The Multicultural Road to Hell

I’ve got a simple message in this post. Simple, yes, but not the less needed for all that.

What have you done with the gospel, Christian? Where is your voice these days?

I’m not telling. I’m asking. I don’t know you, or what you’ve done, or where you’ve been. Really, this is a question only you can ask yourself, and only you can answer.

Well, you and God, of course, because that’s the urgent point. God knows what we’ve done with the gospel. He knows whether we’ve been living like we believe it, or only saying we do, and living another way. He knows.

I don’t.

A Worry

But if there’s one thing I fear about this, it’s that too many of us have been shut down by our culture’s language of compromise. I do not find myself confronted by many people with the gospel. Nobody approaches me and says, “Well, I’ve been wanting to talk about your soul …” and then, when he finds out I am already saved, says, “I beg your pardon, brother; I’m happy for us both, and must be on my way.” Those conversations never happen to me. And yet, I’m about as open to someone approaching me with the gospel as any person can be.

So how come it never happens?

I worry. I worry that we have given up the gospel. And I don’t think it’s because we don’t believe it anymore. I think we’ve been cowed by the get-along spirit of our age, and it’s tranquilized us with respect to our duty to preach the message of salvation.

We have been put to sleep by the siren songs of the multicultural road to hell.

Not the Point

There’s a lot of hot talk around these days about things like immigration and national identity. None of that interests me at all. Some of it’s probably good, and some of it’s probably bad: but either way, I’m not in charge of any of that — and I don’t want to be. So let’s dispense right away with any idea I care about official multicultural political policy, or current immigration controversies, or any of that nonsense.

The Wide Road

I’m talking about inclusion. The road to hell is just so very inclusive. It’s so open-minded. It’s so tolerant of everything. It’s so multicultural.

Every culture, subculture and so-called “culture” — racial, regional, national, linguistic, aesthetic, historical, sexual, political, religious and ideological — is on it. Here we find Third-Wave Feminists walking companionably with neo-Nazis. Frivolous ecumenists and neo-Wiccan priestesses dance beside frowning atheists. Frisking down the road, gay activists hold hands with the ISIL terrorists who routinely throw them off buildings. It doesn’t matter what one really believes here. People of every race, religion and lifestyle all gyrate and spin in a human mosaic of infinite variety. There is space for everything and everyone, from ascetics to hedonists, from men to women to those who imagine they are neither man nor woman.

Every form of everything is welcome. And the soundtrack that floats above the cacophony of that ribald crowd is Frank Sinatra’s anthem ... I Did It My Way.

All But One

Did I say that everything is welcome?

Well, everything but the truth. On this road, the one intolerable is the gospel-believer, particularly the one who speaks that truth. There is even room for the one who secretly believes, but holds his tongue and does not “confess with his mouth”. The road to hell is a broad place, and many there are who travel it. It can hold a lot of people.

In contrast, the way to heaven is “narrow”. It allows approach from many directions, to be sure: you can start out for that gate from anywhere. But when you get there, you will find that it squeezes down until only one person at a time can come, and there’s only one way through. Nobody enters shoulder-by-shoulder, or as part of a group: groups go through the other gate. And nobody enters by any other door; there’s only one way in.

It does not matter how easy or hard that is for us to accept: it’s a fact. It does not matter if it offends all those on the broad road, from atheists to Zoroastrians. They may rant and gnash their teeth at us; it will not help them. They may call us narrow and fanatical for sticking to the one way. But their venom will not soften that truth or broaden that gate. It is what it is.

Real Inclusion

Paradoxically, though, the way it provides is universally inclusive: whosoever will may come. It won’t shorten your odds if you are a woman or a man. It won’t change your chances if you are white and Western or a native Fiji islander. It won’t help you if you are a Pharisee, or hurt your chances if you started out as a biker with Hell’s Angels. Being born into prosperity won’t give you the edge, and you won’t be at a loss even if you live under the horrid scourge of slavery or imprisonment. You may walk in the sunshine every day, or be in the darkest pit of ultimate foulness and despair. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not where you started that counts; it’s where you ended up. You’ve got to get down to the gate.

Get Them Down to the Gate

I think we need to remind ourselves of that today. We live in an age in which tolerance, acceptance, open-mindedness, pluralism, amorality and alternate lifestyles are lauded to the skies, and the only “sin” left is refusal to embrace all that. But this is not the teaching of the Bible. As God sees it, sin remains as wide and various as the alternate “ways” people choose to travel, and just as deadly as it always was. The preaching of the narrow way is just as crucial as it has ever been. The ideological shifts of our day do not shift God. And they do not widen the gate.

So the Bible tells us to give up the nonsense of inclusion, the prattle about the “many roads to God”, the omni-tolerant rubbish. The Bible has no use for the soft-headed softening of the heart toward evil in the name of acceptance. There are milestones to be hit, and a destination to be aimed at; and anything other than that is disaster.

Pointing to the Gate

To be a gospel witness is to be willing to say so.

I’m going to say more. To be a faithful Christian is to delight in saying more. It’s to pull down the proud towers of omni-tolerance. It’s to shatter academic pretension, to smash the citadels of egocentric “freedom”, self-confidence and the worship of humanity, and to revel in beating the whole stock of modern, open-minded and empty-headed delusions to thin dust.

It’s to upset everyone, so that everyone can be saved.

Because the road they’re going down with such alacrity and enthusiasm leads only to the Pit.

“Near” Misses

Remember this when you hear someone taking about “nearly-Christians”. A Unitarian or Jehovah’s Witness who does not believe in Christ as the door is not a Christian. Not even a bit. A Catholic who believes every theological pronouncement of Catholicism is not a Christian, and a United Church person who believes in the theology of the United Church Synod is not a Christian: they are legalists. A very morally-earnest Muslim or Jewish person is not an “anonymous Christian” (i.e., someone who doesn’t know they believe the gospel but actually does). What they believe is not good enough. They are just as lost as the Apostle Paul once was. All of that inclusive song merely floats over from the other road, emanating ultimately from the Pit.

I will go farther. Even an evangelical Christian who does not really believe and practice the truth — that person is also not a Christian, though he goes to the “right” church and says all the “right” words. The Lord knows the hearts; and though a man may be full of all the right doctrine and sentiments, that will not save him. Stop including him in your thoughts as a “believer”. He’s just as lost as everybody else on the broad road.

Get them all down to the gate. There is no other way.

Simple

That’s a simple message, isn’t it? Funny how the simplest messages are sometimes the easiest to forget. But we cannot afford to be caught asleep at the switch on this one. We have a universal duty — a sacred duty which you alone, not your church, must fulfill — to speak the truth of the gospel to as many people as we can, whether they want it or not.

Don’t let the lukewarm and vapid nonsense about acceptance, inclusion and toleration lull you to sleep about this, or the absurd fear of being perceived to be “harsh” or “closed-minded” keep you from this sacred duty. For at the end of the day, none of those who publish this pap will stand beside you to help you make your answer to God.

The door is still open. Make sure you’re still pointing to it.