4S: Hard sayings
Hard sayings
Growing up, I watched my denomination struggle with various doctrines that were difficult to understand and more difficult to live with. But if it was one of those doctrines that was foundational to our beliefs, or just seemed to be pretty airtight with regard to clarity of scripture, we just had to go with it. Questions about those doctrines would often be met with a phrase like, It’s a hard saying. This is something that was said of some teachings of Jesus. Here is a an example:
Many of His disciples therefore, when they had heard this, said, “This is a hard saying; who can hear it?” Mt. 6:60 KJV
For a more modern take…
When many of His disciples heard this, they said, “This is a difficult and harsh and offensive statement. Who can [be expected to] listen to it?” AMP
This was the net effect of many, if not most of his teachings. It is a hard saying. Who can be expected to listen to it? This is what immediately came to mind when I ran across this article from The Christian Post:
2 toughest truths in the Bible
What the author was getting at was that these, for him, are hard sayings. The two he chose were the doctrine of hell and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. I think I would have to put those in my top 5. But that set me to thinking about what my 5 hardest biblical sayings are. And why stop at 5? I probably could rattle off 10. So rather than start out with a specific number, I will give you a few, hopefully in descending order. I expect to do some editing on that front. From the least hardest saying to the most, here we go:
7. Holy wars
As a human with no powers beyond that which is common to humanity, I understand why we have war. We have to. Some things are beyond our ability to resolve any other way. It is a natural limitation that we have at this stage in our evolutionary development.
This goes sideways once a god is inserted into the picture. We don’t need a god who can win wars for his cause. We need a god who can forward his cause without the need for a war at all. The god who orders holy wars is just a being much like us, but with the power to win all of his wars, unless the enemy has iron. God acting as a general in a war that he ordered is a saying that is too hard for me.
6. War crimes
While we are on the subject of war, I would at least expect this god of war to do it better and cleaner and more righteously than we would. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. We have limits to how far we would go even in war. But god doesn’t have any such limits. Without recounting the greatest hits, I believe it is fare to say that many of his actions in war would be considered war crimes. When a god orders war crimes, it is too hard a saying for me.
5. Generational curses
There are so many generational curses I could have pulled out as an example. But limiting myself to just one, I would have to say that the whole original sin thing is the quintessential generational curse of all curses.
It only took one person to commit one sin and suddenly we have childhood cancer. There are many instances where the punishment of a thing was said to be to the third, even the fourth generation. I believe there is one that extends it to the tenth generation.
This type of curse is an inescapable trap because since everybody sins, the curse just starts over from there, so every generation gets a fresh three to ten years of curses. We would need some type of divine intervention to break the divine curses. Even if you say that god changed his mind way back in the Old Testament, we are still under the ultimate generation curse as we are all born with a corrupted nature. Generational curses; too hard a saying for me.
4. Capital punishment
To be clear, I am on the record as being in favor of capital punishment. But it is not because I believe it is ever a corrective action. It is a little like war in that it is sometimes the only option that remains for dealing with certain kinds of dangerous people. We are not gods and cannot solve some problems that a god could. So I am willing to give a bit of grace to us mostly hairless apes.
However, a god always has a better option. Knowing who would have needed to be executed under his law, he could have made sure they weren’t born at all. There is no reason that anyone should be born whose life inevitably ends in some form of capital punishment.
There is another aspect of this that I don’t hear much discussion about: It is especially cruel to require humans to kill other humans. If killing is a thing that can have the effect of fundamentally rotting one’s soul, why have us do it even for righteous purposes?
No person, in the role of executioner, should have to kill their brother. If killing is the way god must deal with some crimes (a proposition I don’t buy) he could do it himself without any ill-effects for him. Instead, he has us running around killing people we mistakenly believe to be witches, or correctly assess as adulterers or same-sexuals. That these things are ever worthy of death is a hard enough saying. But that we should be the ones tasked to do the dirty work is beyond my comprehension.
3. Human sacrifice
This one made the article that inspired this write up in the author’s top two. That I have it as #3 means that I also think this is awful. The thing is, I don’t hear many Christian’s expressing the sacrifice of Jesus as any kind of hard saying at all. They seem to be pretty pleased with it and not at all grossed out by the concept. Perhaps they have just been desensitized to the reality of the thing to be offended by it. Or perhaps they can only see personal benefit in it and that makes it seem like a beautiful thing rather than the grotesquery it is.
Jesus was said to be human. We need not nitpick over the biology. Any part human is human enough. If they see Jesus as any kind of atoning sacrifice, then he was a human sacrifice. No amount of dancing about can distract from that basic fact.
If the believer attempts the ploy that rather than human, Jesus was god, I would say their situation is even worse. If sacrificing an innocent human is bad, sacrificing a much higher-order being is much worse.
It is like acknowledging that sacrificing a family pet would be bad. But that is not what happened. Instead, we sacrificed the human owner of the pet. You will have gone from bad to worse. Make it a god and you have gone from bad to infinitely worse. If god requires that something bleed before he can forgive, that is a hard saying to which no one should listen.
2. Hell
There is no version of hell that makes it other than a nightmare drawn from the twisted imagination of a monster. Nothing, NOTHING mitigates that fact. Anyone who believes that lesser versions of hell make it okay have given themselves a strong delusion that eats away at their remaining humanity.
Many have moved to the notion that instead of the fire and brimstone torture chamber, hell is more akin to a room that we lock from the inside. There, we are left alone with only the company of the darkness of our poisoned soul. Worse, we might have to share that room with others who are equally bereft of goodness. Since we didn’t want anything to do with god, he stepped aside and ultimately gave us what we wanted. See how that makes it all better?
Except it doesn’t. You have only traded fire torture for mental anguish. Do you really believe that one is better than the other? People get burned all the time. What little experience I have had with it has been awful. People who are burned still want to live. They just don’t want to be in agony, which they are for a long time.
Mental anguish, on the other hand, can make you want to die. For those suffering the worst forms of it, life has become a living hell. It is that which one cannot imagine anything worse. Believing that god leaving people in the worst kind of mental anguish forever is somehow better than burning is a failure of understanding and perhaps of human empathy.
For the record, I don’t care which is worse. They both are unthinkable to impose on another person without even the release of death as escape. That leads to the only version of hell that makes any sense at all, annihilationism. Thing is, I don’t consider that hell. Jesus says that hell is a place rather than a state of not being. He describes it as a prepared place.
However, while not hell as I know it, annihilation is no picnic either and is also the domain of a twisted mind. There are a handful of possibilities because not all annihilation is the same.
There is the annihilation an atheist tends to believe in which is that once we die, we stay dead. This is not generally the annihilation Christians are talking about.
There is the kind where we are raised from death, judged, and killed again. This is one of the most dickish moves a god could make and that is deemed reasonable by his followers. Consider, the person is already dead? They might have already died in a fire. But this god so needs the last word that he has to perform a full resurrection just to tell them that he is condemning them to death. Then he kills them again. What the annihilation is that all about?
Finally, there is the kind where they are resurrected, read their sentence, then killed, but in a slow and tortuous way in accordance with their sentence. That means that a person could have an annihilation of being burned in flames for the next billion years before being allowed to die. Under this formulation, that is still allowed under the doctrine of annihilationism. Choose your annihilationism wisely.
Point being that there is no good hell that makes god any less a monster than he is under the most accepted view of hell. It is a doctrine that simply can’t be saved.
1. I never knew you
While it is difficult to imagine what could be worse than all that, I believe there is a particular saying that is harder than all of those combined:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my heavenly Father. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not perform many miracles in your name?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers!’ Matt. 7:21-23
If you are not chilled by this passage, you are simply not grasping the full implications of it. You can cry context all you like. There is nothing here that suggests these many people are insincere, or reprobate, or any such thing.
Jesus says that calling upon his name is not enough. In other places, we are told to call upon the name of the lord. Yet here, that is not enough. We learn that these many people are not just calling upon the name of the lord, but doing many good deeds in the name of the lord. That is still not enough.
Then we examine these deeds and discover that these are things they could not possibly do without the special help of the lord. According to this Jesus, demons either couldn’t or wouldn’t cast out other demons. That has to be from god. In this passage, these many people are casting out demons and performing legitimate miracles in the name of the lord. But somehow, that still isn’t enough.
Think about how many times we have been told that a person is of god because they prophesied correctly, such as the Old Testament prophets, or because they performed miracles that could not be explained any other way, like the apostles, or that they received some confirmation from god that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. This one passage pounds all that to nuclear sand.
Even if god is the one giving you the power to cast out demons all the way to the very end, you might be left at the gate with Jesus pouring salt into the wound by announcing to all that he never even knew you. Not only were you not one of his in the end, you were never one of his. You are, and always have been quite literally dead to him. He was never really into you.
I have often spoken of my works of faith and have usually been met by Christians with sneers and jeers. They would say that my boasting of my Christian resumé of works is part of my problem. I was clearly trying to work my way into heaven and apparently still believe that all those works were supposed to have punched my ticket into heaven. I have to bite my tongue every time because they do not know what they are saying.
I probably knew more about faith and works at 7 then they do today. I wasn’t trying to work my way into heaven as they assume. I was working out my faith as a response to my great gift of salvation. It is hard for them to believe such a thing because their own walk of faith is so different. But I took it seriously. I didn’t need to work my way into heaven. I worked as a response to my salvation and gave god the glory for every damn bit of it.
I studied till my eyes dried out because I wanted to know god better. I knew where I could do better and devoted my self to spiritual improvement. How the hell does that later get turned into a bad thing by internet apologists? There was no act of devotion I wouldn’t do, or at least try to do. There was nothing I took for granted. I prayed so much, it was reflexive. I would often catch myself doing it and not remembering when or how I started. So habitual was it that I continued to do it even after coming out as an atheist.
I produced the kind of works that all the sermons suggested my faith should produce. I did them with joy and anticipation of doing more. I was earnest in a way that only kids without greater worries or time constraints could be. And yet…
Before trying to go to sleep every night, there were two things keeping me awake: the dread of secret sins that I didn’t even know about, and the double-dread of standing at that gate and being told that he never knew me. At the moment of my faith’s ultimate fulfillment, I would find myself headed inexorably to the flames with the cold as ice face of Jesus mocking me all the way down.
The worst part about this vision was that when examined under the cold light of reason, I couldn’t debunk it. The existential terror evoked by this saying of Jesus is that a person could be doing the best they knew how to do with the best intentions and with all the confidence we are told to have, and still never know how far from the mark they were. That is the terror that should freeze your soul.
The people in the saying of Jesus had no indication that they were on the wrong track. Worse, they had many indications that they were on the exact right track. There is nothing to indicate that they were harboring some secret wickedness. But let’s just grant that possibility and play it out to see how it holds up:
They were wicked because Jesus said they were wicked. Fine. Which heaven bound believer is not equally wicked? Which one will enter in without some kind of un-kicked jones? Will not smokers who knew they should have quit, not make it in? Will drug addicts who just couldn’t kick the habit be disqualified? Will people who harbor some racism be turned away? Will the preacher shot by the angry spouse of the person he was having a secret affair with be denied because of his weakness? How many of you who are convinced you will be in heaven are not also evildoers in your own eyes. All of you are. So what has that to do with being told by Jesus to hit the bricks?
The saying is hard because it is not something a person can do anything about. You already believe you are on the right track. You already pray. You already call upon the name of the lord for your salvation and only hope. And on top of that, you also do as much in response to those things as your faith and current reality allow, and always wanting to do even more. You are already there.
You are already getting all the right signals from your sensus divinitatis. But something is off, something you don’t know about. In this saying, god didn’t let them know and try to redirect them to the right path. He watched them the whole time, gave them magical powers, or watched demons give them the powers in the name of Jesus. He watched it until they died. And at the last moment, he informs them that he never knew them and they are going straight to hell with no advocate of the court.
You thought the sign said, Forgiven Unconditionally. But in the end, it was just a big F U!
Those are my 7 hard sayings. What are yours?
See you in the comments…
David Johnson
