Biblical Evangelism (Continued)

It is a peculiar Western obsession to worry about going to Heaven.

People in the Old Testament didn’t talk much about going to Heaven. It’s not as if they didn’t know about it. Granted, a large percentage of the uneducated mass of Hebrew peasants didn’t understand much at any given time, but the concept of the afterlife was taken for granted among those with an education. That is, they recognized how difficult it was to talk about it since mankind is fallen. What we experience here in our daily lives reflects the limitations of the Fall. Talking about eternal matters required the “dark sayings” of symbolic references and parabolic language.

You’ll see a direct reference to that early in Psalm 78 (the NET Bible really misses the point there). Notice the connection: The Psalmist begins by promising to poke into the very depths of divine revelation, then proceeds to criticize all the things Israel did wrong in provoking God to wrath. How does that qualify as revealing deep truths? First, we have to understand that the Psalmist reviews the history of Israel with a powerful moral judgment. He’s revealing sin as defined by God’s moral character. It’s not simply a matter of the Law of Moses, but the deeper moral justice that Israel failed. The Law is parable. The Law of Moses was not the heart of God but a shadow cast by the glorious truth no man could see directly, a reflection of what God hoped His people would realize was there outside of human view. No one with an education ever believed the Law covered all the bases. From the very first few days after Sinai, Jethro advised Moses to find people who could see the underlying moral fabric of the Law as clearly as Moses did, and appoint them to interpret to the Law for situations not covered precisely by the Law word for word. The net failure of Israel was far more than simply transgressing the code; it was a failure to even try understanding the deeper moral truth.

So when Jesus comes along, the primary effort in His teaching was clarifying the underlying moral foundation on which the Law stood. Instead of quoting the words, He spent time drawing out the full flavor of what the words signified. The Jewish leadership had gone in the exact opposite direction. They were as legalistic as Job’s friends, plus they were so sure they understood it all because of their thrilling Hellenistic reasoning. They had redefined all of reality and reshaped God into some image man could control with reason. This is the very opposite of the whole Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) trend of scholarship. All the centuries of serious commitment to God’s revelation was thrown in the trash. You cannot possibly read any part of ANE literature without bumping into that otherworldly focus, that pervading sense that the real truth was always ineffable. So Jesus warned He would use parables to hide that ineffable truth from those who were spiritually dead; doing so wasn’t going to hinder anyone who was spiritually alive. When the disciples congratulated Him on helping them understand the Parable of the Sower, it was at the cost of oversimplifying things. They weren’t spiritually perceptive and He realized they couldn’t get it without a significant effort to reeducate them in the ANE ways of thought.

The whole question answered by God’s revelation was never about how to get the Heaven. It was always about how to view this fallen world so that you could claim all the promises He made to redeem fallen men. Redemption was not solely a question of spiritual birth; that was beyond human understanding for the most part. Matters of the Spirit Realm required a very long and deep education before you could discuss it much, and it was distressing to Jesus that a member of the Sanhedrin had spent all those years without getting any of it (Nicodemas). But the question they discussed that night in John 3 was not going to Heaven; it was a question of how to live and claim the promises of God’s Justice. The query was what to make of all the things Jesus taught and the miracles that God provided to back up that teaching. What Jesus had been teaching was a renewed ANE approach to the Law of God, the current revelation of the moral code that made it possible to deal with the Fall.

At no point did any New Testament preacher make much of going to Heaven. They always talked about repenting and turning to the ways of living revealed by God. They always talked about how to understand things so that you could see the moral character of God clearly imprinted on Creation and walk according to God’s wishes. It was always a question of obeying God, not pleading with Him for spiritual birth. So more than once Paul laid it out bluntly, as in Ephesians 2:8-9. You cannot muster saving faith from inside yourself; it is not available from human resources. It must come from above first.

We are not working out salvation with fear and trembling in the sense of getting a ticket to Heaven. We are working out our salvation in terms of conforming ourselves to the image of moral justice revealed by God in His Son. Those of us who are spiritually alive need to discover what that higher consciousness if for: It grants us enlightenment in God’s divine justice and power to live it. The whole point is not going to Heaven; we couldn’t possibly understand that nor discuss it. What we can discuss is how to live like it in the here and now. The sum total of God’s revelation up to the birth of Jesus was how to live in this fallen world. Jesus reinforced that lesson in His teaching, then set us free to pursue it by purchasing our redemption. We are granted spiritual birth so we can live righteously here below. We don’t have to wade through our own sins to claim that heritage. We don’t have to study the whole revelation of God first and slowly come to some dawning enlightenment of deeper truths. We don’t have to spend decades of life overcoming all our human weaknesses so that our moral habits keep us out of Satan’s reach. We don’t have to earn our wings. We can waltz right into all this because our fleshly resistance was nailed to the Cross.

Death on the Cross means nothing if it doesn’t change how we live. The gospel is not fire insurance keeping you out of Hell; the gospel is power and light to walk on earth. The focus is on changing this life and leaving the eternal life in God’s hands.

Addenda: When you stand before God at the White Throne Judgment, it won’t be a question of whether you are “born again” — you have no control over that. Nor will it precisely be a question of making Jesus your Lord, since it has always been possible to grow up never hearing His name. Rather, the question will be whether you responded to that spiritual apprehension that touches all humanity. God said He calls to every man; He never explained how that worked, only that it was so. Obviously, the whole question can only be a matter of whether you responded within the context of His call. If you turned to that light, such as it may be in your personal consciousness, you can be assured God will provide the rest. That’s the basis on which He judges all people.