Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

by Brian Zahnd

“Do you believe in Jesus in your heart or just in your head?” He went on to say that if we believed in Jesus in our heads but not our hearts, we would miss heaven by eighteen inches and wind up in hell forever! More anxiety-inducing theology! Now I had to decide if I had faith in my heart or if I was on my way to hell because I only believed in Jesus with my head. That’s a lot of pressure for a twelve-year-old…or anyone. I had grown up believing in Jesus, but now I had to decide if I was believing with my head or my heart. My eternal destiny was at stake. If I got it wrong, I would be tortured forever. But how could I know? How could I be sure?

That kind of theology is a prescription for religious psychosis!

Oh! Ephraim is my dear, dear son, my child in whom I take pleasure! Every time I mention his name, my heart bursts with longing for him! Everything in me cries out for him. Softly and tenderly I wait for him.*4

Ephraim is idolatrous, adulterous, backslid, covenant-breaking, sinful Israel. But Ephraim is still the child of God, and Jeremiah reveals God’s unconditional love for his prodigal son, the wayward Ephraim.

This is the heart of God toward me. Toward you. This is the good news that God is love. At our worst, at our most sinful, at our furthest remove from God and his will, God’s attitude toward us remains one of unwavering love.

Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.

The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love.

“The wrath of God is understood as divine consent to our own self-destructive defiance.”*19 When we sin against the two great commandments—to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves—we suffer the inevitable consequences of acting against love. We can call this the wrath of God if we like; the Bible does, but that doesn’t mean that God literally loses his temper.

God’s wrath is a biblical metaphor does not make the consequences of sin any less real or painful.

When we live against the grain of love we suffer the shards of self-inflicted suffering.

And what about the fear of God? The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love. We fear God in the same way that as a child I feared my father. I had the good fortune to have a wise and loving father, and I had deep respect, reverence, admiration, and, perhaps, a kind of fear for my father, but I never for one moment thought that my dad hated me or would harm me. God does not hate you, and God will never harm you. But your own sin, if you do not turn away from it, will bring you great harm. The wisdom that acknowledges this fact is what we call the fear of God. Sin is deadly, but God is love.

In the hands of God, there is no place to hide.

The hands of God have been stretched out in love where they were nailed to a tree. The nail-pierced hands of God now reach out to every doubter and every sufferer, revealing the wounds of love. The hands of God are not hands of wrath but hands of mercy. To be a sinner in these hands is where the healing begins.

The Bible is sent by God and inspired by God, but the Bible is not God. The Holy Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—not Father, Son, and Holy Bible.

The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. It’s a process. God doesn’t evolve, but Israel’s understanding of God obviously does.

What is an enemy? An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard.

Calvary is not where we see how violent God is; Calvary is where we see how violent our civilization is. The justice of God is not retributive; the justice of God is restorative.

The cross is not what God does; the cross is who God is!

The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives.

A forgiveness-centered view of the cross saves us from a pathological anxiety about God, which is so detrimental to the soul.

In this icon the hands of Saint Anthony hold a scroll bearing the words “I no longer fear God, but I love him. For love casts out fear.”

The peace of no longer being afraid of God has been hard won. It has come from relentlessly seeking to know God as he is revealed in Christ.

Jesus isn’t talking about what happens to people when they die. Jesus is talking about an avoidable threat in this life. In effect Jesus is saying, “Unless you rethink everything, embrace the way of peace that I am teaching, and abandon your hell-bent flight toward violent revolution, you’re all going to die by Roman swords and collapsing buildings.”

Jesus’s teaching on hell is basically this: if you refuse to love, you cannot enter the kingdom of God and will end up a lonely, tormented soul.

Elder Zosima says, “I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘The suffering of being no longer able to love.’ ”*26 Jean-Paul Sartre famously said in his existentialist play No Exit, “Hell is other people.” Elder Zosima’s response to Sartre’s cynicism would be, “No, hell is the inability to love other people.” Dostoevsky’s Zosima seems very close to how we should understand hell. It has something to do with a wrong reaction to the very essence of God: love.

God has a single disposition toward sinners, and that is love.

Those who are suffering in hell, are suffering in being scourged by love….It is totally false to think that sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love.

But love’s power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it.*27

God has a single disposition toward sinners, that of unconditional, unwavering love. From the heart of God there flows an eternal river of fire, the fire of unquenchable love. The question is not whether God loves us but how we respond to God’s love. To those who respond to God’s love with love—“We love because he first loved us”*30—the river of fire is a source of warmth and light. But to those who refuse to love, this same river of fire produces torment.

When hate wins, hell is inevitable.

The gospel is the beautiful story of how God is bringing the world out of bondage to sin and death through the triumph of Jesus Christ.

No one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. —Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life

The book of Revelation is easily the most misunderstood and misused book in the Bible. It’s the book that had the hardest time gaining admission into the New Testament canon of Scripture. Fifteen centuries after its composition, in the early days of the Reformation, Martin Luther wanted to remove it from the Protestant Bible.

Protestants and Catholics have been weaponizing the book of Revelation ever since.

The only way to consistently interpret the book of Revelation is to acknowledge that everything is communicated by symbol.

Over the years I’ve heard countless sermons and songs about the Lion and the Lamb in the book of Revelation. But they’ve missed the point. There is no lion in Revelation, only a Lamb…a little slaughtered Lamb.

when we look for Jesus to be a lion, we see only a Lamb.

Armageddon isn’t the end of war; Armageddon is endless war. We cannot war our way to peace. There is no way to peace; peace is the way, and Jesus is the Prince of Peace.

We reason that if Jesus is going to kill two hundred million people upon his return,*5 what does it matter if we kill one hundred thousand people at Hiroshima? This kind of reading of Revelation gives license to military superpowers to employ massive violence, which is exactly the opposite of what John is trying to accomplish!

A Left Behind theology of Revelation turns the Lamb into a beast!

The book of Revelation is not where the good news of the gospel goes to die.

Love is how we are to think about God, talk about God, believe in God.