The subtitle of Erasing Hell sums up the approach taken by the authors: what God said about eternity, and the things we've made up. The authors dig deeply into what the Bible says about hell, from Old Testament understanding of Sheol to what Jesus said.
The book is written with Chan's voice, and throughout he makes no secret of the fact that this is a difficult issue for us to wrestle over. We don't like the idea that anyone will suffer for eternity; we want everyone to have infinite opportunities to repent and turn to God. We don't believe that God would condemn anyone permanently.
In doing so, we forget our place.
"The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don't fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don't need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways."
"It is incredibly arrogant to pick and choose which incomprehensible truths we embrace. No one wants to ditch God's plan of redemption, even though it doesn't make sense to us. Neither should we erase God's revealed plan of punishment because it doesn't sit well with us. As soon as we do this, we are putting God's actions in submission to our own reasoning, which is a ridiculous thing for clay to do."
The authors convincingly make the case that hell is indeed real, a destination for those who reject God's provision for salvation. Understanding that hell is real should make us look at the world differently, restore urgency to our witness to the gospel.
Hell is real, but so is the solution.
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23
2 comments:
Yep. The temptation to make God in Man's image instead of the other way around is an ever present danger. And isn't that just a variation on the promise that Satan made to Eve in the Garden? "Eat this and you'll be Gods yourselves"?
This is the sort of stuff that wakes me up in the middle of the night.
Being woken up in the middle of the night thinking on these things is actually a good sign, I think. As long as we're conscious of it, we can work to avoid setting up our own little gods.
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