Plans and Literature

Tomorrow I plan to visit the Annapolis Friends Meeting.  Their website indicated a kind disposition towards all God’s creatures and I have high hopes of meeting people there who share the view that God is not going to eternally torment his own creatures for sins committed in this short lifetime.  What a difference this stance is compared to the website of a local Baptist church I received literature from last week.  The literature, interestingly, completely avoided the important topic of the afterlife.  Why would they do this, I wondered, when their purpose was, I suspected, to pluck me from the everlasting fires of “hell.” Note that there is no such word in the Greek language – that will be a topic later –  but if you would haven’t investigated this I would highly recommend you check out Gerry Beauchemin’s book Hope Beyond Hell, Kalen Fristad’s Destined for Salvation, or Eric Stetson’s Christian Universalism for excellent information on this topic.    

So, somewhat curious as to what the Baptist’s church’s true beliefs were on the issue of hell, I decided to check out their website.  Why would they hide their views on “hell” from their door-to-door literature if not to conceal their view of God as an essentially merciless being who plans (and logically, planned this even when he created people) to torment his own creatures forever with no chance at repentance?  Anyhow, sure enough, down at the bottom of their belief statement I found the following horrific confession:

“We believe that the souls of unbelievers remain, after death, in conscious misery until the second resurrection, when with soul and body reunited they shall appear at the Great White Throne Judgment, and shall be cast into the Lake of Fire, not to be annihilated, but to suffer everlasting, conscious punishment (Luke 16:19-26; Matthew 25:41-46; II Thessalonians 1:7-9; Jude 6-7; Mark 9:43-48; Revelation 20:11-15).”

Note the common technique of making a dogmatic statement and then picking out a few verses that they think supports this belief.  Most people probably never look up such laundry lists of verses.  Note, however, that this is a VERY short list, and it is pretty much complete.  That’s all they have.  What’s more, each one of these passages can be shown to be incorrectly interpreted without much difficulty.  Again, the books cited above deal with each of these passages in detail and I will be posting interpretations of these passages that will show clearly that they do NOT teach that anyone will “…suffer everlasting conscious punishment.”   Horror of horrors!   No wonder the church has hidden this hideous belief from their evangelical literature.  This makes the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the holocaust seem like relatively minor events if one thinks of billions upon billions of God’s creatures being put into the furnaces, not to be destroyed, but to be subject to his eternal wrath!  May it never be. 

Thank God, this is not what the Bible really teaches about the nature of God.  It says God is Love in the book of 1 John, twice.  Jesus demonstrated to us what God is REALLY like.  Can you imagine Jesus tossing live human beings into a burning pit?  Jesus commanded us to love our enemies and forgave his own enemies even hanging on the cross, by all the accounts we have available.  Can anyone who has read of the love of God and Jesus really believe that he will not have mercy when people ask for it, even after death?  Unfortunately, it seems, many people can – generally a good number of kindhearted people in the eternal torment churches believe this because they incorrectly think this is what the Bible teaches and they don’t think it is all that important, perhaps.  But it is.  Well, we have good news for them – this is not what the Bible says about God or “hell” at all!  God’s mercy endures forever, his “wrath” lasts only a moment, and there are many more passages that show that God will have all creatures to be saved ultimately, with punishments fitting the crime.  I will not give a laundry list of verses (but there are a LOT more than just five of them) to support what I have said here, in future posts.

  

To conclude, this portrayal of God as one who runs a cosmic torture chamber that never ends because his creatures didn’t believe in him, or pray to Jesus to “receive” him (or something to that effect) during this short life is a horrific misrepresentation of our merciful Creator, our Father in heaven, who cares about all people and will have all people to be saved in the end.  Everyone may get a little fire or a lot of fire which means punishments and rewards appropriate to perfect justice tempered with mercy that endures forever.  Punishment is for REMEDIAL purpose.  That’s what the Greek word for punishment in the Matthew 25 passage above really means – it means “chastening” or “chastising.”  THAT is the good news.  No wonder the Baptist church hid their terrible view of hell in their literature.  Their tactics are reminiscent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  They put a shiny, happy face on their literature when underneath they believe in a God who will keep people alive in torment for NO PURPOSE.   It should be noted that the Jehovah’s Witnesses at least believe that the wicked will eventually be put out of their misery!  We believe this is an error, but it is infinitely better than the alternative:  eternal conscious misery for infinity.   There is probably no more damaging doctrine to the image of a loving God than this doctrine that he is going to eternally torture his own creatures for all infinity with no mercy.  We need to be more vocal and aggressive in standing against this doctrine!

“For men are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love.”  (Lamentations 3:31-32)

God bless all of you and please feel free to respond with comments or questions, anytime.