For a fire is kindled in My anger, And shall burn to the lowest hell; It shall consume the earth with her increase, And set on fire the foundations of the mountains.
(Deuteronomy 32:22) NKJV
In October 2015 we went to Open Door Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with our girlfriend. The last girlfriend as it turned out. Our neighbors liked it there and they had invited us so we went.
Our girlfriend wasn’t a believer but she was tall, blonde, well-endowed and we thought that she was awesome. She was also older, which has been a repeating theme. We had no idea what to expect so we wore our favorite grey suit with a white shirt and a gold Wake Forest Demon Deacons bow tie. Probably won’t do that again.
It was the first hell-fire and damnation preaching that we had heard in a long time and we were greatly impressed with the sincerity and voracity of the preacher. It was also quaint, because the educated would say that he was too uneducated to realize that hell isn’t at the center of the Earth. However we’re sufficiently educated to have deduced a theory of gravitation which means that hell is at the center of the Earth.
Sitting there listening with my unbelieving girlfriend we reconnected with the urgency of the mission that we’ve been given to reach out to a lost and dying world. It’s not just that people are going to die not knowing God. It’s that people are going to die and then wake up on the other side to find out that hell is real and it’s too late to do anything about it.
As we left the church we turned to our girlfriend and said, “that’s what I should be doing”. She said, “What?” We replied “Preaching about hell”. That was effectively the end of the relationship as we realized that there was no way that we could re-engage with our calling to write the definitive work on science and the Bible if we were in an immoral relationship. She wasn’t happy about it. We saw that coming.
FYI it’s never a good idea for a Christian to get involved in a relationship which lies outside the parameters that have been clearly established in scripture. It’s going to end badly. You’ve been warned.
Shortly after that we began putting our material onto a blog and promoting it on social media, in particular Twitter. That was the beginning of what has become Matty’s Paradigm.
Matty's Paradigm 