GROANING, LONGING, GROANING

I’m not trying to impress non-believers. Nor am I interested in criticizing non-believers. I mean to speak to believers who take the Holy Bible to be truth about God that comes to an unending climax in the ‘Word of God’—Jesus of Nazareth, the now glorified Lord of all who currently chooses to rule in the midst of His enemies until the Day He rights all wrongs when He judges the world in righteousness. I’m as sure about that as I am that GOD raised Him from the dead to immortality and has appointed Him to be Judge of all (Acts 17:31.

In regard to human capacity for and the practice of heartless vicious cruelty and injustice no book is more realistic than the Holy Bible. When it speaks of that it speaks of it as SIN. (Note what sly David thought about his adultery, his murder of Uriah and all the troops under him and his heartless response when he was told the job was done (2 Sam. 11:25) . Later, convicted by a truth-teller his ungodly behavior haunted him and in prayer to God he said, “Against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight,” (Psalm 51:4).

Understandably, sensitive non-believers may well think that is a profound insult to Uriah, one of David’s acclaimed and loyal military leaders (2 Sam. 23:8, 39). Some believers feel the same way. The entire Psalm needs to be read to sense David’s change of attitude. Understand! David was no, Joseph or Jeremiah and he was certainly no Jesus Christ!

But He wasn’t insulting Uriah when he said what he said in 51:4. He could find no other fitting description of his abominable evil than to make it a personal sin against GOD alone. “I must have been born evil and destined to behave like that,” he said (51:5). Nothing less than that could explain it—all other excuses—they couldn’t come near. How deep can we humans sink? How deep did we sink when we screamed, “Crucify him!”?

Christians in their right minds don’t make less of Dachau, the Gulag, the rape of Nanking when they speak of the horror of the legal murder of Jesus Christ. They’re making more of those hellholes and satanic behavior that every nation justifies. It isn’t the amount or nature of physical suffering that we handed out at Golgotha to the young prophet. He never claimed it was nor did any of His witnesses or divinely appointed teachers. It was WHO we did it to. We laid hands on God and broke His heart, made Him sob and made Him bleed (Acts 20:28; Luke 19:41-44). Christians call their evil behavior SIN because anything less than bringing GOD into the picture is too little. They don’t deny what Auschwitz was; they say it is more! Worse! They say it was worlds in Collision and it is satanic and demonic—it is gods against GOD and His created children (John 3:16-17). It is what ‘blind’ Nietzsche saw in his more lucid moments—we unloosed our earth from the ‘Sun’ and we just continue to spin deeper and deeper into ‘night,’ a darkness we can’t fathom and a freezing cold there is no deliverance from.

For all their realism the Holy Scriptures have no despondent tone. In Romans 8 the creation groans waiting for its deliverance from its inability to be what God made it for. It will not be jettisoned but glorified, made more wondrous than it was before. Those in the Lord Jesus Christ groan as they wait for their full redemption from mortality to glory and immortality and the Spirit of God assures them that in their groans for a better, lovelier, purer mode of being He approves of that longing for it is indeed His work within them that leads them to groan and long rather than to be content with less than the glory, adventure, mystery, joy and unending LIFE as God’s companions. (Titus 1:2)

The creation, groans;
the People of God of all the ages groan:
The Spirit of God— all groan
All like a woman in great pain, ready to give birth to new life!
AND LOOK! Look how Paul ends chapter 8! 31-39

Holy Father help us your People to bear in mind a wise and challenging observation that “The Church can repent but it must not whimper.” In the Lord and Savior’s name we pray,

Jim mcguiggan

JESUS CHRIST & EVERLASTING & CEASELESS TORTURE

A mouse showed up in my basement. I chased it but…

I got some traps, set them down. No luck. I was moving stuff out from under the sink and found a trap I didn’t know was there. It was set by a vermin man many months earlier. It was one of those black sticky ones. And there lay the poor wee thing, dead on it; a slow traumatic death. Maybe they can’t reason but they can suffer and I attribute to the little creature the panic I judge it must have felt and it’ll be a while before I can like what I see in the mirror.

I don’t live where such creatures are a threat to me and I have no criticism for those who must deal with them as disease carriers. It’s the world we live in and we must deal with threats of this kind for many good reasons. Finish this off for me so I can move on without further discussion of it.

The sight of the mouse with its limbs outstretched to the limits, striving for freedom, and now the memory of it, still troubles me. If you were to write and criticize me for having the trap I won’t complain. Currently I feel I deserve all the criticism I’d get. Later I’m sure I’ll calm down and reason my way to my “freedom” but I’ll have to say it hasn’t arrived yet.
But the incident has led me to think about the doctrine of everlasting, conscious and ceaseless torment inflicted by God on unrepentant sinners (a doctrine I cannot and therefore do not hold).

There are kind, generous and deeply religious people who fervently believe that God is going to everlastingly and ceaselessly torture human beings. These are not insensitive people; they hurt, and weep over people in far-off lands who go on hurting day after day without hope of change. They sometimes sob over people that live much nearer; people born in stinking tenement buildings, vermin infested, oppressed, unemployed and often unemployable. Many of these sincere believers are kind even to their enemies and they do them good. And yet they believe that God will everlastingly and ceaselessly torture humans and they believe it because preachers and writers teach them that this is what God has said He will do; the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the kind of God that would do such a thing? And Jesus is such a Person as would approve of His beloved Father doing it and doing it in Jesus’ presence; this endless torment will go on in Jesus’ presence? (Revelation 14:10-11 is used to prove the doctrine). Sigh.

These sensitive and kind people see the brutal and unrepentant torturers of fellow-humans and are horrified and then believe that God will keep humans alive forever so He can ceaselessly do to them what vicious and heartless troops in war did to their enemies; the kind of thing that horrifies us even to watch in a documentary. Jesus approved of that by His Holy Father? Jesus, the One who said, “When you see Me you see Him”? Jesus, the Man in whom God was revealing Himself approves of that?—what does this say about that Jesus? Jesus, the One who died for the sins of the world (1 John 2:2)?

This the teachers say He will do even to multiplied millions who’ve never heard and will never hear anything about God and His glorious Son, Jesus Christ. They will only come to know this loving Father and His loving Son on that day when He consigns and subjects them to endless and unceasing conscious torment because they sinned? Sigh. Don’t be afraid to doubt such teaching!

All who knowingly and unrepentantly choose Death in knowingly rejecting the Savior who says, “I am…LIFE “ they get what they insist on having: They die never to live again and so they miss the LIFE that they could have.

I’ve been reminded more than once “but they won’t know it, they won’t suffer missing it if they are forever dead.” That’s true; but it is still true that they miss the glory, the joy, the adventure, the mystery, the fellowship in a ‘new world’ with the experience of everlasting peace and love of righteousness in a new mode of being in which humans can be God’s companions forever. “I won’t miss any of it,” is already ‘death’ and love of profound darkness and that qualifies us for unending loss. God’s inexpressible gift is there to be missed. Godless and ungodly wretches who feed on the lives of others, who despise life, they earn Death. All who unrepentantly reject God and His offer of life experience everlasting destruction (compare 2 Thess. 1:8-9) in that day when God judges the world in fairness (righteousness) through Jesus Christ, the Man God raised from the dead): Acts 17:31.

I wonder if it is significant that I (we) can feel pity for a little mouse’s passing anguish but can live easily with the doctrine of ceaseless and everlasting torture of sinful humans who were once born innocent babies. But more pointedly: Can we really believe and love and commit to a Jesus who adores and serves a God who will forever and ceaselessly torture humans? Better by far to love and commit to the Jesus who says, “Father forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.” And this, while He is dying for them.

Write me if you wish: email: holywoodjk@aol.com

Acts: The Gospel of the Holy Spirit (Part 120)

Watch the latest video from McGuiggan Reflections.
For the next few months, we will be exploring the book of Acts in a series titled Acts: The Gospel of the Holy Spirit. We hope you enjoy and can benefit greatly from this study. To contact Jim, feel free to email him at holywoodjk@aol.com or visit his website at: http://www.jimmcguiggan.com.
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