Rush Limbaugh on hell

Last week I heard a very troubling thing on the Rush Limbaugh show. Granted Rush is not much of a theologian, that mantle is probably carried more by his brother David Limbaugh but this is really a frightening misinterpretation of the Bible. Here is the section from the Transcripts which save me so much time because he posts his transcripts for free!

From 3-30-2018 Emphasis Added:

You know, Billy Graham said that he was most often asked the question about hell, is there hell, did he believe that there is a hell. And he quoted scripture. He said in the Bible the person that most often talks about hell is Jesus. He said it might surprise you to learn that the person in the Bible who spoke the most about hell’s reality was Jesus. He repeatedly warned people not to take it lightly. And then he quoted Matthew 10:28: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
In other words, be afraid of the devil. Do not be afraid of dying. Be afraid of going to hell. And that this admonition was frequently coming from Jesus. So for that to be contradicted by the pope, believe me, is going to shake some people up, if they can’t sweep this away. And, by the way, what happens now to being devil’s advocate? If there’s no hell, there’s no devil. So how can you ever be a devil’s advocate? A whole line of questioning has also been obliterated by the pope!

What a twisted doctrine hell has become if an intelligent man in his 60's has gone through his whole life and thinks that the Devil is in charge of hell. That the Devil is the one who destroys the soul and body. 

Disturbed artists from hundreds of years ago have succeeded in giving Christians a completely distorted view of God

Even those who believe in eternal torment in Hell know that this verse is not about the devil, so at least we can comfort ourselves with that fact.

Fear God Alone (Matthew 10:28)

Because God is judge in the end, we should not fear even persecutors who threaten death (vv. 26, 28). Mortals can destroy only one's body, while God can resurrect the body for damnation and destroy the whole person (with eternal torture; compare 3:12; 25:46). The choice is not between courage and fear but has to do with whom we will fear more (Minear 1950:169). Jesus may here recall the Jewish martyr tradition, which exhorted its followers not to fear those who think they can kill, because eternal suffering awaits the soul that disobeys God's command (4 Macc 13:14-15).

IVP New Testament Commentaries are made available by the generosity of InterVarsity Press.

pj media hell

PJ media has a horrible article: https://pjmedia.com/…/dont-be-deceived-like-adam-and-eve-…/…

In that traditional but totally misguided article at one point it says:

" The Bible addresses all of those questions directly. For starters, God is loving and just (Ps. 33:4-5), and justice demands eternal punishment for all who reject God’s loving sacrifice of His own Son (Rom. 6:23)."

It is so pathetic how people use the Bible this way. Notice they give the Bible verse as if that ...verse says that eternal punishment is Justice. In Fact the verse simply says: Romans 6:23 (NIV)

23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in[a] Christ Jesus our Lord.

Death not eternal punishment in hell is what the text actually says. A billion and more years of torture for 100 hundred years of life, even rejecting God could never be considered justice. But of course they would condemn me of apostasy. Well yes I definitely am an apostate to traditional Christianity. Sadly traditional Christianity has not been too Christian and much more tradition.

Guest Review of Rob Bell's new book

Love Wins, But Always?

In Rob Bell’s best seller, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and The Fate of Every Person Who Every Lives, the writer raises questions which have rocked the Christian world and have been discussed on the internet, TV shows, religious columns, and many Christian Bible studies. No matter what one believes, as a Christian about either Heaven or Hell and the afterlife, this book brings those questions to the forefront and are back of almost every Christian belief. This is only one of the very provocative questions he has dared to ask:  “Will only Christians be saved?” This was prompted by a scrawled not underneath Gandhi’s picture in an art show of prominent peacemakers: “He’s in Hell.”

Seriously, what is the common Christian belief? How can we be sure? What must one do, be, or perform to qualify for entrance to the Pearly Gates? Is it dependent on one’s parents? The country of your birth? Making the right choices during your life? How much control do we really have over our parents, our birthplace, or our early environment that plays such a pivotal role in our attitude?

If one dies very suddenly is there any hope if he may not have been baptized into the Christian faith? Is that what Christians believe? Or, is it based on one’s personal relationship with Christ? Even though there is never such a phrase in the entire Bible?

The age-old questions “What must I do to be saved?” Is answered by sheer luck of being born in the right place, at the right time, to the right parents, and to good environment. If that is true, then my eternal future is in the hands of others.

Or, is it solely on my belief in Jesus’ blood that has saved me? How is this to be applied?

What conditions are necessary for me to be assured?

Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there promised a future eternal life; they did not talk of a future life somewhere else because they anticipated a coming day when the world would be restored, renewed, and redeemed and there would be peace on earth.

Jesus was the first to speak of Heaven as eternal life when asked of the young ruler who was most anxious to be assured. In Jesus’ reply he said that one day when God’s will would be done on earth as is now done in heaven, that earth and heaven will be one.

Surely, this question is one of the most important of all questions Christianity has been asked. If Christians cannot be certain of what the future holds, why be a Christian?

Since first they were introduced into the Christian lexicon, heaven and hell have been central to their mission.  Are they literal places? Was the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus merely a metaphor for telling men that we must show mercy to others?

Is the Devil the one in charge of Hell and God is in charge of Heaven? When did the concept of Heaven as the home of the saved originate? Or that Hell was reserved for the most devious of humans? How much of the concept of Hell and Heaven were influenced by both ancient and more recent writers? Both John Milton and Dante described these two abodes of humans: Milton described Paradise in his epic poem Paradise Lost and Dante wrote the Divine Comedy portraying Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. This poem had an enormous influence on Christian thinking and was incorporated into Christian theology.

One of the most famous Bible verses in found in John 3:16: “For God so loved this world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not , perish but have everlasting life.” What is often forgotten and seldom read are the two verses following: “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him.”

This is the overriding theme in Bell’s book: according to the book of Timothy, “God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2). And in Hebrews, the writer says: “God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear“ (chap. 6).

What did the writer of the letter to the Philippians mean when he wrote “Every knee should bow…and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord”? and Peter says that Jesus will “restore everything” (Acts 3), and Paul writes in Colossians 1 that through Christ “God was pleased to….reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”

On to Revelation: in the last chapters, the gates of that city in that new world will “never shut.” Gates are for keeping people in and keeping people out. If the gates are never shut, then people are free to come and go. When, in that book, God is saying that He will make all things new, does that mean everything, including people?

What did Jesus mean when he said “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen” (John 10).

In the parables of the prodigal son and the worker who only worked one hour compared to those who had worked all day, it demonstrates that in Jesus’ kingdom, people will get what they don’t deserve.

Bell asks deeply unsettling questions for those who have been so secure in their beliefs of who will make up heaven’s inhabitants: Does this sound familiar? “Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with his child would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter.”

If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities. And yet millions of Christians have been taught this very belief and converted millions based on this fear. Has there been a bit of schadenfreud in Adventism that goes like this:
‘
“Those people out there may be going to parties and appearing to have fun while the rest of us do ‘God’s work,’ but someday we’ll go to heaven, where we won’t have to do anything, and they’ll go to hell, where they’ll get theirs” This is the same sentiment expressed by the elder brother when he was so angry because his father welcomed the prodigal son with open arms.

If God’s love is so small, so parsimonious that only those who have joined with the “elect” will be invited to heaven, that god has become much too small to redeem the world; to build mansions to be inhabited; to extend his welcoming arms to his children.

That can only mean that for those who believe this,:their God is far too small, and deserves no worship and adoration. Like the Wizard of Oz, that god is a very small image of our own making.
　

Obedience starts with fear, irrational Christianity

Can you be scared into love? It does not sound that reasonable, you can be scared into paying your taxes but it is not all that likely that you will find that after paying your taxes you find that you love paying your taxes. Wesley Snipes is in jail for not paying his taxes do any of us really think that when he gets out he will love paying taxes? Often however Christianity has this mindset that says we first fear God because of what He will do to us and that through the obedience out of fear we will later learn to love Him.

Recently on the Adventist Today website discussion of an article on Hell one of the bloggers of the site said the following:

“My take on the “hell” doctrine is that if it were not for it, there would be no Christians. It is somewhat analogous to teaching/informing your children that there are, and will be, corporal consequences to willful disobedience; even though your strong preference is that there will never be an occasion to ever administer it.

Obedience starts with fear. As we mature and come to understand that the source of the consequences cares about us and knows more than we do, fear becomes respect. As the maturation process continues further, and we realize that we love and owe a debt of gratitude to the executor of the potential consequences, obedience results out of…love and gratitude.
If there were no initial fear of (ultimate) consequences, the obedience which always directly results in our good would never commence in the first place.”

There is something twisted in this kind of thinking, but the author of the above is probably in the majority of Christians. They see God in terms of crime and punishment. Obey or God will kill you. And if you obey Him then He won't kill you and you then become thankful that He won't kill you and you begin to love Him. Christianity as a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. After all God in the Old Testament is quite free with His killing. It is that kind of thinking that informs many people as their interpret the Creation story. Eat of the fruit and God says He will kill them. As the King James version says

Genesis 2:27 KJV But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die

Many interpreters take that to mean God is pronouncing what God will do as opposed to a natural consequence to the action. The more accurate New English Bible makes it clear that the “day” is idiomatic for “when”, after all they did not die on that day and no they did not spiritually die on the day either though you will hear teachers make such claims as nonsensical as they may be.

But this idea of death as punishment rather then the natural consequence of actions has powerfully changed Christianity. The cessation of life because one does not accept the gift of life given by God becomes God's punishment of death. Instead of God as the source of life they focus on God as the cause of death. But if one rejects the offer of life from God the natural consequence is death because God's gift is not accepted. The wrath of God then becomes something that God does to people rather then something that people do to themselves by their own actions. It is very understandable if one does not read the progression of understanding in the Bible. After all in the Old Testament both the good and the bad came from God. The successful blessed by God the sick cursed by God. The side that won the war was the result of God making them successful. We who read the Bible have to learn to read it with these historical factors figured in however.

After all there is a lot of confusing language in the Bible. If we took it all literally we could not mix crops or material in clothing, we would be killing rebellious children, adulterers and sabbath breakers and even as we kill them claiming we are loving them. That become the problem, we assume these kind of things about God and make Him to be as irrational as ancient human beings. Then of course to explain the irrationality we would say God's ways are not our ways or God is mysterious and we can't understand what He does or will do.

But is this what God in human form wanted us to do. Jesus wanted us to be friends with God, Jesus wanted us to move even beyond the idea of servants because servants do what their master says to friends who understand what the Master wants done.

John 15:15 NIV: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

When we look at the first sermon ever recorded being preached after the resurrection of Christ it has nothing to do with fear.

Acts 2:22-24 NASB“Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know— this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. “ But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power

The good news, the New Testament is not about the threat of God but the salvation of God. Peter could have threatened them with damnation for killing Christ but he did not, he offered what God offered and that is forgiveness rather than condemnation. Love as a demonstration of God rather then punishment to scare people into behavior. You can scare people into conformity but you can't scare them into love.

The question we should always be asking is what does our doctrine say about the God we believe in?