WARNING PREACHY…
I have a problem; I often open my mouth and insert my foot. While many people are good at thinking before
they speak my brain requires that I speak in order to process my thoughts. Is this an excuse for my unkind words? Not at all, I am perfectly aware that I need to
control my tongue despite how my brain processes and disseminates
information.
Then there are phrases of speech that just sound wrong, I say them simply because I learned them that way. One in particular is when I am talking about
eternal life and the sinner’s lot. I
tend to say that we sinners deserve
hell. I’ll admit, I hate the sound of it. I just don’t like the word deserve in the context of eternal life;
I understand what the idea is getting at, but I think it is an ugly phrase.
When I was a brand new Christian, I struggled with the idea of my
origins. I was never asked if I wanted
to be born and neither was I asked if I wanted to exist in the first place, but
yet, I was born and I did exist so I was forced to make a choice between heaven
and hell. I didn’t like the choice and I
struggled with the unfairness of the situation that I was presented with. (Heh,
heh, sort of like the present choices for President this year.)
In Christian circles it is popular to express that we sinners are deserving of hell because hell is our
default option. But I wonder if the word
deserve is the best choice here. Deserve
is defined as someone who has done something or has a quality that is worthy of
the result, and therefore while the word deserve may be proper, I think the
common use of the word weighs it heavily on the side of the doing something rather than just having a quality of.
As a sinner, was I deserving of hell as the default for Eternal Judgment? Yes; because the quality of my very existence
showed this to be true. However, did I
do anything that made me worthy of the default eternity? No; because my worthiness of hell stemmed
from my very creation, not from what I did.
Follow me hear, many times it is easy to believe that we become sinners
who are worthy of hell because we have broken one of the 10 Commandments (i.e. we lied, killed, or stole), but
the reality is that we break the Commandments because we are already sinners. The act of breaking the Commandment is the
result, not the cause. Sort of like how
a sneeze is the result of having a cold and not the cause of the cold. Why then are men worthy of hell just because of being created? Because men are born the children of Adam and
Eve; let me explain with the following example.
My last name is Rock simply because my dad’s last name was Rock. I did nothing to earn that name but I deserved
it because I possessed the quality of it (i.e. my bloodline was Rock). So when I say
that sinners deserve hell, it’s not a statement of judgment but one of recognition
of the human situation.
Romans 7:24-25
24 What a wretched
man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus
Christ our Lord!
And so, while it is bad news that we
possess the quality of humanity that makes us deserving of hell, the good news
is that in the same way we become deserving of life, because when we are in
faith in Jesus He gives us grace and we possess the quality of His Righteousness. Through no effort of our own we are given
the quality of Christ by His finished work on the Cross.
When I started writing this piece, my goal was
to debunk the phraseology of ‘deserving hell’, but now that I worked through it
I don’t think I want it debunked at all, now I am hoping that I will simply hear it differently.
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