Recently, we’ve been looking at what we’ve coined as The Stephen Fry syndrome – the idea of hiding behind the views of people more famous/clever/socially acceptable than yourself. Whatever our worldview, it’s easy to lazily hold up as truth things that the glitterati have said, rather than engage with the questions at hand. Below is a prime example of this. It’s one that gets plastered on Facebook and memed all over the internet in different ways. It was said by the wonderfully quintessential Englishman, David Attenborough. So, let’s have a look at what he says and then unpack it a bit.
“I often get letters from people who say I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature. To which I reply and say, well, it’s funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the Almighty, always quote beautiful things. But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in West Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he’s five years old. And I reply and say, well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well. I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action. And therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the morality of this thing.”
Ok, so the main point seems to be that a ‘merciful God’ wouldn’t allow a small boy to suffer in this way. And therefore we’re looking at the classic question of ‘Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?’
First of all, let’s acknowledge the horrendousness of what that small boy is going through. We don’t think it’s good – we don’t even think it’s acceptable. But nor do we think that God causes it to happen. Christians don’t believe that God created a broken world where life would be a bit crappy and then you’d die. It’s broken and crappy because of us.
So much human suffering is down, ironically, to human freedom. Could God remove all suffering? Yes, but he would have to remove all freedom. And you might think a world where we weren’t free to sin or suffer would be the obvious thing to create anyway. But think about it: the freedom that allows a man to slaughter innocent people is the same freedom that allows you to watch your 50″ plasma TV, or drive a sports car, or disbelieve in God. Seriously. There aren’t good people and bad people. There’s free people.
You want God to stop famine? Great – let’s give everything we have to Africa. What are you waiting for?
Furthermore, if you’re an atheist, the situation here for this young lad is bleak. Because for this little boy there is no ultimate hope. He will remain blind, suffer throughout his short life, die and turn to dust. He won’t ‘Rest In Peace’ as we glibly say. He won’t be ‘At Rest’. He will simply cease to exist.
Interestingly, there seems here to be a strange irony at work. Attenborough, who doesn’t believe in God, is blaming God for being unmerciful. But if there’s no God, then the only hope this young lad has is…us. It’s startling that we in the West would hold up this example as an example of a heartless God we don’t believe in, when the reason this lad has no hope is because we have raped the planet so we can have nice GTAV marathons and venti Chai Lattes.
He finished by talking about the morality of it. But on Atheism, by what standard is this situation morally wrong? If we’re just molecules bumping into one another and the only purpose is what we create for ourselves, then why should I care? We’ve talked about morality here, but you only get objective morality once you ground it in God. And once you do ground it in God, you realise that God isn’t cool with this situation either. We know this is wrong because He does.
However, for Christians, the situation is not so futile. We should indeed plough resources into situations like this (Jesus told the rich man to give everything he had to the poor), but we also believe that there is hope in this life for people like this young lad. Jesus changes lives, transforms, forgives, heals. And what isn’t fully redeemed in this life absolutely will be in the next. We believe that, through Jesus, a day will come where suffering is finished, and this young lad can sit on the river bank and drink a Chai Latte in peace.
God’s major hope for you isn’t to have a long, comfortable life. It’s simply to know the transforming and saving love of Jesus.

This is a direct continuation from Part I (astonishingly) so read that first.
Here we are, then, having a bit of a play around with some of the sound bites that get erected as defensive shield walls by people.

“Every thinking man is an atheist.” Ernest Hemingway

Ok, Ernie…but what if I think hard about what you’ve just said, and I disagree. What if, actually, the idea that I accept everything on blind faith is misinformed, and that I’ve thought long and hard about this? Or does the sheer fact that I can think make me an atheist?
Me:1 Greatest-Novelist-Of-All-Time: 0
There are, of course, people who accept all sorts of propositions without much thought, but being wrong is not the same as being unthinking. I thought for a long time during my GCSE Maths exam, and still got the worst score in the school’s history – but then, according to Hemingway. I’m an atheist now, so it won’t have any lasting significance.

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”  Douglas Adams

Yes, of course it is. Frankly, if I thought for an instant that there were fairies anywhere in my garden, I would move house immediately.
But when you see a beautiful garden, mightn’t you think that there was at least a gardener?
It reminds me of the God of Gaps thing: the idea that theists attribute to our Magic Sky Clown anything in the world that we don’t understand. In fact, for most of us (I hope) God is simply the best explanation of what we do know from Science and the world around us.

“If you’re an atheist, you believe this is the only life you’re going to get. It’s a precious life. It’s something we should live to the full. Where if you’re religious and you believe in another life, that means you don’t live this life to the full because you think you’re going to get another one. That’s an awfully negative way to live a life.”― Richard Dawkins

Aside from the fact that RD has used ‘religious’ as a bizarrely catch-all term, this is classic uninformed presumptuousness. I would agree that if someone fails to appreciate this life because of the prospect of a future one, then that’s flawed and negative. But the Christian message isn’t ‘forget this life, there’s another coming along shortly’. In John 10:10, Jesus says:
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
Jesus doesn’t just want us to live life to the full, He is the one who offers it.
And finally for this week…

“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.” Carl Sagan

This is a good example of how being a genius doesn’t guarantee that everything you say will be genius. Who does this apply to? Every single person who believes in God? The theoretical-physicist John Polkinghorne? The geneticist Francis Collins? Me?
Please understand this: for most Christians, our Faith is not blind obedience to a childhood indoctrination, but something that we have put our trust in based on the evidence around us, not in spite of it. To say my belief is not based on evidence is uninformed, a bit arrogant, and quite rude. We may be wrong about God, but let’s not build up straw men like this.
Furthermore, I think Sagan is right about us (all of us) having a deep-seated need to believe. We all need to put our trust and faith in something (look at the change in mindset of Arsenal fans since Mesut Ozil arrived). We may put our faith in Science to explain everything, but we are all wired to ground ourselves in something we can trust. And wouldn’t it make sense, if God was real and wanted us to engage in relationship with Him, that he would at least give us a few hints. If we had no in-built need to believe or trust anything, we would never find Him. The fact that we all have this longing to believe is a good sign that there is something worth believing in.
Right, good. So, get involved in the comments section, follow us on Twitter @cvmdemolition. Have a lovely day!

There’s something called ‘an appeal to authority’. It involves glibly quoting someone more famous or more intelligent than yourself as though that proves the point you’re trying to make. Both Christians and Atheists do it, and it’s annoying.
I call it the Stephen Fry syndrome (Melchett from Blackadder for our American readers): here’s a wonderfully funny, clever, charming man who everybody loves, and who doesn’t believe in God. He is patently more in-the-know than me, so I can therefore hide behind his beliefs, appropriate them for myself, and never properly engage with the questions at hand. I will also leeringly deride anyone who dares to question Stephen Fry’s view on God, because he’s cleverer than that person, too – #win
It’s not that quotes aren’t helpful at times, but they aren’t arguments in and of themselves. They can often act as placebos, giving us the idea that we’re more clued up than we really are, while actually stopping us from engaging with the question of truth. It’s so frustrating to hear people say ‘Well, you’re an atheist when it comes to Zeus’, as though it’s something that has just sprung into their fertile mind, and not something that gets copy-and-pasted by atheist automatons. (Nb. Christians do exactly the same thing with C.S. Lewis and…er…Bono?)
So let’s check out some quotes that get bandied around, and look at how we might respond. Remember, shooting down a quotation doesn’t necessarily prove anyone right or wrong, but our gripe is with the people who victoriously parade such quotes like placards of objective truth.
Truth is not a popularity contest. We are all wrong about lots of things in life, so no matter who says what, our aim should be (in the name of intellectual honesty) to look into the truth of the statement, not at the wealth, social standing, number of Twitter followers of the person making it.

“Faith means not wanting to know what is true.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Richard Dawkins uses something similar when he says that ‘Faith is being content with not knowing’. Nietzsche was a brilliant philosopher, but I don’t understand where he plucked this from. I have literally never read a single Christian apologist from throughout history who affirmed this statement. Faith, in Christian terms, means ‘putting your trust in’, but to apply that here would mean that Christians ‘put our trust in not wanting to know what is true’. That just doesn’t make any sense. You might think that’s what Faith-heads do, but you’d be way off-piste. I became a Christian in my early twenties, because I wanted to know what was true. I didn’t look at the list of all the worldviews and think, ‘Hey, that one where you can’t have sex before marriage – sounds perfect!’ I may be wrong about God, but my route to Him came out of genuinely desiring truth, not ignoring it.

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” — Denis Diderot

Nicely said, Denis (who really sounds like he should play in midfield for Auxerre). But in this world we would still be left with someone happy enough to gruesomely kill other human beings using their own innards. How do we get free of that guy? Oh brave new world…

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.” – Terry Pratchett

I love Terry Pratchett – what an amazing mind that man has. But I don’t agree with this. I mean, what if those guys who had been seeking the truth suddenly came upon it? Isn’t that the whole point of seeking something? I don’t find my car keys in the morning and then think, ‘I better just check in a few more places’. My wife doesn’t come in and say, ‘I preferred you before you got all hoity-toity and confident about finding your keys; keep looking or it’s divorce.’
It’s great to seek the truth, but isn’t it ultimately depressing if we never feel like we can get to it. That was the whole problem with Lost! Five series of expecting answers that never materialised. Embarrassing.
Next week, we’ll look at a few more. And, as you will have noticed, we’re being light-hearted about this, so feel free to get involved in the comments section. It’s great to banter – C.S Lewis said that, so it must be true.

“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

– Alexander Pope
The week before I got married, my Dad and I had a stand-up fight. A proper all-guns-blazing fight that saw him throw me across a table, cutting my back open. It started because I told him to shut up. I told him to shut up because I hadn’t forgiven him for years of not being allowed to share my opinion without being told to shut up myself. Essentially, Dad had never said sorry, and I’d never said ‘I forgive you’.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe about how the world came into being, you know about forgiveness. Any relationship in the world – friendship, marriage, business – simply cannot persist if one party will not forgive the other. Think of all the people you’ve cared for who you no longer talk to because you fell out. Why don’t you talk anymore? Not simply because you fell out, but because at least one of you said, ‘enough is enough’. If one party is determined to pursue peace and reconciliation, but the other party refuses to answer the phone, there can be no relationship.
We apprehend how important forgiveness is for our well-being, and we understand how deadly, how destructive unforgiveness is.
There’s a Greek term called Logos Spermatikos. It basically means ‘the seeded word’ – the idea that God hard-wired His Gospel into the very fabric of the universe. John 1:1 tells us: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.’
There is no other worldview that talks about forgiveness in such strong terms as Christianity; nowhere else do we see such a close correlation between what we intuitively understand about forgiveness and what the major worldviews say about it. If your worldview is atheism, then you might believe that forgiveness is just a handy survival mechanism, and that you can forgive someone if it makes life easier for you, but that you’re under no duress to do so. (And if you’re going to follow atheism to its logical conclusion of nihilism, then it just doesn’t matter whether you forgive someone or not).
But that isn’t what you intuitively understand about forgiveness. If you think about it properly, you know that, at times, you need forgiveness. We have all said or done things that we just cannot live with until a time when the person we have wronged accepts our apology. It’s much deeper than just a mechanism for keeping the species together: this need to say sorry and to be forgiven is wired into the universe. But it’s not an instinct in the same way that sex or eating is an instinct. You only have to read any newspaper on any given day to understand how, as a species, we very easily overrule what we apprehend about forgiveness.
However, when Jesus goes to the cross, don’t we get it? Jesus dies and Logos Spermatikos comes into play, because that deep need, that longing for forgiveness that we all experience at different times finally takes its proper form. Jesus dies for us, for our sin, to forgive us for the stuff we haven’t yet said sorry for. Don’t we intuitively understand that we need that?
If you were teaching a TEFL class to Bulgarians and you wanted to devise some work sheets, you would make sure that all the words were in both Bulgarian and English, so that the students knew what they were looking at. You would construct that particular learning universe in such a way that the students recognised what was needed. I think that’s the same with the cross. God seeded the universe with an understanding of a need for forgiveness. And when Jesus dies and says, ‘Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,’ that seeded Word finally flowers.
After I’d patched up my bleeding back and we’d cleared away the broken glass from the table, Dad and I were both able to reflect on how we’d treated each other. We understood that we both needed to say sorry, and we both needed to forgive. It wasn’t instinct. It was something that we both understood, but had failed to recognise.
 

Richard Dawkins famously said that faith is belief without evidence. That’s not how the Oxford English Dictionary would describe faith, but the phrase has stuck and so the idea that there is no evidence for God has memed its way through our culture. We’ve talked before about the difference between evidence and proof. Evidence is about looking at what’s in front of you, and deciding where it points, no matter how uncomfortable.
Today I want us to think about the things that really matter in life: love, hope, beauty, purpose. No matter who you are or what you believe, these are the things that count. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks, I wish I’d understood cosmology better or had a firmer grasp of Schroedinger’s Cat. What matters is this: was I loved? Did I experience beauty? Did I have hope? At the end, did my life contain some purpose – was it worth something? There are 2 major worldviews in the West – Atheism and Christianity – so let’s see how those 2 worldviews make sense of the above.
First up, the atheist. He’s a good guy, loves his friends and family, tries to live a moral life.
Love is one of those things that is as notable by its absence as by its presence. Now the atheist will of course believe in love, even though he has no basis for understanding it. Because Science has nothing to say about love; you can’t prove love scientifically and it isn’t necessary for evolution. The atheist might try and say that it’s just instinct, but ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is based on self-preservation, not self-sacrifice. So the Atheist will just have to acknowledge that the thing central to all relationships, the major subject of all artistic endeavour, is just a queer disinterested product of unguided evolution. How romantic!
And the Atheist won’t be able to explain hope, because if we are just molecules bumping chaotically into one another – if we are simply that – then there is no hope in the way we would like to understand it. The only hope we can really have is that those molecules will bump into one another in a randomly fortunate way…until they stop bumping into one another and we die.
The Atheist will be stuck when it comes to explaining beauty, too. Because you can’t prove beauty using Science. Yes, we all share that sense of awe when we see a beautiful sunset or the way the waves lap up on a Caribbean beach, but why do we experience it in the first place? Where does that totally erroneous sense of awe and wonder come from? We don’t actually need it.
Finally, our Atheist friend, when talking about purpose, will probably say something like, ‘Well, we make our own purpose.’ But why should we believe that? If the universe came from nothing, by nothing, and will end up as nothing, then where have we got this ridiculous idea of purpose from? Our only real objective purpose as a species is to bounce around for a few centuries until the sun burns us up. Anything else is just an overly-romanticised flight of fancy.
And all this might be true, but let’s allow the Christian to take a run-up…
He can say, well of course I know why you understand love, because the Bible says, ‘We love because He first loved us.’ And when you experience love for your wife, or your kids, or Ryan Gosling, you’re getting a tiny glimpse of how much God loves you.
And the Christian can confidently talk about why we experience beauty, because God created a beautiful world, and that sense of awe we feel at a snowy mountainscape or Rickie Lambert’s header against Scotland, these are traces of the awe and reverence we should have for our Creator.
And hope. Yes, we are molecules, the Christian will say, but we are not merely molecules. Hope is not a pipedream. That cross on calvary – there’s your hope! The empty tomb – he hasn’t gone to get milk. There is hope, not just that when you die you might go to heaven, but that now – here and now! – you can experience what Jesus calls ‘fullness of live’ through Him.
Finally, purpose. Sir John Templeton said, ‘Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose created human beings so obsessed with it?’ And the Christian can concur, and say that of course there is purpose beyond surviving for as long as you can or trying to make life as comfortable for yourself as possible. In God, through God, because of God, you have a purpose.
Now, the atheist might be right – all these things might be sheer chance. But what makes most sense? If we’re going to talk about evidence, where does the evidence of our own lives point? In the direction of blind chaotic nothingness, or towards God?

This week, we’re looking at some of the gnostic gospels discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.

The Gospel of Thomas

Gospel means Good news. This is actually not a Gospel at all. It has no theme, no actions of Jesus, no crucifixion or resurrection. It is simply a collection of 114 phrases attributed to Jesus.
Some of the phrase are almost identical to the ones we find in the Gospel. Others are corruptions of the earlier Gospel texts on which they were based, and fly off in weird directions. Saying 2 is: ‘Jesus said, Let him who seeks continue until he finds. When he finds he will be troubled. When he becomes troubled he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.’ Saying 13 describes Jesus as ‘the wise philosopher’. Phrases like these are alluring for people who want to be king of their own life (to ‘rule over the All’), and for people who don’t want to believe that Jesus claimed to be God. However, with the general scholarly consensus being that Thomas was written towards the end of the second century, there’s absolutely no reason to trust it over the earlier source material.

The Gospel of Peter

The explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection that we find in the 4 standard Gospels is supernatural rather than mythological. It is written as history. The Gospel of Peter shows dependence on all 4 Gospels, but also takes a lead from Greek mythology when it talks about the stone in front of the tomb rolling itself away, 2 angels with heads reaching to heaven escorting Jesus from the tomb, and the cross itself following them out while having a chat!

The Gospel of Judas

In what Irenaeus called (in the second century) a work of ‘fictitious history’, Judas is Jesus’ favourite disciple. Bizarrely, in this Gospel, Judas’ part in the arrest of Jesus is not a betrayal but a premeditated plan between Judas and Jesus (who in the film version would be played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn). In the plan, Judas helps Jesus complete his earthly mission by helping his soul to be released from his earthly body.
‘You will be cursed for generations, but you will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me’.
The soul is released from the unworthy mortal body and sails upwards towards the spiritual God. You can’t get more Gnostic than that!
The reason these Gnostic gospels are so attractive is that they replace the orthodox Christian view that Jesus is the Saviour of the world and the only way to God, with a kind of Hollywood mantra of ‘Find yourself; be true to the real you!’ However, the Gnostic gospels give us no independent historical information about Jesus, nor do they show any knowledge of the Jewish background out of which Christianity grew. Even the most sceptical scholars agree that all were written many years after the 4 canonical Gospels.
The Gnostic Gospels were lost, not because ‘history is written by the winners’ (you remember what happened to most of the disciples!) but because they were rejected as forgeries and a cultish fad. They show no interest in the ministry, teaching or incarnation of Jesus, but simply concentrate on putting obscure mystical teaching into his mouth – teaching which he could not possibly have given.
It may be comforting to think that these writing are true, that we all have a divine spark in side us, and that Jesus came to help us find the God in ourselves. But he didn’t. He really, really didn’t. In fact, it’s better than that! The real Gospel is that Jesus (God incarnate) came to rescue us from our own rebellion against God by a life of service and love and incredible self-sacrifice.
Next week, the Apostle Paul (played by Will Ferrell) meets Morgan Freeman on the road to Damascus.

The Gnostic Gospels. Something that you have probably heard of a bit, but you couldn’t give much detail on. Like an Arsene Wenger signing.
In 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Egypt, an earthenware jar was found containing a series of manuscripts that can be dated to the end of the 4^th Century. Lots of them have gospely-sounding names like The Gospel of Thomas, or The Gospel of Mary, but of the 52 pieces of writing discovered, not one of them was orthodox – that is, they were all at odds with the person of Jesus mapped out in the New Testament.
These writings, however, have formed the basis of the revisionist pictures of Jesus like the one we find in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code. So, are they a threat to Christian belief? Well, let’s see… (Spoiler alert: the answer is no).
First of all, who were the Gnostics? They appear in force in the 2^nd Century, seemingly a spin-off of Judeo-Christian beliefs with aspects of Platonism thrown it. It’s as though they threw Frasier Crane, Ross from Friends and Alan Partridge all together – and created a monster.
Although there was room for manoeuvre amongst Gnostics, there seem to have been 6 main areas of common ground.

1)   There is a supreme God who dwells in inapproachable splendour in the spiritual world and has no dealings with the world of matter.

2)   The world is ‘evil’, and human beings are imprisoned within it, incapable of reaching the spiritual God. They need a redeemer! Not for salvation from sin, though, but from bondage to matter. The human body is a tomb. Sounds cheery.

3)   Some human beings, but not all, have a built-in ‘divine spark’ which offers hope of freedom from bodily bondage*. But not automatically, because you still need ‘gnosis’ (knowledge) – it is this secret knowledge, and not Faith, that sets you free.

4)   The job of enlightenment is carried out by a divine redeemer from the spiritual world in human disguise, who was often, not always, identified with the Jesus of the NT.

5)   The freed soul will have immortality, but only those with this secret divine spark and the necessary knowledge can aspire to this. (Here we see the debt to Plato, who virtually associated goodness with knowledge).

6)   There is a strong mythological element, whereby rays of divinity emanate from ‘God’ becoming harsher and crasser until they create a being called Demiurge (world-maker), who in turn creates the material world as we know it. It all sounds like something that ran for half a season on the Sci-fi channel before it was binned and the exec producers got fired and covered in hot tar.

Two other factors are noteworthy. Firstly, the Old Testament is thoroughly rejected by Gnostics – because the Divine Being could never get his hands dirty by creating anything so sullied as the world. Second, women were seen as ‘not worthy of life’. To enter the kingdom of heaven, a woman must ‘make herself male’ (Like ‘Bob’ in Blackadder II and Goes Forth).
So we can already see major differences between orthodox Christianity and these Gnostic gospels. We are not saved from sin by a historical figure both human and divine, but from ignorance by a mythological one who only seems to be human. Salvation is not for those who sincerely believe and repent, but for a small gang of ‘know-it-alls’.
The big question is this: does this mean that there were several strands of Christianity around in the 2^nd Century, and you could simply pick and choose what flavours you liked best? Was Christianity like buying an ice-cream? Absolutely not!
The Christian message that has been accurately handed down from the same era is the same today as it was then. Not for one moment did the church tolerate the idea of secret revelations to an elite bunch. The Gospel was open for all. And the central features of the Gospel – Jesus, God’s son, died on a cross to save humanity and rose from the dead in bodily form – were not open for discussion; if you didn’t hold to these, you simply weren’t a Christian.
Next week, we’ll look at some of the Gnostic gospels in more detail.

When someone raises an objection to Christianity like: ‘There’s no proof of God’, it’s relatively easy to respond. You can talk about how, outside of pure maths, we don’t talk about proof, or look at how most of the important decisions we make in life are not down to irrefutable proof (see our blog, Prove It To Me!) It doesn’t guarantee that people will buy it, of course, but the answers are there.
But when asked about the eternal fate of someone who has never heard the Gospel or never heard about Jesus, the truth is more hidden from us.
Remember, our role is not to win arguments. We are called to love people and point them to Jesus. With something like this, I think it’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know.’
What can we say that might be helpful?
God has promised us that, if we seek Him with all our hearts, we will find Him (Jeremiah 29:13). He is not eager for anyone to die (2 Peter 3:9). “For there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:12-13). We do not know how God is dealing with people in lands yet unreached by the gospel, but from Scripture we can see that He will never condemn anyone unjustly, but will be faithful to reveal Himself to anyone who looks for His salvation. Nobody goes to hell on a technicality!
We also know that John saw in heaven “…a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:9-10). Not only every nation but every tribe will be represented in heaven.
Notice that they all sing the same song. We are not saying that sincere Muslims or Hindus, trusting in their religion, will make it to heaven. There is only one Saviour, and everyone in heaven will be there through the salvation provided by Jesus.
Jesus died for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2)! We are confident, for example, that the Old Testament patriarchs who lived by faith before Jesus’ earthly ministry, are in heaven. So certainly some people have got to heaven without knowing Jesus in the personal way that the New Testament speaks of. Ultimately only God can judge as only He knows the individual’s heart. We hold out hope for those who have not heard but have not rejected God, those who have been misinformed, or those who are unable to understand. And we don’t need to worry about injustice, because God is Justice. It is impossible for God to go against his own nature and be unfair. Nobody will stand before God and claim foul play.
Certainly, the Bible does not teach “universalism”. Universalism is the idea that everyone gets to heaven. The Bible clearly teaches that the only certain way to heaven is through Jesus. We are confident that God will not hold anyone accountable for any knowledge he did not receive. At the same time, the Bible emphatically states that Christ is the only sure way to salvation. For anyone who has heard of the saving grace of Jesus and rejected, you have to ask what more God can do in that situation?
So, we don’t know what happens if people die not knowing about Jesus. We do know that we need to tell people about Jesus. And we do know, above all, that God has all the bases covered!

So, in Hell: Part 1, we discussed how God wouldn’t send good people to hell because there are no good people. In Hell: Part 2, we discussed how God wouldn’t send anyone to hell because we choose it for ourselves. This week, we want to look at the solution to the problem that hell creates.
We need to be clear that God didn’t create the world so that we would be condemned to hell. He didn’t decide that we would be sinners and some of us would be forgiven but others would go to eternal destruction. Hell is a consequence of sin, which is a consequence of our rejection of God.
But what do we mean by ‘Hell’?
If heaven is the undiluted presence of God, then hell might well be the total absence of Him. He loves us unconditionally, and if we say ‘No’ to His offer of love, then what more can He do but remove Himself from our sight? The problem is that, when He goes, Love, Hope, Beauty, Justice all go with Him – because He is all those things. We love because He first loved us. We understand Beauty because of His hand in Creation. Etc…
When we reject the presence of God, we choose the absence of Him: hell. That was our move. Fortunately, God has countered so that our move away from Him doesn’t have to be check-mate. He knows where the path we have chosen leads, and He’s not cool with that, so He has done something about it.
The answer is Jesus Christ. He is the fulfilment of both God’s Justice and Love. At the cross, we see God’s love for people and His wrath upon sin. He cannot allow sin/wrongdoing into his presence, but He loves us too much to just let us run away hopeless.
When Jesus died on the cross, He took the consequence of our sin/rebellion/rejection upon himself. He took your bullet/paid your fine/jumped on your grenade. He provided that doorway (the narrow gate) between you and God. Nobody else has ever made that gesture for you. In every other major religion, it’s up to you to save yourself. That’s a lot of pressure. But the moment you say ‘Yes’ to Jesus – the moment you let Him take over at the centre of your life – it’s no longer about you. He looks at your sin, your guilt, your wrongdoing, and He says, ‘I’ll take that, thanks. You’re free now.’
Nobody need end up in hell. “The Lord is not willing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance” (2Pet. 3.9). “He desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1Tim. 2.4).
Of course, if we reject Jesus’ offer of forgiveness, then there is simply is no one else to pay the penalty for our sin -except ourselves. If you were on the verge of signing a contract and, instead of shaking on it with the other guy, you pulled your hand away and spat in his face, you wouldn’t still walk away thinking, ‘that deal’ll probably still go through.’
Jesus is the only rescue plan. No other God is coming for you. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”
Next week, in the final part of the Hell Quadrilogy, we will look at questions like, ‘What about those people who never hear the Gospel?’

God wouldn’t send good people to hell.

Last week, we looked at the idea that there are no ‘good’ people for God to send to hell: There’s Jesus, and then everyone else. Here we want to look at the idea that God doesn’t send anyone anywhere – we satnav our own eternal destination.
A lot of people seem to think that the statements “God is all loving” and “Some people go to hell” are explicitly contradictory. Why would God, if He is all-loving, allow anyone to end up in hell – whatever it is that hell is? It seems so unjust! And I agree, it does seem unjust.
The first thing to say is that without a God of Justice behind everything, our sense of justice and injustice would be totally flimsy. If human death is the end of existence, then there is no such thing as ultimate judgement or ultimate justice. There is no such thing as fairness! Live how you want, and the result will be the same: nothingness.
For something to seem unfair, it has to first be measured against a definite, immovable standard of fairness. An orange wouldn’t approach the colour Orange and say, ‘I don’t think you’re very Orange.’
You just don’t get a definite standard of justice without God. So when we worry about God being unfair, we’re worrying unnecessarily because He is Fairness. He is Justice.
According to the Bible, God’s nature is both perfect Justice and perfect Love. Both of these are equally powerful, and neither can be compromised. With God, you are guaranteed both unconditional love and perfect justice.
But this is precisely the problem! Because God’s Justice exposes our inadequacy. The Bible says that every person has failed to live up to God’s moral law (his standard of goodness) and so we find ourselves guilty before God. The biblical word for this failure is sin. You might think you’re a good person compared to rapists or politicians, but you are not going to be judged against them.
The prophet Ezekiel declared, “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel. 18.4), and the apostle Paul echoes, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans. 6.23). You reap what you sow. This is justice in its purest form. By yourself, you fail the entrance test into heaven.
But why doesn’t God just stop us from sinning? Well, because He loves us. God has not made us robots. We have Free Will. We can use that Free Will to accept his offer of love and ‘life in abundance’, or we can use it to do our own thing. He will not and cannot force us to believe in or follow Him. You cannot force someone to love you – we have a different word for that.

“Don’t be misled—you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant. Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature.” (Galatians. 6.7-8)

Heaven isn’t a treat. It’s not Center Parcs. Heaven is the undiluted presence of God. And if you’ve spent your entire life rejecting that presence, why would you suddenly want to be there in the midst of it?
It’s horrible to think that people I know may end up in hell. I reject it on an emotional level. But I wonder whether we put too much emphasis on how we feel, and not enough on God’s holiness. Sin just cannot exist in the presence of God. It would be like a damp book thrown into a furnace – by the nature of those two things, the book would just get burnt up. And we are sinful – we’re damp books. We can do good things with a small ‘g’, but we are not wholly Good. Without some kind of protective suit, we are going to get burnt up.
Next week, we’ll look at what we call this protective suit. But, to end, remember that we don’t preach hell. We preach Jesus’ offer of ‘Fullness of Life’. Nobody else in history has ever made you that offer. It’s not ‘turn or burn’ – it’s ‘turn, and see what it means to live life in all its beauty’.