COLLEEN TINKER
The moment caught me by surprise. It was Sunday, January 16—just two weeks ago—and Gary Inrig had just preached from John 3:31–36 ending with that last verse: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” Gary moved from the life-and-death impact of that verse into introducing the Lord’s Supper. Because Jesus took our sin and died the death that was our eternal sentence, our debt has been paid when we trust His finished work. Now we have life in Jesus, and we celebrate His body and blood which propitiated God’s wrath—Jesus’ own wrath—against sin!
As usual, we sang a song while the bread and juice were distributed, and that day we sang a song by CityAlight: “What Love My God.” I have sung this song many times, and it moves me:
WHAT LOVE MY GOD By Jonny Robinson, Michael Farren, Rich Thompson. What love my God would bring you down to earth What king would take a low and lonely birth Yet to this dark and broken place you came To sleep beneath the stars that you had made What love my God would send the Way of Life To walk the road, rejected and despised That you might know the weakness I possess And be my rock of strength and righteousness O Your love my God like a flood As heaven opened up pouring out on us O praise the King who came to the world In his love like a mighty flood What love my God could hold you to the tree To bear that overwhelming debt for me The Son of heaven leaves the Father’s side The Healer bleeds, the Life was made to die O Your love my God like a flood As heaven opened up pouring out on us O praise the King who came to the world In his love like a mighty flood What love my God, so gracious and extreme Was strong enough to come and fight for me To go through hell and down into the grave And raise me up to see you face to face You raise me up to see you face to face O Your love my God like a flood As heaven opened up pouring out on us O praise the King who came to the world In his love like a mighty flood
That Sunday, though, the last stanza caught me by surprise, and I could not stop the tears from coming: “What love my God, so gracious and extreme/Was strong enough to come and fight for me/To go through hell and down into the grave/And raise me up to see you face to face.”
The idea was not new, but for some reason the impact of that stanza overwhelmed me in a way I had never understood it before, and I realized that one more deep layer of Adventist obfuscation had just been stripped away.
When Jesus hung on that cross in the horrifying three-hour midday darkness, He experienced the wrath of God. He had taken our imputed sin into Himself and hung exposed between heaven and earth, shamed and mocked, but the horror of those hours was His separation from His Father. He took God’s wrath against our sin. The man Christ Jesus knew the infinite wrath of God against all our unbelief as He hung there, and finally He cried out in words that still echo in eternity, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus knew the horror of hell.
“What love my God, so gracious and extreme
Was strong enough to come and fight for me
To go through hell and down into the grave
And raise me up to see you face to face
You raise me up to see you face to face”
Adventism had taught me that God does not have wrath. Jesus, I heard Adventist pastors say, did not experience the wrath of God. He merely condescended to suffer exquisite torture to make it possible for people to be saved. He showed us how much He cared by taking our punishment—a bit like one Adventist mom I knew who would whip her son with a belt and then herself, saying, “This hurts me as much as it hurts you.”
I knew that paradigm was blasphemous, but that Sunday morning I realized that the darkness, the separation my Lord Jesus experienced during those black hours, was hell. He knew the wrath of God, and He satisfied that wrath by offering Himself—by taking not just one man’s imputed sin but all of our sin onto Himself and suffering all of God’s wrath against it.
Jesus went through hell and died so that He could raise me up to see Him face to face. God’s glory is no longer a death sentence for me. He wrath against my sin is propitiated by Jesus’ blood, and I can stand before Him, alive with Jesus’ resurrection life, and be transformed from glory to glory “just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).
Hell is real
Before He went to the cross Jesus told the Jews why He had come. After He had fed the 5,000 with miraculous bread and fish, the people flocked to him. Was this the one Moses had said would come? Was this man feeding them in the desert as Moses had mediated the manna centuries before? They wanted more miraculous bread!
Jesus didn’t satisfy them. He exposed their craving for sensation and said to them,
For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:38–40).
When the Jews grumbled, refusing to believe what Jesus had declared about Himself, He spoke to them again:
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me—not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:44–51).
Jesus came to this earth, God the Son incarnate as the Son of Man, for a single purpose. He did not come to show us how to keep the law or to vindicate God’s character or to shame us by His sinlessness or to obligate us to obey Him by guilting us with His suffering.
Jesus came to take the wrath of God for our sin—to experience hell instead of us—before giving up His life and going to the grave. He did this extreme sacrifice of suffering in order to open a new and living way for us to escape our domain of darkness and be brought to life, transferring us into His own kingdom.
Former Adventists often struggle to worship in Christian churches where the doctrine of hell is taught. We were so steeped in our physicalist worldview that death meant nothing to us except annihilation. The body is destroyed, and the person ceases to exist, we thought.
On the cross, however, Jesus showed us what hell is. However it “looks” in eternity, we know from His experience that its horror is the utter separation from the Source of Life, from the communion between our souls and God’s own heart. The grave was not Jesus’ hell; His hell was taking God’s wrath against sin while He was still alive!
Jesus said that the day is coming when the wicked will come forth from the grave to a resurrection of judgment (Jn. 5:29). The righteous—those who believe and trust in Him—will be resurrected to eternal life.
My Adventism taught me that there is no true hell, that the destruction of the wicked will be a “quick burn” which will last only as long as the heinousness of their sins. Jesus’ agony, however, reveals that hell is far, far more horrifying than being burned to annihilation.
Our sin is against a holy, infinite God, and our spiritual death is infinite and eternal—unless we believe in the Son.
My dear brothers and sisters who are still rooting Adventism out of your worldview, know this: Jesus came to save you.
Jesus became sin and experienced hell for you so that in Him you can become the righteousness of God (2 Cor .5:21)! Look at Him hanging on the cross and repent that you thought you had Him figured out. See Him cry out to His Father and give up His spirit—and see Him breaking out of the tomb three days later.
Look at Him—and believe. He will raise you up to see Him face to face. †
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