God and Love

 

I am reading a lot of religious books at the moment.  I am curious about all things Christian faith and just getting into it.  However, I can’t read anything too preachy or without a narrative.  I need a bit of flow and story.

Two authors I have come across and love, probably because of their humanity and accessibility are Philip Yancey and Rob Bell.

 

I read Philip Yancey ‘Disappointment with God’ that the book guy at church lent me after me telling him that the last book he lent me was too dry and intellectual.  Now I am not pretending to do a book review on these guys.  I am just telling you what I remember most vividly about what I read and the questions it answered for me.

What struck me like a bolt of lightning and I am sure this isn’t even the main crux of what he wrote in the book, was one part of his answer to the question, ‘God, why don’t you show yourself?’

He explained how in the Old Testament (which I don’t know that much about), God showed himself all the time in real and dramatic manifestations and people still didn’t believe so in the New Testament he tried a different tack. 

‘As I studied the story of the Israelites, I had second thoughts about crystal-clear guidance.  It may serve some purpose – it may, for example, get a mob of just-freed slaves across a hostile desert – but it does not seem to encourage spiritual development.  In fact, for the Israelites it nearly eliminated the need for faith at all; clear guidance sucked away freedom, making every choice a matter of obedience rather than faith’.

It made complete and total sense to me.  He says that God wants to be loved and for that to be real it has to be free choice.

Philip Yancey writes about lots of other stuff in this book, but that was my Aha moment.

The 3 questions he asks are, Is God Unfair?  Is God silent?  Is God hidden?

Book 2 was ‘Love Wins’ by Rob Bell which I got from the second hand book shelves at Luton Christian Bookshop.

What this book answered for me was the bit about what happens to all the good Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists etc when they die.  Do they really all go to everlasting torment?  He gives lots of biblical references to reconciliation, but basically says that the loving God we know could just not be that mean and unforgiving.  I have always secretly thought that whoever God decides is in or out is his business – not mine.

‘A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.  It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus.  This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear’.

 

The other thing he answered for me was the viewpoint that it doesn’t matter what a terrible life we might have here on Earth, because we are going to get our just rewards in heaven.  Well actually I do care about making the best possible use of my time on this planet and being happy and content.  He argues, that living a life that follows biblical principles can bring us a little bit of heaven here and now.  Makes sense to me.  I imagine heaven as earth in a different dimension without the sin and evil.

‘There’s heaven now, somewhere else.

There’s heaven here, sometime else.

And then there’s Jesus’s invitation to heaven

Here

And

Now,

In this moment,

In this place.’

 

I probably haven’t made you want to read the books at all, but I found them riveting and joyous.  Poor old Rob Bell stopped being a pastor at his church after publication of the book because it got such a negative reaction from some quarters, but I thought it made sense.

We can love and honour God by being happy in this life now.