CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LOVE: THE STOP SIGN ON THE ROAD TO HELL
There's a song in words like the ones that compose the title of this chapter. The words bring to mind a love song, a love song that needs to be sung loud and clear and sweet in a world headed down the broad road leading to hell. Truly, the gate is wide leading to that road. And, in the modern world, the gate is wide open.
Christians, ever since there were Christians, have tried to stand in that gate holding a sign designed to stop people from entering the broad road to hell. And the sign Christians have always held was a sign made out of what they understood to be love.
But Christians have not always understood what, from God's point of view, the word love means. The Inquisition during the Middle Ages was carried out in the name of love. Those martyred during the Protestant Reformation were martyred by a Roman Catholic Church acting in the name of love. The witches burned in Salem, Massachusetts, were burned in the name of love.
These events, and thousands more like them, have been etched so deeply into the consciousness of modern man that a cynical sneer is the most likely response a Christian receives when attempting to explain they are motivated by love. The world knows too well that what we Christians call love has too often been in the past a self-serving vehicle designed to lead to our own personal power and aggrandizement.
All of us who seek to follow and serve the Lord Jesus Christ understand that these examples of "Christian" behavior, examples where Christians in the name of God and His Love terrorized the world in the past, do not reflect what God means when He uses the word love. This much we surely agree on. But, even when we agree on this, we are still tempted to be insensitive to the plight of a world going to hell. This insensitivity can be traced, I believe, to what we are taught about God, to the model of God that has been accepted as fact in the Body of Christ.
As those of us who know the risen Jesus search the Scripture and pray to grow in the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we are all struck hard with the knowledge that God is Love. It does not take much insight into God's plan to know why this occurs: God's love is an indispensable part of God's agenda; we receive the Holy Spirit because God intends to lead us to understand God's definition of love.
I have written a book talking about what I see as a grievous error in Protestant orthodoxy's model of God because our model of God is also our model of Love. In other words, what we Christians believe about God creates our definition of the word love. If our model of God is in error, our model of love will also be in error. The road to hell is full of speeding vehicles because the Stop sign we're holding up is misspelled. It reads SOP instead of STOP. We've got to put the "T" back in.
The "T" in the STOP sign stands for trinity. One in Three, Three in One. The word trinity is not found in the Bible. In fact, the word would probably have never been heard in the Church unless people had gotten confused about who Jesus Christ is. The only reason we have spent so much time down through the ages talking about trinity is because it was the only way we could keep people from utterly misunderstanding what the Holy Spirit was trying to lead us to understand about Jesus Christ. I won't go into the various misunderstandings about who Jesus is that have been taught in past that gave rise to the doctrine of the trinity. I'm only concerned with our present misunderstanding, the misunderstanding created when Protestant theologians taught us the Father turned His Face away from the Son as the Son was dying on the cross.
I know I may be beginning to sound like a broken record but I've got one more point to make before I can tie all this up. Orthodoxy's explanation of the actions of the Father toward His Son at the moment in time when Jesus took upon Himself the sins of the world makes it impossible for us to understand the love of God as that love actually exists in this world today. By removing the Father from the picture of Jesus dying on the cross for the sins of the world, we make the love of Jesus easy to see, but we make the Father's love into a grotesque and frightful image that, if love, is something different from the love that motivated Jesus.
Jesus' love is easy to see. He gave Himself for people who hated him, for people who despised, ridiculed, mocked, blasphemed His Holy name. What motivated Him to endure that abuse was love, what motivated Him to present His Body as a living sacrifice for the sins of the world was love. When the Apostle was moved to give us the famous definition of love in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, the Apostle was not talking about some feeling that exists within humanity, the Apostle Paul was talking about God: "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
A measure of how deeply infected we are with the error of the Protestant Reformation is found in the difficulty with which we apply Paul's definition of love to the character of the God the Father. God the Son clearly qualifies, God the Holy Spirit certainly is easily seen to conform to Paul's definition of love. But God the Father? The Father that turned His Face away from God the Son when the Son was dying on the cross, the Father that allowed His Son to go to hell alone? When applied to God the Father Paul's words of love seem strange indeed.
But that's because we have been infected with error. When Paul defined love, he knew he was defining God, the fullness of the Godhead--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Paul could apply this definition of God because Paul never considered the Father to have turned His Face away from the Son as Jesus was dying on the cross. To Paul this was inconceivable because Paul knew that God, the fullness of the Godhead bodily revealed, was hanging there on the cross. It was the love of God--Father, Son and Holy Spirit--that was being revealed in Christ's sacrifice of Atonement.
Because Paul knew that the fullness of God was contained in the flesh of Jesus Christ, Paul also knew that much more than God's love was being revealed in Christ Jesus on the cross. God's justice was being revealed, God's wrath was being revealed. But God's wrath and God's justice was being revealed in the context of God's love.
It is only when we see that Paul never conceived the Father to have turned His Face away from the son that we can truly grasp the model of God Paul was called to communicate to God's people. What utterly destroyed the resistance of the Pharisee Saul was the knowledge that the God He had once feared above all else, the God whose wrath and justice were inextricably poised to descend on a world of sinners, had actually descended in the person of Jesus Christ. When Paul understood that Jesus Christ is that God, the same God who once had refused to allow anyone but Moses to even touch the mountain where He lived, Saul became Paul. For the first time, Paul saw the wrath of God and the justice of God in the context of the love of God.
Had Paul perceived the Father to have turned His face away from the Son, Paul would never have perceived his relationship with God in a fashion that moved him to choose the words he chose in describing what he understood about God. That is my bottom line in this argument. There is no one proof text that can resolve the argument I have raised. This argument can only be resolved as individuals reread the message in Scripture with a mind open to hearing what God would have them to understand. It is not my purpose to persuade people to believe my point of view. I am persuaded. But what God wants you to understand is ultimately between yourself and your God.
But I have to say this: there is a world of people out there who are hearing about a God who turned His face away from His only begotten Son. This book is evidence that I am presently absolutely committed to calling those people in error. I have to do this because I believe we can never put the "t" back in the stop sign until that error is exposed and corrected.
In my own life, I never actually understood God in a way that allowed me to be secure in His Presence until I understood that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were on the cross, went to hell, and were resurrected because God loves me. I tell you about it because I now understand how much God loves you. And the world.
I am convinced we have such difficulty conceiving the Father to have been on the cross because, just as we have great difficulty perceiving time from God's point of view, we have equal difficulty perceiving death from God's point of view.
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I think what God did in Christ Jesus is make it possible for an image created by inference to be perceived as exactly equivalent to an image created by physical experiment. How God accomplishes this is through moving us to first conceive (infer) certain factual conclusions, then move us to perceive ourselves to be physically present in the image formed by inference. In other words, God moves us to experience as physical fact that in Christ there is no real difference between objective and subjective reality. There are distinctions, but no differences.
I know that last paragraph is complex, but let me try to tell you what I mean. Ever since man left the Garden of Eden, man has felt alone, separated from all things. In marriage, two become one, and Paul uses the marriage union to help explain what he calls a "great mystery, namely Christ and the church." But note that Paul is trying to explain the mystery. He admits it is a mystery in the sense that the world does not understand it. But Paul is trying to explain the mystery to us. That Ephesians passage is just one of countless times when Paul uses the imagery of two things that are apparently separate but which Paul shows as being brought together into one unified thing. It is his perseverance in trying to talk to us about how things that we once perceived to be separate are now physically one, that convinces me God wants us to understand our Union with Christ.
The model that I believe the Bible is trying to construct is a model where people perceive that what Paul calls the "dividing wall of hostility" has been torn down, and things that once appeared to be separate and different, now appear together and the same. In Hebrews we are told that we now enter the Holy of Holies "by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body..." The only logical image that those words can create is an image where Jesus fleshly body replaces the curtain that once separated the world from the place where God was seated. Then we are told that Jesus' body opened for us a new and living way into the Holy of Holies. Remember how the curtain was split when Jesus died, exposing the Holy of Holies so that it could be viewed by anybody who looked? Well, Jesus body is being split open to reveal what is inside: us inside the Holy of Holies. As we conceive that image, God does something that makes us perceive that it is more than an image: it is an exact picture of what occurred in the material, concrete world of space and time. It is done. The world is dead in Christ.
But we can only participate in the reality if we believe it. That is why salvation is by grace through faith. If we do not believe what happened when Christ died, we cannot be in union with God. That is why the Church has always had to teach some form of the union with Christ doctrine. Without believing we were somehow in union with Christ, there was zero ground for believing we had been restored to union with God. But to the extent that we did not understand what happened when Christ died, we left people vulnerable: their faith was faith without knowledge, blind faith...but faith, saving faith, nonetheless.
How did "Jesus' body" open this way? Everything in the universe was contained in that body but everything could only come into consciousness of that fact when the body of Christ came into the place called death. Why? Because God had said that those who disobeyed him had to die. In Christ all died. God's justice was fulfilled. In Christ's body all died, and in Christ's resurrected body all entered the presence of God, the Holy of Holies. That is how any of us were able to receive the faith that saves. Until Jesus died, all Jews got to know about the God revealed in Holy Scripture, but only one Jew, the High Priest, could enter the place where God resided, the Holy of Holies. And then that one person could only enter once a year, and even then had to be covered with blood before God would let the person in. Now everyone has that opportunity.
Notice how close the images I use are to the images we've heard all our lives. The only difference is I'm contending that I understand how we entered the Holy of Holies: since God contains all things--space and time--in His Body, and since Jesus is God, therefore all things died, were buried, and were resurrected in Christ.
This is where the image, the model, can contact the material world. What we are talking about happened in the real, material world two thousand years ago. When people are visualizing the model I construct, it is possible that their imagination might perceive their union with Christ Jesus was an objective, material fact. It would happen like this: if Jesus actually contained time and space in his flesh, then the person who is imagining Jesus dying on the cross would perceive that the very moment they are sitting there examining the image of Christ dying on the cross, that exact moment was actually contained in Jesus' body as he died on the cross. But--and here's the world-changing thought--it would not be only the image of the person that was contained in the Body of Christ Jesus, but the actual physical body of that person would have been contained in Christ's body as well!
At that instant, the difference between objective and subjective reality disappears from the image in the person's mind and all of space and time--objective and subjective--is seen to exist in the Body of Christ Jesus as He is hanging on the cross. In short, the believer would see themselves to have physically died on the cross when Jesus Christ died. That perception, if it is accepted as fact, creates a factual basis for believing that one is united with Christ. It would be an existential fact that could not be denied.
Meditation on that reality leads us to understand the love of God in a way far beyond any I had ever understood before. As I meditated on the reality described in the words above, I felt God's love, I knew God's love like I had never known it before, and I was no stranger to God's love. Instead of believing that God, the Father, had turned His Face away and left God, the Son, to suffer alone for the sins of the world, all of a sudden I saw that the Father was there too! The triune Godhead--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--were there on the cross! Suffering for me, being humiliated for me, dying for me: dying so that by entering the place called death in the flesh God could come and get me. Such love is absolutely overwhelming. I was overwhelmed with God's love.
I believe that is what will happen to everyone who perceives the reality I am talking about. I think people will perceive that which will make them so secure in God's love for them, and in God's amazing grace, that we will see a single-mindedness in our desire to show God how grateful we are that will utterly transform how we Christians relate to this world around us.
Death holds no fear for those who know that God--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--has entered that place called death and hell and made it no longer the prison of those who have no sense of the presence of God. The only ones who fear death are those who do not understand that the kingdom called death has been liberated.
All Bible-believing Christians have been taught to believe they have been delivered from having to spend eternity outside the presence of God, but the model that has been constructed is a model that is disconnected from historical events and depends totally upon our ability to believe the message in the book. By judging our union with Christ a mystery, we simply cannot connect our present sin with Jesus' death in a factual, historical, reasonable way.
We retain those images best that we understand are a factually accurate picture of reality. Our ability to believe is greatly enhanced when we have experienced the things we are supposed to believe: belief in those cases does not depend on an act of will, but an act of memory. This is a blessing because memories exist whether we want them to or not. Because I am convinced that the model being constructed in the minds of Christians is defective in that it does not allow people to see their union with Christ, I have no alternative but to try to correct that model. I have no doubt that the model is corrected when Christians enter the place called death and find the fullness of the Godhead waiting there for them. But in this world, we need this understanding now, if we are to stand against the one who holds the whole world in bondage through the fear of death.
Those who understand how they came to be united with Christ can never be in bondage to the fear of death. Because they know that Jesus is risen from the grave, and because they understand themselves to be united with Christ in the flesh, death cannot be seen to have dominion. The fear experienced by the flesh in the presence of death will be controlled as the individual in physical union with Christ refuses to allow the fear in the flesh to confuse us by reminding us that our union with Christ is a mystery. For those in physical union with Christ, there is no mystery. Fear cannot rule those people, for their is no place for fear in their Union with Christ. For them there is only love. There is only love because love restrains sin more powerfully than fear ever will. There is only love because, in addition to restraining fear, love also motivates, motivates powerfully. Those who are mature in Christ Jesus are not in bondage to fear because fear restrains love and therefore restrains the works that we were created in Christ Jesus to perform, works that will glorify God in this world, works that could well stop this world from going to hell.
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