Increasingly I have found the narrow path less comfortable. It seems an inflexible and limited route. There is a lack of latitude over the way taken for deviation, carelessness and loss of bearings. In all of our times, in all of our journeys hasn’t there always been a multitude of pathways. Isn’t it the direction and destination that count?
Its too hard to accept that this is all there is, the one and only chance. The evidence for evil is too powerful and pervasive. A three score and ten without any resolution, any meaning, is too unbearable and a curtailed life even more so.
If I were asked now about the ultimate destination, the pie in the sky thing, then I would affirm my belief in heaven. I cant say what heaven exactly is. I would say it’s an afterlife with God. I think it’ll be brilliant beyond our imagining. More colourful, more noisy, and as crowded or as solitary as we can ever desire.
It’s the getting there. We don’t have to do anything. That’s enormously comforting. No anxious earning of approval. In by grace and by the faith. Yet how will they know unless He is preached? So may didn’t know and will not know. They will not be ‘in.’ Or will they be there? Will they be because of other ways? Will we visit many mansions? Will there be many surprises? Shall we be eternally stumbling upon Muslim brothers and Hindu sisters that we never knew and that like us they travelled there too? Perhaps in parallel with us or in a diametric route but still able to satisfy the Truth and finding the Way?
Of course taking a narrow path needn’t mean singular. I don’t think believing the magnanimity of God and his blessing of many paths affects my witness to Him. Rather I think it strengthens it. Its clear to me that I can show people to the door that I know best as it has been revealed to me. I cant and wouldn’t direct people to the path along to the mosque, temple or chapel because I know nothing of it. So I can only point to the door where Jesus stands and knocks.
Totally with you on this Gavin. Would like to have some answers as I share many of the same questions. In particular the whole "what if they haven't heard?" ones...
ReplyDeleteWe give the clearest directions to places we have been or know well. We describe best the people we've met, the better we know and love them the more likely it is that our witness will mean others do too.
There are places and people, routes and roads out there that I have no experience of. Who am I to say the way I have chosen is the only one that leads to that final destination - the pie in the sky?
That's the nub of it for me - whilst I can't say that the one that I know and love and follow dares to do so.
I stumbled across Jesus and his teaching as a child in a Sunday School mission tent in the local rec! I grew to believe in the atoning sacrifice of Christ - the light of the world - for the whole world.
Forty years later I'm still trying to join up all the dots ...
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ReplyDeleteAlways enjoy reading your blog Gavin ... food for thought instead of the usual trivia! Thanks for the suggestion re funding - any funds would be greatly appreciated as we have very little to speak of. You can contact Lauri Crawford at workindesign@gmail.com - he's chairman of Vis de Copil (A Child's Dream) Scotland, you met him at church.
ReplyDeleteGavin
ReplyDeleteThanks for raising an issue that has worried me deeply for most of my adult life - how wide really is God's love and the the scope of grace.
Let me add some more questions that I lie in bed at night and ponder
- Does everyone on earth have access to God’s revelation? Do some nations like the Western ones have more access and do some (like New Zealand until 150 years ago) have less? Why?
- It is pretty well impossible to know how many members of the human family have lived and died without hearing the Gospel and about Jesus. It seems safe to conclude that the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have never heard the good news of grace regarding the Gospel. What happens to them after death?
- What about individuals born with or raised to have defects – mental, psychological, spiritual? (heaps of examples – those who are abused, those raised in horribly corrupt communities etc)
- How can we believe that God is just and loving if He fails to provide people with any opportunity to place their faith in Christ?
- To whom do we attribute the goodness, truth, compassion and beauty which we see in other religions if we believe they are zones of absolute darkness and deception?
- How could heaven be a place of joy when most of humanity are suffering eternal conscious torment? (traditional view of the church although many sensitive Christians are now are saying wait on here....)
Throughout the last 2,000 years, Christians have wrestled with the the issue that Gavin has raised and no single answer to these questions has bubbled to the surface - committed Christians have argued for inclusiveness and generosity as well as exclusiveness and pessimism - and both have done this conscientiously and with care using the Bible.
Traditionally, folk from my tradition (evangelical) have gravitated towards a pessimistic view of salvation and concluded that there is a very strong risk that most of humanity will go to hell.
I have moved to a position of optimism and generosity and it has not diluted my desire to speak of the gospel - Brett