Love Wins Indeed

     Popular preacher Rob Bell has hit a new time low with the publication of his book, “Love Wins,” (for short).

     In it, he tries to reframe the long-time argument that a God of love would never allow any one to go to hell. It’s called universalism – the belief that all will eventually wind up in Heaven. Baker defines it as the doctrine that in the fullness of times, all souls will be released from the penalties of sin and restored to God.

    The teaching has reared its ugly head from the beginning of our Christian faith, largely due to a misreading of scriptures such as Acts 3: 21; Romans 5: 18,19; Ephesians 1: 9,10; and I Corinthians 15: 22.

     Belief in universal salvation was associated with the early Gnostic teachers, and was given early credence by such teachers as Clement of
Alexandria, and his student Origen.

     The absurdity of the teaching is rooted in two undeniable facts:

     First, Jesus taught more on hell than virtually any other subject, and exactly how to avoid going there;

     Second, if all eventually are saved, then true believers in Jesus Christ and the atonement provided only by His shed blood, will come face to face with such human monsters as Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and a host of others who never repented of their heinous deeds.

     Further, the saving blood of Jesus is virtually spit upon in Bell’s foolish rebellion against the truth of God’s word. Look at his own words:

     “There’s nothing wrong with talking and singing about how the ‘Blood will never lose its power’ and ‘Nothing but the blood will save us,’” Bell writes. “Those are powerful metaphors. But we don’t live any longer in a culture in which people offer animal sacrifices to the gods.

“People did live that way for thousands of years, and there are pockets of primitive cultures around the world that do continue to understand sin, guilt, and atonement in those ways,” he continues. “But most of us don’t. What the first Christians did was look around them and put the Jesus story in language their listeners would understand.”

     The atonement as metaphor? I don’t think so.

     Let’s ring Bell’s bell by not buying his book, or into the junk within its pages.