The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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who people are from God’s perspective. Who we already are. They insisted that people can live a new life, counting ourselves “dead to sin but alive to God.”15
When we stumble and fall back into old patterns, we call them what they are: old patterns. Old ways. Old habits of the old person.
Something new is happening inside us.
Jesus said that as this new reality takes over our hearts and lives and minds and actions, we are crossing over “from death to life.”16 He called this new kind of life “eternal life.” For Jesus, eternal life wasn’t a state of being for the future that we would enter into somewhere else; it is a quality of life that starts now.
Eternal life then is a certain kind of life I am living more and more now and will go on forever.17 I am living more and more in connection with God, and I will live connected with God forever.
This has huge implications for when I do stumble, when I sin and the old person comes back from the dead for a few moments.
I admit it.
I confess it.
I thank God I am forgiven.
I make amends with anyone who has been affected by my actions.
And then I move on.
Not because sin isn’t serious, but because I am taking seriously who God says I am. The point isn’t my failure; it is God’s success in remaking me into the person he originally intended me to be.
God’s strength, not mine.
God’s power, not mine.
So what does this mean for the Christian life? To begin, Christians are people learning who they are in Christ. We are being taught about our new identity. Do you see how deeply this new identity affects the life of a community? I heard a teacher say that if people were taught more about who they are, they wouldn’t have to be told what to do.18 It would come naturally. When we see religious communities spending most of their time trying to convince people not to sin, we are seeing a community that has missed the point. The point isn’t sin management.19 The point is who we are now.
Often communities of believers in the New Testament are identified as “saints.” The word saints is a translation of the Greek word hagios, which means “holy or set apart ones.” Those who are “in Christ.” Not because of what they have done, but because of what God has done. There is nothing we can do, and there is nothing we ever could have done, to earn God’s favor. We already have it.
Jesus tells a parable about a young son who leaves home, hits bottom, and returns in shame. His father sees him from far off, runs to him, embraces him, and announces a party in honor of his homecoming.
In this story, God is the God who stands in the driveway, waiting for his kids to come home.
So the party starts and everybody is celebrating, and the older brother comes in from the field mad. He wants to know why his brother gets a party and he doesn’t. The parable ends with the father telling the older son, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” The father wants the older son to know that everything he wants he has always had; there is nothing he could ever do to earn it. The elder son’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t have anything; it’s that he has had it all along but refused to trust that it was really true.20
We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.
Let’s take this further. As one writer puts it, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”21 While we were unable to do anything about our condition, while we were helpless, while we were unaware of just how bad the situation was, Jesus died.
And when Jesus died on the cross, he died for everybody.
Everybody.
Everywhere.
Every tribe, every nation, every tongue, every people group.22
Jesus said that when he was lifted up, he would draw all people to himself.23
All people. Everywhere.
Everybody’s sins on the cross with Jesus.
So this reality, this forgiveness, this reconciliation, is true for everybody. Paul insisted that when Jesus died on the cross, he was reconciling “all things, in heaven and on earth, to God.”24 All things, everywhere.
This reality then isn’t something we make true about ourselves by doing something. It is already true. Our choice is to live in this new reality or cling to a reality of our own making.
God is retelling each of our stories in Jesus. All of the bad parts and the ugly parts and the parts we want to pretend never happened are redeemed. They seemed pointless and they were painful at the time, but God retells our story and they become the moments when God’s grace is most on display. We find ourselves asking, am I really forgiven of that? The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true. Our choice becomes this: We can trust his retelling of the story, or we can trust our telling of our story. It is a choice we make every day about the reality we are going to live in.
And this reality extends beyond this life.
Heaven is full of forgiven people.
Hell is full of forgiven people.
Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for.
Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for.
The difference is how we choose to live, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust.
Ours or God’s.
When we choose God’s vision of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever. This is the life of heaven, here and now. And as we live this life, in harmony with God’s intentions for us, the life of heaven becomes more and more present in our lives. Heaven comes to earth. This is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” There is this place, this realm, heaven, where things are as God desires them to be. As we live this way, heaven comes here. To this place, this world, the one we’re living in.
Two Realms
Now if there is a life of heaven, and we can choose it, then there’s also another way. A way of living out of sync with how God created us to live. The word for this is hell: a way, a place, a realm absent of how God desires things to be. We can bring heaven to earth; we can bring hell to earth.
For Jesus, heaven and hell were present realities. Ways of living we can enter into here and now. He talked very little of the life beyond this one because he understood that the life beyond this one is a continuation of the kinds of choices we make here and now.
For Jesus, the question wasn’t, “How do I get into heaven?” but “How do I bring heaven here?”
The question wasn’t, “How do I get in there?” but “How do I get there here?”
I was in Rwanda two years ago doing research on the AIDS crisis. It had been almost ten years since