CUT OFF
I want to tell you something about God that is far better than what many people know. Unfortunately, to do that I need to tell you something dark about humanity.
Human history is full of examples of people using all of the creativity and empathy God has given us for the dark propose of inflicting as much pain and suffering on another person as possible. In other words, torture. It is the combination of creativity and empathy that allows us to imagine what things would be ultimately terrifying and painful to another person and invent different ways to do it. It seems like everything imaginable has been used to cut off, rip open, push into, pull apart, burn, freeze, starve, gnaw, and poison other people.
The real limitation of torture has always been how much suffering could be inflicted on someone before their mind broke or their body died.
In the twentieth century, monstrous people began to explore the boundaries of that limitation with the new tools of the scientific method. Most prominently, these were doctors and scientists employed and commissioned by the Nazi government, the Japanese government, the various communist regimes, and the American government (after World War 2 our government recruited and hired many of these Nazi doctors and scientist to continue their work for us through the Operation Paperclip and MKUltra programs).
From the little we know, with the application of their new methodical and calculating tools, these people achieved more in their grotesque field of maximizing human suffering than all who came before them. But they still encountered their limitations. The human mind and the human body can only take so much before they give out.
In the mind of many Christians, there is only one who has, or at least will, ever overcome this limitation of maximizing the suffering a human being can endure – our God. The belief is that one day this loving God will pull off something that all the campfire sadists, the torture chamber inventors, and the modern torture scientists could only dream of. God will give people – likely the majority of human beings – a new body that can endure the unending torture of being burned alive without their bodies ever giving out or their mind breaking. Not for an hour or a day, or a week, or even a lifetime, but for time without end.
In one additional way this ultimate achievement of torture will go beyond what anyone has ever been able to accomplish. This unending suffering will go along with the un-escapable message from their tormentor, “I love you. I didn’t want to do this. But you made me do it. It’s all your fault.” It is the dark and twisting message of so many abusive fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, and girlfriends throughout history and throughout the world today – but un-escapable.
A common variation on this view is that at the end of all things God will give people an un-dying body and an un-breakable mind and then hand them over to an evil being called Satan to do the torturing. Either way, it is all within the purview of an all powerful God.
This is an all too common understanding of God among Christians. It is one of the main reasons I find that people reject God, the Bible, church, and Christianity. Thankfully it is as untrue and unBiblical as it is horrible.
Before we get into what the Bible actually does say about God, let me say something true about strength and goodness. Torture is always either a sign of a psychological defect – like when a psychopath tortures out of curiosity – or a sign of weakness. It is a sign that someone either doesn’t have the power to get something they want (“Give me the information!”) or they don’t have the power to protect something that is important to them (“This is because of what you did to me or what I’m afraid you could do to me.”).
God is not psychologically defective, weak, or vulnerable. The power move of people who are strong and good – the very definition of God – in the face of a bad situation or relationship is to simply walk out of the room. Getting closer to the message, the power move of a being who is infinitely capable and good in the face of a bad relationship is to withdraw the life and blessings of their presence.
The message of the Bible is that the danger of rejecting God – the author and originator of all life, light, beauty and goodness – is that God will eventually accept your rejection.
The theme of the danger of being cut off from God and blessings of connection with God fill the pages of scripture.
What was the Garden of Eden but a place of connection with the author of life, light, beauty, and goodness? What were the consequences of rejecting God as God? Being cut off, or at least tragically distanced, from the relationship that made Eden what it was.
It is a theme that is repeated over and over again. In the words of the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became foolsand exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts…
Paul is talking about people rejecting God and God eventually accepting their rejection.
Paul’s message here is highly similar to Jesus’ messages about the dangers of “hell.” When Jesus uses the word “hell,” he does not mean the fiery underworld of the Greek god Hades that often comes to mind. The word that Jesus actually uses is “geena” or “Geheena.” It is the name of a valley southwest of Jerusalem. Contrary to popular myth, it was not a place where trash was burned outside the city. The only historic, archeological, or Biblical references to the fires of Gehenna is as a place where people, mainly children, were sacrificed by fire to other gods.
So how do we understand Jesus’ few references to the dangers of being lost to hell or Geheena by rejecting God as God? He is saying that in rejecting God and God’s teachings we are in danger of becoming utterly – morally, mentally, and physically – lost to the gods we serve and cut off from the author and originator or life, light, beauty and goodness; eventually becoming no more. Paul reflects this when he says, “Therefore, God gave them over to sinful desires of their hearts” and later says, “the wages of sin [rejecting God as God] is death.” Not unending torture, but death – a cessation of life, being, and existence.
Many of Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven and the end of all things reflect this idea as well. God loves us more than we can imagine and is pursing us throughout all the ages of history and our life to bring us home, set us free, and help us become fully alive. Jesus’ parables tell us that if we continue to reject God as God, at some point God will accept our rejection and we will find ourselves cut off, burned up and destroyed, cast out, on the outside, and missing out on the great party or great feast that God wanted us to be a part of.
When trying to understand what God does with people at the end of all things, it is important to understand that the worldview of the Gospels is that the default destiny of all people is death or non-existence. Notice when the rich young man comes to Jesus in Matthew 19, he asks, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” He assumes by default, that he won’t live eternally. Notice in the famous verse, John 3:16, Jesus says, “…whoever believes in him shall not die but have eternal life.” Later in the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (John 6:40) and later in John 11:25-26 Jesus says, “
I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” Death is the default, eternal life is the gift.
God is both strong and good and loves us more than we can ever know and has been on a mission to rescue us, mainly from ourselves, our whole lives. God is running after us with love, forgiveness, healing, and life itself. All we have to do is stop running, accept God as God, and our need for God. When we do, God will start growing eternal life, the coming Kingdom of God in our hearts and in our lives in the here and now and when this life is over, God will welcome us into a new world made so overwhelmingly good and beautiful that it will make all the evils and sufferings of this life seem like they don’t matter. They won’t have a hold on us anymore. We will be free. We will know what life really is for the first time.
For everyone else, our strong and good God will not do something as weak and ugly as torturing people. God will give them what they want – a life without God. Disconnected from life itself they will cease to exist and miss out on all that God wanted for them.
This is the tragedy that Jesus came to rescue us from. We only need to take hold of the hand that is being held out to us.
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