“And anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
This morning we started wrestling through what we are supposed to do with a passage like this one and its disturbing images of the final fate of those who reject God as Lord. We started with the basics: The doctrine of Hell is hard, but it’s also necessary. With those two truths in place, let’s deal with the emotional hard of the idea of Hell being a place of eternal death and fiery torment. Are those both true pictures of Hell? Because, if we’re honest, those are the ideas that drive so many away from the doctrine.
“And anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Preachers of old were famous for their sermons filled with “hellfire and brimstone.” Some, like George Whitfield, were famous (infamous?) for offering their audiences graphic descriptions of Hell that were so compelling people would give their lives to Christ then and there on the spot just to avoid even the remotest possibility of such a fate. Today, however, the idea of a fiery Hell waiting for all those who refuse to have faith in Christ not only isn’t very popular, for many it is an active impediment to their accepting the existence of God in the first place. So then, what do we do with verses like this one?
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.’ Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
I was recently reading through a devotional looking at various statements people often associate with the Scriptures, but are not actually found in them at all. In fact, when you break down these popular sayings, their foundational ideas are actually counter to the truth claims the various authors who contributed to the Scriptures make. One that really jumped out at me because I have heard it so many times is this: God won’t give you more than you can handle. This idea is popular, but is it true?
“For we conclude that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.” – Romans 3:28 (CSB – Read the chapter)
”For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.” – James 2:26 (CSB – Read the chapter)
Paul and James were two of the brightest lights in the early church. James became the leader of the flagship church in Jerusalem and was ultimately martyred by the Jewish religious authorities when Rome had their political back turned. Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles and was almost singularly responsible for the expansion of the church into Europe. The church was in many ways built on their backs. And yet in this pair of verses, they seem to be deeply at odds with each other. What gives?
This past Sunday we kicked off a brand-new teaching series called, Bible Stories to Make You Squirm. If you are the kind of person who believes the Scriptures should have some kind of a place of authority in your life, you are left with a thorny problem: There are some stories in there that are just downright uncomfortable. If they are there on purpose and for our benefit, what are we supposed to do with them? In this series, we’ll explore several of these hard stories and begin to see that all Scripture really is for our benefit. Even the hard stuff.
You Want Me to Do What?
Have you ever
watched or read something that just wasn’t good? It’s not necessarily that it was bad, it just
wasn’t good. You just didn’t enjoy it. I remember watching Adam Sandler’s Punch
Drunk Love when I was in college. If
you’ve never heard of it, you’re better off for that. It’s a dark comedy about a socially awkward
guy falling in love. It was awful. The credits rolled and all of us gathered in
my friend’s living room watching it looked around at each other and as almost
the same time said, “We can’t have that two hours of life back.” I remember reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
when I was growing up. A book combining
science fiction and medieval adventure should have been an easy winner. It was all I could do to not put it down and
find something better to read. If I
wasn’t such a perfectionist about finishing books I probably would have. The thing about reading a book or watching a movie
that isn’t good is that you can always just walk out. There are some stories, though, that are
harder to ignore.
The Nexus 