CHAPTER 28

The Choice

Loving God or Loving the Darkness

Michael McClymond

Michael McClymond is professor of modern Christianity at Saint Louis University. He has held teaching or research appointments at Wheaton College, Westmont College, the University of California–San Diego, Emory University, Yale University, University of Birmingham (UK), and Humboldt University (Berlin). He wrote or edited thirteen volumes, published about a hundred articles or book chapters, and was co-chair for both Evangelical Studies and Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements in the American Academy of Religion.

John 3:16 is a well-known verse. These familiar words are often understood as suggesting that the purpose of God’s love was nothing more than rescuing people from eternal punishment. But God is pursuing something far greater than helping people to escape the flames of hell and giving them never-ending lives. God created people to be lovers of God, to serve Him in lives of worship.

The next verse in John 3 says that “God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him” (v. 17 NASB 77). As this passage indicates, judgment is a process of distinguishing and separating. Jesus announces that God’s judgment is already taking place as people go through their lives: “And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil” (v. 19 NASB 77). The light of God, which came fully in Jesus, is a present-day reality that continues to expose what is in the hearts of people. Even though God created people to love and serve Him, they can choose to love “the darkness rather than the light.” Jesus made it clear that those who practice evil hate the light of God and instead love darkness.

How is it possible that people choose to love darkness—the empty, cold, and pointless nothingness of evil? Jesus clarifies the choice that people make: “For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought (literally “worked”) in God” (vv. 20–21). So people make the fundamental choice to love evil and reject the joy of walking and working with God.

One scholar described the process of judgment:

People today often reject the whole idea of judgment. They feel that it is not in keeping with the concept of God as a loving Father that He should judge people, and sentence them to hell. This objection overlooks entirely the way that judgment works. It is not that a tyrannical God looks down grimly on men and picks out certain ones with whom He will have nothing to do. God is love. People . . . choose darkness and refuse light.¹

C. S. Lewis described the self-sorting process of God’s judgment:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no people in hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.²

If someone asked why I believe that some persons reject God and end up being rejected by God, my answer would not only be “because this is what the Bible teaches” but also “because I have eyes to see.” It should be obvious to us that we live in a world in which pride, stubbornness, and wickedness cause people to turn away from God’s gracious offer of mercy. This is the world in which we live. This is what we see around us every day. This is what we read in the news. To picture a world where everyone loves God is utopian and illusory.

Despite the clear biblical teaching on heaven and hell, the Bible seems not to present the perishing of the damned, nor the prospect of their future suffering in hell, as a primary motive for preaching the gospel. Instead, the gospel proclamation is the means by which God fulfills His promise to be lovingly obeyed in faith. The ultimate outcome is heaven for those who believe, though heaven remains obscure to us in the present life: “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor 2:9). What the Bible reveals about heaven is that it will be a place of worship, where God’s people eternally rejoice in God, and God eternally rejoices in the joy that His people have in Himself. This unending worship will include persons drawn from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation on earth (Rev 5:9; 7:9).

RETURN TO LESSON 4: Mandate for the Nations

Notes

1. Leon Morris, The Biblical Doctrine of Judgment (London: Tyndale, 1960), 51–52.

2. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, in The C. S. Lewis Collection: Signature Classics and Other Major Works (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 721.