The Apostles’ Creed is a beautiful summary of the essentials of the Christian faith. But it’s so broad that heretics can recite it with a straight face. The Nicene Creed is much more specifically trinitarian, but it is still pretty “ecumenical” -- meaning that believers of all stripes can attest to (most of) it. What would it look like to create a summary of the things Evangelical Christians believe? Here’s my attempt as such a creed:
We believe in one God,
Infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth,
The maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible,
Eternally existing as three distinct persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The Father, who loves us and adopts us as his children,
Sent his Son into the world to reconcile sinners to him.
The Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the Father,
Begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father,
Having two natures, indivisible but without confusion,
For us and for our salvation became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and was born of the virgin,
Lived a righteous life,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died for our sins, and was buried;
The third day he rose again in the flesh, as the prophets predicted.
He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father
Where he intercedes for us.
From there he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
His kingdom will never end.
The Holy Spirit, the comforter, the giver of life, who spoke through the prophets and apostles
Was sent by the Father and the Son to convict sinners, regenerate hearts, and conform believers to the image of Christ.
And we believe in one universal church, a nation of priests called to be a holy people,
The inspiration of the scriptures
The forgiveness of sins through faith alone,
The resurrection of the body,
And the life everlasting in the world to come. Amen.
Living in the Problem of Pain
“But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted;
you consider their grief and take it in hand.
The victims commit themselves to you;
you are the helper of the fatherless” (Psalm 10:14).
“Why does God let bad things happen” is a very different question from “Why did God let this happen to me” or, worse yet, “to my baby”. What do we say to people — or to ourselves — when their world has just collapsed on them?
Suffering can either push you away from God or draw you near to him. Let it make you draw near to God.
Yesterday you knew God was good. You knew God was sovereign. You trusted that he had a plan that he is working out in this broken world. All of that is still true. God is still good. And he still loves you.
How can we believe God loves us in the midst of the pain? Our feelings will lie to us and tell us he doesn’t. We have to remind ourselves of the truth:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).a
The cross proves God’s love. Don’t let the Devil tell you that God doesn’t love you, because you know he does. He loves you more than you can understand.
When you lose your job, your heavenly Father loves you. When your house burns down, he loves you. When your life burns down, he loves you. When he takes your baby to heaven far earlier than you wanted, he loves you. And he loves your child more than you do.
People will offer suggestions for why this has happened. Don’t listen to them. They don’t know. No one knows but God, and he rarely tells us why. But you know it’s not because God doesn’t love you and your family. You can trust his heart in the plan he is working out.
Job is the quintessential sufferer. We all know what befell him. As Sproul said, “Ultimately the only answer God gave to Job was a revelation of Himself. It was as if God said to him, 'Job, I am your answer.' Job was not asked to trust a plan but a person, a personal God who is sovereign, wise, and good. It was as if God said to Job: 'Learn who I am. When you know me, you know enough to handle anything.'”1
We have to remind ourselves when things are easy and when things are hard: God is powerful, God is sovereign, and God is good. He does not promise that we won't have hardship, but he promises that nothing will be wasted and he will see us through. And one day, he will make beauty from the ashes.
There’s another thing people will say you shouldn’t listen to: “God never gives us more than we can handle.” He absolutely does. When these things happen, God doesn’t want you to lean on your own strength because he thinks you can handle it. He knows you can’t. He wants you to lean on him. His grace is sufficient for you; his power is made perfect in weakness (2Cor 12:9).
God never promised not to give us more than we can handle. His promise is, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb 13:5).
What do you read when your world’s falling apart? The Bible. God has given us a treasure trove of comfort in his word. Many people turn to the Psalms of lament, like Psalm 10, 13, 22, 88, or 102 (among many others). I find more comfort in the passages that magnify our vision of God: for example, Psalm 23, 46, or 139 or the ending of Job (38-42) or Isaiah 40-45. Perhaps a little bit of both would be helpful.
a If someone wants more like this to meditate on, consider Rom 5:8, Gal 2:20, 1John 4:9-10.
1 RC Sproul, Surprised by Suffering
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Living the Solution to the Problem of Evil
“Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness” (Matt 9:35).
CS Lewis wrote, “If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.”1 If God is not going to end the problem of evil until he ends the world, what do we do until then?
Sharing The Gospel
First and foremost, we need to let the pain of this world remind us that people need Jesus. They need to hear the real gospel, not some watered-down self-help version. People need to know, “We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are ... rebels who must lay down our arms.”1
When we “lay down our arms” — when we repent of our sinful ways — and trust Jesus to be our righteousness before God, we are transformed by the Spirit, adopted by the Father, and promised that joy forever will eclipse the pain of this world. “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations ...” (Matt 28:19).
Living The Kingdom
Second, we need to live in this world the way it ought to be.
“I have argued so far ... that the ultimate answer to the problem of evil is to be found in God’s creation of a new world ... with redeemed human beings ruling over it and bringing to it God’s wise, healing order. ... I now want to suggest that part of the Christian task in the present is to anticipate this eschatology, to borrow from God’s future in order to change the way things are in the present, to enjoy the taste of our eventual deliverance from evil by learning how to loose the bonds of evil in the present.”2
I’ve seen several versions of a cartoon where one character says, “Sometimes I’d like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he could do something about it.” The other says, “I’m afraid he might ask me the same question.” Sin will exist in this world until Jesus returns. Disease is a part of this world. But so much of the pain people experience could be removed or at least eased if we could just get our act together and do something about it.
There are lots of reasons why people are poor, but people are hungry because no one feeds them. Injustice exists because we act unjustly or allow others to. We cannot stop cancer or hurricanes, but we do not do all we can to alleviate the pain the natural world causes.
When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven”, it means more than merely making Earth more like God’s ultimate kingdom, but it does not mean less. In the Old Testament, we see again and again that God wants his people to help the poor and to create just laws and see that they are applied impartially. To God, real religion and real piety are as much about our neighbor as it is about him:
“Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” (Is 58:6-7).
As NT Wright said, “The Christian ... is thus under obligation both to honor the ruling authority, whatever it may be, and to work constantly to remind that authority of its God-given task and to encourage and help it to perform that task: to do justice and love mercy, to ensure that those who are weak and vulnerable are properly looked after.”2
And we are under obligation to do so ourselves, whether government does its job properly or not. We also are to be people of forgiveness and reconciliation. We are to be living examples of God’s healing and grace in this world.
To live out God’s solution to the problem of evil means “to live between the cross and the resurrection on the one hand and the new world on the other, and in believing in the achievements of the cross and resurrection, and in learning how to imagine the new world....”2
Saying God will make everything right in the next world will sound like pie in the sky to unbelievers. Living like his Kingdom has come on Earth as it is in Heaven will make it much more believable.
“We are not told — or not in any way that satisfies our puzzled questioning — how and why there is radical evil within God’s wonderful, beautiful and essentially good creation. One day I think we shall find out, but I believe we are incapable of understanding it at the moment, in the same way that a baby in the womb would lack the categories to think about the outside world. What we are promised, however, is that God will make a world in which all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, a world in which forgiveness is one of the foundation stones and reconciliation is the cement which holds everything together. And we are given this promise not as a matter of whistling in the dark, not as something to believe even though there is no evidence, but in and through Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection, and in and through the Spirit through whom the achievement of Jesus becomes a reality in our world and in our lives. When we understand forgiveness, flowing from the work of Jesus and the Spirit, as the strange, powerful thing it really is, we begin to realize that God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of others, is the knife that cuts the rope by which sin, anger, fear, recrimination and death are still attached to us. Evil will have nothing to say at the last, because the victory of the cross will be fully implemented.”2
For more on a practical approach to the problem of evil, see NT Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God.
1 CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain
2 NT Wright, Evil and The Justice of God
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The Problem of Evil (1/3)
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field” (Gen 3:17-18).
Why does God allow evil and suffering in the world?
There is pain and suffering in the world because there is sin in the world. Humans do evil things to each other because they are sinners. We are all doing evil things to each other all the time. We kill and steal and deceive and mistreat. He will not stop us from doing the evil in our hearts. This is the path humanity chose. He cannot end evil without ending evil. He will do that one day, but not today. For today “he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2Pet 3:9). Until then, we live in the fallen world we created.
But what about natural evil? Couldn’t God at least stop the world from hurting us? That, too, is part of the curse for our sin. The world “will produce thorns and thistles for you”. The thorns and thistles are part of the punishment, but they are also for our benefit — they are “for” us. The pain and suffering caused by the natural world tells us that everything is not right with the world. It keeps us from getting too comfortable here.
Why is that a good thing? Because happy people in a fallen world have a hard time seeking God. We see time and again in scripture and in life that the poor and sick are much more open to the gospel than those who are sitting fat and happy. Does that seem cruel? It’s the opposite of cruel — it just recognizes our real need. “Suppose a person lives his entire life experiencing nothing but prosperity and happiness, yet dies without a right relationship with God. What has he gained? Actually, he has lost everything.”1
Humanity’s real problem is our separation from God. Not only are we alienated from our true purpose and nature, we are born on a course for damnation. “Man, as a species, spoiled himself, and ... good, to us in our present state, must therefore mean primarily remedial or corrective good.
“The Human spirit will not even begin to try and surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”2
And so at times God puts us on our backs to make us look up. “It sometimes seems that it is only when suffering, pain, or grief invades our lives that we begin to be sober and direct our thinking toward the things of God in a significant way.”3
But that seems cruel to some. “Let me implore the reader to try to believe ... that God, who made [humans], may be really right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all of this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched.”2
Therefore real love does not seek to make broken people happy in their brokenness; it wants to make them recognize their brokenness and turn to the cure. If this sometimes seems worse than the disease, it’s because we have forgotten the ultimate outcome of the disease.
To speak of the cure brings us to the answer to the problem of evil.
“If we again ask the question: ‘Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?’ and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we now know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.”4
As John Stott said, “I could never believe in God if it were not for the cross.”5 Whatever God is doing in our world, he did not insulate himself from the pain and suffering we face. He came down here and lived through the worst of it with us. He didn’t come as a king but as the poorest of the poor. He came as part of an oppressed religious and ethnic minority that lived under harsh totalitarian rule. And he suffered more than just a few years of physical pain.
“Just imagine every single pain in the history of the world, all rolled together into a ball, eaten by God, digested, fully tasted, eternally. In the act of creating the world, God not only said, let there be pretty little bunny rabbits and flowers and sunsets, but also let there be blood and guts and the buzzing flies around the cross. ... God’s answer to the problem of suffering is that he came right down into it.”6
In Christ, God suffered with us. Through Christ, God will heal the world and make everything right. One day those who responded to suffering by turning to God will see that it was all worthwhile. As Mother Teresa said, “In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.”
One day we will live in a world with “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev 21:4). Justice will be done. God will right every wrong. We will see the glory achieved by our “light and momentary troubles” (2Cor 4:17) and know that it was all worth it. The God who always keeps his word has promised it.
You should definitely go deeper on this topic. The single best book I’ve found on the subject is CS Lewis’ The Problem of Pain, but any of the books below would be worthwhile.
1 Jerry Bridges, The Gospel for Real Life
2 CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain
3 RC Sproul, Surprised by Suffering
4 Tim Keller, The Reason for God
5 John Stott, The Cross of Christ
6 Peter Kreeft in Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith
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The Problem of Evil, Part 0
“How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrong?” (Hab 1:2-3).
How can a good, sovereign God allow evil and suffering in the world? I said before that this is the final exam of Christian theology and apologetics. Now that we’ve covered all the bases, we should be able to address this difficult topic.
The Bible doesn’t pretend this isn’t a problem. All of Job and Habakuk as well as several Psalms and some passages in the New Testament address the question in one form or another. The scriptures do not give us a nice, pat answer, though. Instead they give us a big God.
Just about every post of this project could be a book; that’s doubly true about this. There are many good books written on the topic, and it’s worth everyone’s time to read a few. Everyone will be touched by this at some point.
The intellectual problem has been called the “armchair question” — the question we ask when we’re sitting in our comfortable chairs wondering why God allows evil things to happen over there. “Why does God let children starve in Africa?” The heart problem has been called the “wheelchair question” — the question we ask when we’re suffering, wondering why God let this happen to me. “Why did God let my baby die?” To the best of my meager ability, I’ll speak to both in turn.
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An Eternal Perspective
“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2Cor 4:17-18).
What good is it to know we’ll go to heaven “some day”? It gives us an eternal perspective which can and should transform the way we live.
Hope for hard times
Embracing the knowledge that to die is to be with Jesus and that we will once again live and walk upon the Earth can give us comfort and strength during trials. What is in store for us is far, far better than what we have now, so we can endure “light and momentary” trials. (It might be edifying to remind ourselves what Paul considers “light and momentary troubles” in 2Cor 11:23-27.) For centuries, and even today, Christians have faced suffering and even death boldly because they know “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil 1:21). In the end, anything the world can inflict on us is just one more thing the Father will use to make us more like Jesus (Rom 8:28-30). And the “worst” it can do is send us to live with him forever.
Encouragement in the everyday
Sometimes life is hard; a lot of the time life is just boring. Our lives are filled with sweat and drudgery. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward” (Col 3:23). The truth that we will have physical bodies on a literal earth restores some of the lost dignity of this world. Physical things matter. And honoring God in the small things matters because he sees all. “God wants you to remember that while you are ironing clothes and scrubbing floors; Jesus Christ is coming back someday to take you to be with Him forever.”1
Encouragement to work for the Lord
Life is hard. Living for Jesus is harder. Working for Jesus can be harder still. But it’s worth it. There’s an old saying: “Come work for the Lord. The pay is low, the work is hard, and the hours are long, but the retirement benefits are out of this world.” And that’s what Paul teaches in 1Cor 15. After reminding them of the evidence that Christ rose from the dead, he tells them that Christ’s victory will not be complete until he conquers death by raising us all from the dead. Then death will be swallowed up in victory. “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1Cor 15:58). God will have ample time to reward us for our labor on Earth 2.0, so we should work faithfully.
Clarity on priorities
We all have the same 24 hours every day. The Lord may give us 80 years of those days, and he may not. Let the knowledge that what happens here will not be the end of it spur us on to good works. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rest and relax. God has commanded that we do! But this should help us focus our efforts and how we use our time. As the saying goes, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead.”
Randy Alcorn tells us, “Heaven should affect our activities and ambitions, our recreation and friendships, and the way we spend our money and time. ... Even if I keep my eyes off of impurities, how much time will I want to invest in what doesn’t matter? What will last forever? God’s Word. People. Spending time in God’s Word and investing in people will pay off in eternity and bring me joy and perspective now.”2 So store up treasures in Heaven (Matt 6:20). “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Col 3:1-2).
Encouragement to holiness
Finally, and most importantly, the sure hope that we have in Christ Jesus should cause us to strive to be holy. The New Testament emphasizes this over and over. “All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1John 3:3). Knowing that this Earth and the things of this life will pass away, “what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. ... So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him” (2Pet 3:11-12, 14).
“If my wedding date is on the calendar, and I’m thinking of the person I’m going to marry, I shouldn’t be an easy target for seduction. Likewise, when I’ve meditated on Heaven, sin is terribly unappealing. It’s when my mind drifts from Heaven that sin seems attractive. Thinking of Heaven leads inevitably to pursuing holiness. Our high tolerance for sin testifies of our failure to prepare for Heaven.”2
Some people fear too much thinking about Heaven will make us no earthly good. I don’t think that’s a realistic danger. The people who do the most for the Lord seem to be those who are most entranced by him and the hope we have in him. This is not a call to spend all day thinking only about Heaven. It’s encouragement to develop a realistic perspective about the things of this world and what really matters in life and let that shape the way we live. Because of “the joy set before him,” Christ endured the cross (Heb 12:2). In Christ, because of the joy set before us, we can endure as well.
1 Tony Evans, Theology You Can Count On
2 Randy Alcorn, Heaven
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The Believer's Final Fate
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away ... And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away’” (Rev 21:1-4).
Heaven will be on Earth.
The Great White Throne of Judgment (Rev 20:11-15) will be a terrible thing for those who have rejected Jesus. For his followers, though, it will be there that our salvation will be made complete. Those whose names are found in the Book of Life will not have to pay for their sins because Jesus has already paid. Instead our adoption will be fully realized as we reign with Christ in the new Heaven and new Earth.
We talk about going “to Heaven” when we die. And that’s where we’ll be for a while. But we were made to live on Earth, and that is where we will live after the resurrection. Heaven will be on Earth because God will be there. People debate whether the Earth will be replaced or renewed; I fall into the latter camp because “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay” (Rom 8:19-21). But whether the Earth is totally new or totally renewed, we will live on Earth.
What will that Earth be like? Earth. “If we can’t imagine our present Earth without rivers, mountains, trees, and flowers, then why would we try to imagine the New Earth without those features? ... He promises us a New Earth. If the word Earth in this phrase means anything, it means that we can expect to find earthly things there — including atmosphere, mountains, water, trees, people, houses — even cities, buildings, and streets.”1 It will be Earth, but it will be an unfallen Earth.
What won’t be on the new Earth?
“No death, no suffering. No funeral homes, abortion clinics, or psychiatric wards. No rape, missing children, or drug rehabilitation centers. No bigotry, no muggings or killings. No worry or depression or economic downturns. No wars, no unemployment. No anguish over failure and miscommunication. No con men. No locks. No death. No mourning. No pain. No boredom.”2
No boredom? Won’t sitting around playing a harp all day be boring? We have to separate popular culture from the scriptures. There will be worship. And there will be work, responsibility. Believers will judge angels (1Cor 6:3). Jesus’ words about his followers being responsible for things in the Kingdom of God (eg, Matt 25:14-30) should be taken literally. There will be work to be done, but it will be good work, fulfilling work, work without the frustrations created by living in a fallen world.
The new Earth will be Eden restored. The mission of Adam was to enlarge the garden until it filled the whole world. The new Earth will be as if that had been fulfilled. That doesn’t mean we’ll live a primitive existence, though. What would the world be like if we had filled the earth and subdued it (Gen 1:218) without the fall? There still would have been technological advancements. There would still have been cultures. But no pain, no weeds, no wars, no disease. That is the world we will live in. The good things about this Earth will be better, and the bad things will be gone.
And the best part is God will be there. There will be no temple “because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev 21:22). The new Jerusalem will be the holy of holies, and we will all have free access to it and to him. We will no longer be separated from God by sin. We will see his face and live with him and he with us.
Life in this fallen world is hard. Either you die young or you live long enough for your body to fail you. We earn a living by fighting with thorns and thistles and fallen people. Every beautiful thing decays or erodes or otherwise passes away. And God is hidden from us, separated from us by our sin.
Life on the new Earth will be unfallen bodies that never grow old or experience pain. It will be work that is meaningful and fulfilling, never frustrating or boring. It will be gardens without weeds, beauty without decay. It will be getting to know the saints that came before us. And it will be ever growing knowledge of the infinite God who called us in Christ Jesus before the foundation of the world.
Come, Lord Jesus!
I highly recommend Randy Alcorn’s Heaven or at least the abbreviated Q&A version (a mere 60 pages).
1 Randy Alcorn, Heaven, emphasis in original
2 Randy Alcorn, Heaven: Biblical Answers to Common Questions
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The Return of Christ to Judge the Quick and the Dead
“A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned” (John 5:28-29).
Jesus is coming back. That is good news for some, bad news for others.
“According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1Thes 4:15-17).
This return will be quite literal, physical, and unmistakable (Luke 17:24). When will it happen? No one knows. Life will be carrying on just as it always has, and then it’ll happen (Matt 24:36-39). It’ll be unexpected, coming “like a thief” (Matt 24:42-44, 1Thes 5:2-3, 2Pet 3:10).
What comes next is greatly debated, but at some point after that, whether it’s immediately, seven years, or a thousand years, everyone else will be raised to life also, and Christ will judge everyone.
“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev 20:11-15).
This is what we call Hell. Heaven was created for us (cf, John 14:2-3); Hell was not. It was created for the devil and his angels (Matt 25:41). But humans who have persisted in sharing their rebellion will share their fate.
Jesus taught about this a lot, sometimes speaking of fire (eg, Matt 13:42), sometimes darkness (eg, Matt 22:13) but both including “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The phrase “gnashing of teeth” has come to refer to deep sorrow in our culture, but in the OT, it is always a show of anger (eg, Psalm 37:12), therefore it probably is in the NT, too. So even in Hell, the wicked will still be in rebellion against God.
That answers one of the common objections to the idea of Hell: “What is fair about eternal punishment for finite sin?” But that objection assumes people stop sinning in Hell. “A filthy, vile person on earth will exist eternally as a filthy, vile person.”1 In the end, God will let people be who they are, who they have wanted to be. As Lewis says:
“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They [do not want to be] forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.”2
Is all the talk about fire, darkness, and worms metaphorical? Probably. If so, they’re metaphors for things that are worse, simply bringing it down to language we can understand. Whatever Hell will really be like, it is something so terrible that Christ died to keep people from going there.
Will Hell be the same for everyone? No. Despite popular misconception, Jesus actually taught that some sins are worse than others (eg, John 19:11), and Jesus made it clear that the day of judgment would be worse for some than for others (eg, Matt 11:21-24). We do not need to fear that God will treat everyone like a mass murderer. Everyone will receive a just sentence.
Can we really be happy knowing some people are being punished? We can, and we must. Some people simply do not want God, not on his terms. God must deal with sin. “Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.”3
Will Hell really last forever? There are an increasing number of evangelicals, even some surprising ones, who believe Hell will be finite. I would love to believe that, but I can’t find that in the scriptures. But infinite or finite, it is something to be avoided at any cost (Matt 5:29-30), and we should do all we can to help as many as we can avoid it.
For more on Hell, I highly recommend The Great Divorce by CS Lewis.
1 Tony Evans, Theology You Can Count On
2 CS Lewis, The Problem of Evil
3 CS Lewis, The Great Divorce
What Happens When We Die?
“But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1Thes 4:13).
Death is not the end. When our bodies cease to function, the immaterial part of us — let’s call it our spirit — continues to exist. A day will come when all spirits will have bodies again (more on that later). Death is temporary; that’s why the New Testament frequently refers to it as “falling asleep.” One of two things will happen to our spirits while they wait for bodies.
One of the thieves crucified with Jesus came to trust in him. Jesus told him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:43). And it’s the same for all believers: To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (cf, 2Cor 5:6-9). When our bodies fall asleep, our spirits will “depart and be with Christ, which is better by far” (Phil 1:23). Sproul says, “There is joy in living, so we hold on to life with a passion. Yet for Christians, death is even better, because we go immediately to be with Christ, a hope verified by Christ’s resurrection.”1 Death has been called the last enemy, but in some ways it’s more of a frenemy because, in wounding us, it takes us to be with our Lord and those who have gone on before us.
This “intermediate Heaven” is not our final destination, however. Our spirits will wait there for the day when they will have new bodies like Christ’s resurrected body. Randy Alcorn uses the analogy of someone flying to their new home but having a layover in another city. While there they spend the afternoon enjoying the company of relatives who meet them there, family they haven’t seen in years. But as wonderful as that visit is, they’re not home yet.2 The intermediate Heaven will be a temporary stop, a layover on the way to our true home (again, more later).
But what about unbelievers? If the intermediate state of believers is just a foretaste of the ultimate fate that awaits us, the same is true for the intermediate state of unbelievers. Jesus said they go to “Hades”, a place of torment (Luke 16:23) where they will await their final fate (Rev 20:11-14) the “lake of fire” we call Hell. Does this make you uncomfortable? Good. It should. It is a terrible thing, but it is necessary.
If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse. I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be saved.’ But my reason retorts ‘Without their will, or with it?’ If I say ‘Without their will’ I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? ... I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay ‘any price’ to remove this doctrine. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact.3
God sacrificed a great deal to rescue people from Hell. But not everyone wants to be rescued, not if the requirement is to bend the knee to their maker. I have wept, ugly cried, over good people I know who refuse that “self-surrender”, but the distastefulness of the doctrine does not make it untrue.
But what makes it true? How do we know any of this is true? Maybe when we die, we really do just turn off like a light.
There are an increasing number of books out there that explore near-death out-of-body experiences as proof that humans have an immaterial component.4 But for proof of Heaven and Hell, we’re really just going to have to take the word of the Man from Heaven, the one who lived and died and rose again. He is the one who promised us Heaven; he is the one who warned about Hell. Will we call him a liar?
So what do we do with this? We need to live like it’s true.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.5
So let’s live in a way that makes the gospel attractive. And don’t forget to actually share the gospel with those who need to hear it.
For more on death, I recommend “The Authority of Christ Over Death” in Theology You Can Count On by Tony Evans. For more on Hell, see the chapter of the same name in CS Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.
1 RC Sproul, Everyone's a Theologian
2 Randy Alcorn, Heaven
3 CS Lewis, “Hell” in The Problem of Pain
4 For example, Gary Habermas and JP Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality
5 CS Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”
Image via Pixabay
Introduction to Eschatology
“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” (Rom 8:23-24).
The basis for our hope in Christ is his death and resurrection. The content of our hope is that we, too, will conquer death in Christ Jesus, and then our justification and adoption will be fully realized. That is what the Doctrine of Eschatology (or “Last Things”) is ultimately about.
Theologies usually cover Last Things last. In terms of the Apostles’ Creed, we’ll be looking at how Jesus “shall come to judge the quick and the dead” leading to “the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting” and all that will transpire.
There really isn’t much to a “mere evangelical” eschatology. Committed Christians disagree about most of the details beyond the very fact of it. Will the Millennium be literal or figurative? Will it come before or after Christ’s return? Will the Rapture come before or after the Great Tribulation — if there is one? There are lots of interpretations of the biblical data. And that’s OK. So I’m not going to go into any one theory of how the end times will shake out. It doesn’t matter how we believe events will unfold.
What matters is that we believe Christ will return, that evil will be conquered, and that he will live with his people forever and that we live our lives in light of that.
So. Many. Churches.
“I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:22-23).
Why are there so many denominations? Does the existence of all of those denominations, the fact that Christians can’t agree on anything, prove Christianity isn’t true?
The existence of denominations causes many Christians a lot of angst. Jesus wants his people to be united. Denominations are proof we aren’t, right? I’m not sure that’s true.
Unity and uniformity are not the same thing. To borrow from an earlier metaphor, the body needs eyes, ears, muscles, and bowels. That lack of uniformity doesn’t stop the parts of the body from being unified. Christians disagree on a lot of the finer points of our theology. The greatest divide between Roman Catholics and Protestants is over whether good works play a role in salvation. That is a great divide, and that’s the reason for the Protestant Reformation — we have a fundamental disagreement over a very basic part of Christian theology.
Protestants, then, disagree over things like what exactly happens during the Lord’s Supper, when and how to baptize, and how to govern churches. These are important, but they’re not fundamental issues. Many of the things we disagree over make it difficult to do church together. For example, if you are convinced baptism is for believers only, it’s hard to be in the same local church body as those who teach and practice baptism for the infant children of believers. It’s not that you cannot get along; it’s that running a church like that would be difficult, chaotic even. It’s easier on everyone to separate into different local bodies over that issue.
You can be separate churches and even separate denominations and still act like a family who loves each other. Believers from different denominations can and do work together to preach the gospel and to show the love of Christ to people in need. That, I believe, still demonstrates the unity Christ was praying for.
The problem is when we don’t act like that. Some people divide over a host of tertiary issues (or worse) — eg, a particular view of the end times, worship styles, or which Bible translation to use. It’s not unheard of to find a church that teaches that the salvation of anyone who disagrees with them on these things is suspect. That is not keeping the unity of the faith. As one old theologian put it, in essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.1
Many skeptics today will say that the vast number of denominations, the fact that we seem to disagree about every conceivable point of doctrine, proves Christianity isn’t true. Does it?
What is untrue is the allegation that we disagree about every conceivable point of doctrine. Yes, Christians today disagree over many things. What we agree about is more important:
I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,All Christians everywhere can recite the Apostles’ Creed. The Eastern Orthodox churches disagree with one phrase of the Nicene Creed, but otherwise we can all attest to that. The majority of what I’ve written here in this project would be agreeable to traditional Christians across the branches and denominations. For all there are supposedly thousands of Protestant denominations, we agree on more than we disagree.
And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and buried.
He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
The holy catholic Church,
The communion of saints,
The forgiveness of sins,
The resurrection of the body,
And the life everlasting. Amen.
So we don’t disagree about everything, but we do get lost in the weeds of the details sometimes. It’s understandable that people want to dig deeper into their theology and ask “what does this mean” and “how does this work”, but sometimes we take our tentative answers too seriously. That’s on us. We can do that without losing the unity Christ demands and desires. We just need to obey the words of the apostle:
“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph 4:2-3).
1 It may not have been original to him, but it’s widely attributed to Rupertus Meldenius (1582-1651).
Church Gone Wrong
“He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 24:51).
If Christianity is true, if the church can be so good, why are there so many bad people in the church? We cannot deny that people have done terrible things in the name of Christ. What we can deny, however, is that these people are the product of Christian teaching or that they somehow disprove Christianity.
The first question we should ask about the people who do terrible things in the name of Christ (or any religion) is whether they’re following the teachings of the religion they claim to be part of. Did Christ teach us to force people to “convert” at the threat of death? Did the apostles teach that leaders should steal money and wives and flee to a new city? Do the scriptures say that preachers should accumulate wealth from church members who can barely feed their families?
Do we even have to answer that? When we point out the terrible things people do, the “none of this in the Bible” is at least implicit if not explicit. And if they’re not following Christian teachings, they aren’t an indictment against Christianity.
So where do these people come from?
First, the Church is made up of sinners. I wish it weren’t so, but Christians are capable of doing the same things after they trust in Christ as they were before. In the earliest days of the church, sin quickly made itself known. The church in Corinth had a lot of problems, including sexual immorality “of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate” (1Cor 5:1). Sometimes people give in to greed or lust. Sometimes they are angry or spiteful. We should not be surprised when sinners sin, even though we hope for better from them, and the scriptures demand better. But it’s a process; it doesn’t happen overnight:
“You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph 4:22-24).
Second, not everyone who claims the name is actually a Christian. Jesus told a parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared” (Matt 13:24-26). The weeds, or “tares” traditionally, are fake believers who, according to Christ, will reside inside the visible Church until the judgment when they will be separated from the true believers (v30).
Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt 7:21). Not everyone who claims to be a follower of Christ actually is. The best way to tell who is and isn’t is by their actions: “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Matt 7:20).
Sometimes the person in question is even a leader in a church. A pastor is supposed to be “above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1Tim 3:2-3). Sometimes people become pastors who do not fit this description. Sometimes pastors cease to fit this description. Some become lovers of money; others fall to sexual temptation. Many of them may never have been true believers — perhaps they were simply looking for a career where they could use their talent for speaking (or manipulating people).
Some are even called “false prophets”, wolves in sheep’s clothing (cf, Matt 7:15, Acts 20:29) who are in the church to cause harm. Whether they themselves know it or not, the devil wants them to do as much damage as they can to the church, its reputation, and the cause of Christ.
We cannot allow the evil men do to make us turn our backs on the Church. The Church is the body of Christ — this is how we can be part of Christ’s work. We will never be able to do what Christ wants us to do unless we are together.
Some will say, “I love Jesus but not the Church.” We don’t have that option. As Voddie Baucham has said,
If a man says to me, “Hey, you’re really cool. I’d like to get to know you. But I don’t like your wife,” we’re not going to be friends. She is my bride.
The Church is the Bride of Christ. She may not be perfect, but she is beautiful to Christ, and he is making her into what she ought to be. Our option is to be part of that or not be part of Christ.
As the saying goes, if you ever find a perfect church, don’t join it — you’ll just mess things up. But don’t worry, you won’t find one. All we can do is find a dysfunctional little church family and fit our particular crazy into it as best we can then seek to follow and imitate Christ together.
Image via Pixabay
Church Done Right
“Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1Pet 2:12).
Christians are called to holy living (Matt 5:48, 1Pet 1:16) and to love our enemies (Matt 5:44), our neighbors (Mark 12:31), and our brothers in Christ (John 13:34). Our lives can be a witness to the lost world around us (eg, Matt 5:16, John 13:35). We’re not very good at this (cf, Acts 6:1, 1Cor 6:6), but when we do it right, it is glorious.
What does it mean to love our brothers and sisters in Christ? Scripture expands on the call to love one another with dozens of more specific commands. One person has helpfully cataloged them.1 This is what it looks like to love one another: We honor one another, accept one another, serve one another, forgive one another, encourage one another, submit to one another, and pray for one another among many, many other instructions.
When we love the way Christ has told us to love, the world notices. The Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (332-363) complained, “[Christianity] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”2
Early Christians were known both for their refusal to abandon “undesirable” newborns and for taking in those of others. They were known for marital fidelity and charity.3 They cared for orphans, widows, and prisoners:
Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. ... These gifts are, as it were, piety’s deposit fund. For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they become the nurslings of their confession.4
They also cared for the sick — even plague victims. Shelley tells of one such account:
In the year 165, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a devastating epidemic swept through the Roman Empire. ... No one knew how to treat the stricken. Nor did most people try. During the first plague, the famous classical physician Galen fled Rome for his country estate where he stayed until the danger subsided. ... [But] Christians met the obligation to care for the sick rather than desert them, and thereby saved enormous numbers of lives!5
As Stark points out, countless numbers of those whose lives were saved by Christians undoubtedly became Christians, but besides that the world saw what was happening. As Tertullian put it, the unbelievers could not help but say, “See how they love one another.”4
As the centuries have progressed, Christians have been known for founding orphanages, hospitals, and schools. They have fed the hungry, nursed the sick, and taught people to read — even inventing written languages where there was none.
Sadly, this reputation has not followed Christianity to the present day because this behavior has not. But it can once more. The commands to love each other and our neighbor have not changed. We only have to obey them again.
If you’d like to view Christianity through the eyes of a charitable unbeliever, you might enjoy Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland (not Spider-Man).
1 "The 59 ‘One Another’ Statements in the Bible" https://churchleaders.com/smallgroups/small-group-articles/176356-the-59-one-another-statements-in-the-bible.html
2 Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language
3 Epistle to Diognetus, ch 5
4 Tertullian, Apology, ch. 39
5 Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity
Why Do We Gather?
“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb 10:24-25).
Why do we need to come together on a weekly basis? There’s only so much weekend, and to be honest people can get kind of annoying. Why can’t we learn about Jesus from books or by listening to sermons online? There are several reasons why the church needs to meet together in the same place.
The first is worship. It’s odd, but I can’t put my finger on a verse that says the church should worship. It’s simply assumed. All throughout the scriptures God’s people worship because that is the natural response to believing what we believe — that a holy God took on flesh and died to save us from the consequences of our own sin. That God is worthy of praise. So we gather together to worship God “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24). It’s not enough to sing at home alone (or with our families) for two reasons: First, worship is corporate. Whenever we see God’s people worshipping, they are doing it together, and as it has been, so it shall always be (cf, Rev 4). Second, when we worship we encourage each other and “teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” (Col 3:16). So worship is both for God and for us.
The second reason we come together is for discipleship. Jesus commanded us to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them ... and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20). The mission of the Church is to take the gospel to all nations, but the work doesn’t stop there. We’re to make disciples, not just converts, and that takes time. So we bring converts to the church where they become disciples. It’s done a little at a time, week after week. We can quit going to church when we’re just like Jesus. Of course, Jesus probably wouldn’t miss church.
And, thirdly, that discipleship is best done by the church body, not just one person, because the Spirit has given different believers different gifts “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:12-13). We are to build each other up, not just sit and listen to one person doing all the work. As important as good sermons are, that is not all of discipleship. Discipleship happens when we learn from each other, encourage each other, and, yes, irritate each other. Learning to love your brother or sister in Christ even when it’s hard is an important part of discipleship.
The fourth reason we come together is for fellowship, to support each other. We’re not just in church to learn about the Bible. Living for Christ in a fallen world is difficult. Living as “aliens and strangers” (1Pet 2:11), trying to be “in the world but not of the world” (John 17:14-19) is hard, confusing, and perplexing. And life in this world is harder on some than on others. So we come together in order to “encourage one another and build each other up” (1Thes 5:11) and to meet each other’s material needs (cf, 1John 3:17, Acts 4:32-37, 11:29). Paul says, “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1Cor 12:26). “While hurt is reduced, joy is increased by being shared. We are to encourage and sympathize with each other.”1
We are the Church wherever we are, but the body needs to come together to be what it was meant to be. So “let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb 10:24-25).
I am only able to barely scratch the surface on the topic of worship. I recommend the chapter “Worship” in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.
1 Millard Erickson, Introducing Christian Doctrine
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Pictures of the Church
“For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body...” (1Cor 12:13).
We can better understand the Church by looking, once again, at pictures used by the scriptures.
The Body of Christ (eg, 1Cor 12:12-27, Eph 4:1-16, Rom 12:3-8)
Christ has left the world, and yet Christ’s body is still in the world continuing his work. The Church is his body, with Christ as the head and, like Christ’s metaphor of the vine and branches (John 15:1-17), our life flows from him. The Church is the expression of Christ in the world today; they see him only to the extent that we show him to them.
Not only are we connected to him, we are connected to each other. The body has different parts that depend on each other. The body needs ears and eyes, a heart and a liver, lungs and bowels and muscles. If one part is unhealthy, the body is unhealthy.
“If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body” (1Cor 12:17-19). God has made his church, like the world, to be full of variety. Believers are given different spiritual gifts for various tasks, and all are necessary. The body is healthy only when all the parts are present and functioning properly. An unchurched believer is like a liver sitting on a table by itself — both the organ and the body will suffer because they are separated.
A Building and the Temple of the Holy Spirit (eg, Eph 2:20-22, 1Pet 2:5, 1Cor 3:16)
Once again, the picture is of believers being interconnected. A Christian who is not part of a church is leaving a hole in the wall, and that believer is just a stone serving no purpose rather than a part of the temple of the Holy Spirit. Just as in a wall one stone is held up by those below it, we hold each other up in our struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. The missing stone is being held up by no one and holds no one up.
The foundation of the apostles and prophets is their teaching in the scriptures. That is what we build the Church on, with Christ as the standard and model. It is not wrong to acknowledge the learning the world has gained through God’s common grace, but we must remind ourselves that not everything modern humans think they know is true and remind ourselves that we can only have one foundation. Churches must be cautious in the use of the world’s “knowledge.”
Flock of Sheep (eg, 1Pet 5:1-4, Acts 20:28-30, Heb 13:20-21)
God calls his people “sheep” a lot. It’s not a compliment. Sure they’re cute, and they were valuable, but they are powerfully stupid and almost completely helpless. Sheep need a shepherd. God’s people need a shepherd.
We are weak and helpless sheep, and our “enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1Pet 5:8). What’s more, “savage wolves” will be among the flock, trying to destroy God’s Church from within (Matt 7:15, Acts 20:28-30). God gave his church shepherds, the pastors who are supposed to guide us and protect us. Sadly, sometimes pastors turn out to be wolves, but that only shows how dangerous the world is and our need for good shepherds. And all the shepherds serve under the Good Shepherd (Heb 13:20-21) who will ultimately keep his flock safe.
The Family of God (eg, 1Tim 5:1-2, 2Cor 6:18)
The Church is called a family, with God — as we said before — as our Father. Believers are to act like brothers and sisters in a family. Which means we will squabble and fight, and we won’t always like each other, but we need to love each other and act like we love each other. We are to treat each other with grace and make sure that our family’s needs are met. And this love when done right will be a testimony to the world about Christ (John 13:35, 17:23).
The Bride of Christ (eg, Eph 5:22-33, Rev 19-22)
Finally, the Church, collectively, is the Bride of Christ. This speaks to Christ’s affection for his Church and his care for her. “...Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Eph 5:25-27). And in line with the tradition of the time, Christ is preparing a home for his bride. One day he will come to get her and take her to their new home. But that is a topic for another time.
Together these pictures show that the Church is a collective, an interdependent people who need the leadership Christ gives through his chosen leaders to make her way and to make a difference in this fallen world.
Image via Pixabay
What is the Church?
“His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Eph 2:15b-16).
When Christ said he’d build his “church” in Matt 16:18, the Greek word used, ekklesia, means “called out ones. “It was also used of an assembly; so the idea is that the church is a special assembly of people called out from the world to become part of God’s family”1 and “set apart for a holy task.”2 The English word “church” derives from the Greek kyriakon which “refers to those who are possessed or owned by the kyrios, or Lord.”2
The thing is, before Christ created his Church, God already had an assembly, a holy people — the Jews. In Jewish thought, all the world was divided into two peoples — Jews and everyone else, called Gentiles. Christ’s Church was to take from the Jews and from the Gentiles to make a new people, a people now called Christians.
When the Apostles’ Creed says, “I believe ... in the holy catholic Church”, it is not saying that we are all Roman Catholics. “Catholic” means universal. (Yes, that means “Romans Catholic” is a bit of an oxymoron.) The creed is saying there is one universal assembly, one people, set apart to God.
Everyone who is called to Jesus is called to be part of that assembly. John Stott calls unchurched Christians a “grotesque anomaly” and says, “The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. ... Indeed, Christ died for us not only ‘to redeem us from all wickedness’ but also to ‘purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good’ (Titus 2:14).”3
But not everyone who attends church is part of the Church. There will always be church members who are not true believers, and there are a few true believers who for good reason cannot be part of a church. Historically we have referred to the “visible Church” (those who appear to be Christians) and the “invisible Church” (those who actually are).
What is the difference between the Church and a church? There is one holy Church, but it meets in many places at many times in local expressions called churches. So is every gathering of Christians a church? No. There are parachurch organizations created for charity or missions. There are gatherings of believers to study the scriptures or fellowship. These aren’t churches.
A church must, first of all, be trying to follow Christ as laid out in the scriptures. If a group is no more bound to the scriptures than they are to the writings of Thoreau or Emerson, they are not following Christ. Which means not every group that claims to be a church truly is one.
Second, even if they are Christians, they must be trying to be a church. This includes baptism and celebrating the Lord’s Supper. “So, functionally, a church is a group of Christians who believe and proclaim the Bible, and intend to function as a church.”4
Why did Christ create his Church? We are part of his work to establish the kingdom of God. “[O]ur job is to help establish the rule of God in the hearts of people and bring the values and priorities of God’s kingdom to bear on every aspect of our culture.”1 We are here to represent God to the people around us and to try to bring them into his kingdom. This is something the forces of darkness do not want. They will oppose us at every turn. But Christ has promised, the gates of hell will not prevail against us (Matt 16:18).
1 Tony Evans, Theology You Can Count On
2 RC Sproul, Everyone's a Theologian
3 John RW Stott, The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor
4 Rick Cornish, 5 Minute Theologian
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Introduction to Ecclesiology
“...on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18).
I think basketball is a good analogy. Unlike football, you can play a reasonable imitation of a proper basketball game one-on-one. But you cannot play one-on-five against a team. Trying to do battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil by yourself is like trying to play one-on-five basketball against a professional team: You simply cannot win. You need a team. You need the Church.
What is the Church? The Church is not a building. And the Church is not an event. What happens on Sunday morning is a meeting of the Church.
The Church is a community. It is the assembly of the people God has called to himself. There is one Church, and there are many, many local gatherings of the people of God called churches.
What is the Church supposed to be? Why do we gather? How are we supposed to help each other in our war against the enemy? Why is the church sometimes not very attractive? These are the kinds of questions we’ll consider as we look at the Doctrine of the Church.
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The Gospel
“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son” (John 3:18).
What is the gospel? Let's sum up what we've learned so far.
The God who spoke the universe into existence, who needs nothing at all, made human beings to know him and have a relationship with him. But when we sinned — and whenever we sin — we created a separation between us and him. We became something that cannot exist in his presence and someone whose company he cannot abide. We also joined in the treason of the fallen angels. The punishment for treason is death, but all the treasonous beings were designed to be immortal, so hell was created as a way to isolate the contagion and punish the guilty. When we joined their rebellion, we joined their fate.
But God, who is rich in mercy, chose to create a way for us to escape that fate. God became a man. As Jesus, he lived the perfect life we owe our creator. Then he was put to death on the cross, his sinless death being accepted as a payment for the debt we owe for our crimes.
Then he rose from the dead, not only proving that he was who he claimed to be, but also defeating death, showing what will happen to those who trust in him. Through him we can be reconciled to the God who made us to be with him.
To escape hell, all we have to do is live a perfectly sinless life from the moment of our conception to the moment of our death. Or we can place our hope in the death and resurrection of Jesus to pay the penalty for our sins.
When you trust in Jesus, you are united with Christ. Your sins are forgiven and forgotten. The Spirit of God transforms you into something new, making you someone that seeks God and can live with God. And you are adopted as a child and heir of that God.
One day every human being will stand before God’s judgement. Those who have not trusted in Christ will be held responsible for their own sins; they will be found guilty and “thrown into the outer darkness” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 8:12). Those who have placed their trust in Christ will be found not guilty, because Christ has taken their sin. They will see the results of their adoption in Christ, becoming heirs of God, reigning with him in his renewed kingdom forever.
The Objections
“Jesus answered, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me'” (John 14:6).
How can there only be one way to God? If God is love, shouldn’t he make it easy for people to find the way to heaven? And what about those who’ve never heard the gospel? Why is Christianity so exclusive?
The best answer to whether there could be more than one way for humans to be reconciled to God is to look at Jesus. God the Son became human, lived a hard, poor, oppressed life, died a horrible death, and experienced the wrath of God. If there were any other way, would he have done that? Of course not.
It’s really a matter of truth. What actually works? Medicine is a far better analogy. To say that penicillin is the proper treatment for a disease isn’t to say that I like penicillin better than saline; it means penicillin will actually cure the disease whereas saline will not. To say that Christianity can save and Hinduism can’t is to say that Christianity has the cure for sin (Jesus) and Hinduism doesn’t. Jesus and the apostles repeatedly taught that there is no hope for mankind apart from Jesus, and that’s why they risked their lives to take the gospel to the ends of the earth and told us to do the same. “Singular problems need singular solutions.”1 Sin is the most singular of problems, and trusting in the death of the God-man is the only solution. For people to get to heaven without trusting in Jesus requires salvation by works. But our works are pitifully inadequate.
“Why can’t God just be happy that they believe?” Some people want to think being a faithful Hindu or Muslim should be enough to please God. But that’s watering down “believe” into the worst of modern terms. It’s not enough to believe that God exists. “Even the demons believe that—and tremble” (James 2:19). Biblical faith requires depending on Christ alone for your righteousness, something that is anathema to every human religion.
“Do people go to hell just because they don’t believe in Jesus?” No. They go to hell because they have committed treason against their King. Not believing in Jesus is simply failing to take advantage of the offer of amnesty.
But what about those who’ve never heard of that offer of amnesty? That’s an issue that has caused a lot of ink to be spent. First, some hard truths: We’re all sinners who deserve the just punishment of God. No one is owed grace — by its very definition, grace is what we do not deserve. The people who’ve never heard the gospel still sin willingly.
Second, some comforting truths: God is God. The universe is not run by the temperamental Allah of Islam nor the petty gods of the pagan pantheons. The world will answer to the holy loving justice of the God who describes himself as “the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished ...” (Ex 34:6-7).
And this God is sovereign. He doesn’t just oversee the universe; he runs it. In Acts we read how Philip was sent to meet an Ethiopian official who was seeking after God. After that he was physically relocated to where God wanted him to preach next (8:26-40). We also have the story of Cornelius being told to seek out Peter (10:1-8). In the modern world, similar things happen. There are many stories today of people having dreams telling them where to go or who to seek out to find out about Jesus. God can get the gospel where it needs to go. But most people, whether in the jungles of Africa or the cities of the West, simply don’t want to bow their knee to the true God.
“Why can’t God just forgive everybody?” That would send the message that sin isn’t a big deal, and it is. It’s treason against the King. It also harms people. When we suggest that God should just forgive, we don’t really mean he should forgive everyone; we know some people are murderers or harm children. But everyone hurts other people with their sin. When we steal or lie or gossip, we’re hurting other people. We don’t want people who harm us to get away with it; we can’t be allowed to get away with it either. The crime must be paid for. Or it must be atoned for.
Those worried about the fate of people who’ve never heard the gospel should make it their mission to see that they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
1 Greg Koukl, The Story of Reality
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