I never set out to be controversial.
That's not compelling to me. When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.
That being said, I spend the past several years writing a book called Love Wins which released last week and, from what I'm told, has generated a fair bit of, well, controversy.
So why did I write the book?
First, as a Christian pastor I believe that for many in our culture the Christian story has lost the plot and a number of other stories have been told that have nothing to with who Jesus is and why he came.
I believe that God loves everybody and that Jesus came to give us and show us and invite us into that love so that we can experience it and then share it with others. As Jesus himself said, he didn't come to condemn but to save.
The first people who heard the announcement that God has not given up on the world but sent Jesus to save us from all of the ways we've made a mess of things, they called this "good news."
Who doesn't need good news?
This leads me to another reason why I wrote the book. Over the years I've interacted with a massive number of people who have questions about the Christian faith.
What about heaven and hell? What about people who have never heard of Jesus? Are billions of people who aren't Christians going to burn in torment forever?
How is that good news?
And then the big question, the one that lurks behind all of the others: "What is God like?"
For many these questions are obstacles; barriers to faith. And so I wrote this book to address these questions. Obviously, I haven't spoken the last word on any of these subjects. My book is part of an ongoing discussion people have been having for thousands of years about the things that matter most.
When we enter in to this discussion, the one about heaven and hell and salvation and God and the future of the world, our questions matter because to ask is to acknowledge our need, which requires tremendous humility. And God can work with that, because God is in the give and take.
"What do you think?" is a question Jesus often asked. We are wise to pause here and remember that Jesus rarely answered someone's question with a direct yes or no or with an even remotely straight forward answer. He tells a story, he spins a parable, he point to flowers and birds.
This isn't because he's avoiding the questions or he's scared to come clean on where he really stands. It's because he understands that some truths can't be crammed into sound-bytes.
And then another reason, which is really an invitation. I recently received an email from a woman who had just finished reading the new book. She said it was ''...Like when you scuba dive and you first breathe in the oxygen. At first it feels a little panicky, like you can't breathe. It doesn't fit. But if you give it a minute and relax, you can breathe. You can breathe in places you've never even tried to breathe before and can see things you couldn't see unless you let that panicky feeling be there for a bit. Then it's underwater...to unseen life."
I love how she uses that word "panicky" because that's how faith is. You stumble into something new, you hear something you haven't heard before, and first it's jarring, strange, even shocking, and yet you know something life giving is lurking in there. And so you keep going.
Jesus said "Repent," which means to "be transformed."
Let the good news grab you, disrupt you, unsettle you and shake you up. Lose your life and find it, die and be reborn, take a breath, open your eyes, and see things you've never seen before.
It's an ancient invitation, a pressing, urgent wake up call to say yes to this Jesus and the love of God he insists is for every single one of us, right now, here, today.
If that invitation, that insistence, that message and that conviction cause controversy, I'll accept that.
Because now, more than ever, good news is what we need.
Rob Bell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Rob Bell: Everything Is Spiritual
I share with Pastor Bell the truth that God is Love, and that Jesus is the ultimate expression of that love to a fallen world. The Bible states that Jesus was full of "grace and truth." Pastor Bell offers a "feel good" message that grace is disconnected from truth. The truth is that God will not be fitted into our box of "fairness" or "grace." He will run the Universe as He pleases, and He will create the principles by which it runs with or without our approval. Particularly, he will not change His nature so that we will "feel good" about Him.
Jesus spoke very directly about a condition and place known as "hell," a place of eternal suffering. There are consequences to rejecting or ignoring God. There are consequences to accepting a diluted and self-serving version of God. These consequences follow from the principles God has set in place: separation from God brings suffering, and dying without accepting the truth of Jesus brings eternal consequences.
At its peak from 1,100 to 1,200 A.D., the city covered nearly six square miles and boasted a population of as many as 100,000 people.
All those 100,000 people who lived in Cahokia were born and died after Jesus death and resurrection but I'm sure they never heard of Jesus, but God is going to condemn them to hell anyways?
Seems to me christians just make it up as they go along, some things never change.
Verse 14 tells us that death and hell (Hades) were hurled into the lake of fire . This means the SECOND DEATH, the lake of fire. The FIRSTdeath is Adamic death . We die because of Adam and Eve. We inherited imperfection. Theres a ressurection from Adamic death which is the first death. But whoever dies the second death will not have a ressurection. Fire in the bible symbolizes destruction. Not torment but instead eternal destruction.
You really should use scripture to back up your belief in hell fire.
Those who believe in eternal damnation sometimes refer to God's "justice" or "holiness" as if they were a needed counterbalance to his love. But there is no "justice" or "holiness" in creating fallible creatures and then damning the majority to hell eternally for non-eternal wrongs--as if he had no idea that it would all turn out that way!
Eternal damnation is incommensurate with short, limited, fallible lives. We are too small to do any harm to God.
God does not tell us to forgive yet find himself incapable of it. He does not tell us to forgive people only if they apologize or later agree with us, nor does he recommend unforgiveness for the sake of "justice". In fact, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. Is he then recommending injustice re wrong-doers or a higher kind of good? Is God incapable of this higher good?
I don't see how anyone can take Jesus and his teachings seriously and NOT question the idea of eternal hell.
fanned!
All we have to do is to tell the truth that is able to sanctify us so that we will want to do all of the right things
Whoever approved abortions or approves of them, for example will have to face the 50 million babies that were aborted.
Jesus was in Hell or hades for parts of three days before his ressurection. Acts 2:31 speaking about Jesus ressurection there in verse 31 it says," HE saw beforehand and spoke concerning the ressurection of the Christ, that neither was he forsaken in HADES (Greek word for Hell ) nor did his flesh see corruption. If hell was a place of torment for sinners Jesus wouldn;t have went there. It's clearly NOT a place of torment, but is the grave, death, the opposite of life.
Jesus died and was ressurected on the third day.
All who are in HELL will be RESSURECTED AFTER Armeggedon Which is Gods war againt all unrighteousness. Revelation 20: 13 And the sea gave up those dead in it , and death and HADES ( Hell) GAVE UP THOSE DEAD IN THEM.
GOD loves you. The Being by Whom all the universe was made, and in Whom it persists, cares about litte old you, a tiny speck clinging to a rock orbiting a minor sun at the far end of a medium-sized galaxy.
God LOVES you. You are loved and cherished.
God loves YOU. Yes, you. With all your faults. There is nothing you can do that is so bad that God will stop loving you.
This is the Gospel, the Good News.
http://wsimpson.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/love-wins-is-rob-bell-at-his-best/
Genesis 3:4
Viewing the 1769 King James Version. Click to switch to 1611 King James Version of Genesis 3:4
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
Then the criminals might as well continue to commit their crimes the world might as well continue in sin ,child molesters ,human traffickers ,defrauders ,torturers,thieves , liers ,killers .What happens to the message of redemption at Calvary? I thought we were all supposed to repent ?.Isn't that the biblical message?
Hebrews 11:6 tells us that
"And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him."
So, yes, eternal punishment and reward shouldn't be our SOLE motivation for living the Christian life, as love for each other should come naturally as an overflow of our love for God. But according to Jesus, it should be PART of our motivation. Jesus does not condemn us for seeking eternal personal fulfillment-- he promises us that very thing.
But do they practice what was preached on Monday?
They say non-believer's go to Hell and burn,
Only believer's go to Heaven, but what have they learned?
What is needed in this world is Peace, not blame,
For the The Goddess & God are united, no matter Their Name!
Blessed Be!
I believe the same thing as you preach in this book, and having just reverted to the RCC, it was ...comforting? to me to realize that God is much more merciful that black and white/heaven and hell that I had been previously taught (which was one of my major sticking points of mainstream Protestantism).