REFUGEES, APOSTASY, AND AVERSION TO GOD

The atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, had argued that no one can be impartial about God:

• I am talking of...the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true...It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God. I don't want the universe to be like that...I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God. (The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, 130)

Nagel is unusual. Even though he has expressed a high regard for intelligent design, something for which he had incurred great disapproval, he still admits that he has an aversion to the idea of God. 

However, many others have confessed to such an aversion. Author of “The Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley, had also been very candid about his rejection of a higher meaning to life:

• I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning [and moral absolutes]; consequently assumed that it had none…We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. (Ends and Mean)

Nor are scientists immune to these commitments to a God-less world. Todd C. Scott admitted:

• Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic [mindless and purpose-less].

Richard Lewontin also admitted the bias of present-day science:

• We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs. . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Why are they so adverse to God, even though they have everything, if not in this world, then in the next, to gain? As Huxley admitted, a belief in God doesn’t suit their commitments, lifestyle, or “their books.” Others have been less forthright about the prospect of being judged by a righteous God.

However, I think that there is even another reason – guilt and shame. Jesus taught that the Spirit convict the world of their sin:

·       “And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me.” (John 16:8-9)

Especially for those of us who have become proud with our worldly attainments, conviction of sin and of our unworthiness is utterly intolerable. It tells us that we are nothing without the Savior and deserve only judgment. It cuts us down to size. Besides, this truth has been wired into us:

·       Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:32)

This is why we are so agitated by the existence of God. When we know that we are in sin, and we do, we love the company of others like us – escapism to the max!  This is why that even Christ’s people are a stench to them:

·       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. Who is sufficient for these things? (2 Corinthians 2:15-16)

I say this to warn you about the aversion of the world to us and to our faith. We will sense this aversion in the university, in the media, and even in our neighborhood.

Rejoice when you are treated well, but do not expect it. Jesus warned us of this aversion:

·       “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.” (John 15:18-20)

Jesus even warned that our “brethren” will turn against us:

·       And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. (Matthew 24:10-12)

We see this happening today. The New York Times, in an article entitled “Christian Leaders Denounce Trump’s Plan to Favor Christian Immigrants,” gave voice to the “Christian Leaders” who thought it illegitimate to favor Christian immigrants. Meanwhile, they fail to mention:

·       That, for years, we had been favoring Muslim immigrants, while deporting Christian immigrants.

·       That Muslims create massive problems and criminal abuses for non-Muslims.

·       Christian refugees are the most peaceful and the most hated.

·       That Christian refugees would be grateful for their new sanctuary, unlike Muslim refugees.

·       That our first responsibility is for our family and brethren: Galatians 6:10 “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.”

We shouldn’t be surprised by such betrayal and hypocrisy. Jesus even promised us:

·       “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.” (John 16:1-2)

As horrific as these truths are, we must still repeat them to others.

WILL THE KNOWLEDGE OF OUR PAST FREE US FROM THE PRESENT?

Does understanding our past relieve us of its influence? A male complained that he had consistently taken abuse from friends and acquaintances. He didn’t feel that he had the right to assert himself against their abuse. However, through psychotherapy, he saw that this had been the way he had been treated by his caregivers. He then “understood” that not speaking up for his welfare and setting boundaries were behaviors and a self-concept he had inherited and that they no longer had to dictate his life. He therefore began to set needful boundaries with his friends and acquaintances.

We don’t like seeing anyone abused, so we regard this as a “success story,” but is it? There are two problems here. For one thing, our memories can be either distorted or highly selective. Therefore, this male might not be connecting the right dots in his analysis of his past and how it impacts his present.

However, we might think, “Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he is now finding relief from his feelings of unworthiness and is now setting necessary boundaries.”

This might be true, but he is left with a problem that will eventually resurface. Even if he has correctly assessed that his failure to set boundaries was a product of his past, it still fails to give him the rationale he needs to resist victimization.

Let me try to illustrate this point. If we realize that our past “nurturing” inculcated us with the idea that we should tolerate abuse, all this realization tells us is that we need not be led by our past. However, it fails to tell us what we should be led by or to give us an objective standard of behavioral and cognitive rightness. It doesn’t tell us why we shouldn’t tolerate abuse.

It is like the girl who was taught that it is wrong to abuse others. While this might help her to understand her disdain for abuse, it does not answer the question, “Is it wrong to abuse?” It would therefore be absurd for her to begin to abuse others, because she now understands that her disdain for abuse had come from her parents.

It is not enough for us to merely connect the dots and to understand our present inclinations from the perspective of the past. Instead, it is more important to have an objective standard for right behavior.

When I first began going to church, I felt strongly that everyone who came to shake my hand was a hypocrite. However, I found that it is more important to live by the guidance of the objective truths of Scripture and love others than it was to understand why I felt this way. When I began to treat others with love, miraculously my opinions of them changed.

It wasn’t enough for me to know that my feelings of self-loathing came from the way I had been treated as a child. Instead, I needed to know that I was lovable and had value. This was something that I was unable to obtain through psychotherapy. Nor did it seem to matter how many times the psychotherapist would assure me that I am a “good person.” My deeply ingrained feelings of self-loathing would just laugh at these reassurances.

What could assure me that I had value? The psychotherapist’s words were only his opinions and were unable to penetrate to the depths where my feelings were preaching their life-controlling messages.

It was only Jesus who was able to break through my deadly waves of self-loathing. I became assured that if He loved me so much that He had died for me, while I was His enemy, He would love me all the more once I became His friend (Romans 5:8-10).

This awareness didn’t come overnight. Since I had not known love as a child, it was hard for me to believe/feel that God now loved me. I had hated myself and therefore projected that everyone else, including God, hated me. And I felt sure of this. I was also sure that I had to produce a steady stream of successes in order to be worthy of anyone’s love. This, of course, caused me to envy and even hate those who had more success.

However, Scripture began to rewrite my own script. I began to experience the “love of God that passes all understanding” (Ephesians 3:19) and the assurance that He would never leave me (Romans 8:38-39). Even through suffering, the words of my Savior became more real to me:

·       “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Jesus does give us a “yoke” and a “burden,” but these can become the instruments of freedom from many of the things that oppress us.

SCRIPTURE HUMBLES AND THEN BUILDS US

Scripture afflicts us in many ways. It calls us to meet standards too high to attain.  Scripture makes us feel unworthy, guilty, and inadequate. God often informed His chosen that they are to be as holy as He:

• “For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy." (Leviticus 11:45) 

What a burden! We want to run away from a requirement that inevitably leads to frustration and failure. I certainly tried to run away but to where? To the NT? However, there too we are smacked in the face with the very same requirement:

• As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, "You shall be holy, for I am holy." (1 Peter 1:14-16) 

It soon became apparent that I could not fulfill such a calling, and years later, I realized that no one else could.

For years, I wanted to turn away from this demanding God, but I couldn't. I had no other place to go.

However, Scripture slowly revealed a blessed purpose for my failures and inadequacies. In fact, there is a purpose for all of our hardships.

Paul informed us that he had suffered so that he too wanted to give it all up:

• For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:8-9)

Ordinarily, we like to delight in ourselves. We too must learn the lesson of self-despair so that we can learn to glory God alone (Psalm 62).

Some lessons can only be learned through despair and suffering. If we found that we were successful in keeping Jesus' commands, we would become arrogant and self-righteous, the very thing our Lord abhors (Ephesians 2:8-9). 

Failure and self-despair nurtures other essential fruits. As the Spirit illuminates Scripture for us, we begin to become grateful that He would love and persevere with us, in the face of the growing awareness of our unworthiness. 

I wouldn't have understood His love had I regarded myself as a successful Christian. Instead, I would have understood His grace as an entitlement, something I deserved, because I am deserving.

Spiritual growth requires the understanding that it's not about what I have earned for God but what Jesus has earned for me. He has taught me that if I have Him, I have everything that I need (Col. 2:8-10). I am inadequate, but He is my total adequacy (2 Cor. 3:5). 

In this, I rejoice. However, I would not be able to rejoice in Him as long as I was convinced that it is about my performance. Yet He comforts me by assuring me that it’s about the One who took all of my sins upon Himself:

• I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)

I am convinced that it is only through self-despair and suffering that we could come to this assurance and freedom – the freedom from trying to prove ourselves deserving. Once we despair in ourselves, we can only look to our Savior:

• Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. (1 Peter 4:12-13)

It is our failures and suffering that weans us away from the love of the ways of this world and focuses us upon our only hope - the return of our Savior. Our cry becomes, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!”

I now know that I need to be humbled and readied for Him by the impossible but necessary commands of our Lord. They continue to remind me that it’s all about His gift of righteousness, and this is freeing.

LOVE DEMANDS US TO PREACH HELL

The doctrine of hell is routinely denigrated as “hateful.” Why? Secular wisdom believes that:

·       People don’t deserve hell. We are products of our nurturing. Instead, violence makes children violent; hatred makes haters; love makes lovers. Therefore, love conquers all. Meanwhile, belief in eternal punishment will turn us into punishers.

Some secularists take this to such an extreme claiming that if we had just loved Hitler and Stalin enough, we would have been able to turn them from their genocidal intentions. And the fault doesn’t even rest in an unloving society, because we are also products of our nurturing. This analysis, therefore, eliminates any blame or guilt for a pleasure oriented world.

It follows that the secularist can have nothing but disdain for the Biblical teachings on eternal punishment. Instead, I want to argue that we need to know of the eternal consequences for rejecting the only hope available to us.

Contrary to secular opinion, we need to know that God will ultimately judge. It is this knowledge that enables us to leave aside thoughts of revenge, hatred, and unforgiveness and to apply ourselves to what we have been called to do – to love.
Miroslav Wolf, who has survived the civil wars of the former Yugoslavia, has written:

·       The only means of prohibiting all recourses to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God…My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance.

Volf knew that his stance would be unpopular in the West. He understood that when we have no tangible experience with victimization, we also have no experience of the overwhelming, life-controlling need to avenge.

Writer and theologian Timothy Keller, explains:

·       Can our passion for justice be honored in a way that does not nurture our desire for blood and vengeance? Volf says the best resource for this is a belief in the concept of God’s divine justice. If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain. (The Reason for God, Dutton, 2008, 75)

Instead of the belief that hell leads to a more hellish society, it seems that the absense of this believe will incline us to seek our own form of “justice.” Why? The impulse to seek justice transcends the way we had been raised. Even children universally demand justice. Desiring justice is part of our human nature, and it demands expression and satisfaction.

Keller observes that in societies where the doctrine of eternal judgment rejected, brutality reigns:

·       Many people complain that belief in a God of judgment will lead to a more brutal society…[but] in both Nazism and Communism…a loss of belief in a God of judgment can lead to brutality. If we are free to shape life and morals any way we choose without ultimate accountability, it can lead to violence. Volf and [poet Czeslaw] Milosz argue that the doctrine of God’s final judgment is a necessary undergirding for human practices of love and peacemaking.

Love warns. The greater the threat, the more must love warn. This is especially true in regards to eternal punishment. In the West, we readily dismiss this threat as so barbaric that it couldn’t possibly be the design of a God of love. However, it might just be our design.

Keller calls hell “simply one’s chosen identity” (78). In other words, hell is something we choose. Lewis calls hell “the greatest monument to human freedom.” In “The Great Divorce,” he paints a vivid picture of how we choose hell:

·       Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud. (78-79)

How do we nip it? By confessing our sins (1 John 1:9), crying out for Christ’s help (Romans 10:12-13)! How did we get in this mess? According to Lewis, we continue to harden our heart against the Lord until we have no heart left (Romans 1:24-28). With every refusal to turn away from our sins and to turn to Christ, we embrace our final destination. Lewis therefore concludes:

·       There are only two kinds of people—those who say “Thy will be done” to God or those to whom God in the end says, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it. (79)

Is this assessment Biblical? Keller correctly reflects that there are no Biblical accounts of people pleading to be released from hell into God’s presence (Luke 16). This makes perfect Biblical sense. If we hate the Light so much in this life that we flee from it, we will flee all the more hastily when confronted with His greater intensity in the next life (John 3:19-21).

The Apostle Paul taught that we are a stench to those who are perishing (2 Corinthians 2:14-16). How much more will our Lord nauseate them in the next life! By that time, their die has already been cast, along with their tastes and preferences.

This is horrific. What then must we do if we love the hell-bound? We must warn!