Erasing Hell by Francis Chan预览

“I Wouldn’t Have Done That”

Sending people to hell isn’t the only thing God does that is impossible to figure out. The Bible is bursting with divine acts that don’t make a lot of sense to us.

The flood of Genesis 6-8. He decides to save some animals and 8 of His people—and then He drowns the rest.

When Moses comes down from the mountain in Exodus 32:27 and the Israelites are worshipping a golden calf. God commands the Levites to whet their swords and run through the camp and slaughter their brothers and friends and neighbors. Three thousand people died that day, and the Levites were blessed for their obedience.

In Deuteronomy 20:16-18 God commands the Israelites to slaughter all the inhabitants of Canaan, men, women, and children.

The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don’t fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don’t need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God and confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways.

We serve a God whose ways are incomprehensible, whose thoughts are not like our thoughts. Ultimately, thoughts of God should lead to joy, because those same thoughts designed the cross—the place where righteousness and wrath kiss.

Would you have thought to rescue sinful people from their sins by sending your Son to take on human flesh? Would you have thought to enter creation through the womb of a young Jewish woman and be born in a feeding trough? Would you have thought to allow your created beings to torture your Son, lacerate His flesh with whips, and then drive nails through His hands and feet?

I’m almost sure I would not have done that if I were God.

It’s incredibly arrogant to pick and choose which incomprehensible truths we embrace. No one wants to ditch God’s plan of redemption, even though it doesn’t make sense to us. Neither should we erase God’s revealed plan of punishment because it doesn’t sit well with us. As soon as we do this, we are putting God’s actions in submission to our own reasoning, which is a ridiculous thing for clay to do.

* Can you accept all of God’s incomprehensible truths, even the ones you don’t like?

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