Ever try to fit a square peg into a round hole? Things can get pretty ugly if you try to modify
or force together two very different parts that were never intended to be fit
together in the first place.
Yet that’s what we do when we try to change the historical
gospel to fit a more contemporary world view.
There are a lot of square corners that just won’t fit, and we end up
trying to ignore or modify our understanding of large parts of the Bible just
to make it “work” with our enlightened modern sensibilities. Eventually it
becomes so ugly and misshapen we end up throwing the Bible out altogether,
either by a conscious choice to reject it or by default as we ignore it as
irrelevant for our lives.
I think that toward the end of that process is where I found
a man named Jesse, a Brit who had grown up in an atheist household but married
and divorced an American woman whom he describes as “born again”. Jesse had joined and attended her
non-denominational church, and still has a great respect for Jesus as his “savior”,
but now believes in reincarnation as a better alternative belief than the
historical understanding of a judgment day leading to heaven or hell. He has had to shave off some square corners
to make them fit into his enlightened world view that a God of love wouldn’t
punish people for their “mistakes”.
Jesse seemed genuinely surprised and speechless when I asked
the obvious question “If Jesus is your savior, and all people are reincarnated
after we die, then what is it that Jesus has saved you from?” Later I found out the reason for his surprise
that the square peg wasn’t fitting into the round whole very smoothly – he hasn’t
read the Bible in a long time. There is
nothing that can smooth out the edges of the Gospel and make them fit into our
own imaginative world view than just avoiding the details.
Just one short passage from Hebrews, for example, contains
details that form some pretty sharp corners that won’t fit into the round hole
of Jesse’s new beliefs. In chapter 9 we
read “But he (Jesus) has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages
to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and
after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the
sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring
salvation to those who are waiting for him.”
Here we see several square corners – the presence of sin,
not “mistakes”; the fact of death followed by judgement, not multiple
reincarnations; the need for Jesus’ sacrifice for sin, not just glossing it
over as unimportant; and the salvation of those who are waiting for him, not
the automatic reincarnation of all. It
isn’t possible to explain away such details as this without a lot of mess and
dishonesty, so I can see why Jesse has just opted to stop reading the Bible
altogether.
Other people might cherry-pick different passages of the
Bible to form their own theology – ignoring the parts that don’t fit
conveniently in order to make it work.
Sometimes these explanations sound convincing if we don’t think about
those parts of the Bible they left out.
But what convinces me of the historical Gospel of Jesus’ sacrificial atonement
for our sins and our redemption and adoption as children of God is the way it
fits the Biblical narrative all the way through, from Old Testament to New,
from Genesis to Revelation.
I think of the geometric peg board – the child’s toy in
which pegs of different shapes fit only into holes of corresponding shapes, or
of jigsaw puzzles in which only certain pieces fit into a particular
space. There is something very peaceful
and satisfying about matching and fitting the right piece into it’s correct
position, and something very unnatural and disconcerting about trying to force in
the wrong piece. When it comes to our
theology, we may want to form it around our own comfortable assumptions, but in
the end there is nothing but dishonesty, awkwardness, and chaos when we try to
make it fit.
Thanks Jesse, for allowing me to record our
conversation! It can be viewed HERE at https://youtu.be/7Vu6ONSp5Ig
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