You will rarely catch me discussing religion in public, let alone online, but there comes a time for everything and this being the week after Easter, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the people around me. It actually started when a rude bicyclist with a "share the road, be considerate to cyclists" sign cut off a car and illegally run a red light in oncoming traffic. So with that inspiration for the title, here goes.
There was a time when I was known for getting into arguments with people about the Bible. Well-known among all my friends as the guy who read through the whole Bible and practically memorized half of it by age 13, I was a strong Christian who refused to believe anything in the world that couldn't be proven by science or wasn't written in the good book. Of course, as time went on, I began to see the polarizing effect that this attitude can have on other friends and Christians, about the same time that I began to really see the big picture that is life and to go through Luther's writings which focused on the big things in Christianity: "solo scripturo, solo venia, and solo fides". The combination of these things helped open my eyes to God's all-encompassing love for us and the importance of his sacrifice to save us from ourselves.
I hate to see the Bible misquoted as much as I hate hearing the Lord's name used in vain (entirely different than cussing like a sailor), and there is nothing that angers me more than people who preach hatred to the sinner, claiming that their own righteousness is provided by God's forgiveness and their continued works on his behalf. God loves everyone equally and nothing could be further from the truth than to speculate that he hates some and is planning to send them to hell because they have sinned. Bear with me here and I will show you my Lutheran perspective on the issue.
My first encounter with said people was on MSU's campus. The irate preacher swung his Bible at passing students, calling down punishment from the sky on those who did not turn from their sinful ways of anger, sex (because he thought everyone who went to college fornicated regularly), drinking, drugs (he was probably more right about the percentage of occurrence in this crowd than he knew) and smoking. It was only a few days of this before I couldn't put up with it any longer and so I stopped to debate with him. He began waving the Bible around in my face, refusing to let me use it myself to show him verses, but citing every bit of anger God had ever poured out in the old testament. But my efforts were not to prove in vain because once one person took the time to stop, more students began to do the same and soon there were a half dozen of us standing there and another guy with a Bible was able to take some of the heat off of me. We continued to try and reason with this man but knew it to be pointless because he was unwilling to stop shouting long enough to listen. So I pulled everyone back (at this point we'd drawn a decent crowd) and I led a prayer for God to help the preacher to better share His true love with the students. Looking back at that day, I was pretty shocked with myself and from there a group of dedicated students created a group that went every day and prayed for this preacher until he was finally won over.
But things don't always go over that smoothly and some people just don't listen to reason; case in point, the Westboro Baptist Church. I bring them up because they recently got more than they were bargaining for in Mississippi. Originally I was just going to post that story and avoid detailed criticism of the group but it's unavoidable now that I've read their website which I will not quote here. So I looked up Leviticus 20:23 and God obviously references abhorring the despicable people that lived in the country before. But you have to take this all in context. These people were trying to intermarry with the Israelites and God needed to separate them out somehow. He needed to promote morals and laws in a nation for which he planned someday to sacrifice His son to save. So he told them to drive the enemy out. And the laws He put into place then are superseded by the loving covenant He established with His son.
God is not a God of hate though, he has always been a God of love and it has always been His plan to send His son to die for us (John 3:16). And it's a good thing too, because if not, everything that we did would always end us up in the same place: condemnation (James 2:10). Of course, there are some people who argue there are some sins that lead to death (1 John 5:16-17) but again if you look at a larger sequence of the verses, God is clearly talking about sins where he kills you, the proverbial lightning from the sky. But if he does that, it's his prerogative and not our job to judge someone else. No sin is greater than another and even if it was, it's our responsibility to spread the good news that nobody is being judged by the old deal between God and the Israelites; that's the whole point of Easter! It's our job to do His service, helping those around us, and to not worry about the reward or what place we have in heaven.
So share the love and have a great week!
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