And that’s our Christian faith. A little inner tube saving us from the bad place.
But in context, that verse is talking about generations and descendants and the continuation of Israel and the offspring of Abraham forward into history. Paul, a Jew, is writing to Gentiles about how to get in line to receive this same blessing from Abraham and be a part of this ongoing call to bless the world. Could it refer to the afterlife? Possibly. But immediate context suggests otherwise. Either way, there is far more context to dig into than what we are typically presented with when presented with ‘the gospel.’
Anyway.
Last night I was talking to someone who’s on the fence about Christianity. He asked if, since I’m a pastor, I’ll try to convert him. I said, ‘yes, pray this one minute prayer and then you’re in forever….because that’s what the Bible prescribes.’
…Except that it doesn’t.
The Bible talks about a lot of things: knowing God, living like Jesus, transforming our minds and hearts and affections, being and making disciples, as well as a slew of action items like taking care of the poor, the orphans and widows, etc.
But it doesn’t talk about “going to heaven.”
It talks about one person going to heaven: Jesus. Because in the Bible, the word ‘heaven’ literally just meant the sky and everything in it–clouds, sun, moon, stars, etc. In the ancient mindset, there is everything we can touch, like the sea and land and plants and animals; and then there is everything up there, which is, the heavens.
And when Jesus ascended into the sky after His resurrection, He literally went to the heavens.
“But aren’t you worried about getting me into heaven?” asked my friend last night.
I said, “Maybe I would be if the Bible were more worried about getting you into heaven. The issue is, most of our conceptions of the afterlife come from Dante and Renaissance artwork more than from the Bible. It talks about life and resurrection and being with God, and living well in this life. The Old Testament has roughly three verses on the afterlife….”
Let that simmer.
–
“People often ask me what I believe about hell,” said my New Testament professor last year. “I always respond with, ‘do you mean Hades? The Outer Darkness? The Lake of Fire? The Eternal Punishment? The Second Death? Gehenna? Hinnom? Which hell are you referring to?”
He was pointing out that the Bible is far more complex when it talks about, well, everything. And we have oversimplified it to thinking that there is hell and there is heaven and we want to avoid the former and go to the latter and this is the Good News of the Bible…
But each passage needs to be read in context. What are the implications of each of those ‘hells’? Is Jesus talking about the afterlife, or is He talking about living in sin so that your life (this life) becomes a literal garbage pile (Gehenna—a word often translated as ‘hell’ in English)?
Or what about the fact that Jesus ONLY talks about hell with the religious teachers, and never with outsiders like the prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners? Seems that if anyone was in danger of being scorched by hellfire in Jesus’ eyes, it was the exclusive religious folks, not the outsiders.
What about the fact that there is not one clear, distinct method by which people are saved in the New Testament? You’d think that if it were so important, Jesus would have laid out the instructions for how, exactly, to get to heaven, or a prayer to recite so we can lock it in. Instead, the only formula we get is the Lord’s Prayer, which is surprisingly lacking in language about the afterlife, and deals exclusively with our life on this side of the grave.
So all this begs the question then, what is the Good News? What is Christianity? Is it merely a method of escaping hell? If that was the overarching narrative of the Bible–that we are bad and the world is bad and hell is coming, unless you manage to convert to Jesus–then it would seem like predominantly bad news. Or at the very least, scary news.
