Hell is where you find it

 kw: book reviews, humor, memoirs, commentary

Zach Zimmerman is a comedian, a stand-up comic. He expects one day to be slayin' 'em in Hell. Maybe.

His memoir Is it Hot in Here? Or am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth? is my wildcard selection this time. As depicted in this little book, his father is the kind of preacher that makes the Devil smile. More on that later.

Zach was brought up in an ostensibly Evangelical household; his father was an associate pastor, and he was subjected to fire-and-brimstone preaching not just in church but at the dinner table almost daily. Zach writes that he prayed a "sinner's prayer" daily, or more than daily, with no discernible result. He is gay, and became an atheist, having concluded that Hell is much less fearful if you stop believing in it. It makes sense. The only Jesus he ever heard about is one who is just itching to plunge sinners, especially gays, into hellfire.

His essays are humorous, and also informative to someone like me, as straight as they come. Oh, I understand the mechanics of gay sex. Such details are glossed over; rather, these essays reveal the complex emotions of a chronically insecure homosexual, who finds coming out to other gays almost as painful as coming out to his parents. Near the end of the book, it seems he found a partial rapprochement with his mother. His father? Not mentioned, so probably not.

OK, some commentary. Unhappy Christians are an Atheist's best argument for atheism. The several thousand denominations, and Denominationalism itself, are Satan's masterpiece. The overweening focus on homosexuality in American Christianity is just one of the many distractions provided in the Devil's Department Store. Another Department is religion itself. I am enormously grateful to God for letting me see, very early in my Christian life, that He desires not religion, but a relationship. About half the things taught in the Bible are instructions in how to relate to The Almighty. The "sinner's prayer" isn't found there, although it isn't bad in itself, and many people do come to Christ after praying in that way. It is the belief in Christ, not belief in the prayer, that saves.

Fire-and-brimstone preaching easily leads to the belief that Jesus is the Devil's disciple. The real focus of the preaching by Jesus and His apostles was redemption from Hell, by becoming a child of God. As Paul wrote to Timothy, God "desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth." (1Tim 2:4) The first word Jesus spoke in His preaching was, "Repent." It is easier to come to Christ if you know who He really is. Far too many false evangelists preach a non-Biblical Christ. Zach is one of their victims.

In Leviticus 18, verses 6-23 outline numerous sexual sins, most of them incestuous. Homosexual sex is found in verse 22. Child sacrifice and bestiality are also condemned in nearby verses. Gay sex is just one of a dozen or more varieties of adultery. The Seventh Commandment, "You shall not commit adultery," covers them all.

Who knows whether, on at least one of the many occasions that Zach prayed the "sinner's prayer", God accepted it? He had no subjective feeling about it, but it may have laid a foundation for later work by the Holy Spirit to bring Zach into a genuine relationship with God. My own experience of receiving Christ encompassed several events over at least five years. "Where there is life there is hope." (Eccl 9:4)