Chapter 1: Why Should We Be Saved?
by Derek Leman
Life rolls by us, like a film that will not stop, and we miss so much. We’re busy pursuing education, career, family, and a whole lot of other things. And behind all of that we sense something deeper, or perhaps we should say higher—something with meaning beyond our immediate experience. Is our angst entirely unfounded? Or are we missing an opportunity to take hold of something?
We’ve got plenty of time, we tell ourselves. Entire years go by without us thinking about God, death, mystery, purpose, apparent meaninglessness, frustrating futility. But from time to time, we are taken hold of. We might say the universe speaks to us or life grabs us by the shoulders. It’s not always a tragedy—yet so often it is—but could be a book or movie, a profound conversation, an encounter with a starry night, or a thousand other soul-stirring experiences.
Is eating, sleeping, working, and being entertained all there is? Surely not. There has to be more.
The Conversation Has Shifted
There was a time when topics like God, salvation, sin, and Gospel were openly discussed and central to the culture. In most places these days, that is not the case. Tremendous pressure is exerted on us to avoid such topics. Internet discussions turn these topics into ideological war zones. It is widely believed that “science” has disproved God. When I say widely believed, I do not mean among scientists or people with a sound grasp of philosophy. I mean in popular discussions where historical perspective is lacking and superficial investigations are the norm.
Religious talk tends to push political buttons, on all sides. Our in-group may disapprove of religious talk. Having a conversation about God and Jesus might not be safe.
We know we could go to one of those churches we pass on the back roads and highways of our lives. But they’re all so different. Some of them may believe weird things or try to get us “healed” or “delivered from demons” or something. And we can’t just pop in out of curiosity because we know they will harangue us, call us, email us, and maybe even knock on our door to try and keep us coming.
Maybe we have a “religious” friend we could talk to. But we tried that a few times and discussions got political very quickly. And they kept inviting us to their church—the very thing we’d hoped to avoid.
Maybe we picked up a Bible and tried to read. This works for some people, but many people find it to be a confusing book offering little help to the uninitiated.
Maybe we tried learning about world religions and thinking to ourselves, I’ll pick one. There has to be one that makes sense and explains my life and these longings I find within me.
It’s just not easy in the twenty-first century to discover God. Times have changed and the topic is relatively taboo. But the longings do not disappear; they only go under the surface for periods of time. And when they resurface, we don’t know where to go.
For all that times have changed and social acceptance of religious belief has greatly diminished, other things have not changed. We are still deeply in the muck of the human condition—creatures yearning for permanence and true satisfaction of our desires while battling with present needs for survival and well-being. Disturbing news greets us daily and we could easily get disenchanted with life.
We find no earthly satisfaction, not one that lasts. Thrills come and go and we can’t find them again. Our deep anxieties seem to call for God-sized answers. I mean, we have tasted true joy—all of us have. When it went away we mourned for it like a lost friend. At least a few times in our life we’ve felt the heart-rending, perspective-altering kind of joy that must be out of this world because we can’t return to it. And we know a kind of holy dissatisfaction. With ourselves. With the world.
Ultimately, your reasons and mine for wanting to know about salvation are deep within us. Others might try to make us feel weak or inadequate for wanting the promise of Jesus. Marx famously compared religion to opium—a sort of spiritual drug for fragile, comfort-seeking people who refuse to accept that the struggle for survival is all there is. What if life has no meaning? What if we are irrelevant creatures born from random chance in a purposeless universe destined to dissolve into nothingness and chaos?
If that view of the universe is true, then placing hope in God and Jesus is like shooting up with heroin—a meaningless act in which we seek comfort.
Philosopher after philosopher has given the advice: be true to yourself. But being social creatures, we ignore this and care far too much what our peers think, what our family thinks. We avoid religious seeking so as not to face ridicule or uncomfortable questions.
But something inside you must be curious. Otherwise, why are you reading this? So, let’s seriously consider reasons why seeking answers about God and the meaning of life is not only worthwhile, but desperately needed.
The World Is Not Right
We know this. Greed and violence rule the planet. Cancer lays waste to families. Corruption is the norm. We can no longer believe things we see or hear. Fraud and scams lay hidden in our path. Families fight and fall apart. Tragedies are all around us.
And it’s more than the pain and the wrongness. Even the enjoyable things disappoint us. What once thrilled us has become mundane. The excitement of first love wore off. Family disappointed us. If we tried religion, it probably disappointed us too. And the promise of success? Well, we found out it’s not a promise!
Everything is running down, breaking down, falling apart, and failing to live up to its promise. And yet we have a sense things don’t need to be this way. We imagine utopias that don’t exist. We make stories about animals that talk and live in peace. We dream of paradisiacal places, where the weather is good, everyone has plenty, and pain doesn’t exist.
Nature and human nature, both are broken. As surely as an earthquake will kill a bunch of people this year, we can be equally sure human beings will wreak havoc in ways large and small.
But where did the world come from? Why is it here? Is existence an accident or is there a source and ground for our being? Are we alone on a fast moving rock hurtling aimlessly through space or are we children of a Creator?
The world is not right and we know it. John Lennon imagined a world with no God and no religion. He imagined we could have peace if we only abandoned religion. It’s definitely true that religions have started a few wars, but not all of them by any means. I think John Lennon was simply wrong.
We can imagine a better world all we want. But how do we get there? Who can make that happen? What political leader? Will we keep putting our trust in political systems? Science? Progress?
As a wisdom sage from the Bible said, “Futility! Utter futility! Everything is futile!” (my translation of Ecclesiastes 1:2). But we can just try something new, right? He also said, “What has been, it is what will be, And what has been done, it is what will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
I Am Not Right
The world is not right. Are we—the human race—the ones to fix it? We sometimes imagine so but the evidence is far from promising.
We put on a good face, corporately and individually. Corporately we do things like form governments and pass laws. We have ideals. We do not achieve them. We can fly to the moon, but we cannot stop violence, oppression, cruelty, and the thousand crimes human beings are prone to.
Individually we put our skeletons in a closet, but they have a way of being found out. We fail at our own self-expectations. We do things we regret. Sometimes our strategy is to deny the wrongness of our shortcomings—as if good and evil are human ideas from earlier times in need of rethinking. Or we compare ourselves to others and self-justify our uglier tendencies.
The Bible suggests our malady is just that: a malady, a disease of sorts, or a set of external forces acting on us—the forces of sin and death. Perhaps the best strategy is to simply own our failings and desire better from ourselves.
We sense our failings in various ways. Consequences follow from our words and actions and we vow to break the pattern. Or maybe we see someone else demonstrating patience, caring, or selfless humility and we want to emulate them. At times, we catch ourselves acting like hypocrites, doing the same thing we despise in others.
In some moments we feel deep regret, sometimes with tears. Frustration overwhelms us in times like these. Why do I self-destruct? Why can’t I follow reason and good sense? Why am I prey to my own volatile emotions and subconscious longings? Why do I do—again and again—what I hate?
Denial is a temporary source of comfort. What we’re doing can’t really be “wrong.” We know that we have love inside us. We know we are not evil. Our issues come from a good place of trying to do the right thing, don’t they? And who decides what is right and what is wrong? Our parents? Some saint from a thousand years ago? Maybe human society has moved beyond good and evil. Maybe it’s all about our rights and freedom.
Or, if right and wrong actually exist, well, we’re not serial killers (unless we are). We’re not like those sex traffickers or merciless dictators! We’re pretty good. We do as well as others, maybe better. On a relative scale, we feel we’d be at least in the top fifty percent of humanity on the goodness scale. What more should people expect? What more should God expect?
Here’s where I will insert an important Gospel truth. We think being good and pleasing God is about satisfying a hypercritical super-being who has little or no sympathy with our condition. Churches sometimes present it this way: the “holy” God is disappointed with you. That’s not the Gospel. The Gospel says:
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
Why would God do that for sinners? It’s because he is hyper-loving, not hypercritical. He says we have a disease—the disease of sin and death. Far from hating us for that, he offers us healing.
Calling the human problem “sin and death” is simplifying and generalizing a host of complex issues. “Sin” is a word for shortcomings. Some of our sin disease is caused by things inside of us. Some of the problem comes from external forces. Unresolved childhood disappointments warp our souls. Emotionally driven passions and desires lead us to betray ourselves and others. But there are other external forces at work: family, career, society, and—if you can accept it—spiritual forces opposed to God.
We were not made to die. Death is not the final word. We were made for love and perfect enjoyment.
But we are not right. I’d suggest the best thing to do is to own it. Admit that we are not our best selves. And owning it also means seeking a way to do better.
There Has To Be More
You’re at the beach, a cabin in the woods, or some idyllic place. But there are two problems.
First, the vacation is not as idyllic as you imagined. Car rides. Hot sun. Sunscreen in your eyes. Mosquitoes biting. Children bickering. You imagined paradise—and maybe the spot came close to delivering—but you got a dose of reality mixed with your dreams of wonderland.
Second, while things may not be perfect, you come to love your easy days and the beautiful scenery. The last day of vacation draws near and you imagine the paperwork, the drudgery, the stress, or whatever makes regular life less enjoyable than vacation. The enjoyment doesn’t last. Reality returns.
It’s not just vacations that disappoint. Marriages end. Careers crash. Friends move. Thrills fade. We age. We die. The awful reality is nothing satisfies and change is the only constant.
In his memoir, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis describes an experience he had, an encounter with awe and joy. He was looking at an image in a magazine, a painting related to Richard Wagner’s opera cycle concerning Norse gods and heroes. Being a young man at the time, Lewis knew little about Siegfried and the Ring Cycle. He saw an advertising phrase, “Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.”
Although he knew little about the story, the painting and the saying about the gods captured his imagination. He says:
Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity . . .” (Surprised by Joy, ch. 5).
Lewis imagined an idyllic world and felt the grief of the gods at the death of Balder the Beautiful, an event marking the onset of winter year after year in the Norselands.
The experience was brief but intensely emotional. It was gone almost as soon as it came—but its effects lasted long after. Lewis found that many people have similar unexpected brushes with wonder, some of them remembered for a lifetime. These experiences are part of a longing for a world that is completely good and an existence that is permanent and joyful.
Humans, Lewis reasoned, have yearnings that are unsatisfiable in this present life. While nearly everything we desire has some true counterpart in the real world—we hunger and we find food, we yearn and discover romantic love, and so on—we find that not all of our desires are satisfied with things under the sun. Isn’t it reasonable to imagine that those desires must also have a fitting fulfillment? Shouldn’t it be true that our desire for uncontaminated joy and lasting beauty must also be a desire for something real? For something that must surely exist?
In another book, Mere Christianity, Lewis said:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (ch. 13, “Hope”).
He reasoned that our desires come from our making and that the desire for lasting joy must have been implanted in us by our Maker.
Now you may already be thinking of arguments counter to Lewis’s supposal. That’s fine. These sorts of arguments are not proof. They are evidence. Is it more reasonable to assume our longings for eternity are socially programmed? Evolutionarily wired? Or God-implanted?
We know there has to be more than this present existence. Those who believe death to be the end and who accept the limitations of time and space must ignore the feelings of awe that inevitably arise in the face of splendor. Perhaps that is why the majority of people throughout time have believed in some sort of afterlife and in the existence of the supernatural.
Where is joy found? Is it real or just a chemical signature in our brain? Are we computers or are we spiritual beings? How do we explain our transcendental yearnings? Where is satisfaction? Permanence?
A wisdom sage said long ago, “He has also set eternity in their heart,” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). In other words, he made us with a longing for permanence. The Pharisee turned follower of Jesus named Paul said this, “I press on if I may also take hold of that for which I was even taken hold of by Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12). Jesus “took hold” of Paul (and us) to rescue and give the gift of a glorious and unending future. The thing God implanted in our heart—a yearning for permanence and true satisfaction—is the very thing Jesus sought us out for and gave to us. Paul looked forward, pressing on toward that glorious future and living by faith along the way.
Is Death the End?
It could be. If you’re like me, you’ve imagined what nonexistence must “feel” like. It feels like nothing. There are no feelings in nothingness. So, if death is the end, we won’t have any idea when we cease to exist.
But that’s not what I believe because of who I believe. “I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in Me will live, even if he dies,” said Jesus (John 11:25).
We have several intellectual problems with the idea of an afterlife. First, we have to admit, no one has firsthand knowledge (unless you can meet Jesus or Lazarus in the flesh). So-called near-death experiences are not entirely convincing even though some people put their hope in them. Second, the idea of unceasing life—eternity—is frightening and sounds boring. Time might perhaps wear on those who live forever, eon after eon, years without end. Images from popular preaching—golden streets, pearly gates, lots of green hills, dressing like an angel—don’t seem compelling enough.
We are unable to set aside the experience of this present life to envision an eternal one. A world where satisfaction is not only possible, it’s normal. Where minutes do not elongate into hours, but rather where millennia pass by all too quickly. Where love does not disappoint. Where beauty does not fade. Where we are led with wonder and joy, not anxiety and compulsion. Where the numinous is all around us and yet greater wonders exist than any we’ve imagined or experienced. Where eternity and infinitude are met by the infinite potential of the spirit God implanted within us. Where the inner life of the Triune God becomes our community, so that we enjoy one another and God forever.
Death could be the end. We have feared it. We experience death as an ending when our loved ones go through it. The thought of it creates in us a longing for something more permanent. Maybe we try to approach the last half of life more seriously, hoping to create our own kind of immortality through children or fame or some other hopeless endeavor.
Because while we have considered and feared the idea of death being the end, we have also succumbed to optimism about the afterlife more than a few times. Losing a loved one brings up hopeful thoughts. Contemplating our own end, we may find we disbelieve in it. Can we really end? It is hard not to believe in the afterlife.
And even if we do disbelieve in it, consider this: we have not thereby disproved its existence.
No one knows by experience what comes after death. Not the naysayers and not the cultists handing out pamphlets.
But we might choose to believe someone who lived after dying, someone who promised his followers: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again and will take you to Myself, so that where I am, there you also will be” (John 14:3).
I Am Made for More
Death is coming for me. And you.
This is not an empty, intellectual exercise. Thinking about death, afterlife, our Creator: these are vital issues, matters of urgency. The idea that we can dismiss these concerns is all about the illusion that we will never face them. Our eighty or so years may seem long to us, but they are a drop in the ocean of time.
This is the point where many proclaimers of the Gospel message would use fear to motivate you: “You’d better hurry; put your faith in Jesus now and ask him for eternal life!” This is where you might be told that the alternative to life with Jesus is a dreadful existence in hell, which is supposedly a place of agony and woe.
But God doesn’t put it that way. Paul discusses the good news which he received—he claims, and I believe him—by direct revelation through a vision of Jesus. He discusses the human problem, which is our broken nature. A disease called “Sin and Death” has us in its grip. The story of Adam (which need not be taken literally) is about how we came to be in this condition.
Paul says, “For since by a man death came, by a Man also came the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:21). The man who brought death is Adam, of course. All who descended from Adam (in the story, whether it is literal or not) inherited the condition. Death is universal to human beings.
But Paul says something strange after that: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). This is one of many verses promising that every human being will be forgiven by God, changed by God, and given eternal life by God. Christians. Jews. Muslims. Hindus. Buddhists. Atheists. Nothings. Every person, through all time, from every place will be made alive in Jesus Christ after death.
You may be aware that the majority of churches and Christians do not think that all human beings will be saved. It has been a minority view (universalism, also known as apokatastasis) within Christianity at least since the days of the church father Origen.
But I am saying it. Because I believe it. And I hope you will too.
No, the urgency to follow Christ is not to avoid eternal torture at the hands of the supposedly cruel and callous Father. In actuality, the loving Father sent the Son to save us and gave the Holy Spirit to teach us. And his love wins. Absolutely.
No one will ultimately reject God’s love.
The urgency to lay down your way of life and take up a new one in Christ has nothing to do with pain or compulsion and everything to do with discovering who you are. Even death need not terrorize you. God’s love extends far beyond death.
The urgency of the Gospel is simple: if you’re not basing your life on the Gospel, you’re missing out here and now on the experience of divine love and indestructible peace.
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