God, Help Me Be Like My Atheist Friends

I want to peddle back to the story of the Good Samaritan today. I know we talked about it last week, but I had another thought that I wanted to drill into a bit.

Remember the story - a Jewish man had been badly beaten by some robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. He was laying there in pain, blood everywhere and when a couple of priests saw him they walked right by … leaving him for dead; but when a Samaritan saw him, he stopped to help.

This was a revolutionary idea, we said, because Jews and Samaritans were at odds with one another - they hated each other. The Jews hated the Samaritans and the Samaritans hated the Jews. And so for the hated Samaritan to stop and help his hated Jewish enemy - that spoke volumes. 

What also spoke volumes, though, is that the 2 priests walked by someone from their own Jewish tribe and left him to die.

NOT because they didn't like him.

NOT because they were being mean.

NOT because they didn't feel bad for him.

BUT.

Because they were following the rules ... blindly following the rules.

The rules, you see, said that if anyone touched blood or a wounded person then that person would be considered "unclean" and would be unable to enter the temple. And since these 2 men were Temple Priests, they didn't have much of a choice.

Right?

Had they stopped, they would have been sidelined from their Temple duties until they were considered clean again. 

The Priests were just following the rules (what they believed to be God's rules!), but all that rule following caused a fellow Jewish man and a fellow human being a world of pain and abandonment.

I'm sitting here this morning thinking about rule following and how blindly following what we think are the rules (God's rules) can cause real pain in the lives of other human beings.

When I identified as an Evangelical, I believed that anyone who didn't believe in Jesus was going to hell ... and there was a season in my life where I wasn't afraid to tell you that.

I believed it was my duty.

I believed it was my obligation.

AND.

I believed that if I wavered from that path and shrunk back from my responsibility, I would be dishonoring God and would be "unclean" in his sight. I can't tell you how many people (whether online or face to face) I threatened with hell and how many people (as a result) never really looked at me the same again or felt they could trust me with their doubts and questions and uncertainties.

I remember I was part of an online forum where we would discuss baseball and sports, but we also had a thread called "The Sports Pub" where we could talk about everything and anything - politics, religion, science, technology, etc. There were nights I'd be up until 3am debating with people about Jesus, heaven, hell, demons, Biblical inerrancy ... EVERYTHING. I told so many people in that forum that they were headed for hell for their lack of belief and sort of mocked people who had genuine questions and doubts and religious trauma with my Christian smugness.

In short, blindly following what I thought to be God's rule alienated me from a lot of people as I walked down the road leaving other people to die in the bloody wreckage of their questions and doubts.

I also remember in that forum seeing atheists come to the defense of people I would leave behind, telling them that it was OK to have questions and doubts and that if there really is a God ... how could a loving God throw them into hell for a lack of understanding or a hesitancy to believe?

Like the Priests, I left so many to die in their questions as I blindly followed the rules and like the Samaritan, I saw so many atheists come to their aid and bandage their wounds.

Sigh.

Today as I sip the last of my coffee, my prayer is that God would help me to be like those atheists, that God would help my heart overflow with care and love for those who have doubts and uncertainties about God and spiritual things.

Much love,

Glenn Siepert