Lies We Believe About God by Wm. Paul Young

Author:Wm. Paul Young [Young, Wm. Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2017-03-07T07:00:00+00:00

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“Hell is separation from God.”

I grew up in religious environments that were steeped in the dread and specter of eternal conscious torment. My deepest motivation for right living was not the reality of love or trusting in the life of Jesus; it was the fear of hellfire and damnation.

The topic of hell is a massive one, sparking all manner of heated debates. There are a number of basic views of hell, including 1) eternal damnation, 2) annihilation, and 3) an age of redemptive purification. If you would like to step back a moment and take another look at this particular conversation, let me recommend a good place to start: Brad Jersak’s book Her Gates Will Never Be Shut (2009).

For many, the crux and conflict of the question is how we can posit an eternally Good God, whose very nature is Love, allowing human beings to be in conscious torment and pain for infinite time, as if that were somehow Just.

The thought is so disheartening that, for many, it becomes an insurmountable obstacle. I regularly receive emails that say, “I am terrified to take the risk and trust that God is as Good as you have written, and then find out you are wrong.” Doesn’t it seem intuitively wrong to be desperately afraid of a torture-devising God and yet hope to spend eternity with this God?

In The Shack, I tried to move the conversation about hell from the head to the heart by putting the main character, Mackenzie, in the crosshairs of a terrible dilemma. In the cave where Mack faces the Wisdom of God, Sophia, She demands that he take the position of Judge, a role that he, like all of us, assumes daily. But Sophia turns the tables unexpectedly.

“Choose two of your children to spend eternity in God’s new heaven and new earth, but only two . . . and three of your children to spend eternity in hell.”

Sophia is driving the reality of this issue away from a disengaged, heady debate and down into the deepest recesses of the heart and soul—the visceral love of a parent for his or her children. It also exposes the lie that God is not a loving Father—not even as good a parent as we are—and the lie that this remarkable, unreasonable love we have for our children originates in us and not in God.

Sophia is unrelenting, and She begins to examine the behaviors and attitudes of Mack’s children, and thereby reasons that he might justify his choice to send three of them to hell. In Her mock argument, judgment is assumed to be based on behavior and performance, the keeping of a record of their wrongs (an activity that 1 Corinthians 13 states emphatically that love does not do).

Driven into an abyss of hopelessness, Mackenzie finally sees that there is only one way out, a way that any mother or father, with even the smallest degree of health, would choose.

“Could I go instead? If you need someone to torture for eternity, I’ll go in their place.

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