You see, according to the Bible that I was taught there is no way to get into heaven and be saved than by believing in Jesus Christ. These same people like to tell me all the time that you can believe the Bible, as it is, and that you can believe the people who got together, all of those centuries ago, and chose the books of the Bible were cool people that had our best interest at heart. They tell me that I should believe the Bible as it is presented every Sunday.
“Well, what about the Jews in the Holocaust?” I ask.
I usually get blank stare.
“If they were Jews then they weren’t believing in Christ, right? That would mean that all six million of those men, women and children who were starved and brutally tortured would then be burning in Hell for all eternity. Is that correct?”
I have had a few responses to that. Most of them don’t make any sense. “Well, we can never know the mind of God.”
Oh really? Didn’t you just tell me I could believe the New Testament as the absolute mind and will of God? Doesn’t it say in there that there is no way to be saved unless you believe in Christ? How can I trust the Bible word for word and then still have the “mystery” of God’s mind?
I cannot believe that to be true. To me, that would make God, the God who supposedly loves us, worse than someone like Hitler. See, Hitler and his cronies had those people for a certain amount of time, until they died. Am I to then believe that God then took over and threw them in some lake of fire and that they will then spend all eternity in that burning torture? Wouldn’t that make God a bigger monster than Hitler? I say so.
I refuse to believe in that kind of God. I refuse to believe that God would not create the world and then condemn so many of his people to that horrible lake of fire for all eternity. What about the kid in some remote part of the world who never hears about the Bible and then dies? Does he go there too? Again, I refuse to believe that.
That’s me, though. There are plenty in the world who are sure that I am going to Hell anyway just because I am a liberal. I just believe that God it not the one full of hate and fear. I think that was put in by a bunch of people who wanted to make their religion better than all of the others through fear. There were a lot of religions out there when Christianity began and there had to be something to make it stand out. I guess a huge lake of fire with demons poking everyone in the privates would do that.
So, maybe I am going to burn. I don’t know. I just cannot believe that God would do that. It doesn’t make any sense and no mysterious ways can possibly justify it.