The Ridiculousness of Being "Saved" Based on What Theology You Profess

      Why does it make sense to us that God judges based on the theology someone professes? That is, why have we decided that what theological teachings we profess to believe are more important to God than whether or not we love or how we live? It's pretty clear from the testimony of Scripture that the God who is described and describes Himself in the pages therein is far more concerned with how we treat one another, how we love, and how we live our lives than with what we think He is or whether or not the Earth is young or old. Even Jesus taught explicitly that the final judgment would be based on how we treat the "least of these," the poor, the hungry, the foreigner, the sick, the prisoner, and so on. In the Scriptures, Widows and Orphans are high on the list of God's priorities while whether you're trinitarian or unitarian is not. So, given what God's M.O. actually is, why does it somehow make sense to us, even when He explicitly says otherwise, that "believing" a specific creed is the standard by which salvation is granted?

     The religions which we have constructed make no sense given who God has revealed Himself to be if you really sit down and think about them. Even the word "believe" isn't really the right translation for the word in Greek which all of this rests on. The better translation for Koine Greek is "trust," and that's a very different shade of meaning from just "believe." You can "believe" a certain set of facts, or at least you can say you do, or you can "trust" those facts. You can say you believe in Jesus Christ, or you can put your trust in Him. You can give mental assent to the truth of what He taught, or you can trust Him and do it. To actually conform to the conditions of the verb in Greek, you have to actually put your trust in Him enough to live as He taught.

     And what did He teach? In a nutshell, to love and be love for everyone. To forgive, turn the other cheek, not judge, go the extra mile, do good to those who hate you, and do to others what you want them to do to you.

     Here's another question, why have we decided that our salvation only has to do with the afterlife when Jesus explicitly said and preached that the Kingdom of Heaven is right here and right now, so close as to be touchable? He explicitly said that the Kingdom of God is inside of you. Nowhere in the New Testament is the deliverance which comes through Jesus Christ ever described as only pertaining to the afterlife, if it pertains to the afterlife at all. The writings of Paul in particular describe the effects of this deliverance or salvation as being in the immediate present and this life, not the great by and by.

     The truth is that I do know where these things come from. They come from medieval theologians in the dark ages trying to make things more comfortable for those wealthy and powerful rather than actually adhering to the discipleship which Jesus taught, and the Kingdom of Heaven which He and His apostles described. Because as Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven isn't in the afterlife, and it's not a metaphor for getting into the good place when you die. It's right here and right now inside of you. It's disengaging from your own malfunctioning flesh and coming under the control of, cooperating with, the Spirit of Christ already inside of you. It's returning to being the image of God just as He was the genuine image of God. It's submitting to Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, acting and speaking through you just as He submitted to the God and Father acting and speaking through Him.

     God doesn't care one whit about how you think the mechanics of the spiritual world work. No matter what, we're all wrong on that count anyway in some way. What He has always cared about is restoring us to being His image in the here and now, and that image is being love for all those around us and especially the person right next to us. This is what is most important to Him, how we treat each other no matter who "each other" is. That is, how we love.

The Most Important Diploma on My Wall

 I was going through our "important papers bag" a few days ago looking for something completely different when I ran across the worn, smudged, thirty three and a half year old diploma I hadn't paid attention to since I was about sixteen or so. It was February of 1992, and I was in my junior year of high school and a Police Explorer with the Westminster Police Department in Orange County, California. 

     That weekend, as part of the Police Explorer program, I attended the Orange County Law Enforcement Explorer Academy starting on the Friday evening and ending on the Monday afternoon. Put simply, if you were to take all two or three months of a regular Police Academy and role it into a four day boot camp for teenagers with very little sleep, that was what we signed up for. This wasn't a fun weekend camp. There were a couple hundred of us from many different Departments there. From the word go, our tactical officers were screaming in our faces, forcing pushups, and being as unpleasant as possible trying to get us to quit. I still remember there was one guy standing next to me who quit within five minutes. There were several others who followed suit. Their objective was to get at least one Explorer to quit every day.

     At the time, I was a sixteen year old kid with ADHD and undiagnosed ASD and attachment disorder that had quit almost everything that he had started after it got hard. Everyone knew that too. I remember I only lasted a week on the Freshman Football team at Bolsa Grande High School. My track record wasn't great. So for me, for who I was at the time, that weekend was hell and I felt it keenly. Between the constant yelling and the constant physical exercise and running (I still had asthma and couldn't keep up running to save my life), it was the hardest thing I'd ever attempted in my life.

     If I were to be honest, I wanted to quit within the first five minutes too. I didn't. I was determined to get through it and not just quit. They could kick me out, they could fail me, but I refused to quit, and it was the first time in my life that I made that choice. In order to do that, I kept telling myself, "I just want to see what happens next." And then that next thing would happen, and I would tell myself again, "I just want to see what happens next." I also told myself, to keep myself from smiling (because we would be punished for smiling at our tactical officers), "I'm in hell and that's all there is to it" as well as "Do everything you're told by the tac without question." Every five minutes I would tell myself these things for the next four days.

     We went through police procedure classes, PT, meals, and late night watch duty (we even took the oath to protect and defend the constitution), and then suddenly it was Monday, and somehow I had gained enough points to graduate (my classroom scores making up for my abysmal PT scores). I walked the stage in full uniform with my badge, and received my diploma with the other Explorer graduates.

     For me, it wasn't about being a Police Explorer. I would leave the Police Explorer program the following summer in order to become more involved in my church and pursue the career track I felt called to. For me, it was the first time I had finished something and not quit because it was too hard. I hadn't taken the easy way out. No one made accommodations for me. No one gave me a pass. I either kept up and worked as hard as everyone else or I was out. This four day academy taught me how to keep going even when things seemed too hard or nearly impossible for my AuDHD self.

     The lessons I learned from that weekend stayed with me as I then went on to pursue a career in ministry and attended Bible School in Wisconsin. Within months if not weeks of the semester starting I was running afoul of the deans for behaviors that I didn't even know were wrong or out of place. This particular Bible School put a heavy emphasis on conformity of both theology and behavior, and they just didn't know what to do with me. I took the lessons I learned from Explorer Academy and applied them here too, making plenty of mistakes, socially and behaviorally as I sought to play catch up and at least try to fit in and "pretend" to be a mature, relatively normal young adult; doing whatever I had to in order to keep going and not give up as well as not be told to leave. It was a rough two years, but that December of 1995, once again, I walked the stage and received my diploma as a graduate.

     The lessons I learned that one weekend in February of 1992 to not give up and keep going stayed with me for the rest of my life.

     Thinking it through, I decided to frame and hang this diploma next to my others on the wall of our library at home; the first time I ever thought to. I realized that if it hadn't been for this diploma, I probably wouldn't have earned the others that it now hangs next to.