‘Everything happens for a reason’ is not much comfort when it’s happening to you personally. In this article, John Pavlovitz shares his insights on the difficult subjects of grief and adversity. The link to the original article is provided at the bottom of the page.

That phrase.

We’ve all received it personally gift-wrapped by well-meaning friends, caring loved ones, and kind strangers. It usually comes delivered with the most beautiful of intentions; a buffer of hope raised in the face of the unimaginably painful things we sometimes experience in this life.

It’s a close, desperate lifeline thrown out to us when all other words fail:

Everything happens for a reason.

I’ve never had a tremendous amount of peace with the sentiment. I think it gives the terrible stuff too much power, too much poetry; as if there must be nobility and purpose within the brutal devastation we may find ourselves sitting in. In our profound distress, this idea forces us to run down dark, twisted rabbit trails, looking for the specific part of The Greater Plan that this suffering all fits into.

It serves as an emotional distraction, one that cheats us out of the full measure of our real-time grief and outrage. We stutter and stop to try and find the why’s of all of the suffering, instead of just admitting that maybe there is no why to be found and that perhaps this all simply sucks on a grand scale. May you feel permission to fully acknowledge that profound suckness.

Any even if somewhere beneath all of it; far below all the dizzying trauma that we experience here there is a fixed, redemptive reason for it all—it’s one that will likely remain well beyond our understanding so long as we inhabit flesh and blood.

Deep within the background operating system of my faith there’s a buried, fiercely protected trust in a God who is good and in an existence that matters. But this core truth doesn’t come with the assumption that all things (including all the horrors we might encounter here), have a purpose. It doesn’t come with a hidden silver lining always knitted into the fabric somewhere, if only we can uncover it.

To believe that is to risk painting the picture of a God who is making us suffer for sport; throwing out obstacle and injury and adversity just to see what we’ll do, just to toughen us up or break us down. I find it hard to reconcile that with the perseverant hope in a God who is not out to squash me. 

It’s exhausting enough to endure the dark hours here and not lose our religion, without the addition of a Maker who also makes us bleed. Instead, I prefer to understand God as One who bleeds along with us; who sits with us in our agony and weeps, not causing us our distress but providing a steady, holy presence in it. This still leaves me with the nagging question of why this God can’t or won’t always remove these burdens from me, but it does allow me to better see the open opportunity provided in tragedy.

There’s an oft-misused excerpt from a pastor’s letter to his faith community found in Scripture, where the author Paul writes:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

This isn’t a Heavenly insurance policy paid with faith and exempting us from anything unpleasant, but the promise that if we choose to respond to all things from a place of love and goodness; that we, not necessarily our circumstances will be better for it.

In this way, I believe in suffering as a sacred space; one where we get to choose.

It’s not a supernatural cause-and-effect experiment from the sky, specifically designed to do something to us or in us, but it is a time and place where we can respond and as we do, we are altered. Our pain does not have a predetermined purpose, (otherwise we would be straddled with the terribly complicated task of figuring it out in a billion small decisions every single day), but that pain will always yield valuable fruit.

As much as I hate to admit it, my times of deepest anguish have almost always been the catalyst for my greatest learning, but I could have easily learned different lessons had I chosen differently. Yes, I certainly grew tremendously in those trying times, but I could have grown in another direction altogether with another choice. In that way, those moments of devastation held no single, microscopic needle-in-the-haystack truth to hunt for while I grieved and struggled, but there was still treasure to be found in the making of my choices and in their ripples.

Be encouraged as you suffer and choose.

Click the picture to go to the original article.

An ongoing research project in my theology journey is that of the concept of Hell. Eternal suffering for, well, whoever is in there. I find it incredibly hard to match up the loving Heavenly Father whom I know, with a god who would do that to someone. Indeed, the concept of Hell is one of the main stumbling-blocks that prevent lots of good, conscientious and thoughtful people from wanting to know more about God. Because who’d want to know a god who’d do something like that?

This article addresses this issue in a scholarly and thoughtful manner.

A.W Tozer once wrote that, “What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

I agree with Tozer and would take it one step further: what comes into our minds when we think about hell tells us a lot about God’s character– or at least what we envision God’s character to be.

Continuing our discussion on hell from yesterday, we arrive at a critical barrier those who hold to the traditional view on hell must find a way to pass: the traditional view on hell, if true, would reveal some disturbing qualities of God’s character.

Let me summarize the scenario: If hell is a literal place where people are tortured for all of eternity, it must exist somewhere in God’s creation (what Cook calls the “problem of location”). We further know from scripture that everything which has been created was created by the pre-incarnate Jesus himself (John 1:3), that everything created was for Jesus (Col 1:16), and that God looked at everything Jesus created and called it “good” (Gen 1).

Therefore, if hell as a literal place of unending torture exists, it exists because it pleased Jesus to include it within creation, and the infinite torture of people postmortem (the purpose of traditional hell), is somehow good. As Cook makes the point:

“If eternal conscious torment is a potential future for a living soul, that possibility will have been known and embraced by God. As such, the traditionalist must show us the great goods that would not be possible without eternal conscious torment. That is, there must be a something about hell that God finds desirable—otherwise God would not have created it.”

Obviously, even a cursory reading of Jesus as revealed in the Gospel accounts should raise some red flags as to the legitimacy of the traditional position on hell. To truly weigh the traditional view of hell however, one must seriously consider what this would tell us about God’s character– nay– the character of Jesus– since Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being (Heb 1:3).

Cook touches on this point by arguing that if God created a universe where hell exists, and being tortured eternally in flames was a high probability for the pinnacle of his creation, he is at least partly culpable in that result. While he uses one illustration to make the point, I’ll use another: if I had a five-year-old child and let them play near the road instead of on the lawn, I would at least be partly culpable if they got hit by a car, since I would know in advance that getting hit by a car was a very real possibility of allowing them to play near the street.

While I agree with his point, I would make it more forcefully. If we want to move to the question of God’s character, I would skip straight to the elephant in the evangelical living room: the issue of torture.

The traditional view on hell, by definition, states that individuals will be consciously tortured in flames for all of eternity. Since we know that all things (including hell, if it exists) were created by Christ, at the pleasure of Christ, and that the triune God has pronounced it “good,” it would also have to be true that God finds torturing people by burning them alive, yet never dying or losing consciousness, to be in the realm of good, purposeful, and somehow pleasing to him.

Yet, this isn’t what we see in scripture– instead, we’re told that God takes “no pleasure” in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). If God takes no pleasure in the earthly death of those who hate him, he surely would not take pleasure in torturing them, and therefore would not and could not have created a “good” place where such torture takes place.

As I wrote about here on the blog previously, when ISIS burned a man alive and posted the footage on the internet, the world- including Christians- was outraged that ISIS would commit a cruel, evil, and barbaric act on another human being. Yet, the chief irony was these same Christians believe the Jordanian pilot, presumably a Muslim, is being burned in the flames of hell right now. Yet, unlike the ISIS video where the man died and the pain ended, the traditional view on hell states that he will never experience relief from God doing the same thing to him. In this regard, if the traditional view is right, God takes more pleasure in torture than even the most vile ISIS terrorist. He would have to, as such a place would have been created for him, by him, and pronounced to be “good.”

After my previous post on the ISIS burning I received an email from a very conservative, hell-believing friend. He told me, “man, I watched the WHOLE execution video, and you’re right on this hell stuff. There’s no way I can see God doing that to people. It was pure evil.” And, my friend’s God-given moral instinct was correct– if God would do that, it would reveal something disturbingly sadistic about his character. In the end, he would be found worthy of fear but not of worship– just like ISIS.

Finally, Cook asks a question to those who hold to the traditional teaching on hell– one that is painfully difficult (pun intended) for them to answer: “Why would Jesus include the state of eternal conscious torment as part of the inventory of the universe?” In other words, what is “good” about torture? For the traditional view of hell to line up with what we know about God’s character, one must answer this and demonstrate the inherent goodness in torturing people for all of eternity.

I share his question. What is it about torturing people- perhaps the vast majority of everyone who has ever lived– be something that would be pleasing to Jesus and worthy of being called, “good?”

I’d love to hear some answers from the traditional folks– answers that go beyond the canned statement of “because God is perfectly just,” which doesn’t actually answer the question. Or, an answer beyond the John Piper-like alternative explanation, “because God is God, He can do whatever He wants, and we must respect his authori-tah without question,” as if God is more like Cartman from South Park than Jesus on the cross.

I believe this is an impossible question to answer. God is not Cartman; God is Jesus.

For me, the verdict is in: I see nothing about torturing people that is worthy of being called “good” or remotely being associated with the Jesus I find in Scripture. Therefore, as Cook argues, hell must mean something else.

– Ben Corey

Click the picture below to go to the original article

This is a brilliant post that not only assures the reader that God actually likes them, but also describes how Eternal Life is available in the here and now, something I will be developing in future posts. So I’ve posted this today as a sort of a preview. Here’s Tim from the blog Jesus Without Baggage:

God is not Angry and Harsh with Us as Many of Us Thought

Do you think God is angry, harsh, and vindictive toward us? Millions of people do, and I used to believe it myself—for good reason. All the preachers, teachers, and other church leaders taught that he is; if we don’t walk the straight and narrow, God will pour out his wrath on us. It was constantly in the pulpits, on the religious radio programs, and in Christian books, magazines, and tracts I read.

Even American Literature books often include the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Jesus Tells Us the Truth about God’s Love

Jesus does not support this perspective of God’s relationship toward us. Instead, he tells us that the Father loves all people and wishes to give them eternal life, which begins as a new quality of life we can have today and continues in eternal life after our resurrection.

Jesus speaks of the quality of our current eternal life in his conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4. After she asked him about the well water, Jesus answered:

Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

In my opinion, this present aspect of eternal life is not sufficiently emphasized among believers today. But as we understand the truth of the Father’s love for us, our inner quality of life changes dramatically. We no longer feel alienated from God; our fear and anxiety dissipate; our self-image improves; and we are more at peace with ourselves and other people. As we continue to grow in love our inner life continues to improve.

The Good News of John 3:16

In John 3:16, the most well-known passage of the Bible, Jesus makes an even stronger statement about the love of God and eternal life:

God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

This refers, I think, both to the quality of our present life and to our life after death. It is a powerful statement of God’s love for us. But some believers counteract this Good News message by inserting the idea of an angry and harsh God into John 3:16—and changing the message into something else.

Here is their typical understanding of John 3:16 with added assumptions:

God so loved the world [though he can’t bear to look at us because of our sin] that he gave his one and only Son [to suffer and die on the cross in our place and take the punishment for our sins], that whoever believes in him [and prays the sinner’s prayer] shall not perish [in the eternal fires of hell] but have eternal life.

None of the bracketed concepts are part of the Good News of John 3:16 at all. They are misguided assumptions, and they cause fear, alienation, and other great harm. In fact, they turn the good news of Jesus into bad news.

We can understand John 3:16 better by taking note of the context of the passage.

Picture credit: Jesus and Nicodemus Providence Lithograph Company [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Context of John 3:16

If we read from the beginning of the chapter, we will see that this statement about God’s love builds on Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus about entering the kingdom of God. If you like, you can read it on a separate window at John 3.

Nicodemus, a rigid legalistic Pharisee, approached Jesus about Jesus’ relationship with God. Apparently Jesus sensed Nicodemus’ true concern and replied that no one can see the kingdom of God unless they change their old perspectives about what God requires and become as receptive and teachable as a baby.

It was in this context that John writes:

God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

But the context continues. The very next thing he writes is:

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

God did NOT send Jesus to the world to condemn people; nor, by the way, does he call on his followers to condemn people. He sent Jesus to save the world. This is an amazing contrast to what many believers understand about God’s mission for Jesus.

But what does it mean to ‘save’ people? It certainly does not mean to save them from eternal punishment in a burning hell, as some believers teach. Rather Jesus saves us from our alienation from God, ourselves, and other people. He saves us from fear, guilt, and self-condemnation. He saves us from our destructive and self-destructive behavior and the consequences that follow them.

John continues:

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

It is wonderful to learn that those who believe in Jesus experience eternal life in this lifetime and are not condemned to their old experience of alienation, negative feelings, and destructive behavior. But does John mean that those who do not believe in Jesus are robbed of these benefits for the rest of their life? I don’t think so.

Those who don’t believe can yet believe in Jesus and his Good News at some point—they are not forever barred. Even after death, there will likely be many who, with clearer minds and a clearer understanding of Jesus, will believe and experience eternal life after death; but they will have missed the quality of eternal life during their natural existence.

Yeah, but What about the Stories of Angry God in the Old Testament?

Those who read the Old Testament can easily conclude from certain passages that God IS angry, harsh, violent, and vindictive. What about these stories? The short answer is that many ancient Israelites did think God was angry and harsh, and they attributed many misfortunes to him; however, I think they were mistaken. You can read more about that at The God of the Old Testament vs. the Father of the New Testament.

Jesus tells a much different story about God. One huge result of learning Jesus’ Good News of the Father’s unconditional love for us is that it releases us from our burdens of fear, guilt, and self-condemnation. We will talk more about that next time.

Click the image to go to the original article and/or to follow on in Tim’s series:

Here is a powerful piece, by Jeremy Myers, on how the Church has misrepresented our wonderful God so badly down the ages. It’s no wonder so many people see Him as an Ogre.

– Jeremy Myers

Here is the link to the original article:

“Dear World, I am sorry. Will you forgive me?“