You're Included

JMF:  Welcome to You’re Included. Back with us for a third program is William P. Young, author of the best selling novel, The Shack. The Shack has been described as riveting and powerful – an exceptional piece of writing that ushers you directly into the heart and nature of God in the midst of agonizing human suffering. Thanks for being with us again.

PY:  This is great.

JMF:  We’re enjoying every moment of it and I appreciate your time in coming back.

PY:  I appreciate being here.

JMF:  The view of God that you present in The Shack is a sound biblical perspective that strangely is foreign to the way many people have traditionally thought about God.

PY:  Very true. I think for one thing is that we have lost, or a lot of us have never had the conversation about the very nature of God, period. We’ve been so focused on our ability to keep the rule, or the law, or whatever and it’s all been behavioral. And we don’t… we haven’t had a conversation about what is this character.  You know, we live in such world of uncertainty. Everything about our lives is uncertain. You know, we could get a call from the boss today and what we thought we were heading toward is no longer there.  A sale could go sideways, a truck comes across the middle line, changes our lives. So, we’re filled with uncertainty.

JMF:  And especially about what God thinks about us, we don’t know… we’re afraid of Him.

PY:  So what we try to do is create something that will get his behavior to be certain. And we come up with, “If I can just do the right things, in the right order, to the right degree, then God is rather obligated to do it” – to do whatever it is that we think we want him to do. So… that can be having enough faith, for example… whatever our formula is, to get the result… so that we can get God’s behavior to be certain. There’s a word for that and it’s called magic, you know. And God doesn’t like magic. Magic is, if I have the right formula, the right incantation, the right something, I can get the right result. And so, we try to use magic to get certainty.

Well, if there’s no certainty in our circumstances, and there’s no certainty in God’s behavior, where is there any certainty? It has to be in His character. And if we get His character wrong, or if we think that He is not good, that He is not loving – and we get that wrong, we are by ourselves, and we’re back to issues of fear and control – because we try to get control over uncertainty in many, many different ways. Anger, or you know, dulling the pain of it through addictions of one sort or another, uh, depression… there’s a million ways that we try to gain some control. And instead, if we begin to understand the character of God – that he comes into this relationship with us, for us, to heal us – that place is a place we can put our feet down and begin to stand and move forward. Otherwise, we’re just, you know, on our own.

So, the characterization of God in the book is just an attempt, in fiction, to try to describe that solidity of character that I think a lot of us have not trusted, you know. We don’t trust… that’s Mack’s big issue – is that, he doesn’t believe God is good. But he doesn’t know to get from where he is to believing it either, and God is very gracious about that process and says, “You can’t do it by yourself, but together we can do it.”

JMF:  In the midst of tragedy or great pain, that’s when it’s very difficult to believe that God is good…

PY:  Yeah, yeah, because everything has become totally uncertain.

JMF:  There’s a place in the book where you talk about the Father versus the Son, the Father being so holy and so great that he can’t be touched by our evil and our wickedness. But Jesus on the other hand is the good guy. Kind of the good cop, bad cop… let me just read that section briefly.

“Mack (central character) says, ‘But I always liked Jesus better than you, he seems so gracious and you seem so mean.’Sad isn’t it? He came to show people who I am and most folks only believe it about him. They still play us off like good cop, bad cop most of the time, especially the religious folk. When they want people to do what they think is right, they need a stern God, when they need forgiveness, they run to Jesus.”

And yet as you portray the characters here, we’re not talking about two different Gods of different character, we’re talking about one God who is for us…

PY:  Yeah, and unfortunately we have some theology that has come along side and said, you know… where God the Father is… His issue is our sinfulness. That’s what he… he can’t hang around us. That is sort of like Jesus has made friends with us and God the Father is a little perturbed about it, you know. And He wants to say, “Can you find a better quality of friend, I mean, they come to my house, they mess it up, they leave things dirty, they don’t do the dishes, you know. If you just find a better quality of friend, you know. I know I’ll be ok because, you know, you love them. We have that mentality that there is this… Jesus is trying to convince the Father that we’re worth enough to love.

JMF:  We use the word “advocate” because he’s an advocate with the Father for us, but that we… he needs a lot of convincing.

PY:  Yeah, well, and to make even matters worse, we have this idea that God comes to us and says, “You know… Father says, you know, you and I have a problem. Your behavior doesn’t meet up to the standards required, but I have a solution:  For you and I to be ok, I’m going to take my innocent Son who I love more than anything else in the world, out to the woodshed, and kill him – and then you and I will be ok. Oh, by the way, trust me.” We’re going, “Is there a disconnect here somewhere? Is that what had to happen for God the Father and I to be ok?” We’re going, “That’s not it at all… that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, it was God the Father that crawls inside of this very thing.” People say, “What about, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” And that is Christ on the cross for the first time as a human being, experiences a sense of separation, a sense of separation. He doesn’t believe that it’s real – because the next thing he says is “into your hands I commit my spirit.” So there is no real separation but he feels the sense of it, and… but God is in him in that whole process. There is no abandonment like that. And that cry is a cry of those who have experienced abandonment. And for some of us that is… such a hope for us.

JMF:  There is this sense that you get from preaching sometimes that God is so… that the Father is so angry, he’s furious; that the wrath of God is cited because the word wrath appears in Scriptures.

PY:  Sure.

JMF:  And so, the sense that he is so angry that somebody is gonna pay and so Jesus steps in and says, “Well, kill me if you got to kill somebody.” And so we have the resolution that, “Ok, Christ died for my sins, therefore I’m absolved but there’s still that angry God, you know, that has calmed down but when is gonna break loose again?”

PY:  Exactly, we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop and we fall back on performance, we fall back on our behavior being the basis for his mood. And we have to maintain at least an adequate amount of behavior so that he feels good about himself and doesn’t take it out on us. So we have this real schizophrenic God, we have the good cop-, bad cop-type of God. And we don’t know whether we’re waking up on the side of his love, or the side of his justice – or his holiness. We think holiness is a manifestation of his reaction against sin. The truth is he was holy before there was sin. He was other… what makes God “other” is his very nature of love – that’s what makes him “other” than us. And holiness then becomes a manifestation of his love, not of his justice, not of his dealing with sin. And wrath is the right response to things that are wrong. Anger is the right response when there is pain and hurt, when children are abused, when people lie to each other, when divorce happens,  people taking advantage… to greed, to all of these things, it is the right response. And for God to have that right response against everything that is his creation that prevents the freedom of the human creation which is the object of his love, for him to come after that with everything that he’s got, is appropriate, is right.

My friend, Wayne Jacobson has a book called “He Loves Me.” And I think in there he uses the illustration of being a child running into a hornets’ nest and screaming running in the direction of his mother and seeing her coming at him with this look of rage. Well, she wasn’t after him. She was after “these hornets, how dare they touch her precious little child”. But if you look at her face, he’d think it was all about he’d done something wrong. And we have that mentality when we deal with God. He’s… he is angry against everything that hurts us. Jesus showing up at Lazarus’ funeral – that intense anger, compassion that comes out even though he is in the midst of raising him from the dead. This is wrong. Death is wrong, you know. The impact of sin, as such, is wrong. And so, you know, the wrath of God is definitely an element of his love. You can’t divide his wrath from his love, as if he’s two separate characters. Everything God does is motivated by love. And everything has a loving purpose.

JMF:  Now, the Scripture speaks of “the enemies of God,” and “the wrath of God against his enemies.”

PY:  Sure.

JMF:  And how does the love of God come in to his relationship with his enemies in terms of his wrath?

PY:  And he is constantly saying that we are to love our enemies as well. So, there is an understanding that we wed ourselves to our own lost-ness, to our own independence. And it’s like the surgery, you know. There is a process that is very painful for us. And God, even, in dealing with the Egyptians, or the wonders of the plagues – that was a very painful process. And yeah, there are people that set themselves up in an independence stance and I tell you, you can wed yourself – the people in the New Testament that were most doing that, were the religious people. And they were the most lost when Jesus says, “Woe, woe, woe,” and he tells them that they are dead men, you know… dead inside their… the inside of them is dead. The woe idea is a warning woe. It’s saying “whoa!” like a… almost like a horse. “Stop what you’re doing. Don’t you understand that this process that you’re on, this path that you’re choosing – of independence, is going to drive you deeper into the darkness, not into the light that you think.”

And so, you know, one of the other questions is… that has come up about book is, “Why isn’t Lucifer, you know, in the book – as one of God’s enemies?” And I believe in the fallen angels, I believe in the demonic, and I grew up out in the mission field. I know the reality of these things – the spiritual dimension. We don’t live in a benign universe as far as the spiritual dimension. And I don’t believe God has any rivals, I don’t believe Lucifer is a rival, you know. I think his power was totally destroyed and now all he has is the ability to lie. And so, you know, all of those things being true, the book was not intended to be another book about Satan. It was intended to say, “This is who God is, and this is the process that we’re in – that he comes inside of to bring us to healing. And we don’t need the juxtaposition in this book, and like I said there are plenty of books that deal with that. But this was not an attempt for a systematic theology.

JMF:  Sure. When we talk about enemies Christ died for us while we were yet enemies ourselves.

PY:  Who among us has not been an enemy?

JMF:  Exactly. Right.  And then we have, like you said – we’re told to love our enemies and then we proceed with the idea that God doesn’t love his enemies but he expects us to love our enemies.

PY:  Oh, I know…. So, our… suddenly we have this requirement that even God cannot live up to, you know. The reality is that, he does. And the reality is that his… the creation that he has created, he loves and human beings as the epitome and apex of that he pursues. And we have all, all of us have been in the position of being his enemy, and in some respects, you know, we still fight him, you know, in this process, but there’s no shame to it.

JMF:  That’s the beauty of the… I think in your book, the most poignant scene, to me is the judgment scene where everyone stands guilty. And it’s very beautifully done, (PY: Thank you.) and thoroughly scriptural (PY: Yes.) And that’s what makes it so beautiful.

PY:  And part of that was to try to get the reality of this out of the abstract intellectual framework, you know. And in just like using the loss of a child as the center core part of the story. The term “agape” is used, that God is “agape”, he’s this kind of love that’s so different and the only verse that I can think of (and there maybe other ones) but the only one that I can think of where somebody who is apart from God, experiences “agape” which is normally… you cannot be apart from God to express it. But the closest that a human being apart from God can, is reflected in the verse, “If you being evil…” So it’s talking about your core independence. “If you being evil know how to agape your children…” That’s the word that’s used. So the closest point that we can come to understanding the way God loves is the way that a parent loves their child and I tell you there’s nothing like that – not if there’s any kind of health in your life, there is nothing that comes close to that. And that is the kind of way God is, in his very character and nature. So that’s why I wanted to use the thing that is most deepest in us to raise the deepest kinds of questions, and (for my children) I wanted this to be the conversation around which to develop the conversation, the processing, the ideas, and the relationship with God.

JMF:  I tend to be that kind of person who sees a bandwagon, I say, the last thing I’m gonna do is get on it. So, as people kept saying, “Well, you ought to read this book, you ought to read this book.” And I thought, “Yeah, I don’t read books that you gotta read.” (PY: Yeah.) But finally I did read it. And as I… I read the first few chapters and of course this is where we get into the story of the tragedy and so on and the very real anger and so on that Mack has.. and he enters the shack and I lost interest after God entered the shack. I thought, “I don’t see how he’s gonna get out of this because I’m on Mack’s side here. There’s not gonna be a good resolution to this, I don’t see how, in fictional form, we’re gonna be able to - (PY: Find our way out.) - get from here to there, and resolve this anger without it just being facile, you know, just some easy solution that doesn’t, you know – what do we call that, a platitude, you know, sort of thing. (PY: cliché.) And I eventually got back to it and well, I had to do an interview with the author.

PY:  That’ll get to you every time.

JMF:  So I better finish the book anyway, so… but then that judgment scene, to me, that, itself could be a full treatment of the subject, it was just beautifully done.

PY:  Thank you. And, you know, that scene has become where the whole book leads to – is that scene. And from there, everything becomes resolution after that. So, it was to say, “Look, this is the reality of the heart of God in terms of how he relates to us. And let’s take it out of intellectual, spiritual, religious kind of terminology and make it real to us. So for Mack to have to struggle with this big question about his own children – that becomes something very real to him, and all of a sudden it puts us into a spot going, “Are you telling me that God loves us like that?” And we’re saying, “He loves you more than that. I mean, that is as close as we can get to understanding the intensity of that love – He loves us more than that, and more pure and better than that. So, I agree, I love that… I love that chapter.

JMF:  It’s a – another section that is striking in the book is where Jesus is talking, He’s talking to Mack and he says,

“Remember the people who know me are the ones who are free to live and love without any agenda.” And Mack says, “Is that what it means to be a Christian?” “Who said anything about being a Christian? I’m not a Christian,” Jesus said. The idea struck Mack as odd and unexpected. “No I suppose you aren’t.” And then Jesus says, “Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhist or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions.  I have followers who are murderers and many who are self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I’ve no desire to make them Christian but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa into brothers and sisters into my beloved.” “Does that mean,” asks Mack, “that all roads will lead to you?” “Not at all,” smiled Jesus. “Most roads don’t lead anywhere. What does it mean… What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.”

PY:  Yeah.

JMF:  Some people have taken from that or responded that, well, you’re saying that being a Christian doesn’t matter, they accuse you of universalism, whatever they mean by universalism.

PY: Sure… Yeah, when somebody asks me if I’m a Christian, I ask them back, I’ll say, “Would you please tell me what one is and I’ll tell you if I’m one of those. If we’re on the same page, I don’t have any problem identifying myself as a Christian.” Unfortunately, in the world today that has become kind of a Ziploc bag and as soon as you say the “C” word, there’s no more communication, no more conversation. And what people think in their minds what a Christian is, is not what Scripture reveals as someone who is indwelt by the very character nature of …

JMF:  Become a caricature of kind of a pre-conceived idea depending on a person’s experience of a Christian or Christianity.

PY:  Exactly. But…  For example, we think of anybody in the Middle East, as Westerners we tend to think of them as Muslim. As if they believe all the tenets of Islam, etc, etc.

JMF:  And they’re all the same. (PY: Yeah, they’re all the same.) And they all fit this particular category that we have them on.

PY:  Exactly. And most believers from the Middle East will still tell you they’re Muslim but they’re Christian. And for us that’s little incongruous. The reality is, is that these little boxes, I wanted to get outside. Jesus died, rose again, ascended to the right hand of the Father before the term had even been created or coined. It happened probably in Antioch where it was a derogatory term that they were going, “We like this term.” Right? And so for Jesus to identify himself as a Christian is moot. It didn’t exist. So that was one piece of it. And then I wanted to push it even further and say, “You know it’s not the label that you’re identified with that is the relationship. A label is a label and I don’t care what label you have, let’s talk about what you mean by it. And then we’ll see.”

So, like I say, I have no problem identifying myself as a Christian or the validity of being a Christian or any of those things. But I want some agreement about what we are talking about. (JMF: Sure.) And what a lot of people think of a Christian, I don’t want to be identified with, you know. Because there’s a bunch of it that is not true. And it is not right. And… I want a bridge to be built in a relationship with anybody. And I don’t want the word “Christian” to become the impediment that stops that relationship from being built. And I don’t want it to be an impediment between them and the love of Jesus Christ either.

JMF:  And that has nothing to do with faith in Jesus Christ, or belief in the name of Christ as some would want to say it.

PY:  No. And very clearly, if I can say it as clearly as I can, I am convinced that Jesus Christ is THE only way into the embrace of the Father. There is no other name given among men through whom we are saved – that he is the sole and only road into the Father’s heart and that is – He is the Father’s heart who has bridged that gap to us, you know. And that’s why actually that was the last edit that we put in to the book because somebody who read a pre-version said, “You know, I love this book, I love everything about it but I’ve got a couple of friends who are gonna think you’re a universalist.” And so that little section where he says, “Do all roads lead to Papa?” Jesus smiles and says, “No most don’t lead anywhere, but I will travel down any road to find you.” That was the last edit that we made before it went to the printers in the first edition.

I’m so grateful for the brother who sent that and said, “What do you think?” Because I wanted it to be clear that we are not talking about… you can… I want the centrality of atonement to be the central. This is what God has done to reconcile the world to himself. Now, as ambassadors of Christ, as if you are the very pleading of God beg, “Be reconciled back to him.” Because he’s reconciled himself to you. And that, to me, is the centrality and the significance of… the exclusivity – if I can use that term – of the person of God who has come in Christ in the power of the Spirit to make a way for us. And, you know, that’s… I’m not a universalist. 

JMF:  The subject of the Bible comes up in the course of the discussion between the Holy Spirit and Mackenzie and in one place here, they’re out together in a canoe, and just reading from the book:

“Mack allowed his oar to turn in his hands as he let it play into the water’s movements. It feels like living out of relationship, you know, trusting and talking to you, is a bit more complicated than just following rules.” “What rules are those, Mackenzie?” “You know, all the things the Scriptures tell us we should do.” “Ok,” she said with some hesitation. “And what might those be?” “You know,” he answered sarcastically, “about doing good things and avoiding evil, being kind to the poor, reading your Bible, praying, going to church, things like that.” “I see, and how is that working for you?” He laughed, “Well, I’ve never done it very well, I have moments that aren’t too bad, but there’s always something I’m struggling with or feeling guilty about, I just figured I needed to try harder. But I find it difficult to sustain that motivation, I think virtually everyone, with any honesty would have to identify with that. “Mackenzie,” she chided, her words flowing with affection, “The Bible doesn’t teach you to follow rules, it is a picture of Jesus. While words may tell you what God is like and even what he may want from you, you cannot do any of it on your own. Life and living is in him and in no other. My goodness, you didn’t think you could live the righteousness of God on your own, did you?” “Well, I sort of,” he said sheepishly.”

Anyway.  But you’re presenting here the Bible not as the way it’s popularly taught – as, you know, God’s instruction book for mankind. So it comes out to rule on behaviors and to judge and to tell everyone what they’re doing wrong and then goes back on the shelf. But the whole idea of Jesus in the Scriptures is often missed.

PY:  Absolutely, you know… it makes sense. If we are only flesh, if that’s what we come to this writing with, then we’ll drop back to see it as a behavioral kind of thing without the illumination of the Spirit, and the work of the Spirit. Even those Words are dead to us. They don’t produce life. We are absolutely dependent, even in the Words of Scripture for the presence and life and illumination of the power of the Holy Spirit. All of us are. We know folks who know the Words very well but have no life in them. And so there’s that part of it. Jesus on the road to… you know, on the Emmaus Road with the disciples, saying, Starting with Moses he showed them himself throughout all of Scripture.  It’s a story, it’s a story of his love, it’s a story of his attraction to us.

I love Scripture, you know. We are very blessed in the sense that we have this so available and just at our finger tips. Most of our brothers and sisters throughout history did not. They began with the Holy Spirit. And sometimes I’m thinking, Maybe they have a little bit of an advantage because we so easily fall back into our intellectuality and don’t even know how to hear the voice of the Spirit for ourselves. And we don’t, you know… Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.” And there’s a lot of us who are going, “Well, but don’t we just have to hear it through whatever the leadership is, or whatever the structure is that I’m a part of, and he is saying, “No.” He’s saying, “You individually, you, you hear my voice.” And I think that’s part of what the work of the Spirit is. Is to tune us, to allow us so that through the purification process, we sense his presence and we hear him speak to our hearts. And that becomes central. Then Scripture comes, He can illuminate it – but I’m not at all convinced, at all, that Scripture is the sole and only place through which God speaks. I tell you, in my life, it’s been through mus… movies even, but – music, creation, relationships, conversation, art, architecture, cultural… incredibly beautiful cultural diversity and uniquenesses that happen there. And the Spirit has… it is very able to speak through whatever the Spirit has available or what we’ve given the Spirit to be available.

JMF:  Sure. And the Scripture provides a rudder, a foundation, a primary means by which God reveals Christ to us. But isn’t that something that, so often, it’s misused in order to maintain some kind of control or to subjugate or to rule over and it’s… that isn’t the Holy Spirit speaking to us through Scripture, that’s us manipulating Scripture for our own ends, our own selfishness…

PY:  Yeah, it goes back again, in part, to not believing that people can grow up to hear the voice of the Spirit for themselves – that we need to interpret that for them so that we can maintain control. You know, I think a lot of people are afraid that if people move into freedom, and freedom is why Christ came – it was for our freedom – that if that happens that people will go do crazy things. And frankly there is good evidence that suggests that the amount of coercion and control that’s placed on people is the reason why when the control come off, they go out and do crazy things. They’ve just never matured inside of that framework. And so the work of the Holy Spirit is to move us toward freedom.  You know, that is his life in us.

And freedom within the context of our understanding of reality is all based in dependence, not in independence. You know, and here we are a culture that’s full of independence which makes sense, and God is… the Holy Spirit is constantly driving us toward dependence. And that is the only place where we find freedom, because we were designed to live our life in freedom – in dependence – in that union relationship with God. Scripture is wonderful. It is definitely something through which the frame of our lives are understood. But if I was thrown in a prison, without it, I know the Holy Spirit would be present with me. And, you know, you have a teacher, you have an anointing on you and in that sense you don’t need a teacher because the teacher lives inside of you and in all things will teach you how to abide in him, 1 John.

JMF:  Sure. And yet there’s a submission that we all have to one another, to listen, to test our ideas, and so on and make sure that we are reflecting the self-sacrificial love of God rather than our own agenda and so on. All that works in community…

PY:  Exactly, it takes us back to this relational element that exists in the very character, nature of God that our relationships are just a reflection of that unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity, you know. And the beautiful thing is that he invites us into that level of relationship. I was thinking about Christmas this year, and you have God who is working together for our redemption and they have this circle of relationship and they crack it open and invite a 15-year old little girl into it and they say, “Would it be ok if we did this?” And they wait until Mary says, “Be it done unto me.” And that’s the God of the universe who is in relationship with us and submitting the process to us so that we would join in that process with him. Same in our own hearts, same in the process of our own healing and nowhere does he use shame to try to produce this. He doesn’t use law to try to produce it. And the beauty of it is, as we become whole, pure in heart, we begin to see God everywhere. We see his activity, he’s in the details of our lives, he’s in the present with us. Incredible. Is this good news or what?

JMF:  Well, thanks for your time again.

PY:  You’re welcome.

JMF:  I appreciate it. We’ll look forward to getting together sometime.

PY:  That’d be great. Thank you.

JMF:  We’ve been talking to William P. Young author of The Shack. Thanks for being with us, I’m Mike Feazell for “You’re Included.”