The Story We Tell
Being loved is a finicky thing. It can't be forced, coerced, bribed, or purchased. Though we can desire it, yearn for it, weep for its lack, real love cannot be produced by us. No amount of effort or yearning can produce being loved because love, love worth having, is a gift.
Our culture forgets that. Some of us tell ourselves that we can earn love. So we busy ourselves with causes and catastrophes trying to be the type of people who deserve love. Some of us think that our appearance will be what gets us love, so we work and prune and nip and tuck trying to be beautiful enough to be loved. But love, love worth having, isn't based on who we are or what we do. Love worth having is given to us. Love worth having isn't worth having because of the person getting loved but because of the person loving.
This is one of the things that is so beautiful about the Gospel. Nothing we did made God decide to love us. God didn't look down and see how beautiful we were or how much good we were doing and say, "these people will I love." Rather, through Christ, God loved us while we were still diseased, rebellious, and filthy. More than that, nothing we do now maintains that state of being loved by God. We never stop (at least not completely) being diseased, rebellious, and filthy and God never stops loving us once he's chosen to start. And hear this, as great as that news already is it gets even better.
As much as God is love, God is just. It means that God will one day remake the world and destroy and punish every evil ever done. Every voice that cried out for justice will be heard. Every violation of the image of God in man will be brought before the court and found guilty. The judge will not be bribed anymore by the rich and powerful. The wicked will not triumph any more. Everyone will be judged rightly and fairly. That justice is as immutable as his love but it is terrifying too because that justice turns against anything that is diseased, rebellious, and filthy and we, if we are anything, are diseased, rebellious, and filthy.
So here is God. He wants to show us his love. He wants to punish and destroy everything that is not perfect. How is this conflict to be solved?
There is a tendency for people to look at this problem and try to solve it themselves. Some solve it by focusing on God's justice. They make God into something like an angry father, only being restrained from violence by Jesus. Others make God only loving, as unwilling or unable to punish and destroy what is wicked. But this problem has already been solved, by God himself. Listen to the divine dialog and see what how God decides to join together justice and love.
"What shall I do? Here are these wicked things. They murder and steal and rape and profane without end. The strong strangle the weak. The rich bruise the poor. They are diseased, rebellious, and filthy in their own depravity. Even the victims turn and become villains themselves! They deserve, every one of them, to be destroyed."
"And yet I love them. I made them. Each one I formed out of love and compassion only to see them turn from me. What can I do? I cannot ignore how they destroy anything and everything good, but if I give them what they deserve they will be destroyed."
"I have decided. I will choose one of them to punish. I will destroy that one, he will receive every drop of wrath the rest of them deserve. But again I have a problem. If he is going to be a substitute for the many, he must receive their wrath but be perfect himself, otherwise sin will just be substituting for sin. He must be able to be a substitute both for the wrath they deserve and the perfection they lack. None of them can do this, for none of them are perfect. More than that, I love each of them. How can I choose one of them to suffer my ultimate wrath even if it saves millions of them?"
"There is only one way. I accept it gladly. I will become one of them. In one of the great mysteries of creation, I will empty myself of glory and become human yet remain eternal and transcendent. I will pour out the wrath they deserve on myself. I will take every drop of it. I will be perfect for them, so that as I function as their substitute for my wrath I can also impart to them my own perfection. They will be more than just saved from wrath, they will be birthed into new life. It will be terrible for me, the human me will suffer untold agony, but here my justice and my love will meet and be at peace, neither subsuming the other."
How much more beautiful is that? God did not just say, "I love you." He said to us, "I will love you though I must suffer." He gave us a gift we did not deserve though it cost him greatly. This is the true beauty of the Gospel.
I will admit, there are still parts of the divine dialog I don't understand. Christ's death is powerful enough to save anyone, even Hitler and Gandhi(see 1). At the same time, we see in Scripture that people apparently somehow reject this gift of God and remain under wrath. To say this is not the case is false on its face.
Is it wrong to wish that Muslims, Jews and Hindus make it into the gift of God's love? Of course not, because if they do not they remain under the terrible wrath of God. It is no more wrong to wish for that reality than it is to wish that HIV were no more or that poverty was abolished because, if it were true, much suffering would be averted. But to hope for something and to wish for something is not the same thing. A wish may not find any basis in reality. A hope must be based in reality. Otherwise what is the difference between hopeful thinking and wishful thinking?
And what if scripture isn't clear on the matter? What if Muslims making it in isn't clearly expressed? We can respond to this by saying that, even if their punishment is not clear, a way they can be saved is quite explicit, to believe in Christ. To say "I hope Muslims make it in," to express that hope and then leave it to mere chance, doing nothing to share Christ with the Muslim when we have a clear way they could make it in is just as reproachful as saying "I hope HIV will be cured" and leave that hope to undefined chance, never supporting the relevant pharmaceutical research though that would be a clear way to further that goal.
But shouldn't we leave room for doubt? If we admit that the hope we speak of is developed based on biblical speculation then why would we act and teach as if it is developed on biblical fact? Surely this betrays the point of allowing a generous orthodoxy if we simply make our speculation into a new dogma.
So though we may wish that all may be saved, we must be honest, the Bible presents some as rejecting Christ's gift. That's hard to understand. That is a terrible thing. It hurts God. It hurts us. But we cannot turn away from it. If we focus on that tiny little thing we don't understand, how some people can manage to reject Christ, we risk missing the wonderful, beautiful story that God did tell us through his son. Ultimately, it is listening to the story that God tells and not the story that we tell that will be show that God is love.
1.Gandhi was, among other things, a racist, a proponent (at minimum a detractor of convenience) of the despicable hindu caste system and the type of individual whose ethics would demand he let his wife die for want of western medicine but accept western medicine gladly when his life was on the line. We would know this if we got our history from books instead of movies that were paid for in large part by the Indian government. This is an excellent example of why we should be careful of holding anyone up as an example of a good individual.
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