Shownotes

The lesson in a nutshell: The Good News is not a life raft to take us off to heaven when the world is annihilated. The Good News is that God has entered the world through Jesus Christ to save it. God’s saving presence in our midst is called the Kingdom of God. 

My Leaky Life Raft

I grew up in a world of apocalyptic fear. The buildup of nuclear weapons in the 1970’s made total annihilation seem inevitable. The end could come any moment, with horrifying ease—the touch of a button. The ghastly images in the book of Revelation were not metaphors. Plagues, ecological disasters, and the rise of an Antichrist were right around the corner. Soon, the Beast would rise up out of the pit, unleashing death and hell. Back in the 70’s, if you had told me I would be around in 2017 I would have laughed  in your face. This world was the Titanic and it had already struck an iceberg.

The good news was that God had sent a life raft. When this world vaporized in smoke and blood, the life raft would take its grateful passengers off to heaven to live with God forever. I learned this “life raft” version of the gospel as The Four Spiritual Laws It went like this.

God loves me

Sin has ruined my relationship with God

God sent Jesus to die on the cross for my sin

If I ask Jesus into my heart, I will be made right with God and go to heaven when I die. If I don’t, I will spend eternity in hell.

Maybe I would live to a ripe old age. More likely, the world would end long before that. Either way, I was living on a ticking time bomb. All that mattered was getting a seat on that life raft. The Four Spiritual Laws told me how.

As the decades passed with no Armageddon, I developed some uneasy questions about the life raft gospel. To begin with, getting into heaven seemed like a trick. I just had to believe the right stuff and ask Jesus into my heart. Once I did this, I was in. Done deal. How I lived was irrelevant. I was saved because I knew the formula. It was like crossing the Bridge of Death in Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. The Keeper of the Bridge says,

“Answer me these questions three, 'ere the other side you see.” 

If Lancelot and his men get three trivia questions right, all is well. If they slip up, it’s off to the chasm of death. I had the right answers so I didn’t need to worry. Others would not be not so fortunate. This seemed a strange way for God to decide people’s eternal destinies.

Another problem was that I could find no logical reason to care about the created world. Since the physical universe would soon be destroyed, environmentalism was for softheaded chumps, running around rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Likewise physical health was a waste of time. Why exercise? Why eat right? The human body was just an earth suit. It, along with all other material things, would soon be destroyed. Pass the Doritos.

And then there was the fact that the good news was hidden in a big confusing book. If I was handed a Bible and told to summarize its message, the odds of coming up with The Four Spiritual Laws would be nearly zero. The Bible was a corn maze. Why did God make things so hard to figure out? And what about all the people who didn’t? Was God a sadistic puzzle maker?

Most troubling of all, I saw that my “good news” was terrible news for nearly everyone but me. The vast majority of human beings would roast in Hell forever. This included billions of people who had never even heard of Jesus. I was glad to be one of the lucky ones in the life raft but could I honestly cheer as the Titanic sank? God’s love seemed pretty awful.

Then there was the Bible. As I read the stories of Jesus they didn’t sound like my life raft version of the good news at all. If The Four Spiritual Laws were the recipe for going to heaven, I wondered why Jesus and his disciples didn’t tell anyone. Instead,