In a recent Facebook discussion regarding Rob Bell's upcoming book, 'Love Wins', a number of questions came up on who gets into Heaven and who does not. The short video below (also a trailer for the book) simply addresses the controversial issue.
"Gandhi's in Hell. He is? And someone knows this for sure and felt the need to let the rest of us know? Will only a few select people make it to Heaven and will billions and billions burn forever in Hell?"
This statement alone brings up so many questions; How is one to ever know where another resides after death? Why do we all so naturally want to make a judgment like this? When the Bible tells us so little about Heaven and Hell, why is this our focus and not on the real message of the Bible - Love?
Although the above questions and many more have been asked by believers and unbelievers alike, those are not the questions I'm going to attempt to answer in this post. I'm going to explain my logic, based on scripture as to why we can't know where anyone is after death, regardless of their religion or professions of faith. Time willing, I will follow this up with another blog called, 'What must I do to be saved?'
Here is a short simple breakdown of my logic;
- What God wants from us more than anything, and I believe his reason for creating us, is so we could love Him and He could love us.
- Love cannot exist without freewill. Robots cannot love. Love requires that choice and ability must exist to love or choose not to love.
- So God created man with freewill so that we could truly love him, since without it we wouldn't have the freedom to or not.
- If a native in Africa never hears about God…how can he choose to love or reject him? Freewill is essentially removed if the knowledge of the choice doesn’t exist. If a mentally disabled person or an infant never claims the name of Jesus, are they destined for Hell? Not only does that not sound like the just loving God the Bible tells us about, but once again those individuals never really had the ability to choose either.
- So in conclusion, I believe that man, every man entering the world must have enough of something inside him to love or reject God.
The Bible refers to that 'something' or that choice as light. John 1:8-9 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify about the light. He was the true light, who gives light to everyone who comes into the world (italics mine).
“Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong - in other words, if there is no Law of Nature - what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?”
In the above passage, CS Lewis illustrates the choice, light or that 'something' given to all mankind. It can get muddied with our upbringing or experiences, but I believe the history of mankind shows us it's virtually universal and remarkably specific. The vast majority of the world believes in a higher power, regardless of what they call it. The vast majority of the world has a set of moral guidelines they believe the higher power wants them to follow. The vast majority of the world believes in an afterlife. Belief in a creator is virtually universal. I believe that is because there is something inside every one of us, regardless of where we were born or how we were raised that tells us there is a creator and allows us the freewill choice to love or reject Him.
So how does this effect Gandhi or anyone else that happens to believe differently than we do? I believe that God has judges our hearts, not our knowledge, not our theology, not our good or bad works - simply our hearts. No one other than God can know Gandhi's heart. And even if we could, there is no reason to believe that God judges us all the same. In fact there is reason to believe the opposite - Luke 12:48 From everyone who has been given much, much will be required, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, even more will be asked. But perhaps again, I will save that for another blog.
As always, I look forward to your comments if you agree and especially if you don't.
As always, I look forward to your comments if you agree and especially if you don't.
