This article was not exactly what I had in mind for part two of Is the Islamic Antichrist Among Us?, but it is funny how the news events of the day can change one's course.
My sister called me this past Sunday evening to ask me if I were watching TV. She does a good job of alerting me to things I should be aware of, like an approaching tornado, because most of the time we don't have the TV turned on. This time, though, it was not a weather report she was making me aware of; instead, it was the earth-shattering announcement that our military, particularly the cream of the cream of the crop, the Navy Seals, had taken out Osama within a 40-minute time period within his compound in Pakistan.
It was either Good Morning, America or the Today Show the next morning that held up the New York newspaper headlines announcing the death of this terrorist mastermind. One of the New York City newspapers had this for their big caption on the front page--ROT IN HELL. Beside that was the picture of Osama bin Laden.
How strikingly odd that a secular newspaper in New York City would admit in this "eliminate-all-hell-talk" postmodern religious environment that hell must be a real place after all. True, it is only a place for the really, really, really bad folks, like Osama, or other mass murderers, or serial rapists, or child abusers, or former spouses, but nonetheless, the world still has a place for hell, besides just in our cursing. We can't shake off hell, as much as we are told that we must, in this new age of coexistence, full tolerance and positive feel-happy spirituality where all roads lead to heaven. . .except that one road we must keep in tact that leads to hell.
What is the explanation for all this dichotomy of how we should not believe in hell, yet how we should believe in hell? The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says that God has set eternity in the heart of man. Man has been designed by its Creator to think of eternity, that this life is not all there is. The new atheists or the run-of-the-mill advanced secularists can try all they want to rub this "archaic" thought out of our craniums, but it simply will not go away. We have a list of people that we want to see rot in hell. It is more than just a death wish, and it is more than just a hell wish too.
This is because we know that justice is never fully served in this life. It is not right that Osama had a quick death for one time, when how many people did he kill, many of them very painful slow deaths, on 9/11? Even if we could kill Osama many times over, we still would think he did not fully get what was coming to him.
We demand that there be a fuller justice out there beyond this life, something that is more exacting and more definite by a Judge that is completely able and willing to do the right thing in every case. Justice delayed is justice denied, which is often the case in this life; but that sticky unresolved issue could be more than overcome if justice determined is justice divined in the next life.
Of course, a normal man's thinking has all those people "worse" than himself getting their just desserts before God one day; he never stops to consider that Gehenna will be populated by people that were not as "good" as God. That should strike another kind of terror in the mind of every man. How can anyone be as good as God, and how can I then be removed as a prime candidate for residency in hell myself?
Justification is the heaven-sent solution whereby man can avoid being sent to hell. Since all our righteousness is like filthy rags (menstrual cloths, literally), we need the perfect Righteousness of Another to be transferred to our account. Jesus, the God-man, through His death on the cross, has made it a reality that a believing, repenting man can have all his sins removed and God's righteousness be put in its place. What better deal could man hope for--this is real hope and change--God gets all our sin, and we get all His righteousness. Man comes out on the better end of that arrangement.
This is where the New York City newspaper falls short. All will "rot in hell", apart from God's saving grace.
But at least the secular media recognizes there is a hell of some sort. Maybe they can teach a few things to people like Rob Bell, a Christian pastor and author of Love Wins, who denies the reality of hell.
What a strange world we live in, where we are asking the world to teach a Christian pastor some sound theology. How foolish could we be for expecting it to be the other way around!
Living with eternity in mind,
Chris
