Huge Question
“Do you think I’ll go to hell if I wanna kill people for a living?” he asked. My eyes widened, and I choked, ‘”Like an assassin?!” “No…like in the army.” he said.
Wow…what a huge question. Most people don’t usually take the time to really think about it. Most people spend their whole lives ignoring the deepest questions we can ask. What am I here for? Where am I going? The answers seem too elusive; everyone seems to have a different answer…how can you KNOW, really KNOW?
Well, anyone who has met Gavin or I knows that we both came to a point of asking those questions. This isn’t the place to tell you the whole story, but this is a good place to share with you what I shared with my friend when he asked me “am I going to hell?”.
I prayed alot before and as I was composing this and it just seemed to flow in the direction of making the PROBLEM clear. Most people have been fed the lie that the Bible is unreliable and irrelevant so they never take the time to read it…and honestly, unless God is doing SOMETHING in your life to draw you to Himself it won’t make a whole lotta sense anyway. It sure helps to talk it through with someone you can trust and ask hard questions with. God is actively pursuing every person with more intensity, involvement, and urgency than we know…I sense that God is definitely doing something special in your life right now. You wouldn’t even be asking that question (or reading this webpage!) unless God were calling your name….so
…In a nutshell this is how I would describe WHAT’S GOING ON (based on how the Bible spells it out):
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1.1)…God created a wonderful world for the expressed purpose of creating human beings. Human beings are amazing AMAZING creations. No other creature in all of God’s creation have the honor, the privilege of being made with body, soul and spirit. Humans are primarily spiritual beings. I love the way CS Lewis puts it: “You don’t have a spirit. You are a Spirit. You have a body”.
Body..pretty straightforward, doesn’t need elaboration at this point
Soul..your mind, will, and emotions
Spirit..the very you of you. The eternal and everlasting self that you are.
Earth was meant to be a place of delight and pleasure for humans. We were created to experience a depth of intimate relationship with God that cannot be expressed in words. Being in beautiful intimate relationship with God, no shame, no fear, no distrust. Emotionally and mentally whole, able to stand and SMILE in His Presence.
Willpower: the awesome gift of being free to choose. God didn’t not creat robots who had no choice but to love and worship Him. True love is not coerced..it is given and received freely. By the power of our wills we choose to love God, to trust God, to draw near to God and let Him define us. God gave us/them (I use the term interchangeably) freedom to enjoy EVERYTHING in His Creation. A thousands delights, all yours to enjoy..all but one. (Why is we ignore the thousand things we CAN have and focus on the ONE thing we can’t? Why is it my daughter will ignore every toy she CAN play with and want to stick her tongue in the electical socket instead?! anyway…:) I can venture some guesses as to why the ONE tree was off limits… they had to have the freedom to CHOOSE..to chose to put their trust in God. God made it clear, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” (Gen. 2.16-17)
*it makes a really cool Bible study to study this whole section of the Bible..as you can read I’m pretty passionate about it:) I don’t want to get off on too many tangents so I’ll try to restrain myself from going into it too much…just know that if you or anyone else wants to talk about it, it would be a pleasure for me to share.
Ok, back to what I was saying. Long story short, the first humans put the LIES of another above the TRUTH of God. We put the words of Satan (who is a angel who rebelled against God, desiring the worship due God for himself. He was cast out of heaven and 1/3 of the angels joined his insurrection.) When this choice was made it had 2 immediate effects:
1) allowed SIN to enter human kind (on every level of our being)
2) gave the God given authority mankind had (to rule over the earth) to ANOTHER…I won’t get into it much here, just you need to know that yes, the devil is real (not equal to God in power at all:
he was created good, choose to exalt himself as God, rebelled, was exiled and hell was created for the devil and his fellow rebel angels aka demons.” Earth is now under the rebel rule of a very real spiritual being who hates God and is doing everything in his limited power to attack God by deceiving, using and destroying God’s creation (humanity). I hate to say it because it sounds so incredible and horrible, but it’s true. It’s better to know the truth, however hard it may be to hear, than to live a deceived life, enslaved to sin and it’s master, and suffer the immediate and ultimate consequences of this tragedy. The only way the Gospel (’good news’) of Jesus will make any sense is if you understand the bad news first.
Okay, back to SIN: A very important misunderstood reality. The Bible makes the true definition of sin clear: sin is lawlessness (rebellion, disorder, putting something in God’s place [most often your self!]. The effects/consequences of sin is DEATH. Death is not annihilation, it is SEPARATION. For example, your spirit and soul are separated from the body upon physical death.
God wasn’t kidding when he said “when you eat of it you will surely die”. Lightning bolts didn’t fly out the sky and toast Adam and Eve once they made their choice. No, they didn’t physically die then and there…but ..but the spiritual life, the connection, the intimacy, the unashamed closeness they had with their Maker was IMMEDIATELY and IRREVOCABLY TORN APART. They DIED to God. Does that make any sense? Spiritually their relationship with God was devastated…and physically they were cast out of His presence. Death entered humanity on every level.
SPIRIT: Our spirit was cut off from God. We are created to be in intimate communion with our Maker…when we were cut off, we found other things to try to fill the hole (idols upon idols of every imaginable design; take your pick..).
SOUL: our mind, will and emotions were now cut off from initimate communion with God..our mind, will and emotions became depraved, twisted, corrupted…every generation it only gets worse.
BODIES: Our bodies were now subject to decay and eventual physical death. Illness, deformity..every kind of physical ailment known to man traces it birth back to the reality and ongoing consequences of SIN.
So every human is “born into sin”. They have a fundamental propensity, a leaning towards, sin. We aren’t sinners because we sin…we sin BECAUSE WE ARE SINNERS. (side note: obviously God doesn’t condemn the innocent (babies, mentally retarded people, unborn)..there’s obviously some threshold that every mentally capable human crosses at some point in their life where they are counted in the ‘age of accountability’ so to speak. Don’t worry about where it is; if you’re able to read this email then you’re in it;)
Every human is born with this “virus” so to speak (to use computer terms). It’s infected EVERY LEVEL of our BEING. There is NOTHING we can do in and of ourselves to reverse the reality or reduce the immediate and ultimate consequences.
IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN: other than the ones listed above (how it affects our bodies, soul and spirit) is the reality that we are now allied with the devil. Ignorance works to his advantage in the West. He capitalizes on our rational, post modern, Roman-greco based philosophy and works “undercover” so to speak. In the East it’s the opposite, there everyone knows that the Devil and demons are real and they live in utter fear of them. Either way, whether we ignore him or full out worship him we are in his kingdom and under his rule. He knows how the spiritual world operates and plays it to his full advantage. If he can distract, blind, mislead, or whatever it takes long enough to keep us from the ‘truth that sets us free’ than his mission is accomplished. Because he know that once we physically die (and that’s something EVERYONE can count on..it’s only a matter of time) your soul and spirit will be released from the “body of decay” you live in. You will come face to face with God and there lies the dilemma (that’s an understatement) of every human being. We are SINNERS. We are born with a spiritual/physical propensity to sin. It’s evident in every culture of all time. War, disease, terrorism, perversion, torture, abuse, you name it! Every human will face God and have NO EXCUSE. Every one is guilty and God is JUST. Most people think God grades on some kind of a curve. Add up their “good deeds” subtract the “bad deeds” and hopefully your good will outweigh the bad and you’ll ‘go to heaven’. This is what you’ll find with every religion/belief system/philosophy in the world: they all boil down to “working your way into heaven”. But sin isn’t measured in terms of QUANTITY!!! And it’s WAY huger than that. Words fail me, I try to make it clear, the best way I can illustrate it is by relationship. Sin has utterly, totally, irrevocably RIFTED the RELATIONSHIP we have with God. No amount of “good deeds/works” (no matter how pious, religious, well meaning or otherwise) they are will amount to anything! In fact it’s the opposite! All our ‘good works’ are riddled with SELF INTEREST (if you’re really honest you’ll admit it!). This root of pride is at the heart of EVERY “good work” and sin (whether sins of thought, word or deed).
Have I spelled it out enough? There is NOTHING YOU CAN DO. To put it colloquially, “you’re screwed.” The sooner you come face to face with the fact of your own sinfulness(not Bin Ladens, or Bush’s or your next door neighbor’s sinfulness) the better. Because you never know when your time is gonna up. Which brings us to the ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN: It’s not a question of “if I do/don’t do _______ will I go to hell? I hate to be so blunt, but you deserve the truth. If you died right now you already stand condemned. God is JUST (upholds justice perfectly). He must judge your sin. Just like we are right to expect human judges to uphold the law, God is right to uphold HIS LAW. God is HOLY (no evil, darkness, corruption in Him) and unholy beings cannot enter eternity with Him. All our lives we have turned our backs on God, demanding our own way, setting ourselves up as our own god. He does not force Himself on us but steps back and says (I’m sure with tremendous sorrow) “have it your own way”. If we die in a state of spiritual separation from God, then we will enter ETERNAL SEPARATION from God. That, my friend, is the definition of hell. It’s not a party down below…it’s utter, complete, separation from God. No way back. Every day you live , every breath you take on this side of eternity is one more chance to TURN BACK from the path you are on. There are real and powerful spiritual forces at work in this world; some for evil, most for good. The evil ones have serious invested interest in you NOT hearing this spelled to you so plainly, NOT researching it for your self, and NOT coming to a point of accepting Jesus for WHO HE IS.
Personally when this was all first spelled out to me I didn’t want to believe it. God? Jesus? The devil? Fallen angels? Hell? I didn’t WANT to believe it. The lies I’d been fed from day one were so deeply embedded in my soul that it made me nauseous to think about these weighty matters. It was easier to just brush it all off as myth, “man made religiosity”, ghost-stories, conspiracy theory, ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING but the PLAIN TRUTH. I’ve already ‘talked your ear off” so I won’t share my story (obviously something’s changed or I wouldn’t have written this!), but if you are curious and would like to hear it I love to share:)
So, my friend, if you are at a point where you are willing to stop making excuses for your sin and want to discover WHAT YOU WERE CREATED FOR, then talk to us..we came to this point a few years ago and her our lives have been utterly transformed.