Was the Church Lady Right? by Chris White

Many years ago comedian Dana Carvey had a regular sketch on Saturday Night Live called "Church Chat".  "Church Chat" was a mock television show where news of the week and cultural developments would be reviewed from the perspective of a buttoned-up, judgmental, Bible-thumping character called the Church Lady.  Of course the punch line of the sketch invariably led to her regular evaluation: "I don't know who inspired that….could it be….SATAN!"  It was irreverent, mocking, and of course quite hilarious and even as I write, I'm smirking in remembrance of her sketch with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker or was that Jim and Tammy Baye Faker?  Memory seems to fail me.

It was all in good fun and the Church Lady is definitely a caricature of a type of Christian who sees the devil behind everything even when there is an obvious explanation that would be to the contrary.  There is an equal but opposite type of a Christian as well who sees every little thing that happens as God's direct benediction upon their lives.  If a person like this had been in the passenger seat during my commute to work this morning they would have said "oh, praise the Lord!  He's given us favor with hitting all green lights this morning!".  The reality was that I was purposefully speeding and maniacally weaving in and out of traffic on wet pavement and in the fog.  So if God was blessing me, it was not his favor towards my sin, just mercy on my stupidity.  But these extremes aside, I do want to go on record as saying Church Lady not completely wrong in her assertions about the Prince of Darkness.

I believe in the person of Satan.  I  reject the position that the devil is a human fabrication to explain why decent human beings make really bad choices.  I equate such thinking with the belief that the stork delivers babies to people and that Santa Claus and his elves live at the North Pole and only come out at Christmastime (even these symbolic images are accretions on some serious facts).  Satan is also not an impersonal force of evil exerting influence on humanity like gravity or barometric pressure.  There are plenty of people who believe such things and as C.S. Lewis would say, nothing would delight the Enemy more than we don't believe he exists.

If the polls are true, Satan must be do a happy dance every time he thinks about America .  Belief surveys tend to show a clear majority of Americans (55-57%) do not believe that Satan exists.  The  Barna group who polled only Christians on this question several years ago showed that 59% didn't believe in the person of the devil.  So, if Barna is to be believed here, those people who self-identify as Christians believe even less in the devil than the general population does.  Brilliant.  Once again, I'm certain nothing delights the devil more and I guess I must identify with the minority of self-professing Christians who believe the Bible should be taken literally.

Satan as he appears in the scriptures is at great variance with the devil of public imagination.  He is described as quite beautiful in appearance and not the least bit red or having horns, tail, or a pitchfork in his possession.  What is taught about the evil one is that he is an angelic being created by God who became so arrogant that he attempted to oppose his Creator and in so rebelling became the devil.  His complicity in the occasion of Original Sin reveals something of his nature and his own rebellion against God.  He appears to the parents of the human race as some form of attractive creature and through subtle suggestion leads them to believe God has been less than good to them and that they should take control of their own destiny.  Such a plan had a serious plausibility factor built into it, but when acted upon was quite disastrous and in the end delivered none of its promises.  Beguiling people with stellar appearance, promising them a glorious future and then delivering them to a diminished existence is not a strategy that is limited to American politics alone.  It is the essential core of Satan's standard operating procedure.

Two of the names ascribed to Satan are a dark angel "masquerading as an angel of light" (2 Cor.11:14) and the "accuser of the brethren"(Rev. 12:10).  There are many other names or descriptions for the devil given in the Bible, but these two give insight his strategies against Christians.   The principle effort of Satan is to deceive a person in such a way as to disconnect them from God.  Please listen carefully here.  I am not saying Satan can disconnect God from you.  I am saying he will do most anything he can to get you to sever your ties with the Lord.  Surprisingly one of his best tools for this is religion.   What makes religion good is that it elevates the human mind and soul with an insight that is greater than ourselves about how to live, think, and treat others.  By the same token, this is what makes religion so dangerous as well.  Not all religions are true (unless of course you believe that logical contradictions are logical) which means that if the light you get from it is not true, you find yourself doing things like flying airliners into New York skyscrapers or committing group suicide when you spot a comet in the sky.  The Devil very obviously cloaks himself in religious light to appeal to man's spiritual bent, but what he speaks from behind the masquerade is anything but the truth.

Where I live (the state of Oregon) religious people are much fewer and most people shy away from the spiritual.  What I have long observed here is that Satan has another plan for the more secularized which leads them to give ultimate value to very temporal things.  I'm not saying there is anything wrong with recreation or family or hobbies, but for too many this has become the thing of supreme value which means for all intent and purposes, God's place has been usurped by snowmobiling or worse yet, a new iphone (I have watched people in airports gaze at their smartphones with expressions that border on worshipful ).   Then of course there is the chemical pathway to meaning.  Drugs and alcohol are horrible addictions which I would not make light of, but in a sense they artificially produce many of the same things people would find in religion.  Drink enough merlot or smoke enough weed and at least for a while there is peace of mind and even a mild sensation of transcendence.  Of course it’s illusory and never ends well for the person, but that was exactly the point.

What is so devilish about all these things is people are lured in (rarely against their own wishes) and once they are in deep enough, Satan finishes his work of destruction.  If you are trapped in a false religion or are an atheist, secularist, or drug addict, he’ll nurture you along until you die separated from God like he is.  If you belong to Christ, once you’ve been lured away with his temptations and are trapped, he will do what he can to discredit you and render you completely neutralized.  He is the accuser of the brethren because he knows God is holy and just and wants us condemned and punished even as he is going to be in the future.

In this matter,  Satan is right.  God is holy and just and does condemn and punish sin.  If He didn’t do so He could hardly be considered holy or just.  But this is where the good news of the Gospel needs to be taken to heart.  God is able to remain perfectly just and holy while at the same time show mercy and grace to sinners because He sent His son Jesus to die and take our judgment upon Himself.  This was a costly thing done for us but if He who is creator and judge assumes our penalty, then truly are no longer guilty or condemned by God.   Satan may accuse us before God all he wants, and in every regard it could be said those accusations are not without warrant.  We are all guilty as charged.  But the penalty is already paid by Jesus, which effectively leaves you not innocent, but forgiven in the eyes of God.  This is why Christians say we are not perfect, just forgiven, unless of course you are the Church Lady.  She is perfect.  Now, isn’t that special?

The Hidden Link Between Justice and Eternal Life by Chris White

There is a joke within my religious tradition that goes something like this: two grade school boys were having a theological argument on the playground.  The first boy, who attended the United Methodist church, said to the other “there isn’t a literal hell!” to which to second boy, who attended First Bible Baptist replied, “the hell there isn’t!”  I find this quite humorous because as a young boy this was actually the content of my first theological argument.  I attended Sunday School at the Methodist church and our teacher told us that Hell was not a real place but the human experience of “being far away from God.”  A couple of my playmates at the time came from a devoutly Baptist home and they were certain I was going to hell for not believing there was a hell.  There wasn’t a lot of yelling and arguing in our theological debate, just fists and shoving.  In other words, we were behaving as if we were bishops at one of the early Ecumenical Councils of the church where theology was not just hammered out, but punched out and kicked out as well.  Not very saintly to be sure, but for me, theological truth is actually important enough to merit a sock in the nose if you’re going to be a damn heretic about it!  But, I digress.

Hell most definitely is the orphan-child doctrine of evangelicalism in America today.  American Christians are only second to Canadians in niceness.  Church must be nice, sermons must be positive and very biblical, and nothing should ever happen that would make someone uncomfortable from not having the air-conditioning turned down enough to telling someone they can’t drop their baby off in the nursery with green mucus dripping from its nose (especially if they are ‘a-first-time-visitor’).  People need to feel glad they took the time to come to church and in fact should be honored for doing so because they turned down one hundred other options they had to spend Sunday morning.  So needless to say, the topic of hell and judgment clash with our current mental furniture much like bright avocado green shag carpeting does with a plaid chesterfield couch (and if you think those two things go together nicely you should probably stop reading at this point and ask God to please give you some fashion sense).  But, whether or not hell is something that makes us uncomfortable to think about or talk about, it is an idea deeply rooted in the Gospel of Christ and if it doesn’t exist, God as we know Him is probably not God.

Typically the ‘anti-hell’ party platform goes something like this:  God is love.  A loving God would never send a person to hell because that is neither lovely or the loving thing to do.  Therefore, hell must not exist.  It must merely be the creation of some benighted medieval mind to scare people into going to church and giving their money away.  Obviously, all people must go to heaven when they die.  The problem with this line of thinking is a misunderstanding of God’s love.  God is love and this is the direct teaching of the Bible (1 John 4:8) but, as any parent knows, love is not the same thing as permissiveness and total indulgence of a person’s whims.  To never discipline or punish a child for wrong-doing and let them get away with anything or do anything they want usually creates a monster.  Not only does the scripture suggest this is a form of hatred under the guise of love (Prov. 13:24) but our society patently understands this concept as sure-fire recipe for creating a sociopath.  Even in human relationships such as marriage, if I say I love my wife, and then do things I know will break her heart like love someone else’s wife on the side or threaten her well-being by spending my paycheck on gambling, most people would conclude that my idea of love is either quite twisted or is not even real.  Love that has any real value does come with boundaries and limitations of one kind or another.  In applying this to the love of God, what I’m saying is God does love all people but His love does not preclude the necessity of justice.

Changing perspective just slightly, what we need to understand more fully is the nature of humanity and the gravity of what is called sin in the Bible.  God is the creator of the universe.  As Creator, the universe runs according to His laws.  His laws do include physics, but more importantly they include laws of love and moral rectitude because goodness is at the heart of who God really is.  When God made man, he did make him flesh and blood but also with a rational soul.  This means there are appetites and instincts within mankind such as hunger, thirst, and the desire for sex.  But man is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27) which means that man is rational, relational, and religious in addition to being flesh and blood.  The Christian way to look at human beings is that they are embodied souls;  both are important, both are united by design.  There is a high purpose in man being an image-bearer of God.  Man’s raison d’etre is to rule and steward the earth as God desires and so honor God and make the world a place where all life flourishes.  This higher level of consciousness would enable man to learn to discern the good and evil and to choose to do the good.  The choice to do the good being the choice to act, think, and work according to the way God has ordered the universe.

But clearly things have changed because of the catastrophe often called “the fall” where our forebears became corrupt by believing the lie of Satan that if they chose the path of disobedience with respect to God’s law, they would become gods in their own right.  The temptation of Satan was not to eat some good tasting fruit, but to make a deliberate choice to spurn the law of God (the very goodness of the universe) and become a law unto themselves.  Since that time man has continued to possess his rationality and consciousness but has what Anselm of Canterbury calls a natural indigence when it comes to discerning good and evil and choosing the good.  Not only is there an unwillingness to discern, but the consistent choice is to do the evil which is to spurn the law of God.

With all this said as prologue, let me deliver on the promise of this essay’s title.  The fact is we do not live in a just world but we do live in a just universe.  In this world and within the span of anyone’s life, it is quite possible that grievous evil can be done to you for which there is no remedy.  I will not rehearse a bunch of possible scenarios here, but if you’ve lived long enough, you know that life doesn’t always work the way it does on TV.  People do get away with things and it seems that justice is unable to touch them.  This is actually a common objection many have to believing in God.  If God is real and God is good, how come this bad thing happened to me or this good thing was taken from me?  The answer is that God is real and God is good and because this is true, there must be justice in the universe that goes beyond this life.  If God is omniscient, he most certainly knows the truth of all matters and will be able to mete out justice perfectly.  But if there is perfect justice, there must be a way for you to receive it (either as an offender being punished or a victim being avenged) and therefore this would necessitate a continued life beyond the grave in either case.  Heaven and Hell exist for the reasons of God’s love and justice.  If God is loving, there would be no way he would permit evil to go unanswered or unpunished.  If God is just there is no way he would not bless those who have faithfully suffered in this life in a measure greater than their suffering.  Therefore there is a link between justice and eternal life that there might be sweet aequitas in the universe.

In a way this is very comforting but it does beg another question: are there any of us who have lived so blamelessly, so lovingly, so unselfishly, as to only merit being recipients of God’s justice and not his punishments?  To think so is not only hubris but really an act of willful blindness towards your own faults.  The scripture clearly teaches that all people, no matter how good we (or they themselves) think they are, are in fact sinners (Romans 3:23) and are therefore liable recipients of the penalties of a just God (Romans 6:23).  This is where the Christian message is particularly unique.  What if God can show love and accomplish justice simultaneously?  The message of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ is the son of God sent to live the life you should have lived and to die the death your sins deserve.  In so doing  God shows his love in providing a means of forgiveness and salvation, and at the same time satisfies justice in that yours, mine, and everyone else’s sin was taken upon himself when he died on the cross.  It is unusual, but certainly not unorthodox that the one who would judge us, would also take our penalty upon himself which is exactly what happened on Good Friday so long ago.  From that day until judgment day, there is an offer from God for you on the table.  I will pay for your sins, or you will, but justice will be done.  That choice is entirely up to you.