Martin Luther once said that God reveals Himself in the contrary. Love is revealed in a man, contorted with pain on a cross. And an inability to understand how this can work is what creates problems for those who can find someone like Rob Bell compelling.
Justin Taylor has a good summary of some of Kevin DeYoung’s work on this, and I commend it to you. But my purpose here is just a little different. I want to point to the present effects of denying the truth about our future in the hereafter. The future effects should be obvious — if someone denies the reality of Hell, and there really is one, then he is obviously increasing his chances of going there. That should be the obvious formula.
What is less obvious is how those who deny the future reality of Hell are much more likely to create hellish situations in the here and now. Rob Bell believes that hell is what we create when we reject God’s love. Amen. But I would want to add the absolutely critical proviso that this love of God (that is so rejected) must be defined as He defines it in the Bible, and not as we would wish it might be defined in our Big Rock Candy Mountain versions of Heaven. In the Bible, love is defined as Christ bearing the brunt of God’s wrath against our sin. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn. 4:10). A denial of the wrath of God is therefore a denial of propitation (which is bearing the wrath of God), and this in its turn is a denial of love as biblically defined. This means that to deny the reality of Hell is to deny the love of God which saves us from the wrath of that Hell, and to deny the love of God is the first step in creating our own little microcosm of that Hell, which Rob Bell is engaged in doing. He is the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, and if he is right about what rejecting the love of God does (and he is), then it would appear that someone is trying to turn that place into Mars Hell.
Too often God’s love is defined the way some pop singer would define it when accepting her Grammy, and she is thanking her live-in boy toy for his “unconditional love.” Yeah, fine, but that’s not what it is.
My father taught me that there is a particular kind of soft teaching that creates hard hearts, and there is a particular kind of hard teaching that creates tender hearts. The unconverted human heart is a slab of concrete, and what is needed there is the jackhammer of grace, and not the feather duster of indulgence. Liberals have a reputation for being soft because feather dusters are soft. But feather dusters leave the hearts hard. Conservatives have a reputation for being hard because jackhammers are hard. But conservatives are tenderhearted. Jackhammers break up the slab, and the big trucks of grace haul the chunks away. Then we can break up the fallow ground beneath the slab, seek the Lord, plant a crop and pray for rain (Hos. 10:12)
Grace for sinners is deliverance from wrath. Indulgence for sinners is the realization that boys will be boys and that we are just one or two doctrinal developments away from Grand Rapids being a great place for theologically informed homosex, not to mention those who are straight but not narrow. Keep your eye on the ball, folks. This is about the lake of fire, but more immediately it is about something that rhymes with fire, as countless rock songs would have it — desire. Why are we talking about wrath all of a sudden? Because the doctrine of God’s wrath gets in the way of certain things that are deeply desired.