Yes, I love the physicality of that remembrance. And its not only a feeling of union with others in the mind. In our congregation, we are asked to “examine ourselves” before partaking, and if we have any grudges or sin between ourselves and other Christians, to get up and make things right before participating. So, the symbols of communion are also a gate into physical action of reconciliation and maintaining that corporate unity.
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I started reading John Wenham’s Autobiography, “Facing Hell”. I have loved Wenham’s The Easter Enigma which helped me early in my Christian life and in learning to have more trust in the Bible. His “Re-Dating, Matthew, Mark and Luke” is as scholarly a book as you can get and also affirmed my trust in the Bible.
Wenham says he thought of writing such a scholarly work about Hell, but he thought at his older age, he would not have the 10 years he surmised it would take to do the job adequate justice and so felt that at least some effort would be worthwhile.
I am halfway through the book and appreciating more and more the complexity of church politics, at least in England, in the Anglican church and in the 20th century. He has early on laid out his arguments for believing that hell is not everlasting and an anhiliationism.
Oh, that Wenham were right. How like MacDonald is Wenham and one could easily see why CS Lewis wrote The Great Divorce. We all want an escape clause.
This past Sunday, July 30th 2023, I yearned for closeness with my Lord and have always found Charles Spurgeon to bring me closer to Jesus, more than anyone else, except The Bible and Prayer. I have worked systematically through each of his sermons starting in 1855 and the sermon that was next due was March 25th 1866, “Punishment: A Fearful Thing”.
The scripture quote is: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” — Heb. 10:31.
Spurgeon demolishes ivory towers, myths and daydreams. There is an escape clause the Bible offers, it is the life of Jesus on the cross. In a previous sermon he says, “The difficulty in the gospel is that it isn’t difficult” Believe and live. In Spurgeon’s facing of hell, he speaks plainly. “I do not know what the words for ever and ever can mean, if they do not mean for ever and ever.”
My adult son struggles with the concept of hell as do I. I do not like it. I wish it were not there. It is an act of faith and trust to believe that which I cannot prove and do not like. But Jesus always affirmed the scriptures, He never contradicted the scripture and in facing Satan He said, “It is written”
Some foolish thoughts of Christian Psychiatrist.
Once you’ve read MacDonald for a while, you’ll discover that what Christ is offering us is anything but an escape from God’s wrath. In fact, it is when you’re done trying to escape that you will eventually be brought back to the cross to discover that was your only way (not out) but in … into abundant life itself. What has now come to pass for tradition among so many Christians - that would take a covenant and reduce it into a mere contract, that take trust in a loving Father and replace it instead with a transaction between parties that don’t or can’t rise to the level of trust - once all of that has been brought out into the light of the apostles and prophets - indeed the light of Christ himself, there is no going back. Once the Bridegroom is in the room all the calculations and doctrinal machinations and traditions - true and important as some of them are - they all nonetheless fade into the background baggage which will already be included and need not be fussed over once we sit at the feet of Christ, and then rise to do His bidding.
On the notion of “forever” or the terrors of hell (or the pleasures of God’s welcomed presence) - I have yet to encounter any more terrifying than MacDonald’s or any more blissful than his descriptions of the blessed presence once we are made and then participate in righteous holiness.
[In speaking of ‘escaping God’s wrath’ above, I’m using that phrase in the sense of somebody successfully fleeing an avenger - as in they are getting away with something. Since there is no such thing as escape when God is the avenger, the real escape from God’s wrath we read of in Scriptures instead refers to God’s willingly putting away our past sins when we repent of them and turn to Christ. God will no longer hold those against us when we yearn and learn to ‘make it right’ between ourselves and our neighbor whom we’ve wronged. Only in that restored relationship can we be said to have ‘escaped our sins’ and their consequences - i.e. God’s wrath.]
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Thank you so much for your response. It is certainly a different way of thinking about hell. You probably wouldn’t like that Spurgeon sermon though. He starts out by saying something which I think is true, his focus in innumerable sermons (I think the one I linked was something like the 640th sermon) is on God’s mercy. It may be worth reading, his sermons usually can be read in 20 minutes, reading quickly, 30 with some meditation and research.
How CS Lewis processes this- is that the likelihood of turning to God, decreases, not increases over time in the kind of purgatory he describes in the Great Divorce. He pictures a bus-stop and one can move further and further away from the bus-stop as you struggle with the ugliness of people in hell. He even quips that almost beyond sight there is the house of Napoleon, so far from the bus-stop he would be very unlikely to take that wonderful bus trip to heaven. And remember, most people in CS Lewis story when they get to heaven, chose to return to hell.
I think there is another thing which we mortals struggle with, the concept of ‘eternity’. Here I am very much speculating. Somehow, God sits ‘outside of time’ and invented time. We think of eternity as a very long time, more than a million years. But perhaps that is not the way to think of time.
I know one thing; I hope you’re right.
Thanks again for sharing.
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In this final installment from the ‘Bereavement’ sermon, I take Lewis’ long excerpt from the very end of that sermon, and make it longer yet - so you can see the Lazarus context for the conversation.
(223) Bereavement
You make a lamentable ado, vexing Jesus that you will not be reasonable and trust his father! When Martha and Mary behaved as you are doing, they had not had Lazarus raised; you have had Lazarus raised, yet you go on as they did then!
‘You give too good reason to think that, if the same thing were done for you, you would say he was only in a cataleptic fit, and in truth was never raised from the dead. Or is there another way of understanding your behaviour: you do not believe that God is unchangeable, but think he acts one way one time and another way another time just from caprice? He might give back a brother to sisters who were favourites with him, but no such gift is to be counted upon? Why then, I ask, do you worship such a God?’
‘But you know he does not do it! That was a mere exceptional case.’
‘If it was, it is worthless indeed–as worthless as your behaviour would make it. But you are dull of heart, as were Martha and Mary. Do you not see that he is as continually restoring as taking away–that every bereavement is a restoration–that when you are weeping with void arms, others, who love as well as you, are clasping in ecstasy of reunion?’
‘Alas, we know nothing about that!’
‘If you have learned no more I must leave you, having no ground in you upon which my words may fall. You deceived me; you called yourself a Christian. You cannot have been doing the will of the Father, or you would not be as you are.’
‘Ah, you little know my loss!’
‘Indeed it is great! it seems to include God! If you knew what he knows about death you would clap your listless hands. But why should I seek in vain to comfort you? You must be made miserable, that you may wake from your sleep to know that you need God. If you do not find him, endless life with the living whom you bemoan would become and remain to you unendurable. The knowledge of your own heart will teach you this-- not the knowledge you have, but the knowledge that is on its way to you through suffering. Then you will feel that existence itself is the prime of evils, without the righteousness which is of God by faith.’
The conclusion MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: The Displeasure of Jesus
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Beautiful video. Compassionate, intelligent. What a loss is Tim Keller, but as we know, God’s timing is perfect. A Marionite priest recently shared that in the Middle East, when a person of faith dies they say, “He’s arrived”.
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(224) Abraham’s Faith
They say first, God must punish the sinner, for justice requires it; then they say he does not punish the sinner, but punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, attributes his righteousness to the sinner, and so continues just. Was there ever such a confusion, such an inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as an unrighteous; neither, if justice required the punishment of sin, could justice let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain upon the righteous in the name of justice is simply monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice. Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; for nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one that will no more sin.
We have the word imputed just once in the New Testament. Whether the evil doctrine may have sprung from any possible misunderstanding of the passage where it occurs, I hardly care to inquire. The word as Paul uses it, and the whole of the thought whence his use of it springs, appeals to my sense of right and justice as much as the common use of it arouses my abhorrence. The apostle says that a certain thing was imputed to Abraham for righteousness; or, as the revised version has it, ‘reckoned unto him:’ what was it that was thus imputed to Abraham? The righteousness of another? God forbid! It was his own faith. The faith of Abraham is reckoned to him for righteousness.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness” (224 - 238)
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Thanks for your comment – I might not have watched the video without it. (And there are more of them, yay. ; - ) I trust Keller and Piper a lot more than I do MacDonald. (Thanks to you too, @Randy. 
)
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I can agree with Keller’s being compassionate; he was praising Lewis here, though I think he didn’t agree with him (and Lewis is in the same boat as MacDonald). I think it illustrates that there is a wide variation in interpretation.
I think it was great that Keller could disagree with Lewis (who I agree with more), and yet praise him. May we learn how to approach things like that.
There is a further discussion on line of this discussion, which I can send anyone if they want–it’s a commentary on what Keller and Piper were understanding of Lewis and Macdonald–but it gets longer (4 subsets). Suffice it to say that we can learn more, and still have great respect for anyone for thinking deeply and asking questions.
have a good August afternoon! I am mainly in the paperwork area this afternoon.
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That does not mean, however, that there is a wide variation in what is true. 
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I like Keller (though I think he showed a weak moment in going along with Piper here). I don’t know Piper as much, but trust him even less after hearing him throw MacDonald under the bus, and without much of any biblical substance offered as to why (as I recall - it’s been a while since I watched that video, and I think it was dated even then.) In any case, between MacDonald/Lewis, and their objectors, I’m seeing a whole lot more daylight between the objectors and scriptures than I can find between MacDonald and the scriptures. Which is ironic, because MacDonald wasn’t one to venerate the printed word - and yet (so far as I’ve seen), he’s been the one to most closely adhere to it, both in substance, and especially in spirit. Granted, I don’t know people like Piper as well, but as somebody who probably has a large contemporary following, I think he’s more mindful of what sorts of things his audience deems as acceptable to say, and in this day and age of self-appointed heresy-hunters and the proclivity of so many to write-off their own at the first sign of something to disagree on, I have a lot more trust for a long-gone earnest disciple, like MacDonald who never had much of a following even while he was alive, than I do for leaders of masses today who feel beholden to tickle the itching ears of their many supporters. But even so, popularity (or lack of it) aside, if you can find where MacDonald goes astray from the exhortations of gospel or epistle, please bring it up here! That’s a challenge I have yet to see anybody come even close to meeting, Piper, Keller, or anybody else. MacDonald certainly wasn’t perfect as he quickly makes known - but again - looking for any of that daylight between what MacDonald promotes and the teachings of our Christ - and I’m not spotting it.
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PIcking up directly on the heals of the last post from the same sermon and continuing that thought …
(225) The Same
The faith of Abraham is reckoned to him for righteousness. To impute the righteousness of one to another, is simply to act a falsehood; to call the faith of a man his righteousness is simply to speak the truth. Was it not righteous in Abraham to obey God? The Jews placed righteousness in keeping all the particulars of the law of Moses: Paul says faith in God was counted righteousness before Moses was born. You may answer, Abraham was unjust in many things, and by no means a righteous man. True; he was not a righteous man in any complete sense; his righteousness would never have satisfied Paul; neither, you may be sure, did it satisfy Abraham; but his faith was nevertheless righteousness, and if it had not been counted to him for righteousness, there would have been falsehood somewhere, for such faith as Abraham’s is righteousness . It was no mere intellectual recognition of the existence of a God, which is consistent with the deepest atheism; it was that faith which is one with action: ‘He went out, not knowing whither he went.’ The very act of believing in God after such fashion that, when the time of action comes, the man will obey God, is the highest act, the deepest, loftiest righteousness of which man is capable, is at the root of all other righteousness, and the spirit of it will work till the man is perfect.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness”
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Yes, and no. Scripture can have multilayered meaning, and there are times in life that what is true for one time, may not apply to another. That is not to say that God is not unchanging, but rather that interpretations can be different yet still express truth.
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That depends entirely upon what we are talking about in particular. For instance, anything about God’s attributes – they do not change regardless. How we relate to them may (and should), but they themselves do not.
Merv, I went ahead and listened to the whole sermon today and need to again. As usual, he covers a LOT of ground. MacDonald has guts, to say the least. I need to do some study, before I can say much more. I have a few questions I need to get answered.
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Just out of curiosity, where or how do you access these sermons in audio?
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Aaah. Now you are asking for trade secrets. (Ha!) There are a number of ways to do it.
Here’s the sermon text. Probably the same as you are using:
https://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/34/
Depending on your device, there are a number of screen-readers you can use. For example on my desktop the Chrome “Reader View” extension will read the page to me. I also have an extension called “Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader,” but the voices and cadence are pretty lousy.
On my Ipad I have a fanatastic app called Voice Dream (a bit pricey at $20, but worth every penny), which was developed for visually impaired people. It is outstanding and has the best voice library of any app I’ve used. You can open the file in the browser and then send it to Voice Dream, and it will read it. It will also do all kinds of great tricks to the text to make it easier on the eyes, highlight it, show one line at a time, etc, etc, etc.
On my desktop I also have a super duper program called Calibre. It’s free or by donation. Calibre is an ebook management software, but it does much, much, much more. You can convert file formats (like .docx) to .epub (for all kinds of digital ebook readers) or .mobi for Kindles, etc; side load files to ereaders (like my Kobo and my Kindle), email files to Kindles and other devices that will accept them, manage your ebook collection on your computer; and have Calibre display or read it to you at the computer; AND edit metadata for the ebooks; AND create tables of contents; AND EDIT THE EBOOKS; AND create and design entirely new ebooks; and MUCH, MUCH MORE. There is a lot I don’t know how to do in Calibre. But right now I can pretty handily convert a nice set of text like MacDonald’s sermon into a small ebook and then have my Kindle ereader read it to me.
This is what I did:
Copy the text from the website
Paste it in a Word document. I used Word to keep the formatting, rather than use Notepad.
Make any changes to the file like add an author or the web address or correct typos or whatever.
Save the file.
Open Calibre and tell it to Add Books, then find the sermon file I just created and add it to the Calibre library.
Once the file appears in the list of books in the Calibre library, edit the metadata to include the author and any other things you want. I created a series title called “MacDonald Sermons.” Pick a cover or create a new one, an save the changes.
Go back to the Library and convert the file into .mobi format if I want to sideload it to the Kindle or .epub for emailing it to my Kindle or sideloading it on to my Kobo. Today I decided to try emailing it to my Kindle, because I forgot to bring my Kindle with me to my basement office.
Attach the .epub file to an email, and mail it to my Kindle’s email address.
When I went upstairs and started my Kindle, the file downloaded automatically.
Once the file is on my Kindle, I can use the Voice View features to connect it to a bluetooth speaker or headphones or the stereo in my car (sometimes), and the screen reader reads it to me.
Voila!
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Cool! And thanks for the detailed instructions! So many options to try - and there are times (albeit not often) when I might be driving and this would be cool to do. Thanks for spelling out all the different options.
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So many thoughts are coming so densely from this sermon, my expanded excerpts are picking up where the prior left off so that you may be getting a good portion of this sermon almost seamlessly! As Kendel, and I guess Lewis too must have noted: this sermon is packed with a lot.
(226) Perception of Duties
If you define righteousness in the common-sense, that is, in the divine fashion–for religion is nothing if it be not the deepest common-sense–as a giving to everyone his due, then certainly the first due is to him who makes us capable of owing, that is, makes us responsible creatures. You may say this is not one’s first feeling of duty. True; but the first in reality is seldom the first perceived. The first duty is too high and too deep to come first into consciousness. If any one were born perfect, which I count an eternal impossibility, then the highest duty would come first into the consciousness. As we are born, it is the doing of, or at least the honest trying to do many another duty, that will at length lead a man to see that his duty to God is the first and deepest and highest of all, including and requiring the performance of all other duties whatever. A man might live a thousand years in neglect of duty, and never come to see that any obligation was upon him to put faith in God and do what he told him–never have a glimpse of the fact that he owed him something. I will allow that if God were what he thinks him he would indeed owe him little; but he thinks him such in consequence of not doing what he knows he ought to do. He has not come to the light. He has deadened, dulled, hardened his nature. He has not been a man without guile, has not been true and fair.
But while faith in God is the first duty, and may therefore well be called righteousness in the man in whom it is operative, even though it be imperfect, there is more reason than this why it should be counted to a man for righteousness. It is the one spiritual act which brings the man into contact with the original creative power, able to help him in every endeavour after righteousness, and ensure his progress to perfection. The man who exercises it may therefore also well be called a righteous man, however far from complete in righteousness. We may call a woman beautiful who is not perfect in beauty; in the Bible men are constantly recognized as righteous men who are far from perfectly righteous. The Bible never deals with impossibilities, never demands of any man at any given moment a righteousness of which at that moment he is incapable; neither does it lay upon any man any other law than that of perfect righteousness. It demands of him righteousness; when he yields that righteousness of which he is capable, content for the moment, it goes on to demand more: the common-sense of the Bible is lovely.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness”
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