Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  In my understanding, it all happens in the twinkling of an eye. If you are a believer, I don’t think the walls of a movie house can hold you.

  It was all so legalistic and rigid, and it seemed to me that I heard so much about the wrath of God and so little about the love of God. It appeared that God was constantly on the lookout for the slightest infraction, and it was a roller-coaster ride of doubt and confusion and a guilty conscience. It all just seemed so impossible that I finally just walked away.

  I never stopped believing. I just realized that I couldn’t live a totally sinless life, especially according to the legalistic minutia that deemed so many mundane, basically harmless human actions as sins.

  I sometimes think that so many churches and well-meaning pastors take for granted that people know the basics of salvation when they walk through the door. They forget that there are those who don’t understand why Jesus’ sacrificial death brings eternal life to all who repent, believe, and accept.

  When people are threatened with hell every Sunday and have drawn the conclusion that the only way they can avoid it is to live a perfect life, they many times become disillusioned and bitter. Then, realizing the futility of such an undertaking, they start imagining God as a vengeful patriarchal-type deity who is just waiting for one little transgression to revoke your salvation.

  Actually, the Bible tells us that God is love. He demonstrated His great love by sending His only begotten Son to die the most painful and humiliating death imaginable so that we might obtain life everlasting.

  Now, what does that all mean?

  I decided years ago to read the Bible and draw, as best I could, my own conclusions. I needed to try to work out my own salvation, as I believe every person has to do.

  As the old song says,

  You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley

  You’ve got to go there by yourself

  Ain’t nobody here gonna go there for you

  You’ve got to walk it by yourself4

  Why did God do it that way? He is all powerful and could have forced everybody to abide by His will.

  While there are many ways to the mountaintop, why do I have to go through Jesus to get there?

  I answer these questions based on my own understanding, by my own convictions and beliefs. I have never had any formal theological training and do not, by any means, consider myself an expert.

  I do not ascribe to, nor necessarily disagree with, the doctrine of any organized Christian denomination. I have drawn my conclusions according to my own interpretation of the Holy Bible and the interpretations of biblical scholars and teachers whose opinions I agree with.

  And from my point of view, here’s what it all means.

  When God sent His Son to earth, He instituted a new covenant to replace the old covenant, the terms of which had been given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the forefathers of the Jewish race. Then there were the commandments and laws that were given to Moses during the Israelites’ forty-year sojourn in the desert.

  The Bible says that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. The old covenant required animal sacrifice. Animal blood had to be shed to cover the sins of the people.

  Why did God do it that way? I honestly don’t know. But since His wisdom is so much greater than ours, we should just accept that He knew what He was doing.

  Animal sacrifice was not as cut and dry as it sounds. You couldn’t just go out into the pasture and cut out some old dry cow that had stopped having calves and take it to the priest to be sacrificed.

  It had to come from the very best you had. Your prize stock. An animal without a blemish. I have likened it to giving up one of my best herd bulls or one of my best-blooded heifers. God demanded the best of the flocks and herds for blood sacrifices. It was giving up something that was of real value to you.

  And God gave laws and instructions on how to live, dietary guidelines, and outlines for worship. There was the setting aside of Sabbaths and holy days and seasons that were to be observed in specific ways. There was eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth justice and laws about how it was to be meted out and the proper time and method to offer the sacrifices.

  This was the way to atonement for thousands of years. But humans, being what they are, started trying to exploit the system by ignoring the spirit it represented. They started trying to read between the lines and came to the conclusion that it was permissible to do anything that was not specifically forbidden in the law.

  In Jesus’ time the religious leaders of the day, known as the Pharisees, followed the law to the letter, even down to tithing the herbs in their gardens. But since the law didn’t say you shouldn’t force widows and orphans off their land, they did that and other evil things without pity or remorse.

  The old covenant law was interpreted in a way God never intended it to be, by legalistic people who ignored the spirit of repentance and fairness. They ignored one of the two most important of the Ten Commandments—to love your neighbor as yourself.

  The Pharisees were self-righteous, pompous, and convinced that their interpretation of the Scriptures was the only one that should be accepted. They were so pompous that they didn’t recognize the coming of the Jewish Messiah, an event that had been predicted by their own prophets thousands of years ago.

  When the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious ruling body, was debating about whether Jesus was really the Messiah, one of the leaders made a statement declaring that no prophet comes out of Galilee (John 7:52). For it was prophesied that the Messiah would come from the region of King David, which is exactly where Jesus was born: in the city of David, Bethlehem.

  But as far as the Pharisees were concerned, He was from Nazareth of Galilee. If they had bothered to ask Him where He was born, they would have found out the truth. In their haste and greed to keep their elite place in the Jewish hierarchy and in their fervor to rid the earth of this young man who healed the sick and raised the dead and threatened their exalted place as arbiters and judges of all religious dogma and theological interpretation, they insisted on nothing less than His crucifixion.

  Jesus had given the Pharisees a hard time. He called them whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones and said that men walked by them never knowing the corruption they were passing.

  He called them a brood of vipers and children of the Devil.

  They were self-righteous, supercilious hypocrites who presented an outer facade of pious righteousness, calling attention to their acts of charity and presenting themselves as paragons of virtue, tithing “mint and cumin.” Under the patina of holiness, they were rotten to the core. They kept the commandments and traditions to the letter but took advantage of weaker people. They justified themselves by there not being a specific law forbidding their evil deeds in the Scriptures.

  They kept the letter but not the spirit of the law.

  Jesus said that He did not come to do away with the law but to bring it to fruition. He said He came to bring a new covenant, a righteousness not of outward displays of piety but of conscience and heart. His salvation is received not by eating certain foods, observing certain holidays, or sacrificing animals for the forgiveness of sins but by living a life governed by conscience and the inbred common sense of right and wrong our Creator made us with.

  Jesus said we must be born again. We must become a new creature with an acute sense of right and wrong and a desire to accomplish the true purposes of God, not because of a set of rules but because we knew in our hearts that it was the way of salvation.

  A righteousness based not on laws and traditions but on faith in Jesus. We must believe that He is the Son of God, that He is the only way to the Father, that He rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, and that one day He will return to claim His rightful place as King of kings and Lord of lords.

  But since the scripture stated that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and that without the shedding of blood there could be no remission of sin, one more blood sacrifice had to be exacted. It
was the last sacrifice that would ever need to be made.

  Jesus was conceived not by man but by the Holy Spirit. He was the only human to live His life without blemish or transgression, breaking the cycle of the sin man had been born into since Adam yielded to Satan’s temptation in the garden of Eden.

  God used the blood of the sinless Son of the living God to break the power of Satan and rip open the curtain of the Holy of Holies, the section of the temple where only designated priests could enter. That made it possible for ordinary men to come into the very presence of almighty God to present their praise and petitions in Jesus’ name.

  Jesus was crucified, but He rose from the dead and walked among His disciples, breaking the chain of death and in full view of many. He ascended into the sky to sit at the right hand of the Father, interceding for those who love Him and try to live according to His teachings.

  The blood Jesus shed on the cross covers the sins of those who are willing to accept His promise of eternal life.

  Accepting the salvation of Jesus Christ does not mean a trouble-free life. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never commit another sin. But what it does mean is that when we sin, and we will, we can ask for forgiveness. If we’re sincere and repentant, our sin is covered by the blood Jesus shed on the cross and will be forgiven. The Bible says that if we repent and confess our sins, God is faithful to forgive.

  To receive forgiveness, we must also forgive those who have sinned against us, up to and including grievous wrongs anyone has done us. We don’t have to approve or agree with what they’ve done, but we do, in our hearts, have to forgive them to receive God’s forgiveness.

  When Jesus was hanging on the cross, nailed to it hand and foot in indescribable agony, He asked His Father to forgive the very people who had put Him there because they didn’t know what they were doing.

  And right there is our example for forgiving. If Jesus in the midst of all His suffering could ask forgiveness for His tormentors, we can certainly forgive those we feel have slighted us.

  So, how do we go about this process? How do we receive this eternal blessing of life through Jesus Christ?

  In my own personal opinion, one of the hardest things to grasp about the salvation of Jesus Christ is the simplicity. There’s nothing you can do to earn it, deserve it, or obtain it. You don’t have to be in a certain place. You don’t have to be with a certain person or perform some ritual or physical act.

  The Bible says that “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).

  First of all you have to believe that Jesus is the Son of almighty God. The God that loves you so much He was willing to send His Son to this earth to suffer the most painful and humiliating death a human has ever suffered so that you can live in unspeakable splendor and peace for all eternity.

  You have to repent, which simply means turn away from, change directions.

  And it’s a “come as you are” proposition. You can’t wait to clean your life up by yourself before you present yourself to God because you’ll never get it done. It’s impossible.

  You come with all your wrinkles and warts showing, all your bad habits, all your faults and flaws and prejudices, and with your heart on your sleeve. You must come contrite and broken and truly meaning in your heart, mind, and spirit that you realize that it’s going to take something much bigger than yourself to ever give you the peace of mind you seek.

  And in this humble, broken, and willing state of mind, confessing that you’re a sinner who needs a savior, you ask Jesus to forgive you and take over and help you to make the changes that you need to make in your life.

  There is a standard prayer; it’s called the sinner’s prayer. But I believe that if you cover all the bases and are honestly sincere from your heart, you can do it in your own words, your own vocabulary.

  Believing in our hearts, we make our profession of faith. Then Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow Me.”

  We follow Jesus, trying to be representatives of His love, trying to emulate His compassion, His forgiveness, and to walk in His way. When we sin, and we will, we acknowledge it, confess it, accept God’s forgiveness, put our feet right back on the path and move on, following His teaching and our conscience.

  God knew what was going to happen to His Son. He knew that even after giving mankind the most priceless gift possible, the world would turn into an unbelieving and unrepentant cesspool that flaunts its iniquities and ridicules the name of its one way to escape hell.

  For there is no other way.

  All mankind will spend eternity in one of two places: heaven or hell. One of indescribable joy or one of indescribable pain and horror, and God left the decision up to every individual.

  Jesus said He is the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Him. He did not say a way, a truth, or a life. He said the way, the truth, and the life.

  Lots of people will tell you that there are many ways to the mountaintop. But only God is on the mountaintop. His Word says there’s only one way up—the Lord Jesus Christ.

  One of my greatest joys is that I have seen several of the people in our organization become believers, make their profession of faith in Jesus, and change their lives.

  We had lived in the Nashville area for more than thirty years and had gone to a lot of churches. They were good churches with good pastors who preached the gospel and wonderful people making up the congregations. But we had never found a church that we really felt at home in. In other words, we never felt like a part of the church family.

  Very possibly the reason for this was that my work schedule meant we couldn’t attend on a regular basis. Our attendance was intermittent at best, and we may have gone weeks in between services.

  On Easter 2003 I received a request from a church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, called World Outreach, to do a couple of songs at their annual Easter service. They held it at Murphy Center on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, the same venue where we did Volunteer Jam 2.

  It was a tradition for World Outreach Church to hold its Easter service in the big arena every year to increase the seating capacity in hopes of attracting the unchurched and unsaved who are more apt to attend a church service on Easter.

  The praise and worship team and the musicians that make up the band that plays behind them are top notch. The musical worship segment of any service is special and moving. On Easter they bring in extra musicians, turn out the full choir, and perform special songs and arrangements to honor the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

  In addition, the church brings in a special musical guest, usually a Nashville-based recording artist. This particular year they invited me.

  I accepted their invitation. I went and did a couple of gospel songs and stayed for the rest of the service.

  Pastor Alan Jackson preached an inspired sermon. The music was great and the people were so friendly that Hazel and me decided to attend a regular Sunday service at World Outreach when we got the chance. After attending a couple of services, it was apparent that we had found the church home we had looked for so long.

  Pastor Jackson has a way of preaching that makes it seem that he is preaching to himself at the same time he preaches to the congregation. By admitting his own faults and shortcomings instead of condemning everyone else’s, it is an uplifting message about the love of God and the salvation of Jesus Christ.

  World Outreach is nondenominational and not bound by the doctrine nor traditions of any organized denomination. With two goals, to reach the lost and pastor the found, they are a Bible-believing, Communion-taking, water-baptizing, and evangelical congregation of hard-working Tennessee people who desire to share the love of the Lord.

  We met good Christian folks who were happy to take us into their church family. We’ve been going to World Outreach ever since and, much to my blessing, I am asked to participate in the praise and worship servi
ce from time to time.

  CHAPTER 41

  MANY, MANY YEARS AGO GOD CAME TO ABRAHAM, HE SAID I’VE CHOSEN YOU TO CARRY OUT MY PLAN

  Our church is a rock-solid supporter of the state of Israel and its right to exist, defend itself, and be a sovereign nation that stands in the middle of the total chaos and hostility that surrounds it.

  Pastor Jackson’s mother and father, George and Betty, live a part of every year in Jerusalem. They have Christian books translated into Hebrew so they can be read by the Jewish people. The church sponsors several trips a year, taking large and small groups who want to experience the Holy Land.

  We had always wanted to go to Israel and in 2008, accompanied by our son, Charlie, Dean Tubb, and our grandson, Evan, we signed on for one of the trips.

  I had heard it said that going to Israel will change your life. As one who has made the trip three times and intends to go back again, I will attest to the fact.

  To see where the Old Testament and the New Testament blend six thousand years of history together in the space of a few square miles.

  Where the tenents of the old covenant of animal sacrifice were given to the Israelites.

  Where the long-awaited Messiah Jesus Christ was born, crucified, and resurrected, instituting the new covenant.

  Where the magnificent temple of Solomon stood.

  Where the empty garden tomb is carved out of a hillside of stone a short distance from Golgotha, the place of the skull, where the Bible says Jesus was crucified.

  The Wailing Wall. The Garden of Gethsemane. Mount Carmel, where Elijah called down fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice. The caves of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Engedi, where David hid from King Saul.

  The mountain fortress of Masada, where more than nine hundred Israelites died at their own hand rather than yield to the Roman army.

  The Sea of Galilee, where Jesus walked on the water.

  The gigantic killing plain below Megiddo, where the final war, commonly called the battle of Armageddon, will be waged.