On Sunday, a student asked me how we can really believe God is loving when he sends people to hell. I know this student's home life, how much she loves her older sisters and wishes they would come to church with her. I know how much it must hurt her to look at them and think that, based on what she believes, one day she will be rejoicing with Jesus in heaven and they will be suffering in a terrible place far from God.
Since reading David Platt's Radical a couple years ago, I have been struggling with similar questions. In his book, Platt drills home the point of our hopelessness, how we were born evil sinners without hope outside of Christ. He tells his readers that we are enemies of God, living in opposition to and hatred of him, working against his purposes until we are saved by the mercy of the cross. I struggled to reconcile God's hatred of sin and his love for sinners. I struggled to balance verses that tell me things like God created my innermost being with ones that tell me I was born a sinner. Why did God create me with the capacity for such evil? I had it twisted and felt at times that if God created me and knew the evil I would harbor in my heart, he must have created me to be the wretched sinner I am and have always been.
While I wrestled with these questions, little by little I have been discovering new truths and working out the rough spots in what I believe and what I don't understand. Thankfully, that student asked me her burning question, and God gave us both an answer.
I didn't have this answer prepared, I never had 100% clarity about the answer until she asked and I started speaking. Words came out of my mouth that surprised me like I was hearing them for the first time just like she was.
I told her that God created two healthy humans and gave them the power to choose so that their choices could mean something. Then, an enemy brought poison to the garden, and with their choice the healthy humans drank the enemy's poisonous lies. The poison gave them a disease called sin, a disease that is degenerative, contagious, and fatal. To see how truly insidious the disease of sin is, just look how quickly a sin of simple disobedience (I mean, really- they only ate an apple.) evolved into the sin we think of as one of the worst. It took one generation for Adam and Eve's disobedience to progress to their son murdering his brother. God flooded the world and saved only Noah, which looks so mean to us but was really a great picture of love. Noah was the only man on earth fighting his infection while everyone else was accelerating the effects of the disease, like continuing to smoke when you have lung cancer. Using the flood, God wanted to slow the epidemic because he knows how quickly it spreads and how deeply it destroys. After watching his people indulge the disease for years and years, God knew that this ruthless infection was too much for humans to fight on their own. He came to us in the form of a doctor, a healer, with the only known cure.
Now, our choice looks different. We are dying from what was previously deemed a hopeless and fatal disease but we have been given a vile of hope. Just like Adam and Eve chose to drink Satan's poison, it is up to us to drink the cure of Christ.
Then I asked the student, "If someone was sick and the doctor gave them medicine but they wouldn't drink it, would you blame the doctor?" She smiled and said no. "Would you say he was a good doctor or a bad doctor?"
"He's a good doctor, but his patient is stupid!" she said. I told her that we don't always know why people don't accept the cure for sin that Jesus gives us, but we know it is because God loves us that he has given us a cure and every opportunity to drink it.
Some people don't know they are spiritually sick and dying. Some people know and drink poison for all their days anyway. I know people who only act like they've taken the medicine. I've heard of others who have been suffering from the sickness their whole lives and take the medicine right in the nick of time, getting their second shot of life in heaven. Some think they will cure themselves by doing their best to be good and healthy people, but stage 4 cancer will not be cured by eating right. There are those who swallowed the medicine long ago and still daily choose to lie in their death beds, letting their now healthy muscles weaken and atrophy. While some took the medicine and are healed, they are not living healthy lives. The disease is gone, but they are not taking care of themselves as if they've been given a second shot at life. Others still are stingy with the cure. There is enough to go around, but they keep the answer to themselves.
In any zombie or epidemic movies I've seen, which admittedly is not many, the main characters try to outrun the disease and fight off the infected for as long as they can until eventually they are infected themselves. Imagine how those stories would be different if, in one of the final scenes, the group somehow finds the antidote. They find that not only does this disease miraculously heal those who have been infected; it offers an immunity to the effects of the disease. Now, the group could rejoice in their good fortune and breathe deep sighs of relief, and it could end there. The credits could roll, and the small posse of friends could walk into the sunset toward their happy ending. But what would turn that good story into a great story is if, with their second shot at life, the group departed on a mission to cure everyone else. Now they are not only lucky; they are heroes.
