Why Reject Good News

03/31/2004

Don't we all like good news? How many of us would reject it if someone came up to us and said, "I have some good news for you!"
We would be a fool to say, "Oh, I don't want to hear it."
It's the bad news we should be leery of, not the good news.

So why, oh why, do the people of this earth reject the Good News of Jesus Christ? Everyone wants to be loved, everyone wants to be forgiven, we don't want to die...and yet so many will reject the Good News that tells us anything we've ever done can be totally forgiven, and not only that, totally forgotten as far as the east is from the west. We can be loved with a love that is unconditional!! Who wouldn't want that? And about this dying issue, we all want to live forever. Well, we have been offered that by what Jesus Christ has done for us!!

But we say, "No," and not only, "No," but "I don't even want to hear about it!" Don't tell me such good news, I don't want to believe it, I can't believe it, I'd rather just go about my life as I am, worrying about tomorrow, afraid of death, and living with the guilt of my sins weighing me down each day.

For God decided to save us through our Lord Jesus Christ,
not to pour out his anger on us. He died for us so that we can
live with him forever, whether we are dead or alive at the time
of his return.
1 Thess. 5:9-10

God is not pouring His anger out on us, as much as we deserve to have that done!! He DECIDED to save us from all our sin and misery by sending His Son to die for us! Now think about this, here we are living our lives, doing our own thing, not caring for a second what God thinks about it anyway--and He doesn't condemn us. He doesn't just send another flood and wipe us all off the face of the earth. He promised that He would never do that again, and when we see the rainbow, we see God's signature on that promise.

As much as God might want to, He will not go back on His word, so He does the unthinkable. He sends His Son to die for us! We wouldn't come close to doing something like that for anyone!! We love our children much too much for that!! Nothing would be worth the life of our child.

Not so with God. He sends His Son to this earth to walk amongst us for 33 years, get a feel for what it's like to walk in the human flesh and suffer emotionally and physically. Jesus experienced the temptations we deal with, felt the betrayal and the lack of love we live through each day, and then His Father says, it's time to die for these people. They are my children also, and I have sent You do to do this for them.

If you've seen "The Passion of the Christ," you have seen Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying to the Father!! Blood dripped out of His pours; He was in agony over what was to come! Could any of us have put ourselves in His place? No, because there is no way would have done what He did. His friends and closest supporters and followers were sleeping!! His friend Judas had just "sold Him" for 30 pieces of silver and would betray Him with a kiss. Peter would deny Him after His capture. The crowds that welcomed Him into Jerusalem were now screaming for His Crucifixion. There is not one of us who would have gone ahead with the plan, because we are much too human for that! If they are going to be like this to me then forget them, I'm outta here!

Jesus didn't say that! He never even thought that! He healed the soldier's ear who had come to arrest Him, He remained quiet throughout the accusations, He went willingly to the cross and asked that His Father forgive them, because they don't know what they're doing!! This is not a human reaction, this is a Godly reaction because this Man is the Son of God, and He came to do God's will.

And we say, "Oh, that's fine. But I'm not interested." I'm kind of busy in this life, I have so much going on, so many things to do, I can't be thinking about that right now. And even if I give it a second thought, I reject it any way. It's just too far-fetched! Too out of this world to even believe!! Well, of course it is "out of this world" because it is God! He created this world, He rules this world, He makes the laws of gravity and He created the stars in the Heavens. He made us out of the dust of the earth, and when we die we return to that dust in time.

But even before we return to that dust, God says, don't worry about it because I have Good News for you!! Want to hear it?

And now dear brothers and sisters, I want you to know
what will happen to the Christians who have died so
you will not be full of sorrow like people who have no hope.
For since we believe that Jesus died and was raised to life
again, we also believe that when Jesus comes, God will bring
back with Jesus all the Christians who have died.
I can tell you this directly from the Lord: We who are still living
when the Lord returns will not rise to meet him ahead of those
who are in their graves. For the Lord himself will come down
from heaven with a commanding shout, with the call of the
archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, all the
Christians who have died will rise from their graves. Then
together with them, we who are still alive and remain
on earth will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the
air and remain with him forever. So comfort and encourage each
other with these words.
1 Thess. 4:13-18

Oh, this is impossible, you might say. This is a bunch of malarkey, this could never happen. People rising from the dead, believers meeting in the clouds, archangels and trumpet calls of God!! What a fairy-tale world Christians must be living in to believe this stuff!

Well, what do non-believers "believe" in? Let's take a look! Some believe in Darwin! There is a truck parked across the street from us here and they have one of those Darwin "fish" with feet on their bumper sticker. I'm thinking, you believe in Darwin? Darwin is dead! Long gone! Is there any hope in him? He led a bunch of people astray with his own way of looking at the world and generations later people are still hanging onto his "theology"? Wouldn't it be something if right before Darwin died, on his death-bed, he became a believer in Jesus Christ? It is possible, you know. And maybe no one knew except Darwin and God!

The problem being that his whole life was spent talking people out of God and now all his followers left behind on earth are believing the lies of evolution that says God had no part in it--and they are going to Hell. It's good there are no tears in heaven because if there were and he is there, he would be filling rivers full of them for all the people that have been lost because they "believed" him! Oh, if he could only come back and tell everyone!! But he can't!

There is a story in Luke 16 about a rich man and Lazarus. The rich man lived in luxury. The poor man, Lazarus, laid at his door in poverty. Finally, the poor man died and "was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham." The rich man also died, and his soul went to "the place of the dead. There, in torment, he saw Lazarus in the far distance with Abraham." He wanted nothing more at that point than for the poor man, Lazarus, to "dip the tip of his finger in water and cool" his tongue. He was in anguish in the flames. But Abraham reminded him that in his life, he had everything and the poor man had nothing. The poor man is being comforted now and besides, "there is a great chasm separating us. Anyone who wanted to cross over to you from here is stopped at its edge, and no one there can cross over to us." The rich man begged Abraham to send someone to his father's home. He had five brothers and he wanted to warn them about this place of torment so they wouldn't have to go there when they died. But Abraham told him they had been warned and they could read the writings anytime they wanted to. The rich man knew they wouldn't read it, but he said if someone was sent from the dead to warn them they would listen. Abraham reminded him that if they didn't listen to Moses and the prophets, they "won't listen even if someone rises from the dead."

How many of us say that? "Just show me a miracle, just prove it to me, then I'll believe." And yet we have heard of the story of Jesus, we can see it on the big screen right now in "The Passion of the Christ" and we still do not believe and yet we believe what Darwin wrote about years ago like it was fact!

Now, Darwin was an ordinary man, with ordinary ideas, albeit, he was probably very intelligent. But, how does he know how the world was created any more than the next guy? How does he know how fish grew legs and walked out of the sea onto dry land and then starting breathing air and turned into creatures who then because humans? How does he know except for what he "believes" happened? He was not there!! He did not witness it! He came up with a theory using the "evidence" he had at the time and people to this day are hanging on to it like it is the gospel truth!!

We have the Gospel Truth, inspired by God, our Creator, and it takes less faith to believe in that than to believe in Darwin. What has Darwin left us with to hold onto? He's long gone and we are left with only his theories. What has God left with us? God has left us with the stars in the heavens, which seem to be without end. The farther we look into space with increasingly powerful telescopes, the more stars we find. We can't seem to get to the end of them.

God has also left us with a planet that is set at just the right place in the universe that the sun doesn't burn us up, and it also keeps us from freezing. It also "just happens" to be tilted just right to create weather patterns where no place is too hot, and no place is too cold!

God has left us with daily miracles of birth, new babies that come into our lives and bring us a joy like we have never known. God has left us with things so tiny our most powerful microscopes still can't get to the "bottom" of them. These are miracles! We see them every day but we take them for granted. Because we are so used to them, we miss them!!

And then we run out and buy a Darwin bumper sticker and say that this is the truth?!! That we believe all of this is just one big accident, and we would rather live in that lie than be living in the Truth of God? Why? So we can live our lives here and die into nothingness, having this all be meaningless? Why would we want that? Why would we choose that when we've been given a much better choice to make? Why do we reject Good News when it is offered to us--because it just seems too simple? Do we need something more complicated to hang onto than that?!

Why would God complicate the issue for us so that we couldn't understand it? That wouldn't make sense. He says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." He is a loving Parent who wants to help us. When we try to explain something to our children, we keep it as simple as possible, especially in their younger years. They couldn't handle anything more difficult than that, they just couldn't comprehend it. Are we any different? If God tried to explain to us the workings of His universe, we could never comprehend it fully. He tries to explain His great love for us, and still we cannot even comprehend that! An unconditional love? We don't know that here, we only know a love that wants something from us, that can use us, that looks for what they can get out of it most times. God is not like that. He has no ulterior motive. His only motive is wanting a relationship with the children He created and to do that, He sent His Son as the Bridge between our world and His. Is that so hard to comprehend?

Adam and Eve were born into a sinless world, but they chose sin. They ate from the tree they had been told not to. They then began their lives in a fallen world. But God did not want to leave us here to wither and die. He wanted more for us than that. He tried to prepare us for what He was going to do through His Son, and these are the Words we read in the Old Testament. Story upon story of sacrifices that are made to forgive us of our sins, Temples that are built to focus our attention on a relationship with God. God set everything up to prepare us for the arrival of His Son and basically spelled it out in the Old Testament about a King being born to us. The Savior of the World. And then, after all the preparation, after Moses telling us what was going to happen...the King is born and we reject Him. We crucify Him. We refuse to believe after all of that that He rose from the dead to save us all. We choose to continue on with life as usual because why? Because we love it so much? Because we are just so happy we can hardly contain our joy and we need nothing more? I doubt it!!

It's because we are stubborn and hard-headed and that's why God does not work with our heads, He works with our hearts! That is where He dwells in us, to those of us who will open our hearts to Him. It is the only place it makes sense because our minds cannot comprehend a love so great, so unconditional, so amazing. It is only possible for that love to live in our hearts and for us to experience it even when we cannot fully understand it!

Darwin worked with his head, he explained things with his head, he lived his life trying to figure out what this world was all about using his own intelligence and his own ideas of what it might be!! That is head knowledge. God is heart knowledge!! They are a world apart!! When we open our hearts to God, only then will we even start to comprehend what He is all about! The heart is the most vital organ in the body. We can live without a brain that allows us to think clearly, we can't live without a heart that is beating. When the heart stops beating, we are done. The only thing left alive in us is our spirit, which soon departs our body for another place because it no longer needs the body it was housed in. God has other plans for the spirit in us then, whether that be heaven or hell.

Yes, we will all live eternally. Even Hell is eternal, it's just not where you want to end up because the thought of eternity in Hell is more than any mind can even comprehend. What is Hell? No one is really sure, just as no one is really sure what Heaven will be like, but if I am given a choice, I choose to go where the Good News is happening, whatever that might look like!

I really wonder where Darwin is spending his eternity? Paul said in:

1 Timothy 1:12-14
How thankful I am to Christ Jesus our Lord for considering
me trustworthy and appointing me to serve him, even
though I used to scoff at the name of Christ. I hunted
down his people, harming them in every way I could. But
God had mercy on me because I did it in ignorance and
unbelief. Oh, how kind and gracious the Lord was! He
filled me completely with faith and the love of Christ Jesus.

You see, God will forgive even Darwin because he acted in ignorance and unbelief if Darwin turned to God in the final moments of his life. God understands, He forgives, He is gracious. He knows how we are. The verses above were written by Paul, a man who used to murder Christians before he became one. The good news is, he changed his ways years before he left this earth and ended up taking a bunch of people to heaven with him by his testimony and his service for God.
Not all of us will do that!
Darwin didn't.
Will we?

We don't have all the answers. We never will on this earth. But God does and He is ready to start explaining them to us little by little as we start to live our lives for Him. He does not explain them to our heads, He explains them to our hearts, that is the only place we can truly comprehend what God is all about-His Spirit communicating with our spirit. If we're still living with head knowledge alone, we may be living a lie. We may be missing out on the Good News God wants to share with us. We can cover our ears, shut our eyes and close our mouths, but if our hearts remain open, we can still receive the love of God that is being offered to us. It is a miracle! One you shouldn't leave this earth without experiencing...seriously!!

Living in that miracle,

Diane