Challenging Comments from Francis Chan

 

                Over the weekend I devoured Francis Chan’s highly readable book Erasing Hell, which is a profoundly biblical and compassionate response to the universalism the well-know Pastor Rob Bell seemingly advocated in his book Love Wins, which was published with great publicity and fanfare late last spring.  Pastor Chan systematically sets out the biblical arguments against universalism and for the reality of hell in a thoroughly convincing fashion, all with the great compassion necessary for proclaiming such hard truths.  Where Pastor Chan challenged me the most personally, however, was in some of his observations concerning the Apostle Paul’s teaching on the final judgment in 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9:

 

As I read these verses, I am struck by how allergic I am to repeating the very words that Paul wrote.  Affliction, vengeance, punishment, destruction—for all who don’t follow Jesus.  I’m not sure if I have ever used the term vengeance in describing the fate of unbelievers.  In my desire to distance myself from sadistic Christians who revel in the idea of wrath and punishment, I may have crossed a line.  Refusing to teach a passage of Scripture is just as wrong as abusing it.  I really believe it’s time for some of us to stop apologizing for God and start apologizing to Him for being embarrassed by the ways He has chosen to reveal Himself.

 

(Francis Chan, Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Way We’ve Made Things Up (Colorado Springs, Colo.: David C. Cook, 2011), 102, emphasis in original).  The reason those sentences convicted my heart is that while I as a preacher and teacher of God’s word do not avoid altogether the difficult truths and hard passages in the Bible, I can have a tendency to soften the sharper edges of those texts, in a misguided effort to make them more palatable to 21^st century Western sensibilities.  So I am praying today: “Lord, please forgive me for shrinking back from declaring the harder edges of the ‘whole counsel of God’ (Acts 20:27), and grant me the grace to proclaim fearlessly your word, both when it instantly delights our hearts and when it challenges us to the core of our beings.  Amen.”