Which is stronger and more powerful, the hardness of the human heart or God’s unrelenting, infinite, expansive love? Thousands through the years have answered that question with the resounding response, “God’s love, of course.”
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 109
When we are aligned with God, our heart does lighten and we do experience the humor that is present in life. Freed from the pressure of trying to make life happen as we think it should happen, we are able to enjoy the ebb and flow of emotions and events as they do happen. We begin to be able to play more keys on our emotional piano than just the melancholy and dramatic ones. We begin to be able to experience the full range of responses that are part of our human nature….
When we begin to experience God more directly, less through our intellect and more through our heart, more experientially and less theoretically, we begin to have a more joyous experience. We discover we have access to a broader range of human emotions in our own responses to daily life. We feel the way we do feel not the way we should feel, and we discover that the way we do feel is acceptable to God who, after all, gave us the full range of human emotions we are now willing to undergo.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 135-136
We have a term for this process. When people pursue a destructive course of action and they can’t be convinced to change course, we say they’re “hell-bent” on it. Fixed, obsessed, unshakable in their pursuit, unwavering in their commitment to a destructive direction. The stunning twist in all of this is that when God lets the Israelites go the way they’re insisting on heading and when Paul “turns people over,” it’s all for good. The point of this turning loose, this letting go, this punishment, is to allow them to live with the full consequences of their choices, confident that the misery they find themselves in will have a way of getting their attention.
As God says time and time again in the Prophets, “I’ve tried everything else, and they won’t listen.” The result, Paul is convinced, is that wrongdoers will become right doers.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 90-91
When we release people to God’s will for them and stop forcing agendas of our own, people feel it. They are often surprised. Our coercion had often been subtle but palpable. Now we truly are giving more than lip service to the notion of free will. “You are free to behave exactly as you choose” — our new attitude permeates the air. Where before we sought to wrest happiness and satisfaction from people by their doing as we saw fit, now we are coming to them open and vulnerable. We are dependent on God for our happiness and satisfaction. People can do as they please.
Freed from our agendas for them, people often surprise us by behaving with great generosity. No longer resentful of the subtle and not so subtle forms of coercion that we indulged in, people approach us with a new candor. We are able to meet them with a new openness as well. God is doing for us what we were unable to do for ourselves. God is forging relationships that are based on equality and respect, on dignity and autonomy. In our hearts, these are the bonds that we always hungered for but that always seemed to elude us. As we move toward God in good faith, good faith extends into the realm of our relationships. We begin to experience the heady excitement of seeing people as they truly are and not as we “need” them to be to fulfill our agendas. No longer merely ingredients in our self-willed recipe for happiness, people are exuberantly, magnificently, themselves. Seeing them in all their glory, freed from the cloak of our projections, we experience other people as far more genuinely lovable. They experience us that way as well.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 132
But in reading all of the passages in which Jesus uses the word “hell,” what is so striking is that people believing the right or wrong things isn’t his point. He’s often not talking about “beliefs” as we think of them — he’s talking about anger and lust and indifference. He’s talking about the state of his listeners’ hearts, about how they conduct themselves, how they interact with their neighbors, about the kind of effect they have on the world.
Jesus did not use hell to try and compel “heathens” and “pagans” to believe in God, so they wouldn’t burn when they die. He talked about hell to very religious people to warn them about the consequences of straying from their God-given calling and identity to show the world God’s love.
This is not to say that hell is not a pointed, urgent warning or that it isn’t intimately connected with what we actually do believe, but simply to point out that Jesus talked about hell to the people who considered themselves “in,” warning them that their hard hearts were putting their “in-ness” at risk, reminding them that whatever “chosen-ness” or “election” meant, whatever special standing they believed they had with God was always, only, ever about their being the kind of transformed, generous, loving people through whom God could show the world what God’s love looks like in flesh and blood.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 82-83
The Lord cared for no speculation in morals or religion. It was good people he cared about, not notions of good things, or even good actions except as the outcome of life, except as the bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and came forth.
Could he by one word have set to rest all the questionings of all the world’s philosophies as to the supreme good and the absolute truth, I venture to say that he would not have uttered that word. He would make no attempt to convince men mentally concerning the truth.
But he would die to make men good and true.
— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 225
If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.
Time in prayer makes you even more dependent on God because you don’t have as much time to get things done. Every menute spent in prayer is one less minute where you can be doing something “productive.” So the act of praying means that you have to rely more on God.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 49
I seldom remember, without some prodding that I initially resist, that God is a factor in every person’s experience. My ego’s first inclination is to think that I am a necessary factor — not just an ordinary necessary factor but the deciding one — in the lives of my friends and family. Giving up control and letting God be the key influence in the lives of my loved ones is not easy. It takes trust. Not only trust in God but also trust in others and in my own willingness to approach my experiences with all of them differently.
The benefit of coming to believe that God is the key factor in everyone’s life is that it releases us from a heavy burden. Too many of us have tried to manage the lives of too many others for far too long. No one gains in that scenario. On the contrary, everyone loses the peace that comes with turning our lives over to the care and guidance of a loving God.
— Karen Casey, Let Go Now, p. 10
We struggle over a theology of imagination. We find it hard to believe that imagination is God’s idea and that it is among the chief glories of human beings. Of all creation, human beings are the only creatures who have the ability to transcend the smallness of self and imagine something different than what they know. God is imaginative; we are made in his image.
Children are wonderfully imaginative; they are born that way. Bread crusts on highchair trays become trucks; dolls cry and need to be rocked. Imagination is to be encouraged, trained, developed, enjoyed. That is why we surround children with picture books that tell stories, and why we read to them about adventures in far places. Dr. Seuss lets them put their tongues and their imaginations around words that make up stories. Yet even before the advent of the book, people were drawing images in the sand and making up legends. Imagination is not only a human capacity; it is an awesome gift.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 33
Some words are strong for a reason. We need those words to be that intense, loaded, complex, and offensive, because they need to reflect the realities they describe.
And that’s what we find in Jesus’s teaching about hell — a volatile mixture of images, pictures, and metaphors that describe the very real experiences and consequences of rejecting our God-given goodness and humanity. Something we are all free to do, anytime, anywhere, with anyone.
He uses hyperbole often — telling people to gouge out their eyes and maim themselves rather than commit certain sins. It can all sound a bit over-the-top at times, leading us to question just what he’s so worked up about. Other times he sounds just plain violent.
But when you’ve sat with a wife who has just found out that her husband has been cheating on her for years, and you realize what it is going to do to their marriage and children and finances and friendships and future, and you see the concentric rings of pain that are going to emanate from this one man’s choices — in that moment Jesus’s warnings don’t seem that over-the-top or drastic; they seem perfectly spot-on.
Gouging out his eye may actually have been a better choice.
Some agony needs agonizing language.
Some destruction does make you think of fire.
Some betrayal actually feels like you’ve been burned.
Some injustices do cause things to heat up.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 72-73