JOIN MY EMAIL LIST FOR CONTENT UPDATES
NOTES
If you disobey God, is he out to get you like a mean, vindictive, lawyer looking to take you to court and sue you? Or is he always following you around to make his blessings rain on you if you walk in obedience to him?
Say you told a little white lie about your friend’s ex-boyfriend to make her feel better about breaking up. A week later, you’re driving to work and your front passenger tire blows out, making you swerve off the road and crash into a pole. You’re fine. But your car’s wrecked. Was that God getting back at you for that white lie? What if you’re walking on a city sidewalk and you notice someone dropped his wallet. You pick it up, see five crisp 100-dollar bills. Then, you notice the man’s business card with his number. You call him. Let him know where you are and y’all meet up so he can get his wallet. When he arrives, he thanks you for your kindness, pulls out one of those hundreds and hands it to you as a nice tip for your honesty. Was that tip God immediately rewarding you for doing good?
Who hasn’t had those kinds of thoughts? You think you’re receiving bad for doing bad and receiving good for doing good. This perspective is very common. I would say natural—and whether you follow Christ or not. Countless cultures across the world and throughout history have viewed God in this way. Many still do. But this kind of immediate reaction from God—whether we do good or bad—is not what the Bible teaches. It is unbiblical. Sure, sometimes God does immediately discipline or even punish folks for bad behavior and shower gifts upon others for doing good. But … But that kind of correspondence between our actions and our circumstances is not always how life works. People who do bad have it easy and prosper and people who do good suffer loss and hardship. It’s a fact of life. It’s what the Bible teaches. Now, if that’s what the Bible teaches, then why do Christians still operate with that kind of retribution mentality?
Well, one key cause of it, in my opinion, is what I call heaven-aimed Christianity. This flavor of Christianity emphasizes that Jesus came to save us from the earth and take us to heaven to live with him there forever. So when a Christian dies, he or she goes to heaven and stays in heaven. Here’s how it goes. When humanity rebelled against God, God made them forfeit the earth. So the earth has a place for now, but eventually the earth will not remain. Therefore, God must have made us for heaven. But as Christians, we aren’t in heaven. We are “stuck,” if you will, on earth until we die and get to heaven. So, according to heaven-aimed Christianity, one might say, “We tell others about Jesus” (which is biblical), “We worship God” (which is biblical), “We do well and we do right” (which is biblical), “We learn from God and grow our faith” (which also is biblical). All, right. But there’s a subtle flaw. Heaven-aimed Christianity easily makes you think that in this current holding period, until heaven, God ferociously reacts to your behavior as a way to train you and teach you, correct you and chastise you, bless you and reward you. In other words, your relationship with God becomes contractual. And in your aim to get blessing and reward, you read the Bible to find out what he wants and give him what he wants so you can get what you want: blessing and reward, prosperity and ease. Do you see the reasoning? Can you relate to it?
Early on in my Christian journey, my mind often drifted there. I was a competitive golfer. So if I lost a tournament, I would think over the shots of my rounds where my ball was merely inches away from something better. Missing 4 puts by just a hair, being a foot out of bounds, a bad kick into the sand. And there’s your tournament. Then I’d reflect back over the prior weeks and connect it with something bad I must have done. My flawed thinking was due to heaven-aimed Christianity.
God did not give us the Bible in order to teach us how we can earn his favor. God did not give us the Bible in order to teach us how to place him in our debt. God did not give us the Bible in order for us to manipulate him to give us our dream life today. That posture is very easy to adopt with heaven-aimed Christianity. It is very subtle. But it is poisonous because it creates false expectations when reading the Bible. It creates false assumptions about the Bible. It projects false reasons for having a Bible in the first place. All of us have an impulse in us to try to please God in order to get from God. That impulse is part of our corrupt nature that leads us to mistreat others—we call it abusing the relationship or using a person without carrying about the person. Now, I’m not saying heaven-aimed Christianity automatically causes you to use the Bible that way. I’m saying if you follow Christ and sense yourself using the Bible as a tool to learn about God and then scratch his back so he will scratch yours, then it’s very likely you’re in step with heaven-aimed Christianity.
And right now, I want to express a different kind of Christianity more in line with God’s Word. I call it heaven-now Christianity. Heaven-now Christianity teaches that Jesus saves us and will take us to heaven when we die, but he will eventually return to the earth to remake it and that those who are saved will return with him to live in perfect bodies on a perfect earth in a perfect relationship with our perfect God and his perfect community. That remaking part, that renewal part, that transformative part starts right now. Even though it’s partial, it starts right now. By grace, God brings heaven, himself and his power, to you so that you can live on earth the life of heaven. So you can have a taste of the future and express in a dark world the light of the future.
That means you can experience Christ in a deeper way than you could before you followed him. He gives you joy and peace and strength and wisdom so you can navigate this chaotic world. Heaven-now Christianity teaches that when you approach the Bible, you first receive the word of his grace. What he offers and gives to you. Not what you must earn from him. It is by grace he saves you. It is by grace he sustains you. It is by grace speaks with you. It is by grace he sends you into the world to be heaven’s representative. Heaven-aimed Christianity doesn’t connect how you live in the present with how you will live in the future. There’s not earth in the future so what you do presently on earth has little overlap. Heaven-now Christianity says you receive heaven now so that you can begin to think, act, feel, and be as if you were in heaven. Of course we still live under the mountain of sin and the curse and death and pain. Heaven-now Christianity, though, teaches that God gives you his light so that you will shine all the more brightly in this domain of darkness.
I want to end this post with a few sentences from the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Philippi. They express this idea of heaven-now Christianity very well. It’s Philippians 2:12–16 from the New Living Translation:
Dear friends, you always followed my instructions when I was with you. And now that I am away, it is even more important. Work hard to show the results of your salvation, obeying God with deep reverence and fear. For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him. Do everything without complaining and arguing, so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God, shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people. Hold firmly to the word of life; then, on the day of Christ’s return, I will be proud that I did not run the race in vain and that my work was not useless.
I’m Aaron Massey. Thank you for listening.