Sheeshh! Had to copy and paste this whole excerpt: The chasm between heaven and hell is illustrative of the chasm between God and us. He is glorious; we are not. He is holy; we are not. He is righteous; we are not. And this chasm between God’s total perfection and our total depravity deserves the the chasm of stinking, smoldering Ghenna. This is good information to know. It is true information, and it’s always good to know the truth. But the problem with this information alone is that it is insufficient to keep us out of the chasm. If someone is heading over a cliff, for instance, it makes little sense to hand him a pictorial display of what will happen when he goes over and crashes onto the rocks below. What I mean is that we can receive this information of God’s severity, we can note it, as Paul tells us to do, and we can explore the biblical array of God’s wrath, eternal conscious torment of hell, and how we all deserve both of them, but this information is not sufficient for us to praise God. Have you ever watched Court TV and seen the judge slam down the gavel and say, “I sentence you to die by lethal injection,” and heard the convicted party go, “Yeah! I love you, Judge!” No, you haven’t. We don’t see that, because no one who’s guilty wants justice; he wants mercy. Knowledge of and belief in hell-as important as they are-are unable to create worshippers. Yet mideunderstanding this reality is historically how the doctrine of hell has been abused and misused by so many men in the name of God. You cannot scare anyone into heaven. Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; its a place for those who love God. You can scare people into coming to your church, you can scare people into trying to be good, you can scare people into giving money, you can even scare them into walking down an aisle and praying a certain prayer, but you cannot scare people into loving God. You just can’t do it. You can scare them into moral acts of goodness. But thats not salvation. Its not even Christian. Even if you could scare people into a semblance of Christian religion, they would not be true worshipers, because their fear of God — which is a good thing — would not be shaped by their love for God.” - Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 16:48:22 +0000
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