“The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.” John 1:14
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” When we know him, we know truth. There is no lie in him. There are no discrepancies between the way he acts and what he says. When we tell people that God is Love, we’re not saying that’s all he is. He is also righteous, and holy, and just.
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When there is a cancer in your body you tell the doctor to be aggressive, to cut it out, to kill it, to leave not one trace of it in your body. The church has had an infestation of false teachings throughout its history, from the very beginning, and even more so in these last days.
Paul writes of this throughout his letters warning the churches. In Galatians specifically he was dealing with the false teaching that said, grace is good, but you must be circumcised to have true salvation. These teachers were perverting the gospel. They were as Peter puts it, twisting the gospel to their own destruction. (2 Peter 3:16). And God’s curse was upon them. But grace plus circumcision is not the only possible perversion of the gospel.
Can you be alive with cancer in your body? Of course. In the natural people live with it for years. Just so in the church. Can it survive, can we as individuals survive, believing false teachings, untruth, near truth, or almost truth? Of course. But God wants us to walk in spiritual health. He wants us to walk in truth because He is truth.
I’ve been thinking a lot about John 3:16 lately. God so loved the world. God loved the world so much that he gave his son. Why did he need to do this? Because as the prophet said, our sins have separated us from God (Is. 59:2). John tells us that the reason Jesus had to come is because the world was already condemned. God has not condemned us, we have condemned ourselves by our choices. Because we love darkness and not light. In his book, “Love Wins,” Rob Bell talks about our choices for evil bringing a type of hell on earth. And he is right. There is a pain and a suffering we bring both to ourselves and to others around us when we act selfishly. There is a separation from God. A distance between us. A great chasm.
God does always get his way. So while the scripture teaches that God wants everyone to experience this gift of God’s grace called salvation and to be set free from this condemnation we’re all under, I believe he’s not going to force it on us. Because he has a greater will that he has established: our free will. He has allowed us the choice to submit to his will or to choose our own will.
Rob Bell says he is not a Universalist because he doesn’t believe in the big arm of God sweeping everybody into heaven against their will. He says nobody will be in heaven that doesn’t want to be there. I agree. We have a free will to choose. Our choices do matter.
The gospel is the good news message of victory. The good news is that we are sinners, that we cannot save ourselves, that God alone is righteous, that Jesus was God himself come in the flesh a willing sacrifice for our sins, and that God loved us so much that he gave us this sacrifice so that we could have relationship with him. He has done all of the hard work, now we must just choose to accept this gift and walk in the eternal life that comes through him. For those who do, Love does win.
Unlike Rob Bell, I believe the Bible teaches we must choose now, here, today, while we are still in this body, to accept this gift of eternal life. Because while the gift is all about grace, it’s also about free will. And it’s about sin as well. And how we address the “sin issue” is just as important a thing to talk about as God’s Love…
When anyone teaches that you can live a life committed to sin and still get into heaven, that is a false gospel because it doesn’t deal with the issue of sin in one’s life. After all it’s the whole reason Jesus came – to save us from our life of sin, and the eternal consequences of it.
Additional Scripture Readings
2 Corinthians 6:1-2
Hebrews 9:27
Ezekiel 18:26-32