No One Gets Cheated

No one gets cheated by God.
~Phillip Reynolds

This is what I heard in church yesterday. I’m sure there were lots of other things said, but this is what I heard and what I continued to hear all day.

There are many things about my childhood among the Pharisees that I forget for long periods of time. Then someone says something so simple and innocent, and the floods come rushing back.

I had a friend when I was a child who was Lutheran. The day I discovered that Lutherans don’t believe you have to be saved to go to Heaven was a dark day for me. Even today I don’t actually know what Lutherans do believe, but I know that my friend didn’t know anything about going down to the altar at revival meetings and getting saved.

I said, “Daddy, she’s not ever going to believe she has to be saved because her parents have taught her she doesn’t. Will she still go to Hell even though she never had a chance?”

Daddy said yes. He was afraid so. The Bible said you had to be saved, and that was that.

To my horror, I then remembered the “if you never heard about it you get out of Hell free” rule. But that was already shot. I was the one who had told her about having to get saved. She had heard it. She wasn’t going to ever believe it. She was going to go to Hell because she didn’t believe it, and it was all my fault.

I hadn’t even gotten to junior high yet, and I was already sending my friends to Hell.

It was a dark day indeed.

Now they tell me, thirty years later and way too late to apologize to anyone for my tears and my pleading, that there is a theology that says no one gets cheated.

I have to admit that I don’t understand. I am here to learn.