the King's subjects or the King's enemies?"

Both! The answer is both. And believe me, when the King's enemies are given the gospel, they are not told, "Rejoice! Don't be afraid! I don't want you to be motivated by fear or anything. It's all been done for you." The people whom Paul labels "enemies of the cross of Christ" are not given a gospel that Keller defines as "a message that it’s all been done for you, that it’s a historical event that’s happened, your salvation is accomplished for you." Instead, they are commanded, "Fear God. Surrender. Repent." Contrary to Keller, they are not comforted with the joyful message that their salvation is accomplished but rather terrified with the fearful threat that condemnation hangs over their damned heads. If that does not frighten you, then I do not believe you have understood the gospel.

The point is worth documenting with some actual New Testament usages of the words euangelion ("gospel") and euangelizomai ("gospelize", "preach the gospel").

Luke 3:18 says, "with many other exhortations he [John the Baptist] preached good news ('gospelized') to the people." Read the verses preceding and succeeding verse 18, and you will see what John's gospel involved. It included warnings about judgment and commandments about what his listeners needed to do. "You brood of vipers!" he cried. "Bear fruits in keeping with repentance" (verses 7-8). "Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire" (verse 9). When asked by people what they should do, he gave real answers. To those with means he said, "Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none" (verse 11). To tax collectors he said, "Collect no more than you are authorized to do" (verse 13). To soldiers he said, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages" (verse 14). The one thing he didn't say - as far as we know - was, "Rejoice, and don't be motivated by fear. All other religions of the world try to motivate you with fear. I'm here to tell you the good news that it's all been done for you - or, rather, soon everything will be done for you once Jesus dies on the cross." In all the sermons that the Bible records, both before and after the crucifixion of Jesus, the gospel is never preached that way.

I believe that the next verse, Luke 3:19, gives an example of what it may look like to "gospelize" an individual who deliberately chooses to hold God in contempt. It says that John reproved Herod for adultery and "all the evil things that Herod had done." Warning is also gospel.

Luke 2:10 contains an instructive use of "gospelize". There it looks like good news pure and simple. An angel appears to shepherds and announces the birth of Jesus, saying, "I bring you good tidings (euangelizomai) of great joy." The Savior was born. And that certainly was happy news for worthy shepherds, even as it was for Simeon and Anna later in the chapter (verses 25-38), and for "those with whom he [God] is pleased" (verse 14). They were promised peace.

But how did the exact same news sound in the ears of Herod the Great? It was a nightmare. He was troubled rather than joyful when he heard that a king had been born in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:3). His reign of terror was over. Like a crazed Saddam Hussein he ordered the slaughter of all the baby boys in the region in a vain attempt to eliminate his rival (verse 16). The point worth dwelling upon is that the same gospel proclamation was a blessing for some (Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, Simeon, Anna) and a curse for others (Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Caiaphas, and the hopelessly corrupt religious establishment). It is precisely parallel to the "aroma-of-Christ" metaphor that the Apostle Paul develops in 2 Corinthians 2:15-16: "For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life." Our message is cherry blossoms to some and mustard gas to others.

Now consider the gospel-preaching angel in Revelation 14:6-7:

Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel (euangelion) to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, "Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water."

Let it be noted how far this angel's gospel is from the one that says, "Don't be motivated by fear. I'm not here to give you advice about how to be right with God. All other religions do that. No, I'm telling you the joyful news that it's already all been done for you, your salvation has already been accomplished." This angel does not dismiss the fear of God but commands it! And in addition to commanding the fear of the Lord, he tells his audience two things they must do: give glory to God and worship him who made heaven and earth. If they do not do that, they will not be saved. Read the rest of Revelation 14 to see what happens to them.

Fellow preachers, know your audience and take them into account when you tailor the gospel message to them. Do not say to enemies of the cross what must only be affirmed to loyal subjects of the King. To the penitent malefactor Jesus said, "Today you will be with me in paradise" - and that is the kind of joyous news we can share with all who humble themselves and who beg Jesus for mercy. But to those who are like the man on the other side of the cross, the one who dismissed Jesus with contempt, the gospel begins with sober words of warning like the dagger of a question that the crucified sinner dared to pose to his counterpart: "Don't you fear God?"

Is The Gospel Good News?

The news that came out of Normandy on June 6 1944 was widely celebrated. The allies had routed the Germans and taken the beaches, and in the next few days more than 300,000 American and British soldiers established themselves on French soil. Effectively this meant that World War II in Europe was over. It was just a matter of time. There were still battles to fight and casualties to suffer, but the final outcome of the war could not be in doubt. The allies would march through France and Belgium and the Netherlands, and in less than a year Hitler would be dead and Berlin taken and surrender achieved. So, even though there was plenty of suffering still ahead, victors could ring the bells on June 7 and celebrate glad tidings.

Because there are several points of correspondence between the news from Normandy and the gospel of Jesus Christ, preachers have long been fond of using this victory as a sermon illustration. We have good news. Jesus Christ, crucified on behalf of sinners, has defeated death and risen from the dead. Though suffering may still lie ahead of us, eternal life has been secured and in due time we will experience its fulfillment. In the meantime, we proclaim now the good news of liberty to those held captive. Jesus is risen and will reign forever! ("Normandy has been taken and the allies are victorious!").

It's a good illustration as long as you don't press it beyond appropriate points of contact. As a teacher of mine liked to say, be careful not to make a metaphor walk on all fours. For example, in this case, we certainly would not want to indulge the military aspect of the Normandy illustration in a way that would turn Christians into jihadists who advance against the enemy of other faith traditions and subdue them by force and violence. That is not the point at all. We're about love. Jesus commanded us to love our enemies.

There is however one perfectly valid extension of the Normandy metaphor that I've never heard a preacher make, and I'd like to make it here because it has so much to do with what the gospel means and how we proclaim it.

Was the news that the allies had taken the beaches at Normandy on June 6 good news for everybody?

No. It was good news for the Americans and the British, but bad news for the Germans. It was good news for Jews in concentration camps, but bad news for their guards. Good news for the French Resistance, bad news for French Vichy collaborators. Good news for Roosevelt and Churchill, bad news for Hitler. Good news for Representative Democracy, bad news for Nazi Fascism. And so on.

In other words, though the Normandy news was the same for everybody, it was good or bad depending on who you were. To call it "good" was to tip your hand and reveal that you considered yourself to be on the winning side. But not everyone was. Nazis and all those who cooperated with them were not dancing in the streets on June 7. If they were wise and well-informed, they were quaking in fear and desperate for a chance to change sides.

Part of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it is possible to change sides. It is like the German pilot surrendering his Messerschmidt, being sworn in as an American citizen, and flying his new P-51 Mustang into battle. The Vichy mayor detaches his swastika and declares loyalty to the Resistance. The Nazi prison guard dons a striped uniform, slaps a Star of David on his chest and joins his starving Jewish brothers behind the barbed wire. Praise God, who permits and enables even his most fervent enemies to repent of their opposition to him and submit themselves in glad surrender to him and his way.

But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking - or deceive others by preaching - that the whole gospel is good news for everyone unconditionally. It is not good news for all people regardless of who they are or how they respond. According to the gospel, Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God who is risen from the dead and who will reign forever. That is not good news for people who live their lives in defiance of his authority and who refuse to repent. Frankly they would be happier in the short run and better off in the long run if Jesus were a dead fraud.

Here is the news. Jesus Christ died for sinners and rose again from the dead. He reigns forever with absolute authority, and some day every knee will bow to him. What you do with that news will determine, for you, whether it is good or bad.

Do You Know A Holy Man?

Do you know a holy man? Of all the men in your acquaintance, are there any you would describe as holy?

Here is an incomplete picture of what a holy man is like:

He cannot lie. He does not exaggerate or deceive. He will not shade the truth to gain an advantage, or make himself look good, or make you feel good.

He welcomes you with grace and good cheer.

He takes care to remain in control of himself at all times. You have never seen him drunk or high.

He does good things, but you never hear about it from him. All reports of his good deeds come from others.

He will act heroically as the occasion calls for it. He will run into a burning building or dive into icy water to save a victim. If a crazy man with a gun appears, he will try to disarm him, or if he can't, he will step in front of you to take the bullet himself.

You never even knew he had a doctorate. Or that he won a medal of valor in the military. Or set the sales record for his company. Or played in the NBA. Or wrote a best-selling book. Or was elected to state-wide office. He celebrates all your achievements but remains discreetly quiet about his own.

He is chaste: celibate if single, faithful to his wife if married. If he had to work all day every day alone with your lovely wife, sister or daughter, there would be no danger of him trying to seduce, flirt with, leer at or mistreat her. If, as a single man, he courts a woman, he does so honorably. He would never exploit a woman for the sake of sexual pleasure, but would only take her to himself physically as part of a life-long, exclusive covenant. He protects all women from himself.

He drives safely and with courtesy toward other drivers.

He won't let you bully anyone. He will intervene as softly as possible and as strongly as necessary to stop you.

If he once said, "Till death do us part", he meant it. He cannot abandon a spouse, even if she becomes difficult, contemptuous, lazy, or "doesn't take care of herself". If she develops Alzheimer's, he cares for her as best he can until she dies.

He does not indulge in needless luxuries. If he is poor, he does without instead of racking up debt. If he is rich, he gives it away.

He is very hard to offend. If you poke fun at him he will laugh at himself. If you accidentally insult him he doesn't even notice. If you deliberately insult him he is quick to forget it. He does not regale you with stories of how he was wronged.

He lets you talk too.

He refrains from promising what he cannot deliver. What he has promised, he does, even though circumstances have rendered it inconvenient for him.

He assigns to your actions the best motives that wisdom, prudence and honesty allow.

He is not vain. The idea of getting Botox injections makes him laugh out loud.

He treats people as equals. Weak people gravitate toward him, because they know he will not look down on them or ignore them.

He will read this and say, "I am not that man. But I wish I were."

Graciousness 7: Extolling The Goodness Of Others

(A continuation of an occasional series: Graciousness 1-6 are the posts on March 24, 31, April 7, 21 of 2009; May 6 and December 19 of 2011).

A homiletics teacher once noted my tendency to go negative when I wanted to make a positive point. If I were illustrating some feature of humility, for example, I was more likely to tell a story about a proud person and say, "Don't be like that" than to extol a humble person and say, "Be like him." It was a smart observation. I don't think my teacher cured me of this tendency, but he made me aware of it just enough to encourage others to laud more than they scorn. (You can leave the scorning to me. I'm gifted at it.)

Gracious people laud. They tell you about the good deeds of others, and regale you with stories of kindnesses done to them. If they must tell you, "Here is how I was mistreated," they are quick to add, "But here is how I was helped." Grace-filled people notice grace in others, and open curtains to let light illumine acts of kindness that otherwise would not be known.

Years ago I heard a black preacher addressing a mostly white audience. He had grown up in the Jim Crow South. He talked about the time he was in the army and a white soldier friend asked him for a drink from his canteen. He handed him the canteen and the soldier took a sip straight from it. The preacher was nearly moved to tears. All his life he had had to drink from the "colored" water fountain - the whites he knew would not have drunk from the same cup that his lips had touched. But this white soldier treated him as a man, a peer, a brother.

It was not till later that it occurred to me that this preacher must have had thousands of stories of indignities and injustices he had suffered. But he didn't tell us any of those. Instead he remembered, related, and celebrated with us the kindness he had known. He was a man of uncommon grace.

I once tried to encourage a woman who was mildly estranged from her mother to reach out to her, to give her a call. But the woman replied, "When I call Mom, all she does is talk my ear off about people who have treated her badly." Later I had occasion to verify that that assessment was pretty accurate. The older woman could not seem to remember any good deed, only the bad ones where she was the victim. Good things done for her went unacknowledged and were quickly forgotten. Eventually I made a mental note: be like the old black preacher, not the bitter old lady.

If you would be a gracious person, then try to do this: where you see examples of goodness, relate them to others whenever you can do so appropriately. Instinctively gracious people - like my lovely wife - seem to be able to do this without even thinking about it. But natural-born oafs need to put effort into it, like the klutz who learns to dance by mechanically planting his feet on construction-paper cutouts on the floor. It may be awkward at first, but you'll get better at it.

A Christian Speculation On Time And Eternity

My brother said that somebody asked him the other day how it could be just that a person who commits a few decades' worth of sin should be punished forever in hell. The punishment does not seem to fit the crime. Few people live long enough to sin for even 100 years. So why should they be punished for quintillions of millennia?

I recall that when I was in college a theology professor addressed this problem. He said the reason that finite sin brings about infinite punishment is because it is committed against an infinite God. It is not so much what you did but Whom you did it against. Your sin can be quantified but God cannot. I think I speak for many when I say that this solution is not intuitively satisfying.

Later a seminary professor made an intriguing suggestion. He said that, though he could not prove it conclusively from Scripture, he suspected that hell is full of people who keep on sinning. They refuse to learn, they do not repent, they choose to continue to rebel against God rather than submit to his will. So their ongoing sin is met with ongoing punishment.

He may have a point. Revelation 16:9-10 speaks of people who, though they suffer apocalyptic judgment, curse God and do not cry out to him for mercy or change their ways. They prefer opposition and its pains to submission and its joys. Maybe hell is like that.

I have another idea though that I would like to throw at the problem. It has to do with time and how we experience it. Perhaps it might prove helpful to put the question of hell's duration (or heaven's, for that matter) in the context of how we understand time.

I told my brother about a thought that popped into my head a month or so after our father passed away suddenly from a heart attack. I was a junior in high school. Our mother grieved with a sorrow inconsolable. Mom and Dad were best friends, and never in my life have I known a marriage better than theirs. So she struggled when he was taken away suddenly. She said to me through tears, "I know that this is wrong and selfish of me, but I think, 'How can he enjoy heaven now if I'm not there with him? How could that be heaven for him?'" An answer came to me in a flash. I said, "Maybe when Dad got to heaven he saw you there." I explained as best I could that, maybe, when we die, we get off the timeline of earthly history and are carried above it into an eternal state. If that is the case, then heaven is not to be understood as a place where people are arriving little by little over the course of thousands of years. Maybe the redeemed are all there at once.

She liked that answer, and I am glad that it comforted her. Is it true? I don't know. We'll find out some day. I would be the first to admit that it cannot be reconciled with literal interpretations of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 or the martyred souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9-11. But there are several orthodox doctrines that cannot be reconciled with literal readings of those texts. Everyone acknowledges they are symbolic to some degree. (For example, how can souls, which are immaterial, be "under" an altar?) The question is, "How symbolic are they, and to what extent and in which directions?" and that probably is not easy to determine. The realities of heaven and hell can only be communicated to us in terms of our earthly experience. Everything that is true about them must be transposed down to our limited categories, like a Mozart symphony played on a kazoo.

Maybe one of our limited categories is time. We experience personal reality as a succession of moments which we call time, and have difficulty even imagining any other kind of existence. But I'm pretty sure that God exists outside time. I'm pretty sure that time, like the universe itself, is something that he created and is not bound by. If the timeline of history can be imagined as the pages of a book, then we live our lives on (let's say) page 172. The previous 171 pages are history as we know it, and the following pages are, to us, future and unknown. But God holds the whole book in his hands. He can open it to any page. He can even write himself into the book as a character, as he did in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

I wonder if, when we die, we get off the pages of that book and are joined to God's eternal state. If that is true, then the reality of the afterlife is not quite like an endless series of pages in a book that is already very long. It is not like living a billion quadrillion pages followed by a billion quadrillion more. Maybe it is more like seeing that book of time, and a good many other things besides, from the perspective of a good and loving God.

Somewhere I think C. S. Lewis speaks of our experience of reality as something like traveling on a train. Suppose you get on a train and travel from Chicago to Glacier National Park, as my wife and I did a couple years ago. The scenery zips by you, and you enjoy to some extent the sights from the window as the train moves on. But that's the problem: the train always moves on. You long for it to stop, to reach its destination so you can get off and explore delights on either side of the uni-dimensional track. If heaven were as time-constrained as earth, then its endless succession of days might be compared to a train that never stops, a journey that never ends. It lasts a long time, and you never get off the track. But what if heaven were more like a destination than a journey? In this life, we can never fully explore a good moment, no matter how ecstatic it is. Every moment flits through our fingers and is converted into a memory. You can never hold on to it. Poets talk about trying to possess those moments and re-create them for the sake of ongoing joy. ("If I could save time in a bottle"; "Some day...I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight"). What if, in heaven, we don't have to take a quick snapshot of the scene outside our window and cling to the memory of it by means of a photograph because now, at last, the train has stopped and we can actually go there?

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that the afterlife is not so much a matter of endlessly succeeding days as it is a destination that is either granted by grace or deserved by sin. Its eternality, when transposed into the language of time-bound persons, becomes "lots and lots of years" because the only alternative (again, for time-bound people) is "death" or "non-existence", and it certainly isn't that.

The other day I received a jolt of joy as I listened to physicist Brian Greene explain the extraordinary implications of the nature of time as Einstein helped us to understand it. If you have ever listened to that stuff about relativity, you will know that it is practically impossible to wrap your mind around the paradoxes and anti common-sense notions that physicists now know to be true. At one point, Greene defined time as "that which allows us to see that something has changed." I saw that as a beautiful definition with theological implications that Christians can receive gladly. God does not change. James 1:17 says, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." Hebrews 13:8 says, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Our eternal God is not governed by time which, by its very nature, requires change in order to be perceived, or even to exist. Perhaps, when we die, we will not be governed by time either. Perhaps instead we will arrive at the destination that our will or his grace has chosen: wretched alienation from him, or blessed union with him.

When Does God Forgive Our Sins?

When does God forgive our sins?

One simple answer is that he forgives our sins when we confess them and turn from them. King David received this forgiveness for the terrible sins of adultery and murder. When Nathan rebuked him, David said, "I have sinned against the Lord," and Nathan replied, "The Lord has taken away your sin" (2 Samuel 12:13). In Psalm 32:5 David wrote, "I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.' And you forgave the guilt of my sin."

John the Baptist talked about God's forgiveness in the same way. Mark 1:4-5 says that he preached "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins", and that as people confessed their sins, he baptized them. Presumably God forgave them.

Peter said much the same in Acts 2:38. A few weeks after the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, he told a crowd of people, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins." What Peter said to crowds he also said to individuals. In Acts 8:22 he told Simon the Sorcerer that he had to repent and beg God's forgiveness: "Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord in the hope that he may forgive you" (Acts 8:22).

Then there are the comforting words of John the Apostle to all who confess: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

A thousand tweaks and nuances and qualifications could be offered here, but the general pattern is plain. Forgiveness is something God extends to those who confess and repent. He does not withhold forgiveness from penitent people, no matter how wicked they have been. Even the miserable tax collector who was too ashamed to approach the temple and lift his eyes heavenward, but who could only mutter, "God be merciful to me the sinner", went home justified according to Jesus (Luke 18:13-14). With rare exceptions (Luke 23:34; John 8:11; Acts 7:60), forgiveness of sin follows the acknowledgement and rejection of it.

That is why part of the sermon I heard this past Easter Sunday bothered me. A guest speaker celebrated the resurrection of Christ and encouraged us to share the love of God with our neighbors, which is very good. But he repeatedly spoke of God's forgiveness as something that had already been given to an unbelieving world. The cart of forgiveness was put before the horse of confession, repentance and faith.

For example, though he acknowledged the apologetic value of defending the resurrection of Christ and the validity of the Bible, he said, "I have yet to see an apologetic more powerful than these two: The God of the universe loves you, and he forgives you." But that is not an apologetic. In fact, it is just a false statement when said to impenitent unbelievers. Though it is true regarding followers of Christ, the speaker at this point was not talking about encouraging faithful Christians - he was talking about evangelizing unbelievers. The biblical pattern of addressing people who have not yet surrendered to God is not, "God forgives you" but rather, "Repent, believe the gospel, and God will forgive you." The tense of the verb is crucial. Noah certainly did not say to his neighbors, "God forgives you." Nor did Jonah say that to the Ninevites, nor Isaiah to the Israelites, nor John the Baptist to the Judeans, nor Jesus to the Galileans, nor Paul to the Galatians, nor John the Apostle to the Sardinians. Forgiveness in the Bible is a thing promised to those who turn to God in faith and repentance, not a preemptive strike blasted scattershot at everybody regardless of their attitude toward God and sin.

The speaker doubled down on universal forgiveness when he quoted himself explaining the gospel to a new acquaintance: "It boils down to this: the God of the universe knows you. He knows all about you. And he loves you. And all the goofy stuff you’ve got clogged in you - he has forgiven every bit of it. He’s forgiven your every sin. And he welcomes you into a relationship with him." Then he asked the young man, "Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to trust him right now?"

What a grace that I was not asked that question! Smart aleck that I am, I would have replied, "Of course there's a reason. There's no need to trust him. I'm already forgiven - you said so yourself. You told me that he's forgiven my every sin, every bit of it. Well, if I'm already forgiven, what's so urgent about giving my life to Christ?"

As much as we might like to say to the man on the street, "God has forgiven your every sin," we simply cannot do that and remain true to the gospel of Jesus Christ. God has not forgiven every sin of every man we meet. Some sins - sadly - will remain forever unforgiven. What God has done is provide the means by which all who trust in his Son will have their sins taken away. But they cannot rejoice in this truth until they repent and believe.

The speaker continued, "The world needs to know that they're loved and forgiven." "Loved" I will grant. There is a universal aspect to God's love as celebrated in John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son...". But forgiven? No, not just yet. We can't jump the gun here. A mere two verses later the Gospel of John makes clear that unbelievers are not forgiven but condemned: "Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God." (John 3:18).

We Christians have good news to share with a fallen world. But it is not, "You have been forgiven! Now come to Christ." Rather, it is, "Come to Christ, and you will be forgiven." As Peter said to the centurion Cornelius concerning Jesus in Acts 10:38: "All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name."

Do We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve?

Recently a couple people complained to me about the way their spouses treat them. I had nothing to say to make it better. But it caused me to think about all those cases I know of where good people are matched with flawed partners. How does that happen? Why do good people often exercise poor judgment in selecting a mate?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower offers one answer. A character asks,"Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing?" Another replies, "We accept the love we think we deserve."

This answer strikes many as insightful, but I have a couple problems with it. For one thing, it places "love" in the category of "things we deserve", and I deny that it is healthy to regard love this way. Love is a thing given, a delight freely offered, not a thing deserved or a merit duly compensated. If I do well on a test, I deserve an "A", and if I cheat, I deserve an "F". But love is not parceled out according to the same categories of fairness and desert. If you think you deserve someone's love, or that someone else deserves your love, I'm afraid you are stepping away from the very meaning of the word "love". Love is not a merit-based commodity. Justice may rightly be spoken of as a thing deserved, but not love.

The other objection I have is softer. I cannot help but think that the slogan, "We accept the love we think we deserve" has an edge to it. It seems to accuse the person in a bad relationship of having a bad self image. "It's at least partly your fault you've got a bad partner - you accepted his paltry love because you didn't think you were worthy of better!" Well, I don't know about that. If you have a bad spouse, I won't add to your woes by blaming you for having such a poor self image that you settled for crap. Instead, I want to praise you for a virtue that you might not have known you had. I certainly don't want to tempt you to pride. But I do want to make you aware of a phenomenon that may give some comfort and understanding. For that, I need to tell you a story.

When I was in seminary I had to take lengthy psychological tests to prove I was sane. We all did. Trinity Seminary wisely did what it could to keep psychopaths out of the pulpit. So I filled in the ovals and completed the sentences and asked myself, "What kind of stupid question is that?", and resisted the temptation to give fiendishly sarcastic answers which I would have found very funny but which probably would have landed me in the category of "Needs Counseling".

Amazingly, I passed. I avoided - however narrowly - the label "Totally Bonkers" and qualified for an MDiv without any mandated counseling or medication. Go figure.

But like everybody I had to get my test results interpreted. You would meet with a counselor who would tell you what your tendencies were and where you were susceptible. One thing that came out in my evaluation was that I probably trusted people too much. "Naive" is the pejorative term for it; "clueless" is another. I don't see bad motives. I don't see warning signs that other people see.

The counselor put a positive spin on this defect, for which I was grateful. "Actually this tendency speaks well of you," he said. "The reason you are not suspicious of other people is because you expect them to be like you. You are honest, so you assume people are telling you the truth. You don't have ulterior motives, so you don't suspect others of being devious and manipulative." He gently warned me that there was a possibility that I would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous people, savaged and blindsided by those who lack integrity. I was likely to impute good motives to bad people, and pay the consequences of misplaced trust.

Boy was he a prophet. It's embarrassing now, in retrospect, to see how many times I have been fooled. I am like St. Peter, who despite being warned by Jesus, "Three times you will deny me," went ahead and did it anyway. Forewarned is not always forearmed. Despite being warned to be more suspicious, I forgot the warning (or did not know how to implement it), and trusted liars.

I think a similar thing happens in situations where a good person winds up with a bad partner. Lacking a particular vice, you assumed the other person lacked it as well. Never in a million years could you ever cheat on a spouse, so you naturally assumed she would be faithful to you too. You're honest, so it never occurred to you that he was lying. You're industrious, so you never thought your sweetheart would leave you with 100% of the housework. You're frugal; you never suspected he would rack up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. You're nice; her cruelty came as a brutal surprise.

Rather than saying, "We accept the love we think we deserve", I prefer to say, "We naturally expect to receive back the love that we give." It is not an unreasonable expectation. We project the internal workings of our minds onto others, and assume that they are like us until a mountain of evidence indicates otherwise. The better and more innocent a person is, the longer it will probably take him to realize that the other person really isn't so nice after all. He will keep giving his partner the benefit of a doubt because he knows that a similar benefit, if given to him, would always turn out to be fully justified.

St. Paul wrote, "To the pure, all things are pure" (Titus 1:15). Pure people, till they are better educated and rendered cynical by disappointment, have the blessed ability to see more purity than what is actually there. If you wound up with a bad spouse, well, maybe your discernment was not all it could have been. But take comfort in this. Your blindness to your partner's faults may actually indicate good things about your character. Where evidence was incomplete or ambiguous, something inside you led you to assume goodness rather than suspect evil. That's usually a good thing. I applaud your naive assumptions. Please, just keep being good, and despite your griefs, resolve to be even better.