Mystery

Mystery

by Jeff Treder

Ever since I was quite young, I have been struck by the mystery of human life.  What’s it all about?  Just what sort of thing are we?  Did the universe and human beings evolve on their own as a sort of cosmic accident?  Do our ideas about meaning and purpose in our life have any meaning, and if so, how?  If “meaning” is merely something I think up, how much does it really mean?

As with many other people, the mystery that most disturbed me was the prospect of my own death.  As soon as I grasped its inevitability, I feared it and wondered what it might bring.  Would it bring the same oblivion which was all I knew of any existence I might have had before birth?  Something more?  Better or worse?  (Hamlet, I later discovered, famously speculated on these things in much the same way.)  When I learned something about the ideas of God and heaven and hell, I wondered whether these are just imaginative constructs we have invented in a rather desperate but wholly understandable effort to explain the inexplicable—the mystery.

In adulthood I have discovered—as far as I can tell—that many people do not find life or death or the universe or God to be as mysterious as they seem to me.  They have found answers that give them sufficient satisfaction.  The answers may be religious or non-religious.  They may be almost anything, but they suffice to make the mystery recede into the background for these people, if indeed it ever concerned them at all.  In Western culture at least, “mystery” has been relegated to a category of fiction.

I want to try to explain (to myself as much as to anyone else) why, even as I have grown older and my faith in Christ has grown stronger, my sense of the mystery of life has not diminished but deepened.  I divide the subject into the mystery of human existence itself, the mystery of God, the mystery of the cross, and the mystery of the hereafter.

Human Existence

Human existence comprises both the existence of the universe as we perceive it and, to a limited extent, understand it, and also our existence as self-aware and, to a limited but substantial extent, rational beings.  About as far back as recorded history goes, philosophers have reflected on the coincidental existence of this enormous, fascinatingly beautiful and enigmatic universe, and of relatively minuscule beings who are yet capable of admiring it, wondering about it, and trying to figure it out.  The more we learn about the universe—its scale, its magnificence, its history—the more, not the less, remarkable this coincidence becomes.  We may speculate about other rational species somewhere out there, but so far it remains only speculation.  Even if human beings evolved by purely natural, more or less Darwinian means, and even if other thinking beings have evolved somewhere out there, the mystery remains—indeed, the lack of this awareness of mystery is perhaps the main weakness of modern Darwinism.  Obliviousness or indifference to the mystery shows an insufficent appreciation of the reality in which we find ourselves.

The mystery of human life is a given from the time when we first develop self-consciousness and an awareness of the world around us.  “I” am an exceedingly fragile and vulnerable thing (the quote marks emphasize the uniqueness and intense intimacy of each person’s self-awareness); not for nothing are children afraid of the dark and monsters and bogeymen.  These are surrogates for death, “the ultimate enemy” (1Cor.15:26), and we fear death in exact proportion to the value we place on life.  To myself, “I” am infinitely valuable.  And I am, in the extreme, all I have.  Even if I am fortunate enough to have loving parents and a comfortable home, these are contingent benefits, not guaranteed to me and not enjoyed by a great many children.  I only come to realize this contingent nature of my condition gradually, if at all; but it is my actual condition—on this point, existentialism has it right (see William Barrett’s classic Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy).

Our simultaneously frail and precious personal existence is worth reflecting on.  Great philosophers, Pascal eminent among them, have seen it as a key to making sense of our existence. My infinite self-evaluation has nothing to do with conceit in comparison with others, nor can it fully be measured by the lengths to which we will go to preserve our life (animals with little or no self-awareness also do that).  It is essentially an intuition about “the nature of things” and, more specifically, the nature of human life.  Although my own life is the only one whose value I perceive by direct experience, most of us seem to come around to the belief that others share this same view about their own life. The generalization to human life itself then comes naturally.

But why should something as utterly frail and contingent as human life possess such extreme or even infinite value?  If human life is of greater value than the life of a snowflake, why is that so?  I can find no answer to this except that our value derives from an infinite-personal (Francis Schaeffer’s term) Creator who places such value on us.  That is, our value is what the Bible says it is, for the reason the Bible gives.  If we were only a drop in an infinite-impersonal ocean (most Eastern religions) or a blind evolutionary accident in a merely material universe, we would have no value—of the kind “I” place on my own life—at all.  But that conclusion cannot stand because it contradicts our most personal and undeniable experience. We know it isn’t true in the same way that Descartes knew he existed: “I think, therefore I am.”  The humanist idea that we ourselves create our own value overestimates our creative power and tragically underestimates the true value of human life.  In any case, any value we might create is erased by our death, since we are finite beings.  I conclude, then, that the psalmist has given us an insight into the real nature of things:  “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps.8:3-4)

God

Kicking the mystery upstairs, however, hardly makes it less mysterious.  In any serious theology, a God capable of creating both the universe and the human heart (self-awareness, moral conscience) must be so much greater than the theologian as to be beyond comparison and beyond comprehension.  Such is the God of the Bible:  omnipotent (Isa.46:8-10), omniscient (Ps.139:1-6, Heb.4:13), omnipresent (Ps.139:7-12), and eternal.  All Christian theologians worth their salt would agree that the act of listing and analyzing these ultimate attributes, worthy though it surely is, cannot circumscribe God, simply because he is infinite and we are not.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa.55:9)  Even the concept of infinity is different when applied to God than when used by mathematicians, a perception most memorably expressed by Pascal in his outcry:  “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and scholars!”  God is not a concept, he is a personal Being.  As soon as we understand this, we begin to know that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom (Prov.9:10).  And as soon as we realize that God is holy (morally perfect) and perfectly just, the fear of the Lord really kicks in. We cannot grasp what God’s holiness implies, however, until we have overcome our own self-righteousness enough to think the matter through.

But how can we overcome our self-righteousness?  Only through an act of God.  Convincing us of our own sin is the work of the Holy Spirit:  “When he [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.” (John 16:8)  The “world” here, we understand, is the world of people; but why do some people respond to this conviction by repenting while others do not?  In a famous saying, Jesus pointed to the sovereign initiative of the Holy Spirit in this regard:  “You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.  So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:7-8)  Paul indicates this same divine initiative when he say that believers should tell people about Jesus “in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth ....” (2Tim.2:25)  Repentance is the act of a renewed heart, and heart-renewal is a work of God (Jer.24:7, Ezek.36:26).

  In this supremely important matter of becoming aware of who God is—aware, that is, of the real mystery of human life in general and my life in particular—we are at God’s mercy, just as we are in all other things.  Thus our intuition, beginning usually in childhood, of our simultaneous frailty and preciousness is well founded.  We are indeed frail, contingent, utterly dependent—dependent finally not on parents or good luck or good choices, but on God. But—the good news—God is love (1John 4:16) and “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Rom.10:13)  At this point some people get hung up on the philosophical knot between predestination (God’s sovereignty in salvation) and free will (our responsibility in responding to God).  This problem has proved to be historically imponderable, but it is, thankfully, only theoretical; God knows the answer and we don’t need to know (and can’t know, being finite).  In practice the outcome is the same either way:  Those whom God chooses are saved, and those who choose to trust in Christ are saved, and in the end they are the same people.

We could not know God at all (or even, truly, ourselves) unless he revealed himself to us.  Listen to Jesus:

 “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
“All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Matt.11:25-27)

Am I one of these “chosen ones”?  The only true answer is another question:  Do I want to be?  If so, I have only to look up, simply as a child, and receive and be received.  In a genuine, nontrivial sense, I can choose to be chosen—but only in humility and trust.  In any other frame of mind, I won’t want to be chosen.
  
God has revealed himself in various ways:  through the creation (Ps.19:1-4, Rom.1:18-20), through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, through the Bible, and through the Holy Spirit.  All this revelation, though, as rich and wonderful as it is, does not dispel the mystery of God but deepens it.  God has created not only this stupendous and gorgeous universe, he has also created us. “Us” includes plenty of problems—swindlers, rapists, tyrants, torturers, and politicians—but on the positive side there are amazing accomplishments.  In the third century B.C., Eratosthenes calculated the earth’s circumference and got it nearly right.  Over many centuries, thinkers in Babylon, Meso-America, China, India, and Greece independently developed the mathematical concept of zero.  Homer chanted The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the next several generations of bards memorized and chanted these thousands of exquisite lines until the Greeks acquired writing and the poems were written down.  The Polynesians, in small rafts, successfully navigated a vast ocean sparsely dotted with islands (an image, if you like, of the cosmos).  Medieval architect/masons built Notre Dame and Chartres.  Shakespeare wrote King Lear.  Mozart and Beethoven and Louis Armstrong made music that the angels must envy.  In 1905, working alone in his spare time, Albert Einstein published three short physics papers that transformed the way scientists (and eventually the rest of us) understand the universe.  Since God created us in his image (Gen.1:26), human genius is a reflection of the genius of God, which is like Shakespeare, Mozart and Einstein raised to the nth power.  The more we can appreciate human genius, the more we will be stunned by the genius of God.

Then there is the triune nature of God—one God existing eternally in three Persons.  The Bible doesn’t state this doctrine directly, but it is a valid, even a necessary deduction from all that the Bible does tell us about God.  The Trinity is certainly a mystery; attempts to clarify it by analogy—such as that water can exist as a solid, a liquid, and a vapor—are futile and misleading.  The greater mystery, though, of which the Trinity is only one aspect, is that “God is spirit.” (John 4:24)  This statement is easy to misunderstand through underestimation.  Because God is invisible to us except when he chooses to manifest himself, we are prone to think of spiritual reality as something less substantial than physical reality—if, indeed, we think of it as more than an empty concept.  But the God who created the universe must obviously be more substantial than his creation. And much more mysterious. Some physicists now theorize that matter exists in ten or more dimensions.  Three of those dimensions we can comprehend, the fourth (time) we struggle to comprehend, and the rest we can’t comprehend at all.  That’s just matter, the stuff God created.  Can you comprehend God?  “‘To whom will you compare me?  Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One.” (Isa.40:25)

As a spirit—the Native American expression “Great Spirit” is a good way to put it—God is not only powerful enough to create the universe, he is also a moral being, or, better, he is the moral being.  God defines good and evil. Without God we would be stuck either in amoralism (morality is a bothersome invention) or in moral relativism (individuals or groups define right and wrong for themselves). Moral relativists are usually very earnest, but there is no way they can logically explain why their moral code is better than Hitler’s, since “better” implies an absolute standard of comparison.  Throughout the Bible, God and all his decisions and works are called “holy.”  His holiness includes his unique sovereignty and almighty power, but what the concept emphasizes is his moral perfection.  Just as our own life is of infinite value to us (and God has enabled us to discover that he himself is the source of this value), what is of infinite value to God is his moral perfection. He values it so highly that he will not allow it to be violated or compromised.  All sin is intrinsically a violation of God’s holiness, and therefore he judges sin—calls it what it is—condemns it and ultimately will destroy it, in the Last Judgment (which is often ridiculed and dismissed because, understandably, we don’t like it).  That’s good—sin is completely rotten—but how can God destroy sin without destroying sinners?  In particular, me?


The Cross

The Bible doesn’t explain all that it reveals, but it explains the logic of Christ’s self-sacrifice well enough—Isaiah 53, Romans 1-8, and Hebrews 8-10 are primary texts—and thousands of books have further expounded that logic. Basically it is one party paying a penalty on behalf of another—that is, making a sacrifice to benefit the other.  A common objection to the Christian gospel is that the very idea of an atoning sacrifice for sin is barbaric and immoral.  Such objectors have no problem when one human risks or even gives his or her life in order to save others. That is deemed heroic. Their issue is with a God who requires such a sacrifice for sinners to be reconciled.  They regard God’s holiness as high-and-mighty haughtiness—as a defect rather than a perfection. But his holiness is the sum of all his moral excellence, and moral excellence is a good thing (well, the best thing), and compromising it would be a bad thing. That was God’s problem, how to reconcile sinners, whom he loves, without compromising his justice—that is, acting unjustly.  Paul refers to this when he writes that God sent his Son to take the punishment for our sin, in order “to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” (Rom.3:26, emphasis added.)  If crime has no punishment, there is no justice.  What would we think of a human judge who simply forgave a serial murderer and set him free—or a code of justice that authorized him to do so?  Like it or not, we live in a moral universe, and we do so because it was created by a moral God, a holy God.

The logic of the cross required the incarnation of the Son of God.  God didn’t pay just any penalty in order to save us from death, he gave up his own life in exchange for ours. No lesser sacrifice could have accomplished his purpose. I am speaking of logic here, and it is good, clear, firm logic, but it rests on a foundation of unfathomable mystery.  The mystery does not invalidate the logic, nor does the logic elucidate the mystery.  It is like a small, well-built boat floating on a calm but dark and boundless ocean.  We are all apt to underestimate the mystery of the incarnation, either through overfamiliarity with the idea or through skepticism about it.  For Christians, faith can appear to resolve all mystery:  The Bible says it, and I believe it, and that settles it.  What lies behind this attitude is probably a weakness in perceiving any mystery in human experience in the first place:  The ocean is only a large pond, the shoreline just over the horizon.

C.S. Lewis called the incarnation “the Grand Miracle.”  The miraculous is another concept at risk of being trivialized through familiarity (in talk, not experience).  “Miracle” doesn’t mean “magic trick.”  Magic puzzles and titillates us; a miracle would overwhelm and astound us—which is what Lewis had in mind.  After Jesus calmed a storm on the Sea of Galilee, his disciples “were terrified and asked each other, ‘Who is this?  Even the wind and the waves obey him!’” (Mark 4:41)  If they were terrified when they were still piecing together who he is, what about when they finally figured it out?

God, an infinite Being (not mathematical but real infinity), lives eternally (whatever that means) in three Persons.  One God, three Persons.  The Second Person, himself infinite, at a specific moment in historical time became a human being, yet remained also the infinite, holy God. Theologians and church councils have worked this all out from the Biblical testimony, with substantial agreement on the important points. If we don’t get the astounding mystery of it, though, we miss the most important point.  On the cross, for just one thing, Jesus (the man) certainly died, but did Jesus (God) die?  The Bible doesn’t go into that particular theological detail. Theologians have wrestled with it and come up with different answers, but they are wrestling (Jacob-like) with a massive mystery and we shouldn’t expect them to fully agree.

At this stage, the mystery grows even deeper.  God didn’t become a man merely in order to amaze people with miracles and teach them things more profoundly and pointedly true than anyone else ever taught, he came to manifest the love of God—“manifest” in the sense not only of revealing and demonstrating but also actualizing.  Jesus brought the love of God into history and made it real, not just theoretical, for us.  He did that by living a perfectly loving life and then dying in our place, on our behalf.  That death was the outworking of God’s plan of salvation, what he “had decided beforehand should happen.” (Acts 4:28)  But why did his death have to be so utterly excruciating?  “Excruciating” comes from Latin roots meaning “by a cross,” by an instrument of torture.  The Roman scourging and crucifixion that Jesus suffered were among the most brutal, painful tortures ever devised.  The Romans had sharp swords and strong arms; why didn’t God plan a swift and virtually painless beheading?

The answer has to do with those on whose behalf Jesus was dying.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you ....” (Matt.5:43-44)  And as Paul wrote, “when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son ....”(Rom.5:10) The estrangement between God and humanity was brought on by the rebellion of our first parents, and it produced, in all their descendants, a deep-seated enmity toward God.  Throughout history and in all cultures, we have expressed this hostility in various ways.  We worship idols, things we mistakenly assume will benefit us on a quid pro quo basis:  the sun, the moon, animals, forces of nature, assorted demons, celebrity, technology, or money.  We esteem ourselves and pay God smirking lip service or just declare him dead.  Among ourselves we also do much that is good, but our hearts, until God renews them, are hardened toward him. This attitude Paul referred to as “the mystery of iniquity” (2Thess.2:7 KJV); it is mysterious in its depth, its pervasiveness, its intensity, and its irrationality. But it couldn’t and didn’t deter God’s love. The mystery of iniquity—the hatred, enmity and evil that demanded “Crucify him!”—is trumped by the still greater mystery of love. In the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, God says to us, “Yes, I love you this much.”

Such love comes only from God. I can love most of my family members and many of my friends.  This love is human and imperfect, but it’s still love (although, in truth, since even imperfect love derives from God, I can’t justly take credit for it).  But I can’t and don’t love my enemies.  That kind of love enters my life only when God renews my heart in the new birth, at which point it begins a lifelong process of growth as I embark on my new life in Christ.  This is the love which Paul continually strove to find words to express, as when he wrote to the Ephesians, “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph.3:17-19)  How can you know love that surpasses knowledge?  Only in Christ.

Remember Gethsemane, where Jesus agonized in prayer to his Father about his impending self-sacrifice. What he was agonizing over wasn’t primarily the physical torture.  Many people have faced painful martyrdom bravely, but no one else has faced what Jesus did.  As he prayed, “he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.” (Mark 14:33)  The Greek word translated “distressed” means astonished with fear, terrified.  What terrified him, even though he had long known it was his mission, can only have been the unimaginable (even to him) agony of bearing the totality of our sin and its condemnation:  being spiritually drenched in vicious moral pollution, completely rejected by his Father and alienated from the love which for all eternity had never even wavered. We may wonder why so much distress over a rejection that would only be temporary. The guilt of our sin and the depth of the divine love, however, are not measured temporally.

In this extremity of horrific anticipation, “he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.  Yet not as I will, but as you will.’” (Matt.26:39)  What he dreaded was not just the “cup of suffering,” as we might think, but the cup of his Father’s wrath. As the Lord had told Jeremiah,  “Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it. When they drink it, they will stagger and go mad because of the sword I will send among them.” (Jer.25:15-16)  God’s wrath is different from ours.  Our anger is mixed up with fear, defensiveness, and loss of self-control.  His wrath is a holy, relentless, perfectly controlled determination to destroy and expunge all evil.  When Jesus took all our evil into himself, he made himself the target, as the representative of all humanity, of the unbearable wrath of the Almighty.  That was the price he had to pay in order to redeem us from our sin, to exchange his perfect righteousness for our moral wreckage.  Only thus could we be reconciled to our holy God.

There is a rather strange statement in the Psalms that points ahead to the mystery of the cross:  “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?  But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.” (Ps.130:3-4)  To the extent that we believe there is an almighty God who keeps a record of sins and will eventually punish us for them, we will be afraid.  That’s understandable.  But feared on account of his forgiveness?  Now we are in the boat with those terrified disciples:  Who is this?

Experiencing the forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ is harrowing because it exposes me, consciously in my inmost self—“me”—to the loving scrutiny of the Holy Spirit, who sees every atom in the universe and the heart of every person simultaneously, yet who speaks to me so intimately that his voice is “I am.”  (Notice that securing our salvation was harrowing for Jesus, and receiving it is harrowing for us.  Being God, or being made in his image, is good in innumerable ways, but it isn’t easy.)  No personal connection, outside the Trinity itself, can ever be more intimate than this or more profoundly mysterious.  There is no doubt about the love—proven on the cross—but the scrutiny of the Holy One is painfully humbling to one who only longs to be “holy, righteous and good.” (Rom.7:12)  The Bible addresses this experience in some of its most powerful passages, including two of the greatest psalms, Psalm 51 and Psalm 139.

In Psalm 51, David is confronting his sin against Bathsheba and Uriah.  His self-searching and the Spirit’s searching of him occur simultaneously; they are two aspects of the same action.  He cries out to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” Superficially this is absurd—has he forgotten about Bathsheba and Uriah?  Obviously not, but now he is communing with the One who defines good and evil, who is the first target of all sin.  “You only” is “you,” you who created me and are with me now in this ordeal, closer than my skin.

Psalm 139 begins, “O Lord, you have searched me and you know me,” and ends with the prayer, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”  In between these prayers is an incomparably rich meditation on the experience of being human.

Our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, priceless in its value to us, demands much from us—surrender, commitment, obedience, perseverance, and so on—but the first thing it demands is honesty in the ongoing “I”-to-“I” encounter.  Thus the apostle John advises us, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1John 1:8-9)  God’s voice to us in this encounter comes primarily through Scripture, as “the word of God” itself tells us:  “For the word of God is living and active.  Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.  Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.  Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” (Heb.4:12-13)  Probing and scrutiny as intensely intimate as this would be unbearable if its purpose and result, both short-term and long-term, were not to purify us, and if it were not motivated from first to last by God’s perfect love.  Our purification, which the Bible often likens to gold and silver being refined by fire, is not only good in principle but it is good for us practically, since it enables our relationship with God to grow ever closer and fuller.  “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” (Matt.5:8)

Beyond the cross itself, God’s love for us has never been expressed more beautifully than in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).  Recall that after the son “came to his senses” and decided to go back home and throw himself on his father’s mercy, “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”  Such love is overwhelmingly wondrous, and the most wondrous thing about it isn’t just its immediate expression—Throw a party!—but that the parable ends during the party.  We are told of no one going back to life as usual the next day.  This party goes on forever.


Eternity

The mystery of the hereafter is quite obvious:  “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns ....” (Hamlet, III, i)  The Bible makes it clear that all of us will live on after this earthly life:  “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Dan.12:2)  And the New Testament makes it clear that the difference in our destinies depends on whether we trust in Jesus as our Savior. Among sincere and Biblically informed Christians, however, there is disagreement over the meaning of “eternal punishment” (Matt.25:46) and “everlasting destruction.” (2Thess.1:9)  Both phrases refer to the same thing, coming after the Last Judgment, but is that thing never-ending conscious torment, or is it spiritual death resulting in oblivion?  The case for never-ending torment is based mainly on the thought that oblivion is what all the oppressors, thugs, pimps, child-abusers and bigots, all those who grab what they can get at other people’s expense, are counting on.  They hate God and never stop hating him.  People who take the endless torment view usually regard the physical torments mentioned in Scripture—mainly burning—as metaphors for the spiritual misery of eternal separation from God.  The case for oblivion as eternal punishment is based partly on the idea that “destruction” and “burning” both imply a short-lived event leaving no substantial residue, and mainly on the belief that the everlasting torment of the condemned is, finally, inconsistent with the love of God.  There are three things we can know for sure about this: “The Judge of all the earth” will do the right thing (see Gen.18:25); we don’t really know what he will do with lost people (it remains a mystery); and we are better off not finding out by personal experience.

“Personal experience” leads directly to another hard question about eternity and God’s justice.  We are saved by trusting in Jesus—that much is clear—but what about all those people, probably a majority of all who have ever lived, who have never heard the Gospel or even the name of Jesus?  This question pertains whether your view of salvation emphasizes divine election or human free will.  Either way, God’s plan of salvation apparently favors those who have lived after Christ came, and among them, those who were born in the West, where Christianity has primarily flourished.  Justice means fairness, and if the Judge of all the earth is fair, what will he do?  I think, and hope, that C.S. Lewis is right when he says, “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” (The Great Divorce, ch.9)  Such an affirmation rests on the belief that when the Bible says that the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all people (Acts 2:17), it means that God does not limit himself either geographically or temporally. He moves in people’s hearts sovereignly and secretly (John 3:8), to be sure, but he moves universally.  Not everyone is saved; a remnant, a minority, is chosen, but chosen “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” (Rev.5:9)  I can well imagine a Sumerian girl or Toltec man seeing Jesus at the throne of judgment and saying in delighted astonishment, “Oh!  It’s you!”

I freely admit that this is speculation. We don’t know; salvation is a mystery.  And salvation leads us further into mystery:  It leads us into eternal life and into heaven.  Christians often speak as if they understand what eternity is, but really they don’t.  Theologians differ over whether it is time as we experience it extended to infinity, or whether it is a mode of time beyond what we experience.  Either way, it’s safe to say that right now we can’t quite comprehend it (finite beings can’t comprehend infinity, though they can talk about it).  The same goes for all the Biblical imagery of heaven—streets paved with gold, lush gardens, thrones, crowns, choirs and banquets. It’s royal and festive imagery, “the lifestyle of the rich and famous” as ancient societies conceived it.  This imagery, clearly, is telling us that life in heaven will be richer and better than anything we can now imagine; all our efforts to imagine it are undoubtedly far short of the mark—especially those imagining endless physical indulgence or, at the other extreme, incorporeal hovering (horrible thoughts).  Heaven is a mystery of the best kind.  We know that all who are in Christ by faith will be with him forever, freed from all the power and ravages of sin, with dynamic, imperishable bodies just like his risen body, living in a renewed “heaven and earth” (probably referring to the whole universe; see Isa.65:17-19, 1Cor.15:12-57, 2Peter 3:10-13, Rev.21:1-5).  The earth, our home, will no longer be sundered by sin from God, who lives eternally “in heaven”; the earth and presumably the whole universe will, in effect, be drawn into heaven.  Beyond this, though, attempts to pin down all the Biblical imagery of the hereafter into interpretive certainty are unwise.  How literal or symbolic is John’s vision of the New Jerusalem (Rev.21-22)?  My guess is more symbolic than literal, but I don’t think any of us knows for sure. All these things will be clarified for us a good deal in the future, as our knowledge of the Lord and his love keeps on growing forever. Because God’s greatness and love are infinite, though, they will always remain, to some extent, mysterious to us.  Mysterious, but good.