Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them 'the gospel' does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Livedīut there’s more. so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club.

Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe. God create, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. It doesn’t make sense it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no. sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting “the gospel” is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God.īut there’s more. “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”. “Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that’s what he has the Father say.

Love Wins by Rob Bell