Tag Archives: Christ

Mentoring

Is being a good person enough to get you into Heaven?

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Note to my readers from other religions: Please try to be tolerant of my disagreement with you on religious pluralism. I am not saying that you are bad people. I am not saying that I am going to treat you badly because we disagree. You are just as valuable a person whether we agree on religion or not. I think that I am serving you, though, by urging you to consider whether you have focused on truth in your search for God. Is truth your number one concern? Anyway, please forgive me if you are offended. I mean well.

Dennis Prager is probably my favorite talk show host, along with Hugh Hewitt. Recently he wrote a fine article defending traditional marriage, which caused someone I know and like very much to ask me how Christian doctrine could forbid such a good, effective man from going to Heaven when he dies? Isn’t God mostly concerned with having his human creatures do “good” things? Isn’t that the point of religion – to make us all be nice to one another so that an ordered civilization marches in safety and happiness? Well, what’s the answer?

(The friend I am talking about is a Catholic-raised non-Christian, by the way)

So I talked to him about it, and recommended that he read a short article.

Here’s the article that I recommended, from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.(H/T Apologetics Junkie)

He answers the question “Am I going to Hell if I don’t believe in Jesus?”.

Excerpt:

Sometimes we have to reframe a critic’s question in order to give an accurate answer.  The questions, Am I going to Hell if I don’t believe in Jesus?, is an example.  As it is asked, it makes it sounds as though Jesus were the problem, not the answer.  As though failing a theology quiz sends us to Hell.  Instead, we need to reframe the question to answer accurately and show that sin is the problem, and Jesus is the only way because He alone has solved that problem. Sinners don’t go to Hell for failing petty theology quizzes.

While giving a talk at a local Barnes & Noble, someone asked why it was necessary for him to believe in Jesus.  He was Jewish, believed in God, and was living a moral life.  Those were the important things, it seemed—how you lived, not what you believed.

To him the Christian message depicted a narrow-minded God pitching people into Hell because of an arcane detail of Christian theology.  How should I answer?

Remember that the first responsibility of an ambassador is knowledge—an accurately informed message.  What is our message?

One way to say it is, “If you don’t believe in Jesus, you’ll go to Hell.  If you do believe, you’ll go to Heaven.”

That’s certainly true, as far as it goes.  The problem is it’s not clear.  Since it doesn’t give an accurate sense of why Jesus is necessary, it makes God sound petty.

So how do we fix this?  Here’s how I responded to my Jewish questioner.  I asked him two simple questions.

Read the rest of the article.

Christians all need to understand how to explain why sincere beliefs and good works are not enough to satisfy God’s moral demands on us. My friend thinks that if a person is a “good” person, then he should go to Heaven. But God is not the flapping Tooth Fairy. God is more concerned that we understand the truth about his existence and character – that is the whole point of sending Jesus to die as an atonement for our rebellion. The problem isn’t that we lie, cheat and steal. The problem is that we want to get our own happiness apart from God, without wanting to know him as he is, and without having to care about his goals and his character in the relationship.

Here’s what God wants us to know about ourselves:

  • we have to realize that what we really are is rebels against God
  • rebels don’t want God to be there
  • rebels don’t want God to have any goals or character different from their goals and character
  • rebels don’t want God to place any demands on them
  • rebels don’t want to have any awareness that God is real or that he is morally perfect
  • rebels want to be liked as they are now – they don’t want to change as part of a relationship
  • rebels want to conceive of their own way to happiness, and to use other people and God for their own ends
  • rebels don’t want there to be a mind-independent objective reality, they want to invent their own reality that allows them to be praised and celebrated for doing whatever makes them happy at every point along their lives
  • rebels would rather die that put their pursuit of happiness second
  • rebels have no interest in rules, judgments, accountability or punishments

Here’s what God wants for us to be saved from our rebelling:

  • we have to know his real character so we have a genuine relationship with him
  • the best way to know his character is by taking time to study what Jesus did in history
  • what the incarnation tells us is that God is willing to humiliate himself by taking on a human nature
  • what the crucifixion tells us is that God is willing to die in our place even though we’re rebelling against him (Jesus is Savior)
  • part of being saved is to trust God by allowing his character to transform our desires and actions (Jesus is Lord)
  • as we grow in letting the character of Jesus inform our actions, we build a set of experiences that are like Jesus’ experiences – i.e. – we obey God rather than men, and we suffer for our obedience – just like Jesus

Jesus came to give his life as a ransom for our rebellion against God, and the most important thing we have to do in this life is to come to terms with who he was and what he did. Your own good deeds don’t justify you before God, because he isn’t interested in what you can do unless you are first interested in knowing who he is. A Christian’s good deeds are the result of identifying Jesus as Savior and Lord, and then following him by making decisions in your own life that respect his character. God doesn’t need you to solve all the world’s problems – he could do that himself. It’s not what you do, it’s who you know and trust that counts. The good deeds are just your way of trying to be like him and trying to feel the same thing he felt when he gave his life for you. You have a friend and you want to be like him in order to know what he feels so you have sympathy with him.

(Note to my friend: that is why sometimes it is good to love a person just because she needs love, and not because she is guaranteed to love you back – even if I get hurt loving her, I have the experience of loving her well, just like Jesus loves her well)

The main point is that knowing Jesus as the revelation of God’s character, and then following Jesus, is more important than doing “good things”.

The first commandment, according to Jesus, is found in Matthew 22:34-38:

34Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.

35One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

36“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

38This is the first and greatest commandment.

The second commandment which comes after that one has to do with loving your neighbor. But the second one is not the greatest commandment. You can’t love God unless you know God. That it, unless you make knowing about his existence and character a priority in your life to the point where you find out the truth about his existence and character. And not as your own opinion, or as the opinion of the people around you, or as the faith-tradition you were raised in. No. You have to value God enough to respond to his overtures to you. You have to know him in truth, not as a quick checkbox that you check off for an hour on Sundays to make your life “easier” because you are happier and the people around you like you. You have to respond to God like a Christian in an Iranian jail cell – out of allegiance based on gratitude and recognition. You have to know him before you can act to love him – who he is and what he’s done.

The way that Protestants like me draw the line is as follows – justification (how your rebellion is canceled) is God’s job. He draws you to him while you are still in rebellion, but you have a choice to resist him or not. If you resist his unilateral action to save you, then you are responsible for rejecting him. Sanctification (about doing good works) is not about canceling your rebellion, it’s about the later step of re-prioritizing your life, so that you make decisions that reflect the character of Jesus, so that you become more like him. Even your desires change as the relationship progresses. It is something you work at – you study and experience, study and experience. The whole point of studying apologetics is to build yourself into a love machine that fears nothing and holds up under fire, because you know the truth and the truth makes you free to do what you ought to do regardless of the consequences (e.g. – failure to be recognized and requited by someone you loved well).

The most important relationship is not the horizontal relationship with your neighbor, it’s the vertical relationship with God himself. And when you know God as he really revealed himself in history, then your desires – and consequently your actions – will change naturally. When you know God as a person, you freely make all kinds of sacrifices for him. You put yourself second because you want to work on the relationship. You start to believe that your own happiness isn’t as as important as working on the relationship. It’s like building a house. You don’t notice the sacrifices.

Sometimes, I think that the whole point of Christianity and that vertical relationship is so that we know God better. We sympathize more with him than we do with ourselves, because of how unfairly people treat him, how good and loving he is, and how right his goals are. It’s not that he needs help, because he’s God – he’s sovereign. But the relationship gets to the point where it becomes reasonable for you to put yourself second with God, and to let his goals become your goals – you want the relationship with a loving God more than you want to be happy. You get tired of ignoring the person who loves you most – you start to wonder what it would be like to actually respond to him. For Christians, the demands of this other being eventually seem to be not so terrible after all – and we try to put aside our own desires and to give him gifts and respect instead of worrying so much about being happy all the time.

It’s not irrational to be kind to the person who loves you the most – who sacrificed the most for you.

I happen to know Dennis Prager a little from his show, and his basic view of religion is that you can believe anything you want about God as long as you do good works. Many people in other world religions seem to judge religions based on the fruit they produce – not by testing truth claims using logic and evidence. (That goes for Michael Medved as well) And my point is that Prager’s view is the results of a decision that Prager has made about what religion is about – that the truth is not the criterion by which to judge religions. In another show, he was explaining how people should choose a religion, and his first rule was that you should consider the religion of your parents and family. Why does he say that? Because religion is not about truth for Prager, it’s about community and good works.

Dennis Prager is a far, far better man than I am. He has done enormous amounts more good than I ever will. But on that Day, he’s going to have to answer for his sins. But I have an Advocate who will answer for mine. And I am not indifferent to that Advocate – I am not indifferent to what he has done for me. He is not a stranger to me. He is not a get-out-of-jail free card that you just use and throw away once it’s used. I play for his team every day. I know him well. His existence and character are things I know through study, not things I have faith in, through uninformed credulity. I wear his colors the same in public and in private. And I know what it means to not be liked by people for being different than they are. I know what it is like to be hurt and alone, and to obey anyway.

Related posts

Here is a series of posts I did on why people go to Hell.

News

The apologetic value of self-sacrificial romantic love

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In his arms
In his arms

Here’s a nice list of descriptions of what love looks like in a marriage on Michael Patton’s Parchment and Pen blog.

My favorites:

  1. Love is being willing to have your life complicated by the needs and struggles of your husband or wife without impatience or anger.
  2. Love is actively fighting the temptation to be critical and judgmental toward your spouse, while looking for ways to encourage and praise.
  3. Love is the daily commitment to resist the needless moments of conflict that come from pointing out and responding to minor offenses.
  4. Love is being lovingly honest and humbly approachable in times of misunderstanding, and being more committed to unity and love than you are to winning, accusing, or being right.
  5. Love is a daily commitment to admit your sin, weakness, and failure and to resist the temptation to offer an excuse or shift the blame.
  6. Love means being willing, when confronted by your spouse, to examine your heart rather than rising to your defense or shifting the focus.
  7. Love is a daily commitment to grow in love so that the love you offer to your husband or wife is increasingly selfless, mature, and patient.
  8. Love is being unwilling to do what is wrong when you have been wronged but to look for concrete and specific ways to overcome evil with good.
  9. Love is being a good student of your spouse, looking for his physical, emotional, and spiritual needs so that in some way you can remove the burden, support him as he carries it, or encourage him along the way.
  10. Love means being willing to invest the time necessary to discuss, examine, and understand the problems that you face as a couple, staying on task until the problem is removed or you have agreed upon a strategy of response.
  11. Love is always being willing to ask for forgiveness and always being committed to grant forgiveness when it is requested.
  12. Love is recognizing the high value of trust in a marriage and being faithful to your promises and true to your word.
  13. Love is speaking kindly and gently, even in moments of disagreement, refusing to attack your spouse’s character or assault his or her intelligence.
  14. Love is being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt your spouse into giving you what you want or doing something your way.
  15. Love is being unwilling to ask your spouse to be the source of your identity, meaning and purpose, or inner sense of well-being, while refusing to be the source of his or hers.
  16. Love is the willingness to have less free time, less sleep, and a busier schedule in order to be faithful to what God has called you to be and to do as a husband or a wife.
  17. Love is a commitment to say no to selfish instincts and to do everything that is within your ability to promote real unity, functional understanding, and active love in your marriage.
  18. Love is staying faithful to your commitment to treat your spouse with appreciation, respect, and grace, even in moments when he or she doesn’t seem to deserve it or is unwilling to reciprocate.
  19. Love is the willingness to make regular and costly sacrifices for the sake of your marriage without asking anything in return or using your sacrifices to place your spouse in your debt.
  20. Love is being unwilling to make any personal decision or choice that would harm your marriage, hurt your husband or wife, or weaken the bond of trust between you.
  21. Love is refusing to be self-focused or demanding but instead looking for specific ways to serve, support, and encourage, even when you are busy or tired.
  22. Love is daily admitting to yourself, your spouse, and God that you are not able to love this way without God’s protecting, providing, forgiving, rescuing, and delivering grace.
  23. Love is a specific commitment of the heart to a specific person that causes you to give yourself to a specific lifestyle of care that requires you to be willing to make sacrifices that have that person’s good in view.

Yes, that’s all of them. They’re all my favorites. I’m a big believer in romantic love – and it’s not just for marriage, either, as long as it’s done chastely before marriage. You can do lots of things during courtship that can serve as practice for loving well during marriage, before you ever get married.

I’m blogging this topic because several of my friends (Rob, Wes, Andrew, etc.) have amazing wives and they really, really love them and that’s fun for me to see and hear about since I want to love my future wife like that, too. And I hope that she wants to love me like that, if there is a future Mrs. WK. A list like this provides useful guidelines for knowing what Christian romantic love looks like, although I wish they had mentioned slaying dragons.

And notice that the main focus is on the ability to love self-sacrificially – and the man and the woman are both obligated. Anyone who is growing in their Christian faith should find that growing the capacity for self-sacrificial love is normal for them. And you can actually try it out as you are learning more about it – to follow Jesus by loving self-sacrificially.

The persuasive power of romantic Christian love

One of the neat things that apologists often overlook is the witnessing power of loving other Christians, even romantically. There are lots of non-Christians in my life who are always waiting for the latest news of my adventures in my platonic attempts to loving Christian damsels in distress well. (they usually don’t know who the woman is so I’m not breaching her privacy). Non-Christians are more willing to listen to heroic and dangerous deeds of self-sacrificial love than they are arguments, although the one often leads to the other, because the deeds are supported by a worldview.

When non-Christians see how Christians in relationships bounce back from sin and disappointment to love other Christians, it says something about Christianity. When Christians in love forgive each other for sinning against each other, that says something about Christianity. I think it’s sometimes tough on non-Christians that we have all of these moral rules that make us appear exclusive and judgmental – but by distinguishing ourselves in loving others then we can actually balance that out by the way we love.

Obviously, I think it should be paired up with good reasons and evidences, but love does get their attention. Especially romantic, married love that produces a lot of well-behaved children who know the Lord and serve him effectively! And I think that Christians need to think more about viewing opposite-sex Christians as people who need love and who can be loved – as a way of serving God and witnessing to unbelievers. It’s good to serve God by shoring up other Christians who are in tough trying to serve the Lord effectively. And there is no way to shore up a person more than by marrying them and knitting your soul to theirs, your fate to theirs. It’s the ultimate act of unselfishness towards your spouse and towards Christ the Lord, who expects to be served effectively by the marriage.

Consider John 13:31-34:

31When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. 32If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.

33“My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

34“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Christian romantic relationships are not the same as secular romantic relationships. The criteria of attraction are not the same, and the goals are not the same. It’s not about individual fulfillment, it’s about helping another person be more Christlike and helping them to serve Jesus better. It’s about two people fighting on the same battlefield who are less concerned about their own well-being, and more concerned about the life and combat capability of the soldier next to them. We need to put ourselves second and take care of the soldier next to us even when we don’t like them. It’s enough that they they are on the same side as we are. Some people who are not fighting yet may join us when they see the care and concern we have for each other.

The person whom this post is about can own up to his amazing marriage in the comments, if he wants to. Glenn, Neil, Matt, and Richard B. can all mention their super-duper marriages, too. It’s fun for me to hear about – although I remain cautious.

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Commentary

Mark Driscoll explains what men are supposed to do

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Mark Driscoll writes this article. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

When the man is trying to subdue and harness everything under his dominion to do what he desires for it to do, and it all fights against him, it teaches him about God: The ground is doing to the man what the man does to the Lord. The man asks, “Why is this so hard? Why is everything fighting me? Why is it in rebellion?” And God says, “Because you’ve sinned, and you’re doing the same thing to me.” So the man starts to understand the gospel as he’s working. The more a man works and takes responsibility, and becomes a husband and a father, and buys a home, and runs a business, the more likely he is to make sense out of the gospel. Because he’ll feel what it’s like to have something rebel against you when you’re trying to bring order out of chaos.

This will remind him that he is that way toward God, that he is thorns and thistles, and that God is trying to cultivate him. It brings a man to a place of humility. What this means for the men: Everything you try and do is going to be hard. Some men think, “Well, I’ll just find a woman, kids, job, house, or new car that won’t be a lot of work. But, they don’t make those! Nothing comes that way. Everything on this planet is a fixer-upper. And men are going to have to work hard to cultivate those things.

I think this is something women need to understand about Christian men. When men try to change you to be more Christ-like and more effective, it’s not because we don’t like you – it’s because we do like you. We don’t try to teach apologetics to fishes, and we don’t try to turn feminists into fiscal conservatives and foreign policy hawks. We work on you like we would work on F-14 Tomcats. Because you’re valuable and awesome. And what happens to your worldview matters, ultimately. It’s not judging, it’s serving.

It might be worth checking out chapter 3 of C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain” as well, where he explains divine benevolence as a process in which the lover perfects the beloved, because he cares that the beloved is perfect. That’s why the best women are the ones who let you lead them.

And a little more Driscoll:

Men are built to learn and receive knowledge, and cultivate the mind and the soul by reading, learning, thinking. Not just in abstract concepts, but in practical life. Most men are practical theologians. They want to know about how to make money and work and life and have friendship and defend and have honor and nobility and dignity, all the themes of the Father to the Son in Proverbs.

And that’s why guys like me are always pushing women to learn more about the mechanics of marriage, economics, counter-terrorism, legal firearm ownership, etc. We are trying to live out what the Bible says here in the real world. And that means thinking about how the real world works. What really helps the poor? Cutting taxes, or raising the minimum wage? What really deters terrorists? A carrier battle group parked next to a rogue nation, or canceling missile defense programs?

Now I’m going to be silly to draw comments from Mary.

Regarding Driscoll himself – I like Driscoll, but I think he is a big frightened feminist coward when it comes to holding women accountable for their own choices. I think he is soft on his Bible and theology. You know, he has a flock to maintain and it’s probably like three-quarters women, so he might have to twist the Scriptures here and there in order to fix the blame on men for the bad things that women freely choose to do. Still, you might get something out of his article, even though I think his theology is Unitarian or Episcopalian or something. Oh wait, I remember – he’s Catholic. Oh, I mean he’s Calvinist. I get those two mixed up all the time because they’re so similar. He probably voted for Obama, too. Can anything good come out of King County?

UPDATE: I am totally kidding in that last paragraph. Please everyone comment saying they are not offended so ECM will know that Christians don’t get offended that much.