Fixing the Forgiveness Loophole, and the nature of Heaven and Hell

I was speaking to a dear friend the other night (and it is weird that only the other night I was in Boston.  I love flying--I want to do more of it. As a novice, I find it quite novel how quickly one can be in one place and suddenly another; it's a shame so many people find it mundane.)  My friend asked me about the Great Loophole: the Forgiveness Loophole. 

Last year I did a lot of things that were stupid, wrong, and regrettable.  I am a Christian, but I rebelled.  Can I be forgiven?  Even though I did these things on purpose?

The short answer is, I sure hope so.  No, I believe so and I say "yes," because God is giving and forgiving, and "He knows I am but dust," to quote the Psalmist.  I have repented of my errant ways, and have -- rather imperfectly -- tried to get back on the right path. 

But there is a perceived loophole. I will take some liberties with the question of the loophole, because we were having an informal talk and the way it was all posed is not easy to recollect given my current state.  With no further delay: "Christians can go out, act like heathens, be hedonists, and then ask forgiveness for all of it, and everything is better.  How is this consistent with Scripture?"

This is a troubling question, because it seems many Christians--even well intended ones--act this way.   This way is wrong, and here is why: according to the New Testament, we are justified by faith and saved by God's grace.  Yet there is a catch: faith without works is dead, as we find in the inconvenient but nonetheless canonical book of James.

So if you go out and live horribly and disregard God's commands to obedience and repentance, in hopes of salvation from your sins just out of God's good will (as a deus ex machina to the novel of your life), you are sadly mistaken.  The first error is that one cannot presume upon God's grace: Hebrews says as much, and examples of this error are scattered all throughout the Old Testament.  We have no right to presume upon Him.

The problem is manifold.  Jesus said "If you love me, keep my commandments."  Therefore, it stands that cannot love Jesus if we don't strive for obedience.  James wrote "Faith without works is dead."  So we cannot be justified by faith if our faith is merely an aethereal concept, rather than a concrete thing.   Remember, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen."  It is not merely a construct of the mind, faith is a construct of the entirety of our being.

Remember, we are beings composed of three parts: mind, body, spirit.  Belief is the emotional component of faith; works comprise the rational/physical component.  . 

 

So if we claim to be Christians, but are indistinguishable from our non-Christian friends in terms of behavior, are we saved?

While I sit in judgment over no one, I cannot in good conscience tell you "yes, my friend, you are absolutely saved, because God is loving and gracious."  While the Lord is loving and gracious, our nature must be receptive towards His grace, otherwise it is meaningless.

How do we respond to His love?  We are too often like the children of Israel who turned to strange gods and turned their backs on the Lord.  He loved them, and He loves us, but He clearly refuses to have his love trampled or presumed upon.  Read Ezekiel if you doubt this.  We read the verse "God is love" in John's epistle, and rather than be thankful that we do not worship a capricious pagan god, we act as if we're entitled to His love just because we've completed a to-do list of salvation at some point in our lives. 

Without presumption, or blasphemy, put yourself in God's shoes a moment.  First, you'll find them rather large, as Earth is His footstool, but beyond that--if you loved someone very much, and that person continually did things to show your love really is meaningless to them, how would you react?

Since we are human, we would simply grow bitter, but God is not like us; He never withdraws His love from anyone.  We, however, alienate ourselves from His love by being unloving towards Him.  If we do not obey the Lord, we do not love Him, no matter how much we say we do.  Indeed, we're like abusive spouses: we passive-aggressively go on in our lives of sin while telling the Lord how much we love Him.  It's terribly pathetic, since we're attempting to abuse the Creator of the Universe.

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your mind." Matt. 22:37

If we are consistently and willfully disobedient, it is clear how little we really love the Lord.  This is not to accuse anyone, but it is to remind us all that without obedience, without works, our faith is meaningless, and how can we on the Last Day stand before the great Judge and be justified by meaninglessness?  It does not follow.  If the evidence is meaningless, we are lost.

"Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire." Hebrews 12:28-29

Is God a consuming fire, or is He love?  Or can He be both?  And would a loving God send someone to Hell?

He is clearly both, as the Scripture says He is.  And no, a loving God would not send someone to a place absent His love.  But an unloving human can send himself to Hell.  The Greek church explains this concept best, and much of the rest of this is borrowed from the "River of Flame" speech given by an Orthodox priest some years ago.  The Greek Orthodox Church is perhaps the only Christian sect on the planet which has successfully reconciled God's loving nature and the concept of Hell.  The Greek church makes it rather simple: when wood or chaff is thrown into fire, it is consumed.  When gold is put to the fire, it is purified and becomes something beautiful.

Our nature becomes unchangeable once we've died, because things eternal are unchanging as there is no timeline within which they might change.  God is unchanging because He exists outside of time.  Think of death as burning a CD the old-fashioned way, before rewritable CDs came out.  You can choose what to put on a CD, but once you've burned it, the data cannot be erased, and more data cannot be added.   It is only in this life, in the interface of spirit and flesh that our nature can be changed; it is only before we press the "burn" button that we can change. After that point, we cannot change, and our nature in this life becomes fixed in eternity.

You will forgive me for using alchemical terminology, but thanks to the power of Jesus' ultimate sacrifice, it is possible to transmute wood into gold.  The reverse is also true.  In this life, our belief and our works (our faith) determines who and what we are; they are the protons, neutrons, and electrons that comprise the elemental nature of our spiritual beings.  Wood is mostly carbon, and carbon is a relatively light element.  It is easy to be made of carbon, as carbon is a fairly simple atom.  It requires work to add protons, neutrons, and electrons to a carbon atom.  It is much more difficult to be made of gold.  Inside a nuclear reactor, it is possible to turn any element into any other with sufficient energy and time.  Our lives are no different: with energy, we can be transformed from carbon to metal.  That energy is our faith, and our faith is the interaction of our beliefs, our words, and our actions: in other words, our love for God determines how we will react to His love in eternity.

Hell is not an absence of God's love: it is the reaction of "wood" (an unloving nature) with the consuming fire of God's love.  Likewise, Heaven is the reaction of gold with God's love.  The fire is the same: it is our nature that determines what the flames of His love do to us when we pass from the temporal world into eternity.  God does not send anyone to hell: we choose to enter eternity as either wood or gold, and we make this choice through our actions.

So where does forgiveness come in?

Forgiveness is, quite simply, an erasure of a debt.  We are continually renewed in Christ; if we are living for Him and working towards His cause, we have nothing to fear when we "accidentally" sin or give into temptation--with the caveat that we must work towards doing better.   But if we have rejected Him, and have grown apathetic (neither hot nor cold), what forgiveness is there for us?  We must repent and redirect our lives towards Him, or else we are lost.  Why?  Because we've chosen to be unloving towards God, and it is our love for Him and His word that changes our nature.  Allow me to reiterate that: God does not change you unless you love Him; your love for Him allows Him to work in your life and change you as a person.  God forces change on no one, and He imposes himself on no one.   He has given you complete control of the matter: if you love Him, His love will be a blessing to you.  If you do not love Him, His love will be a curse to you.  Not because His love is a curse,but because chaff or wood simply cannot withstand the fire of His love.

It is unfortunate that the Catholic church and thus the Protestant sects insist on a faulty model of Hell derived from pagan myth; Hell is not a place (although Jesus used the imagery of a place in order to instill in us the seriousness of it.)  Hell is not a state of mind.  Hell is a reaction, like a chemical reaction--a reaction of a weak and imperfect nature with the perfection of God's love.  It is only through forgiveness--God's ability to perfect us while we exist temporally--that we can enter Eternity as something non-combustible, something which is given luster and reflects the glory of our Maker when exposed to the light of His love.  We cannot be perfect on our own; but God has promised to perfect us, if only we will love Him and obey Him, and live our lives as He has asked us to.   Paul put it best: be living sacrifices.  Spend your time helping others around you and strengthening your faith, and not just in the physical sense, but in a spiritual sense: teach those around you, pray, worship Him, read the Scriptures (and not just the New Testament.)  While we are not saved by our works, we cannot be saved if our faith is without works and dead.

We're not called to follow a byzantine set of rules.  His commands are clear: love Him with all your being, and love your neighbor.  If you do these things, you will not blaspheme Him (instead you will worship Him), and you won't do things that harm those around you.  But it isn't just about not-doing-harm--which is a passive, lukewarm life; it is about actively doing good. If you keep His commandments, you will do things to help those around you.  If you love those around you, you will forgive them their faults, even if doing so is a difficult thing.  And forgiving others may be the most important part of obtaining one's own forgiveness, as Jesus said: "forgive, and you will be forgiven; forgive not, and neither will you be forgiven."

 

Today...

On This Grand and Important Date in History:

Among many others, the following were born: John Jay, Alfred Warner, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Frank Sinatra, Bob Barker, Ed Koch, Ai Orikasa.

The Battle of Ninevah occurred in 627 AD between the Byzantines and Persians.

Emperor Sigsimund of Hungary forms The Order of the Dragon exactly 600 years ago. (Later a certain Vlad Tepes becomes a member)

In 1812, the French run away from Russia after Napoleon's resounding defeat to the harsh Siberian winter. They've been retreating ever since.

Marconi gets his transatlantic signal in 1901.

In 1936, My Personal Hero, the Generalissimo--his own bad self--Chiang Kai-shek, is captured in the Xian Incident by his treacherous former-friend Zhang Xueliang and turned over to Mao's forces. He is later freed. This is perhaps the pivotal moment in Chiang's life.

Hitler announces the extermination of the Jews in 1941.

Rhodesia, after being talked into surrender to the Communist revolutionaries, becomes Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe: hellhole since 1979.

In 1984, I was born, and the world both rejoiced and trembled.

Bleh

It's been weeks since I've gotten any substantial writing done. I've been sick in various ways, had various things happen, and otherwise been busy.

You know what sucks?

There are no exciting games out there. That sucks.

Mistaken Identity

Apparently I09 has confused me with the author Ian MacLeod. If you're visiting from their article, mea maxima culpa. Our names are close, but mine is McLeod, sans "a." I'm not familiar with his work, but I'm kind enough to redirect traffic properly.

I'm Back

So, I'm here. I haven't done anything of note. Actually, I've done many things of note. September has been the busiest, best month of the year. I went to Scotland (amazing beyond words), I went to a con and got to spend the weekend with The Nefarious Catgirl. And I've done all sorts of other things too. I love it.

I'm tired of this. I've had zero ability to write the past month, I've been so busy. I'm working on a piece for ANF, but I fear I won't have it in time for tomorrow's deadline.

Oh, and this month is equally busy. Tomorrow I'm going in for a second table-read of the script, and Saturday we have ~12 hours of shooting planned (he hopes we can do it in 7-8). That's the kind of shooting professionals do. He wants to spend two hours on the car scene alone. So I'll sit in my CRX for 2 hours, pretending I'm driving. Next Saturday we'll have about 5-6 hours of (physically demanding) shooting. Not bad. Up to 18 hours of work for 25 minutes of film, not including the editing. I knew it would be a big workload, but I hadn't considered the ratio. We'll probably shoot 10x as much for the feature. And I get to talk like Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop...for 18 hours. Tomorrow I'm doing psychological preparation: in short, my mental image should be, "I am the King of Shantytown sitting on the most comfortable chair in the world...but I have a thumbtack in my ass and I can't get up." So if I'm an unbearable jerk for the next two weeks, it's because I have to be my character. I admire Anthony Hopkins and (post-Aviator) Leo DiCaprio and Patrick MacGoohan for their acting methods. I believe in becoming the character, so tomorrow I'm spending a day in a prison of my own making: will probably go through some old notebooks and find things that sadden and anger me, and maybe shout invective at myself in the mirror.

Anyway, I am also becoming a giryavik--a user of girya, or kettlebells. I've read one of Pavel's books on the technique, and I'm impressed--not because of any hype, but because of the studies he cites--and from looking at the exercises themselves. I discovered these beasts while in Scotland. Youngest's host-family (of sorts) had a set, and I saw the dad wield one. Pretty amazing stuff. Youngest has since reported that he loves them. So I'll try them. Russian science seems a little less unreliable in some situations than Western science. I mean, look at Tblisi--they've been using bacteriophage therapy since the 1920s. It was prevalent throughout the Soviet Union.

The only way to stop MRSA and the plethora of other superbacteria lies in science almost 100 years old, and only perfected in the Former USSR. As someone who has had non-MRSA staph infections a time or two, I would love to have God's Nanotech (aka, virii) used to kill my bacteria, rather than a week-long battery of Amoxylin and commensurate nausea and yoghurt consumption. Bacteriophages are only now beginning to be approved by the FDA. The problem is that naturally occuring virii are hard to patent, and easy to grow. Low profits for big-pharma. Alas and alack!

Then there's abiotic and deep-oil theory. Russia is drilling far below the surface of the Earth for their vast oil deposits. We're still going pretty shallow. There is no peak-oil, there is only peak-stupidity in the West.

But I digress. Kettlebell exercise makes sense. The science behind it seems solid. 300+ years of results seem solid. At worst, I bought a rather ungainly $50.00 paperweight.

Anyway, I'm doing quite fine. I'm once again quite smitten, and this time much less (but not entirely un) confused. C'est la vie.

We'll see what we shall see.

Bleh

I've been sick the past three days. I'm almost better, and not a moment too soon! I'm leaving for Scotland tomorrow. One week in the Ancestral Homeland will be good for me.

I have no real set itinerary. Oh, I know where I'm going, I just don't know when and for how long. I'm backpacking when not taking the train and the bus. I have the most excellent backpack ever, it is in Half-Life colors (gray and orange!) It contains everything I think I'll need. ^_^ After Edinburgh, we're headed to Newtonmore so I can dispatch with Youngest, err, leave him with friends. Next, Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye is definite. Then either Newcastle upon Tyne (one, to take a piece of coal there; two, to see the fortifications and Hadrian's Wall) or Portmeirion in Wales. After those destinations, back to Edinburgh for the balance of my time, and then on to a Royal Dutch flight. Part of me is tempted to stay in Amsterdam, but I can't afford it. I was planning on spending another week in Europe, with a stint in Germany, but that didn't pan out.

I'm stresseed, but excited. I have no idea what I'm doing, I haven't totally planned everything, I don't have everything I want to have, which only adds to the adventure. This is the primary source of my stress; I don't have the first clue as to what I'm doing. I am not trying to escape my Giant, not trying to leave it here at home, to borrow from Emerson. Rather, I hope my Giant follows me there and enjoys the Highlands so much, it stays.

I've been playing Forged Allances. God knows how many skirmishes I've fought while ill. I spent much of Saturday studying the game AI and Sorian's modifications to it. Then I found what I needed: a map-marker editor. In short, it is a tool to give the AI general locations of where to do things. Now that I see how the AI works, I understand the inferiority of it is attributable to bad-mapmaking, not GPG or the modding community.

Against Sorian's, I'm twice as powerful as his non-cheating AIs, and 3/4s as powerful as his Cheating Adaptive AI on a suitably designed map. I put about 200 markers on the World Domination map, an 81x81km recreation of the Earth. It needs about 300 more to be playable for me. I know this, as I played one last night. I did my best work in Australasia; Sorian's Adaptive did a good job using the naval markers effectively, sending some ships north into India and then south down the coast of Africa (for shelling.) It even went between Madagascar and the continent. That made me happy. It rounded the Cape of Good Hope and began shelling the lesser AI I'd placed in South Africa.

I made multiple routes for attacks, even parallel ones that give a little additional variation. A kilometer here and there makes a difference when you've set fire-bases up on the shore and the ships are out of range.

It was pretty damn stupid with its airforce. I may have made the grid too simple. C'est la vie. As for the massive Land War in Asia I wanted, that didn't pan out. I screwed up the pathing over the Himalayas. The AI was smart enough to cross the Russian steppes into Europe, where I'd built an air-force base and a small land army at one point, but it wasn't effective.

The AI in South America was the most feckless. It was supposed to build a navy. It built a couple of the Cybran Salem-class destroyers (which are amphibious) and a battleship it suicided against my carrier-sub (which dived as soon as the battleship was in main-gun range, and proceeded to torpedo the BB to death.) Big whoop. It eventually built nukes, but was dumb enough to let its ACU get nuked by another AI.

Anyway, this is cool. I may begin playing with the AI itself to see if I can make it better against me. It takes me and a weak AI ally (i.e., Nature's Kevlar) to defeat a cheating Adaptive AI. Actually, on an 81x81 km map, I can probably do it myself if I build no land units and devote my entire industry for 3/4ths of the game to defensive systems (SAM and missile defense) and strategic bombers. One feature which would be nice would be Carpet Bombing. A click and drag area for T1 and T2 bombers. That would make me smile. I dislike the T3 bombers, but they are a must-use as they are the most powerful. C'est la vie.

So begins another September. Septembers are notoriously bad for me, hence the foreboding I feel at the moment despite all the great things which will happen this month. If something bad will happen to me, it is in September. Not this year, thank you kindly. This is going to be one of the best months of my life. With grim determination, I set forth to be happy. >_>

Well, I thought I'd leave y'all with an update. I need to spend this evening finishing up that piece for ANF to deploy whilst I'm across the pond.

Whilst I'm across the pond. Wow, that's weird. It's been long in coming, though.

Poetry

Whereupon I play with a dictionary

Ian Mcleod

I thought she was of Faerie
seated above the prairie,
as in an aviary:
she, of the great constabulary
from here to Tipperary.
I didn't see dear Mary,
of that I'm sure--very,
and He I didn't see them bury.
As with all these things, nary
a doubt shall enter my Inner Sanctuary.
I think she was of Faerie.