By David Ryser
I
wouldn’t have been a Christian without hell.
I guess it’s kind of like sex--it sells. (Matthew Paul Turner)
In his wonderful book, Churched, Matthew Paul Turner relates how,
as a child, he “got saved” every time the pastor preached about hell or the end
times. Terror of hell or the Tribulation
drove this tenderhearted boy to the altar time and again to insure that his
Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Card (which also conveniently doubles as a
Get-Out-of-the-Tribulation Card) was still good.
I didn’t realize this card came
with an expiration date.
I had occasion to think about this
recently. And I have no one to blame but
myself. I was sitting in a traditional
church service…even though I know better.
The speaker was lamenting that no one preaches about hell anymore. I’ll admit to being a bit bewildered by this
statement because I wasn’t aware that we Christians have been commissioned to
preach hell. I thought we were supposed
to proclaim Jesus.
Silly me.
I’ve heard many times over the
years that Jesus spoke more about hell than about heaven. I don’t know if He did or didn’t. I never looked it up to see if this statement
is true. It may be. It may not be. I don’t really care. And I’m not easily motivated to look
something up…or to do anything else…when I don’t care.
And I don’t care about whether
Jesus spoke more about hell than He did about heaven. Because Jesus did not come to earth primarily
to speak about either hell or heaven.
Jesus came, in great part, to
proclaim the Kingdom
of God (or the Kingdom of
Heaven--take your pick, they’re the same thing). And I would be willing to bet that Jesus
spoke more about the Kingdom
of God than He did about
hell and heaven combined.
So why doesn’t anyone preach about
the Kingdom of God?
Because hell sells. Hell is good for business. We need hell to make religion work. We need hell to keep people in church. Wayne Jacobsen once mused that the reason we
preach on how terrible hell is (and it is a bad place, make no mistake), is
because we need something worse than the church service to threaten people with
so they will come to church and sit through it.
Hell is so good for the religion
business that if it didn’t exist, we would invent it.
So what has all of this preaching
on hell gotten us? Well, for one thing,
I’ve discovered that how a person comes to God has a great influence on how a
person relates to God. How you are born
in great part determines how you will develop.
If you scare people into church, you have to keep scaring them to keep
them in church.
This calls for a lot of preaching
on hell and the Tribulation. And when
did Christianity become about hell and the Tribulation? Isn’t it supposed to be about Jesus?
It’s all so confusing….
And then we compound the problem by
presenting the gospel as a business proposition. If we will accept Jesus as Lord (as if our
decision makes Him anything) and say the magic prayer…a prayer that didn’t even
exist 200 years ago…we will trade our old sinful lives, consisting of failure
and filth, for Jesus’ righteousness and eternal bliss.
So who wouldn’t make that
deal? And what does Jesus get out of it?
Thus we enter into what is supposed
to be an intimate relationship by way of a business arrangement. I, for one, do not call business-arrangement
intimacy a relationship. I call it
prostitution.
And it gets worse.
Because we married God for His
money/stuff, we don’t really care whether He lives or dies. In fact, He can be a bit of a nuisance. So we learn…compliments of “teachers” (who
don’t know Him any better than we do) to whom we pay big money to deceive us…that
faith is the Bible way of getting God’s stuff without having to mess with Him.
Does this sound just a bit sordid to
you? (If not, then try this on your
spouse and get back to me on how it works for you.)
And who got the brilliant idea in
the first place that preaching the threat of hellfire is the best way to bring
people to Jesus? My Bible says it is the
goodness of God that leads people to repentance (Romans 2:4).
You see, for the longest time I
found God easy to resist. I could resist
the fire-breathing tyrant of religion. I
could resist the stern judge. I could
resist the abusive father. I could
resist the celestial scorekeeper. I
could resist a God who would just as soon throw me into hell as look at me.
But I could not resist a God who
loved me so much that He would die just to hang out with me. I could not resist a God who loved me
passionately. I could not resist a God
who pursued me relentlessly. I could not
resist a God who refused to change His mind about loving me, no matter what I
did.
I have no defense against this kind
of love. Do you?
Responses to this article are
welcomed. You may contact the author at drdave1545@yahoo.com
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