Several years ago I went through a stage in my life where I tended to de-emphasize the afterlife. I had little desire to discuss the joy of heaven or listen to a sermon about the agony of hell. I quickly passed by any title on the bookstore shelf that dealt with the life beyond. I had almost no interest in the matter, pretty much an aversion to it. The reason was not a lack of belief in life after death. I held to it then, as now. Why I cringed when I heard heaven and hell in sermon and song was my impression that overzealous evangelicals had overplayed the concept. I believed that any decision to follow Christ should arise from a heartfelt response to his death on the cross, not a knee-jerk reaction to eternal damnation or delight. I felt that people should run into the arms of the Savior because of His grace. What I observed instead were many who were running to Him merely to escape eternal flames. I considered this a superficial reason for following Christ, and I was sure that the end result would be superficial Christians.
What troubled me all the more was the way some evangelists and preachers would use the afterlife as a “trump card” to ensure a public response to their message. The rationale behind many invitation appeals seemed to be: “If the love of Christ doesn’t bring them down the aisle, then dangle heaven and hell before them. That should do it!” To say the least, I resented this. My favorite hymn-poem became Frances Xavier’s “My Eternal King,” largely because its first two lines urged me to love God “not because I hope for heav’n thereby, nor yet for fear that loving not I might forever die.” To me, life after death was a wonderful benefit of salvation but certainly not the essence of it.
One aspect of the afterlife that I found especially unappealing was the Judgment. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it refers to a reckoning that each individual must face before God after death. It is most commonly pictured as a rewind and review of one’s life before the Almighty Judge, who at that time will “separate the wheat from the chaff” and give to each what he or she deserves. The end result will be justice, final and ultimate. The reason I had such disdain for this concept was the same reason that the afterlife in general was repulsive. I felt that it was overemphasized and, worse yet, misused to the point that superficial decisions resulted. Fear of God became the motivating factor instead of love of Christ. Escaping hell and entering heaven became the primary goal of becoming a Christian. “Taking up your cross” in sacrificial service (i.e. following Christ) was reduced to secondary status.
Over the years, my reluctance to discuss the afterlife has abated a great deal. I still to this day wince when I hear heaven, hell, and the Judgment overused and misused. But I have come to realize that the proper response to such misuse is not to ignore or disown the afterlife but rather to give it its proper place. And that is what I have tried to do. Today, I have a firm belief and an abiding hope that this life is not the end. I consider this to be a wonderful source of comfort to all of us who try to cope with the downside of life. I believe that such encouragement should be voiced often from the pulpit to parishioners straining to hear a word of good news. But when it becomes the topic week after week, to the exclusion of other topics more fundamental to the faith, I reserve the right to expose the imbalance and attempt to correct it.
Along with my willingness to re-embrace life after death has come a renewed interest in the justice of God. That God possesses this trait should not be a point of much contention. Divine justice, implied rather strongly in the Argument from Fairness, is nailed secure by the Argument from Human Characteristics. You and I, like all humans, are born with a tendency to categorize things as fair and unfair, just and unjust. Common sense dictates that this sense of fairness and justice must arise from a source that is fair and just. And since nature, by everyone’s standards, is unfair and unjust, it cannot be that source. That source, again, must be supernatural. Justice must come from God.
This, of course, leads us straight to a real and present problem. How do we mesh the justice of God with our unjust world? As we noted on Day 38, many have attempted to do so by making concessions regarding other divine attributes. But that is not the route I have chosen to take. The way out of this apparent contradiction, it seems to me, is not to limit God’s power (so that He appears unable to act) nor to limit His knowledge (so that He is too unaware to act) nor to limit His love (so that He seems unwilling to act). Already in this book we have dismissed these solutions as unsatisfactory, choosing instead to elevate God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and love to heights yet unfathomed. I believe the only way out of the “just God in an unjust world” dilemma is to also raise God’s justice to new heights, so that He—in infinite power, knowledge, and love—will so act. Then we must appeal to His sovereignty (remember, we also raised our perception of this) concerning when, where, and how He will balance the scales.
In the interim, we must not flounder in distrust, dismay, or fear. We must patiently wait and work in faith, hope, and love. We must never lose sight of God as the One who is big enough, smart enough, caring enough, and fair enough to right every wrong. And we must never forget that He is sovereign enough to know when it’s best to bring it all to pass. If that means waiting until after we die, so be it. In this context, I dare say, we cannot emphasize the afterlife enough.
When I think of the justice of God, two mental images come to mind. One is of President George W. Bush standing at the top of the heap that was once the World Trade Center with his arm around a veteran firefighter, vowing that justice will be served. With this mental image, I capture a sense of the determination and resolve of a just and powerful God and feel His loving arm around me as He passionately promises to act. Another image is Jesus’ description of a father who patiently waits on the front porch day after day hoping his prodigal son will return home. So poignant is this picture and so crucial to the story that some scholars have renamed it “The Parable of the Waiting Father.” Here, in these verses isolated to Luke’s gospel, I am reminded that delay of justice is not always a bad thing. To wait for the son is the most compassionate and gut-wrenching choice the father has. Much easier would it be to “pronounce sentence” upon the son, excommunicate him from the family, and proceed to live as if he were dead. Considering what the younger son has done, this easier route would certainly be fair and just. By taking the harder route, that of patient love, the father’s justice is delayed, but the end result is a relationship restored. In the same way, a patient and loving God may be delaying His justice so that we might come to our senses and travel the dusty path of repentance. So willing is He to restore our relationship that we, merely halfway down the road home, may likewise find ourselves wrapped in His ever-forgiving, ever-reaching embrace.
Along these same lines, let me ask those of you who complain to God that He has not yet acted to consider what you are praying for. As C. S. Lewis explains:
Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think that He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on their side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else—something it never entered your head to conceive—comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it.
To those of you who complain about God’s delay of justice, I ask you to take five minutes to reflect on the repercussions to you had prayers like yours been answered by Him ten, twenty, fifty, or one hundred years ago. Where would you be now? Would you be at all? Perhaps His delay was and is to your advantage. And to those of you who so casually put off God’s inevitable justice, I ask you to consider what defense you would make if He chose tomorrow to bring it to pass. What would you say then? Would you have anything to say? It would likewise be best for you if He waited at least a day longer.
I have the strongest temptation right now to throw in heaven and hell to further convince you procrastinators, but I must stop before I become guilty of the same overemphasis and misuse I cited above. In closing, however, let me offer the following concession and warning: better to come to God for any reason, even a superficial one, than never to come at all.
-Dear God, You Sure Don't Act Like You're Alive (Day 43)
No comments:
Post a Comment