Love Truth Blog

“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” God entered into this world in the person of Jesus Christ as part of a plan to redeem lost sinners. The Lord had even prepared a prophet named John the Baptist to herald the arrival of the Christ. None of this was out of the blue; rather, God had spoken through the Old Testament prophets that a Messiah would be coming. However, when the long awaited Messiah had arrived, many people rejected Him. Jesus compared those who rejected Him as mutinous children resting opportunities to have fun with others. “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn,” said the Lord (Matt. 11:17). John the Baptist called people to repent; yet, many wept not for their sin, but dismissed the Baptizer as a demoniac. Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, pronounced the arrival of God’s kingdom, and there was every reason to celebrate; yet, many complained that He was a “drunkard...

Is Mahatma Gandhi in hell? A while back I watched this YouTube video with Mars Hill Michigan pastor Rob Bell asking this very question. It was a little teaser for his book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived . It was certainly a provocative piece, and this preacher with rock star status on the liberal lane of the emergent church highway 1 really got the social media pages buzzing with accusations about him slipping into universalism. After reading the book, my take is that Bell really finds the Christian doctrine of saints being resurrected to eternal life and sinners to eternal condemnation to be “misguided and toxic” (vii). He indeed desires readers to examine their concept of heaven and hell with the intent to open doorways into other ways of understanding the doctrine of hell asides eternal conscious punishment, to understand that heaven and hell can be experienced in the present as well as in the future, and to be open to the ideas th...

Bill Wiese, a former real estate broker, purports that on November 22, 1998 at 11:00 p.m. he fell asleep alongside his wife Annette and woke up 3:00 a.m. the next morning in the fiery pit of hell, which he describes in a book entitled 23 Minutes in Hell (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2006). Naked inside a fifteen by ten foot stone prison cell, Wiese testifies to being tortured by four demonic creatures that stood ten to thirteen feet tall that had the form of humans with grotesque reptilian features. After crawling out of his cell, he witnessed a full panorama of hell’s utter darkness and unquenchable fire. He felt intense physical physical pain, experienced an unquenchable thirst, smelled foul odors far worst than any putrid thing in the world of the living, heard the screams of a myriad of tortured souls, and felt the utter hopelessness of those who come to realize escape to be futile, for God kept out of his thought process the very idea of a savior (1-14). After 23 minutes in...