I was reminded yesterday of an experience that I had as a teenager. I had some people trying to share the gospel with me, and they spent a lot of time talking about how bad Hell is going to be, and that I should be very much afraid of going there. Also, they tried to impress upon me that I didn’t have to go there, that all I had to do (they said) was believe. They even went so far as to say that if the Gospel message was true, then I could follow it, and go to Heaven, but if I followed the Gospel message and it wasn’t true, then eventually my body would just decay in the ground. The biggest thing that impressed me about their well-meaning attempts was that it seemed that they were trying to blackmail me into believing in the crucifixion. I don’t respond well to blackmail. Fortunately, later on, I found myself drawn in by God’s love for me.I know that a lot of people feel that, to share the Gospel effectively, you have to scare people. I don’t know, I suppose that works sometimes, but it would seem to me that it’s the exception, rather than the rule. I will admit that sometimes the carrot and the stick approach seems effective (do what I want, and I’ll give you a carrot, otherwise, I’ll hit you with the stick), but it occurs to me that the stick should be more of last resort. Sometimes you have to scare people to get their attention (but once that gets your attention, you should very carefully examine the Gospel for its merits), but if someone obeys the Gospel purely out of a desire to avoid eternal damnation, they are wasting their time. They may as well enjoy this life, because the next one will be considerably less pleasant. Your relationship with God should be based on love (Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fear God, we should, but, in general, that should be less of a motivation than love for God). Sometimes we are motivated by desire, and sometimes we are motivated by the fire.
I think that Apostle Paul was frightened into really examining the Gospel. Of course, part of the scare was incontestable evidence that what he had believed his entire life was completely wrong, but once God scared him into looking at Christianity objectively, he became a fierce proponent of the Early Church. Again, though, this is the exception; I think most of us would have just run as fast and as far as we could in the other direction, blind or not.
The point has also been made that God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son… and we killed Him. Some would say, “Oh, but we didn’t kill Him, it was those Jews!” That is just anti-Semitic semantics. The point is, He created us, He came amongst us, as one of us, and we human beings killed Him. Don’t point fingers, don’t try to blame someone else, we did it. Keep in mind, though, that was His plan all along. Jesus took the form of man in order to become the perfect sacrifice in order to absorb the wrath that we already deserved before He even came. He had to die, so that we could be saved. It’s not important who killed Him; it’s important that He sacrificed Himself to save us. The High Priest that twisted Jesus’ words in order to obtain a conviction, Pontius Pilate, who ordered the crucifixion (no matter how much he tried to wash his hands of it), even the soldier who put his spear in Jesus’ side at the cross; those people are all just as entitled to salvation as any of the rest of us (don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think those people actually were saved, but they had the same opportunity to be saved as any of the rest of us, and the same right to claim Jesus as Lord that any of the rest of us have). The crucifixion is not an example of why God should be angry with us, so much as it is an example of how much God loves us, that He would be willing to accept the punishment that we deserved so that we wouldn’t have to. Of course, I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of the ones who reject God’s love after He made such a sacrifice for us…