Among Bible quandaries, few rank higher than one caused by Revelation 21:4, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” The context of this verse is creation of a new earth for a holy city populated with those who have believed God’s promise of eternal life. The passage is meant to encourage believers who are enduring hardships in their physical lives.
The quandary of this passage is understanding how the memory of hardships can be dismissed from our recollection in the holy city. If those memories are removed, wouldn’t that alter who we are? If they aren’t removed, wouldn’t they continue to make us sad on reflection? This situation seems unbelievable or at best, unimaginable.
Yet those of us who will be there, have already believed something even more unbelievable, the gospel message of Jesus. We have believed that our sins have been forgiven simply because we trust in the promise of Jesus that he will return to take us to the holy city. And that makes us a small minority of all the people who have ever lived. The Bible tells us that the majority of people will never get past their doubts that his offer is real, that he will return for them, or that he even exists. They are the ones who are on the wide path to destruction mentioned in Matthew 7:13 because the only alternate final destination, besides the holy city, is the lake of fire, a place with degrees of punishment.
It isn’t easy to believe the gospel message. It offends our intellectual pride and makes us subject to ridicule by people who value their intelligence above everything else. They say we are blinded by indoctrination, inferiority complexes, or mental defects, to believe what we can’t validate with our own senses. But we know otherwise, that none of these things apply to us. Ironically, their denunciation of Christians is itself a validation of the gospel message because their reaction to it was predicted by Christ two thousand years ago. An easy prediction, they counter, because what man in his right mind would NOT reject the gospel? Well, let’s answer that.
What man wouldn’t reject the gospel? Or put another way, what man would believe it? The answer is, the one who has dismissed his intellectual pride, the pride which forbids a spiritual world and getting something for nothing. How did that happen? Was he brainwashed? Or did he experience something from God that the intellectuals haven’t, something that proves His existence and tells this one the message is true? Belief or trust in a person is not something you can work toward with mental exercises. You can’t force yourself into genuine belief. It is an attitude built upon one’s experiences with another person, in this case, Christ. You can’t control those experiences to produce the desired result because you can’t control the other person. Honestly, you can’t even control your own reaction to them. So the outcome of a relationship is usually anything but trust. And that is why God comes into every person’s life as a friend, to help their unbelief.
One of my favorite Bible passages, because I identify with it, is found in Mark 9:24. The situation involves a father whose son has been possessed for many years by a spirit who renders his son mute. He petitions Jesus to remove the muting spirit from his son. When Jesus tells the father that all things are possible if he can believe, the father immediately replies, ‘I believe sir. Be helping my unbelief.’ That said, Jesus removes the spirit from the man’s son. So there are some of us who can generate a feeble belief, at least enough to ask for more belief with expectation. And God responds by giving more belief until we can believe the unbelievable gospel message. That is how genuine faith in Christ comes to every Christian. It is an enablement by God and without it, every man would flee from Him (Romans 3:11).
So, I have experienced the non-believer’s point of view because we are all born with it. And I have felt his doubt because I once had it too. But unlike me, has the doubting intellectual experienced genuine faith in anything that can’t be validated by his senses? Perhaps…maybe love for somebody besides himself, defined by the rational mind as irrational affection for another person based on nothing tangible. You would think that if a person could give genuine, unconditional love to another person, that he could imagine how God would do the same for him. But perhaps not. If God knows the secrets of every man, and He does (Romans 8:27), He would know how self-centered and potentially evil every man is. How could God love someone like that? Here again, we are called on to believe the unbelievable.
According to the Bible, the love of God is outside or above the natural environment of man (Ephesians 3:19). It is supernatural, a miracle in the physical world, and so is believing the gospel message of Christ. Every time somebody comes to faith in Christ through his message, we who remember how we got there, rejoice in yet another miracle of God. And we don’t think less of people steeped in intellectual pride because we understand firsthand that it takes a miracle to overcome it. But we do grieve for them because one day, without that miracle in their lives, our sorrow will be gone but theirs will last forever.
