Autonomy or God

Hell is not a topic that anyone should take joy in talking about. I certainly don’t. However, it’s something clearly addressed in the Bible, and particularly, by Jesus, and if it is a reality, as he says, it needs to be considered carefully. We must not push it aside or ignore it because it is a difficult topic.
 

This topic, as I have come to realize in recent years, really has a paradigm issue. Most think that, if you do bad you go to hell, and if you do good, you go to heaven. Or, if you follow God, which a lot of people define as doing good deeds, then you go to heaven or otherwise you don’t. This topic is much more complex though, and there is something larger at play. The paradigm is really as follows: Do you want autonomy and to live as you want or do you want to follow God, which as we will see later, doesn’t have good deeds at its heart but is part of its implications?
 

To see this, we need to start in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 2:16-17 God says to the first man, Adam, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” It is tempting to say that this is silly. Why would God create a tree and just because you eat of it, you will die? But what is really happening is that God is giving us a chance to obey him as our God or to be autonomous and live as we want. He is a loving God, not a forceful God. He doesn’t make us follow him. Jesus let people freely turn away from him in the New Testament. Without this option to turn away though, love would not exist because love can only be lived out in freedom, not force. Think about it; would you like it if your spouse had to be with you? Certainly not. What makes love great and gives us excitement is the fact that this other person chose us when they had the option to not choose us. Farther on in Genesis, the serpent says to Eve, the first woman, as he was tempting her, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:5). The key phrase here is “be like God.” We can choose to be our own gods. We can turn from God and follow our own way. We can be autonomous. And so, the tragedy of Eden is not that we broke some arbitrary rule to not eat fruit from some tree, it’s that we wanted to follow our way and not God’s, we wanted to be autonomous from him, we wanted to be our own captains, our own gods.
 

Next, let us turn to how Jesus responded when asked what the greatest commandment is. “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40). All too often we just skip to the second one, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Everyone can get on board with this. Be kind to those with which you meet. Basically, do good deeds. Certainly, I don’t want to minimize this second one as Jesus did say it, and so, it is important. We miss everything though if we don’t heed the first commandment to love God with every fiber of our being, which doesn’t equate to doing good deeds. How do I know? Because Jesus split these commandments into two. If they were the same, then we wouldn’t need two commandments to encapsulate them. He wants us to love him first, and the beauty of this is that commandment two takes care of itself then. If we love God, we recognize that he created and loves the people of this earth, and so should we. But what is loving God?
 

To truly love someone, you have to know them, and well. One way we get to know God is by reading his word, the Bible. This is essential. But we need to go deeper too. It’s really not just knowing facts. I can know a lot of facts about a person and not truly know them. For example, I know a lot about the golfer Phil Mickelson. But by no means do I have a friendship with him. I don’t know him at all, and there is no doubt that he would say that he has no idea who I am if showed up at his house. To know someone is to have relationship with them. We get to know God by talking with him, by encountering him in ways like prayer, and praise, and worship, and reading the Bible to know him, not just to know facts about him. He wants us to know him and be in relationship with him. He is passionate about us and he desires us to be passionate about him. 
 

There is a striking passage in Matthew that illuminates this need to truly know God, and the result of not knowing him. The words of Jesus are as follows: “"Not everyone who says to me, 'LORD, LORD,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'LORD, LORD, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!' (7:21-23). This is startling. At the last day, there will be people that did good deeds and great acts, but they didn’t truly know God, and so, he will not know them. 
 

A further aspect of good deeds lies in experience but can easily go unnoticed.  That is, doing good deeds apart from loving God wholeheartedly makes our own moral record our god, and this is a god that can never save us; it is a god that leaves us forever thirsty. There will either be a lingering sense of: “I should or could be doing more good” or a pride that puts the focus on how good we are.  These both put us in the center of the frames of our lives. If our own moral record is our god, then we are our own gods. And when we look to ourselves as god, we can’t help but be left empty. Because, when we truly have a quiet moment, and can look inside, what we see in ourselves apart from God is not good. There is pride and envy and hate, and so many other things. We are left in despair. What’s even more difficult to realize though is that we have aspirations of doing good, but so often we fall short of these desires. The apostle Paul said it succinctly in Romans 7:15, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
 

A stark realization is now present, even if we want to love God with all we have, we can’t of our own volition. We turned from him in the Garden and continue to turn today. When we turn, we disobey God, and judgement must ensue as a natural result because God is perfect and just and therefore must execute perfect judgement for disobedience. If this was the end, there would be no hope. But instead, he stepped into history as Jesus, and decided to bear the punishment for us. How amazing! How beautiful! In God, we have a second chance. 
 

In Jesus, we are restored to a right relationship with God. What’s more, we can, and indeed have to, allow him to work in us if we are truly to love God. A further beauty is this: God chooses us. He didn’t have to. In fact, he would be justified in condemning us to hell, because we have disobeyed him. Much as a man proposes to a woman when he desires to marry her. God has proposed to us. He wants us! God knows the disobedience in our lives and in our hearts, and yet, he wants us. What can be lost too, is that we couldn’t have proposed to him. We needed his proposal through Jesus first. A way for reconciliation, that we as disobedient people could not provide, was needed. 
 

We are now left with this: will we allow God to place the ring on our finger. Will we choose him or ourselves? If we choose ourselves, God will allow it. In so doing though, we are left as being not in relationship with him. And that is the real tragedy and truth of hell. Not that it’s some terrible place where bad people go, but that it is a place where we can be apart from God, and apart from God at our own choosing.