Is God a Malevolent Serial Torturer?

I had a feeling I was heading for a bit of trouble when the question read as follows:  “Melchizadek was, like Christ, an eternal priest.”  True or False?   I answered “false” and got it wrong.   I made a mild protest over that one.  I lost. It turns out the Professor in charge of the New Testament Bible Studies curriculum and the test writer was the same one who attempted to have me expelled from seminary during a class on how to interpret the Bible. Interpret literally, whenever possible, was what he taught us.  The reason for his attempt to have me expelled was for not acknowledging that God would send any of his children to eternal torment, with no hope for escape ever, as a “just” payment for sins.  I argued in a forum designed for debating issues that eternal torment was not justice, not for anything done in a short lifetime and backed it up with scriptures, logic and plenty of real life examples and scenarios. 

  

Now this Professor knew all about Melchizadek; he was an “expert” on the book of Hebrews and took it all literally.  Advice:  watch out for people who can tell you all about Melchizadek!  Anyway, if you were to put hard questions to this Professor on anything, even politely, he would become somewhat belligerent, acting as if the person questioning needed to be quiet and learn the material.  But if he perceived that you had bested him in any exchange, then he would put you up for disciplinary action for disrespect.  One wasn't allowed to best the big man in any debate or exchange!  I wasn’t the only one, that’s for sure.  A lot of those students were a tad smarter than me, and better debaters.  Some would buckle a little easier though, on occasion, and apologize.  Others would just stop debating.  And others would continue, fearlessly, and some did pay the price for “crossing the line.”  But it’s not about that.  In any case, I believe God saw to it that the dean saw things my way when he refused to expel me.  From his personal response to me it seemed he was a closet Christian Universalist even!  But, alas, his job was at stake and to admit that would leave him unemployed.  Months later, the Professor was still seething with rage that I wasn’t expelled.  I have his email response to a question I put to him about an upcoming class and it’s nasty.  It seems this man resembles the god that he serves.  Now I’m not judging him.  Judging means condemning someone to eternal torment and that’s exactly what millions of church folks implicitly do when they let that doctrine go unchallenged or outright support it, especially.  

I suppose me not letting this New Testament Professor walk all over me with all his 350 pounds of doctorate bulk might have had something to do with his failed attempt to expel me.  Would the Christian thing to do have been to silently let him fill our heads with nonsense?  No, I don’t think so.  There is a time to speak up without fear of the consequences a human can deal to us, even if the hammer is going to potentially seriously drop.  It is my belief that the time to speak up is when people attempt to brainwash you with a view of God as cruel, vicious, vindictive and so bloodthirsty that his wrath will never be satisfied forever and ever.   In any case, this Professor attempted to force me acknowledge the Bible taught eternal torment.  He asked me to substitute the word “hell” for “death” in Romans 6:23, meaning eternal torment.  The reason being was, in his mind, that if God sentences a human to eternal torment then it must be just.  Whether it said death or hell or torture or anything didn’t matter to him.  Why?  Because he is God, that’s why.  If God says something is just, it must be just.  Just like that.  I refused.

Didn’t Paul tell us to “test everything” and “hold onto what is good?”  What is good about everlasting torment?  Dump the doctrine, I say, and rejoice in the merciful arms of the Lord as we know he welcomes all his children home – sooner or later.  Sometimes it might be a lot later!  That’s up to God.  Punishments all must have a purpose or they are cruelty.  That purpose cannot be revenge either.  I think even my dog understands this.

 

Isn’t God more merciful than human beings?  Isn’t it actually human beings who have done relatively merciless things (maybe not approaching the horror of everlasting torture) and then on occasion attributed them to God?  “Kill them all!”  (said God)  But did God really say this?  “Save the virgins for yourselves,” saith the Lord.   Did God really say that?  Or did humans say that God told them to do it.  I wasn’t there, but that sounds like human sinfulness in war and brings to mind more recent events such as the rape of Nanking.  Did God tell the Japanese troops to do that to the Chinese civilians of Nanking?  If you are brave and have a strong stomach, just google that one for a seriously bloodcurdling account of human evil.  I’ve had people in church tell me of the genocides in the Old Testament:  “yep, that was a brutal time…brutal!”  And some of them have a little twinkle in their eye, a knowing security that they are the chosen and will never be on the receiving end of any stripes or any fire like the non-elect.     

Anyway, just because something happened 3000 years ago in a brutal time period doesn’t lessen the horror of it at all.  Thanks be to God I don’t have to believe the accounts of slaughter in Numbers, Joshua, and Judges were commanded by God.  If someone else wants to believe this then that’s fine, but we’re talking about the God of the universe here, commanding puny humans to stab and slaughter each other and demanding all kinds of things be killed.  Let the blood flow!!  What insanity is that!  It leads to our view of God though.  Is God benevolent?  Is God love, as the Bible testifies?  Did Jesus show us what God is like?  Did he go around telling the Jews to slaughter every Roman in sight?  Couldn’t he have?  Maybe that would be a little more justified than the slaughter of the Canaanites who had never lifted a finger against the invading Hebrew hordes, wouldn’t it?  If God wanted to give them the land, why couldn’t he take the mighty hand of God and thrust them out of the land to live in peace instead of all that gore?  Slay them!!   What a load we’ve been fed to imagine that the Lord Jesus was behind any of this slaughter and killing.    

And now let’s return to consider the even worse fate of eternal torment.  Let’s try to think of one man who might sentence his children to everlasting torture to no purpose.  Imagine this man is invisible.  One day, he appears to his children who didn’t believe in him because they couldn’t see him so he impales each one with a pitchfork.  But you see, this man is an immortal, powerful magician and has the power to keep his children alive so they can suffer and not die.  For not believing in him, this man allows his children to writhe on the pitchforks for days.  Days turn into months.  Months into years.  The pain never ends and the man is never satisfied that the punishment is enough, that justice has been fulfilled.  Since he is smarter and more powerful, this action of his must be correct and it must be accepted.  

This is pretty similar to the satanic doctrine of eternal torment.  Maybe someone who would actually do this, if he had the power would be an insane serial killer?  Perhaps someone like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy.  Or the Green River Killer.  But what’s striking there is even these evil murderers eventually put their victims out of their misery.  The Green River Killer even said “I didn’t torture ‘em.”  The BTK killer talked of “putting his victims down” after he had punished them for a time.  

Terrible, terrible, heinously evil acts these men did.  But their victims are suffering no more.  The Nazis put the Jews in ovens, experimented on them and so forth, often in agonizing ways.  But their suffering is thankfully over.  Or…is it?   According to the doctrine of eternal torment, the victims may have never believed in Jesus for some reason or another.  The Jews horribly massacred by the millions in the holocaust certainly didn’t – at least, the vast majority.  Maybe other people who were victims of killers were abused, weren’t born in the right neighborhood or any number of understandable reasons.  If that was the case, those victims of the killers are looking forward to a much worse fate:  torture that NEVER ENDS!!  No rest, day or night – Revelation is taken literally.  Tossed alive into a lake where they can burn and experience the anguish of burning, but not ever have it relieved, ever!  Can anyone really, truly believe this without putting up a huge wall in their brain blocking out how horrific this insane doctrine really is?  And people go and sing praises to this being on Sunday?  What’s wrong with this picture?   

What is wrong is the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.  It's wrong because it maligns the nature of God and prevents people from coming to him.  This prevents them from doing good works and following Jesus because they hate God.  They reject the eternal torturer, understandably!  Marx, Lenin, and Friedrich Nietzsche all said that they rejected the Christian God because of the doctrine of hell.  Think of the horrific influence these men have had on millions of people.  Even if not directly responsible, Lenin led to Stalin and Stalin bears responsibility for the deaths of millions of people.  The doctrine is satanic and the fruit it has borne, for one, was Joseph Stalin.

Thank God that he is not a malevolent divine serial torturer.  If he were, we would ALL be in big trouble!  God is not a demon from the pits of “hell.”  That is utterly unthinkable.  And thank God, it is not true.  God is LOVE.  Believe it!  Therefore, we’re ALL in for a royal, wonderful surprise because our God is benevolent and he is awesome, all-powerful and all-loving.  It is true that we sometimes create our own bit of hell on earth sometimes and this is designed to strengthen us spiritually.  It may also serve to make us all the more appreciative of the infinite mercy of God and the eternal life that he has in store for ALL his creatures after a life of sickness, turmoil or other heavy burden is ended.  God will have all men be saved, Paul says to Timothy.  Romans 5 uses an exact parallel to describe how what “Adam” (that is, sin) does is reversed by Christ.  And to a much greater degree!   

 For those of us who think of persons who have done great evil in this life, God does promise justice will be meted out, but the punishment will fit the crime.  I can think of no crime that would warrant eternal conscious torment.  Maybe tormenting someone for all eternity.  That might warrant eternal conscious torment, in which case that god would go off the high dive (picture that in a Chick tract) into the lake of fire himself.  One last thought – if the punishment for sin is eternal conscious torment, and Jesus had to suffer the due punishment – why is Jesus not writhing about in the flames even as we speak?  He would have to, if that were the just penalty.  Of course, there’s nothing just about eternal conscious torment.  We need not fear any of our loved ones are being tormented by God.  Instead, they are in his care and we can trust him because he is merciful and kind. 

Be not afraid, says Jesus, it is I – I am always with you!!  We can all rest in this knowledge.  This is one reason to share this truly good news.  It can remove all that horrible anxiety and depression people might have, thinking about the fate of “lost” loved ones.  Remember, God loves those people and he is going to take care of them and do what is best for them because they are his children.  God, being the perfect parent, will see to it that they receive fair and merciful treatment designed for their benefit until they come back home and he comes running to them with arms wide open like the Father in the prodigal son parable.  May we not be like the eldest son in that parable, annoyed that God is merciful and infinitely forgiving!  Even with the eldest son sulking, the Father said to him:  “everything I have is yours!”  

God bless!

David     

Hope for All, Even for Those Without Hope!

Greetings Everyone!

Today what has been on my mind is the word “hope.”  Specifically, what has been going over in my mind are verses like 1 Thessalonians 4:13, where Paul writes:  “…we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” (New Revised Standard Version/NRSV)

Verses like this can be incredibly misleading.  The difference is between objective hope and subjective hope.  Let’s imagine people who do not believe something wonderful is going to come to pass (e.g. they don’t believe God will have mercy on all people, as he has promised in Romans 11:32; their loved ones, they believe, who have passed away are just ‘no more’) or let’s imagine people who believe something terrible is looming (e.g. eternal torment) – in both these cases these people do not have subjective hope (at least for others…they may have it for themselves).  In light of this example, Paul wanted the believers to not grieve about those who died (surely not all of their relatives were believers)…he wanted them to have subjective hope in objective reality:  that is, Jesus is going to take care of those folks, being the Savior of the world.  That’s why he came!    

As for those “others,” (the unbelievers) let’s go on to see that the very wonderful thing that they never had even hoped for (“they had no hope”), did, in fact happen.  God did (and he will) have mercy on all, as he has promised.  In this case, all along they had objective hope, but grieved because they didn’t have subjective hope.  So to sum it up, Paul is saying that for those that do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world--those that do not believe that he will, in fact, take care of a person’s loved one, how can they possibly have that hope within themselves?  And yet, when God does treat the loved one fairly and with mercy, this shows that there was hope for that person all along and for the loved one, but the one who did not believe simply did not have that hope.  So to say “they had no hope” is NOT the same as saying “there is no hope for them” or “there is no hope for their loved ones who have passed.”    

As an example, before Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus, he was Saul, and did not have subjective hope.  But destiny would have it that all along, even when he had no subjective hope, he did, in fact, have objective hope!  And so it is for all of God’s creatures.  This may be one valid explanation for the conclusion of 1 Timothy 4:10:  “…we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.”  I cannot even express how supporters of the doctrine of a God who eternally torments his own creatures either dodge this verse entirely or desperately wish it wasn’t in their Bibles.  But it is!  And it ruins their theology of eternal torment when it says so clearly that God is the Savior of all people.  What makes sense is that the word “hope” is right in the verse, and so those who have this subjective (and objective!) hope are spared from subjective despair (NOT objective if God is the Savior of all people!) at the loss of loved ones.  God saves the believer in his amazing grace from despair and other anxieties, due to the believer’s possession of this hope NOW.  This would warrant the word “especially,” I believe.  The word “exclusively” is not an option in any translation.  The King James goes with “specially.”  Ask eternal torment folks about 1 Timothy 4:10, not in a mocking way, but really ask them to explain what it means to them.      

In passages like 1 Thessalonians 4:13, you may have someone point to this and try to rob you of you hope for the salvation of all mankind.  They may say something like:  “oh, you see there!  There’s no hope for those people,” and sincerely mourn this fact.  We’ve already shown that not having hope is not the same as there not being hope.  I know very few Christians (they are out there though!) who actually say this with a sort of glee.  This is a terrible sickness of the spirit, that one day will be purged by a metaphorical fire.  As Mark 9:49 tells us, we ALL get some fire!  I can’t stress that enough.  I mentioned this to an eternal hell believer and he just shrugged and said basically “I don’t know what that fire is, but I know it’s not hellfire.”  This is right after those verses in Mark 9 about immortal worms and unquenchable fire!  That, said the man I was debating, definitely was hellfire.   I don’t believe this man was cruel or gleeful, but brainwashed.  The good news just couldn’t possibly be THAT good, could it?    Yes, my friends, it can, because our God is THAT awesome!  He is, indeed, the Savior of the entire world.

  When people realize that God will exact perfect justice but ultimately reconcile all his creatures to himself (Colossians 1:20 reads: “and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”), including “lost” loved ones, then we really and truly are filled with an unspeakable joy.  It’s a little ironic then, that believers in eternal torment today (which was not anywhere close to being the majority doctrine of the early church), have been robbed of this hope that Paul says that they are supposed to have in 1 Thessalonians 4:13…that is, unless ALL of their loved ones believed or “got saved” in their short life. 

What a destructive doctrine – eternal torment in hell.  No hope, no mercy.  Is that justice?  I had a wonderful man at my former church who told me with tears in his eyes how his family was not saved, but he still accepted the doctrine of eternal torment and said that we would not care after death because we would be so close to God after death!  Now, if I believed God was going to eternally torture any of my relatives, he wouldn’t be a being worthy of worship.  I don’t think I’d want to get very close to him at all!  Rather, he would be a malevolent being, a sadistic rejected loser taking out his wrath, forever and ever, on his own creatures, his own children – many of our loved ones. (Acts 17:28-29 clearly tells us who God’s children are: ALL of humankind…this is Paul giving a sermon to the Greeks in Athens).  He is trying to convince them that there IS hope.  That’s the message for everyone:  even if we have no hope, there is still hope for us!  Why?  Because God is not a monster, God is love, and God is the Savior of all people.  We all have a lot to look forward to.  There is hope for all because His mercy endures forever!

God bless,

David