Love Wins: At the Heart of Life’s Big Questions. Rob Bell
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you say,
or who you are,
or what you do,
or what you say you’re going to do,
or who your friends are,
or who you’re married to,
or whether you give birth to children?
These questions bring us to one of the first “conversion” stories of the early church. We read in Acts 22 about a man named Saul (later, Paul) who is traveling to the city of Damascus to persecute Christians when he hears a voice ask him, “Why do you persecute me?”
He responds, “Who are you, Lord?”
The voice then replies: “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting. . . . Get up and go into Damascus, and there you will be told all that you have been assigned to do.”
That’s his “conversion” experience?
Paul is asked a question.
Paul then asks a question in response to the question he’s just been asked.
He’s then told it’s Jesus and he should go into the city and he’ll know what to do.
Is it what you say,
or who you are,
or what you do,
or what you say you’re going to do,
or who your friends are,
or who you’re married to,
or whether you give birth to children?
Or is it what questions you’re asked?
Or is it what questions you ask in return?
Or is it whether you do what you’re told and go into the city?
And then in Romans 11, Paul writes, “And in this way all Israel will be saved.”
All of Israel?
So is it the tribe, or family, or ethnic group you’re born into?
But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let’s set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it’s more simple than that. As some would say, “Just believe.”
In Luke 11, the Pharisees say that the only way that Jesus can drive out demons is that he’s in league with the devil. Then in Mark 3, Jesus’s family members come to get him because they think he’s “out of his mind.” And then in Matthew 16, when Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is, they tell him, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
What we see in these passages and many others is that almost everybody, at least at first, has a difficult time grasping just who Jesus is.
Except for one particular group.
In Luke 4 a man possessed by an “evil spirit” yells at Jesus, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
And in Matthew 8, when Jesus arrives on the shore in the region of the Gadarenes, the demon-possessed men shout at him, “What do you want with us, Son of God?”
And in Mark 1, Jesus wouldn’t let demons speak, “because they knew who he was.”
In the stories about Jesus a lot of people, including his own family, are uncertain about exactly who Jesus is and what he’s up to—except demons, who know exactly who he is and what’s he doing.
As James wrote: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder” (chap. 2).
And then in Luke 7, a woman who has lived a “sinful life” crashes a dinner Jesus is at and pours perfume on his feet after wetting his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Jesus then tells her that her “sins have been forgiven.”
So demons believe,
and washing Jesus’s feet with your tears gets your sins forgiven?
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We could go on,
verse after verse,
passage after passage,
question after question,
about heaven and hell and the afterlife
and salvation and believing and judgment
and who God is and what God is like
and how Jesus fits into any of it.
But this isn’t just a book of questions.
It’s a book of responses to these questions.
And so, away we go.
First, heaven.
Chapter 2
Here Is the New There
First,
heaven.
This is a photograph of a painting that hung on a wall in my grandmother’s house from before I was born. As you can see, in the center of the picture is a massive cross, big enough for people to walk on. It hangs suspended in space, floating above an ominous red and black realm that threatens to swallow up whoever takes a wrong step. The people in the picture walking on the cross are clearly headed somewhere—and that somewhere is a city. A gleaming, bright city with a wall around it and lots of sunshine.
It’s as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line “You know, we really should work together sometime . . .”
When I asked my sister Ruth if she remembered this painting, she immediately replied, “Of course, it gave us all the creeps.”
It’s striking what we remember, isn’t it? An image or idea can lodge itself in our consciousness to such a degree that, years later, it’s still there. This is especially true when it comes to religion.
My wife, Kristen, and I often talk about raising our kids in such a way that they have as little as possible to unlearn later on in life.
One of the only violent images Jesus ever uses is when he speaks about those who cause children to stumble. With a shockingly hyperbolic flourish, he declares that the only fitting punishment is to tie a giant stone around their neck and throw them into the sea (Matt. 18).
Death by drowning—Jesus’s idea of punishment for those who lead children astray. A haunting warning if there ever was one about the spongelike nature of a child’s psyche.
I’m not saying that my grandma’s painting did that, but it clearly unnerved at least two of us.
I show you this painting not because of its astounding ability to somehow fuse Dungeons and Dragons, Billy Graham, and that barbecue pit your uncle made out of half of a fifty-gallon barrel into one piece of art, but because this painting tells a story.
It’s a story of movement,
from one place to the next,
from one realm to another,
from death to life,
with the cross as the bridge, the way, the hope.
From what we can see, the people in the painting are going somewhere, somewhere they’ve chosen to go, and they’re leaving something behind so that they can go there.
But the story also tells us something else,
something really, really important,
something significant about location.
According to the painting,
all of this is happening somewhere else.
Giant