This week, I would like to talk about a video that I saw on YouTube. The video was by Matt Walsh and it's a clip from when he was on Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special. In the clip Matt talks to Ben about Christianity. Hearing some of the things said in the video, I thought some things had to be addressed. The video starts with the two talking about the how to get to heaven and what is required to get to heaven. I have talked quite extensively about this in previous blog posts, but I'll reiterate it here. Jesus said in John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me." This means that you must know Jesus and accept his forgiveness to be able to make it to heaven. Matt says that your belief in Jesus is not enough to make it into heaven. He claims that you need to have works with your faith. This is only partially true. Yes, you must have works that represent your faith, but they are not required at all to make it into heaven. This is made explicitly clear in Ephesians 2:8-10. "For it is by grace you are saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus, to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." Let's break this down. The first part of this verse says that we are saved (aka going to heaven) by grace, specifically the grace of God, through faith. Grace and mercy are often used interchangeable today, but they have different meanings. Mercy is God not giving us the punishments that we deserve. Grace on the other hand is giving us what we don't deserve. So, the grace of God in this context is God giving us his Son Jesus to pay for the sins of the entire world. This says that we are saved by Jesus dying on the cross. This is echoed by John 14:6. The next part of the verse says it is a gift from God, not by works, so that no one can boast. In other words, Christians are not to boast about the works that they do because their works mean nothing when it comes to being saved. Does that mean that we should not do works? Of course not. To be saved we must make the decision to accept Jesus' forgiveness. We do this by loving God. This involves a desire to get to know God more and to do good works. If you don't have the desire to do good works, then you don't love God. I've mentioned the song "Screen Door" by Rich Mullins before. I think it says it well by saying that "faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine." Here is another place that Matt said something that was wrong by the definition of the words that he used. He said that belief is not enough. You need faith. Well faith is belief in something that is not known. You can have faith that a chair exists. Faith is not works. People need faith, but they need more than that to make it into heaven according to the Bible. They must love God, which involves a desire to do more works.
The next thing that Matt and Ben talk about are several different representations of what it takes to get to heaven. Matt says that he finds it too cruel to think that God sends people to Hell based off things that they do. He said that he also doesn't understand the argument that people have to choose heaven because if there was a choice, he doesn't understand why people would choose anything other than heaven. He is taking a vastly narrowed view of a choice and this choice for everyone doesn't fall into this narrow view. This is not as easy choice as he would make it sound. Not loving God and giving up on getting to heaven is easy, significantly easier than trying to get to heaven. Believing in anything is hard enough but believing in God is the hardest thing to do. People will make fun of you. People will try to hurt you. Choosing Heaven is not at all easy to do.
Next, they start to talk about love. Matt makes an appeal that includes people who are not religious going to heaven one day if they have love in them since no love can exist in hell. This again is a far too simplistic view to have as it yields complete and utter falsehoods like this. Look back at John 14:6. People are not able to get to heaven except through Christ. I've already said that we need to love God and that's what brings about our desire to do works. To understand this a little bit better, we need to know the definitions of love in the original text. Since these are New Testament topics that we are talking about, the original text would have been written in Greek. There are several words for love in the Greek language. The most common in the Bible is agape which refers to the love of God for his people or the love of people for God. This means that people who love God will go to heaven, but unless it is God that they love, they don't experience this agape love, then they will go to hell, even if they experienced another type of love. Therefore, there cannot be any agape love in hell, but there can be other forms of love.
The final point of the video was where Matt and Ben talked about the term God is love. This one will be a short and simple point to make. The Bible says God is love and even the original Greek says, when directly translated, God love is. The morphed view of love happened when the Bible was translated into English and the versions of love in the Greek were morphed into one word. Therefore, God is the love of God for his people or of people for their God.
Romans 10:9 says, "If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Therefore, you are saved if you believe in God and you follow him with your heart. This involves the desire to do good works. This bible verse was quoted at the end of the Lifemark movie that I watched this weekend. If you haven't watched it yet, I would highly recommend it. It is one of the most inspiring movies I have ever watched. It's about the true adoption story of David Scotton. It talks about how close his birth mother had come to aborting him and shows how thankful he is to his birth mother as he goes to meet her. I've talked about abortion in previous blog posts. I don't blame anyone for getting an abortion. Who I blame are the people who are trying to normalize it and are willing for perform these abortions knowing the medical science behind it knowing that the thing they are killing is so like a person that it can't be classified as anything other than human. I pray that these people see the wrong of their ways and I pray for those considering abortion that they realize the possibility of adoption to bring a life in this world and give their child the best life they can possibly have.
Until next week,
Seth Pohle