The God Delusion

2 Thessalonians 2

There’s a lot going on in today’s passage, particularly in the middle section, on which I’ve chosen to preach. Coincidentally, this section is left out of the Revised Common Lectionary. In her commentary, Beverly Gaventa suggests this might be because “it raises issues that make us terribly uncomfortable…2 Thessalonians starkly portrays the persistence of evil in the world created and sustained by God.” (1) It also portrays a God who gives us over to delusion. There is much debate over whether 2 Thessalonians is actually written by Paul, but verse 11 sounds like it could have been written by Richard Dawkins, outspoken atheist and author of The God Delusion. “For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion, leading them to believe what is false.” Wait. What? What does this even mean? Who are we talking about? And why does God seem to allow the wicked deception of Satan to persist, why does God send a powerful delusion to cause some to be condemned? The passage ends, “so that all who have not believed the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness will be condemned.” What we have here is very similar to Romans 1:24-25. “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”

If read the wrong way, these passages can make us think that God gives up on us, that grace is in limited supply. But I think we’ve prepared ourselves to approach these texts with new eyes having looked at the gift of grace a bit more thoroughly these last few weeks.

We've looked at grace and forgiveness, and how God forgives us to wipe away the story of sin that tethers our potential to selfish inclinations, that tethers our sense of worth to wealth, that tethers our future to fate. God forgives us to wipe the slate clean and write a new story in our hearts. God wants us to trust that we can do better, that our nation can do better, that our world can do better. God wants us to place our faith in the vision of hope found in the mind of God, commonly referred to as the Kingdom of God. God forgives us because we can do better.

We’ve looked at the challenge to love our enemies and the challenge that also poses for us to trust and love God and God’s will for us against the temptation to trust and love ourselves and our own plans more. The challenge to love enemies is also challenges us to love ourselves differently, to see ourselves as God sees us. This is the type of self-love that opens us to grace and the capacity for love that grace makes possible.

Today’s passage has to do with those who refuse grace, resist the challenge to trust God, trust their own authority, who “trade the truth about God for a lie.” The “lawless one” referred to in Thessalonians is like this. His way is prepared by a religious rebellion, and his lawlessness is “characterized by the refusal to submit to the authority of God as creator, the refusal to acknowledge God as God.” (2)

This is the delusion to which God hands over those who take pleasure in unrighteousness, this is the delusion we looked at last week when we talked about the importance of confession. As 1 John puts it: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” But we live in a world where deception wins out most of the time. We favor the truth so long as it benefits us. No one seems sure where to turn for truth, who to trust, who to believe, so they go with their gut and trust what they want to be true. We exchange God’s truth for our gut.

“The impulse to deny God’s godliness,” writes Beverly Gaventa, “to deny that we are created and not creator, is an impulse deeply set within the human heart.” I find what she writes next particularly intriguing: “Rebellion against God is not the unique preserve of the nonbeliever, however, It is also, perhaps especially, seen among the devoutly religious. Genuine belief in God’s existence and the sincere desire to serve God rightly create an environment highly conducive to the growth of the assumption that one knows God’s mind (perhaps even better than God does). Precisely by virtue of wishing to please God, the religious person is tempted to become God, to dictate God’s terms to God.” This is also a delusion, but one that “masks itself as obedience.” (3)

Okay, so I understand what the delusion is a little bit better, but we still don’t understand why God would allow it, or even send it, why a loving God would act to induce the condemnation of some. This was the question that stumped me. So I read. I want to share with you a section from Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, that I found helpful. This section is entitled: “A Loving God Would Not Allow Hell.” (4)

“Ah,” you may say, “fighting evil and injustice in the world is one thing, but sending people to hell is another. The Bible speaks of eternal punishment. How does that fit in with the love of God? I cannot reconcile even the idea of hell with a loving God.” How do we address this understandable recoiling?

Modern people inevitably think that hell works like this: God gives us time, but if we haven’t made the right choices by the end of our lives, he casts our souls into hell for all eternity. As the poor souls fall through space, they cry out for mercy, but God says “Too late! You had your chance! Now you will suffer!” This caricature misunderstands the very nature of evil. The Biblical picture is that sin separates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy and indeed of all love, wisdom, or good things of any sort. Since we were originally created for God’s immediate presence, only before his face will we thrive, flourish, and achieve our highest potential. If we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell—the loss of our capacity for giving or receiving love or joy.

A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire. Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now, ask the question: “What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends on into eternity?” Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.

In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity. [Pay attention to how he addresses “freedom” here, it helps us answer the question, how a loving God could “allow” us to be deluded.] We see this process “writ small” in addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and pornography. First, there is disintegration, because as time goes on you need more and more of the addictive substance to get an equal kick, which leads to less and less satisfaction. Second, there is the isolation, as increasingly you blame others and circumstances in order to justify your behavior. “No one understands! Everyone is against me!” is muttered in greater and greater self-pity and self-absorption. When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing—though a good thing—becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy. Personal disintegration happens on a broader scale. In eternity, this disintegration goes on forever. There is increasing isolation, denial, delusion, and self-absorption. When you lose all humility you are out of touch with reality. No one ever asks to leave hell. The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham.

In his fantasy The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. There they are urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell—but they refuse. Lewis’s descriptions of these people are striking because we recognize in them the self-delusion and self-absorption that are “writ small” in our own addictions.

"Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be not you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

The people in hell are miserable, but Lewis shows us why. We see raging like unchecked flames their pride, their paranoia, their self-pity, their certainty that everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is an idiot! All their humility is gone, and thus so is their sanity. They are utterly, finally locked in a prison of their own self-centeredness, and their pride progressively expands into a bigger and bigger mushroom cloud. They continue to go to pieces forever, blaming everyone but themselves. Hell is that, writ large.

That is why it is a travesty to picture God casting people into a pit who are crying “I’m sorry! Let me out!” The people on the bus from hell in Lewis’s parable would rather have their “freedom,” as they define it, than salvation. Their delusion is that, if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a supreme and tragic irony, their choice has ruined their own potential for greatness. Hell is, as Lewis says, “the greatest monument to human freedom.” As Romans 1:24 says, God “gave them up to…their desires.” All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair than that? Lewis writes:

"There are only two kinds of people—those who say “Thy will be done” to God or those to whom God in the end says, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.”

May we desire joy, and may joy and nothing less find us, as together we make this joyful journey into God’s kingdom, God’s presence, God’s shalom. Amen.

(1)(2)(3) Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. “First and Second Thessalonians” from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. John Knox Press, 1998. Louisville, KY. 107-120.

(4) Keller, Tim. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. Riverhead Books, 2008.New York, NY. 78-82.