thoughts on the news of the day: God wins

hmmm…..

            Pastor Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church in Michigan recently wrote a book called, “Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived”.  Bell challenges the idea that hell is a place of eternal horror for people who don’t believe in Jesus Christ.  To tell you the truth, his ideas aren’t all that new—they have been around a while.  But, they haven’t ever been expounded by an evangelical pastor in the controversial way that Bell does. 

            Bell proposes that in the end, God wins and love triumphs.  This brings me to the question, Did Osama bin Laden go to hell?  I am curious to know what Rob Bell would think.  Surely anyone who has suffered a loss in the 2001 terrorist attack would like to think that bin Laden had some consequences for his actions.  We would like to know that he didn’t get away eternally scott free for all the pain and suffering he inflicted on innocent people. 

            But is that how God sees it?  Isn’t everyone a child of God?  Doesn’t everyone ultimately receive grace no matter what their actions have been?  How do we reconcile these two very different ideas?  Bottom line is, we don’t.  Paradoxes exist in our world – ideas that seem to be contradictory.  They exist and we struggle with them if we have any spiritual life at all.

            I don’t know if bin Laden went to hell.  I haven’t been there and there is no one that I have ever heard of who has been to eternal damnation and come back to tell us about it.  So I have to go with the idea that God knows and that there are always consequences for actions and that in the end, God wins.

            hmmm…..