SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

            I don’t know if there is a scene in all of literature like the moment when Huckleberry Finn decides he will go to hell. I hope kids get to keep reading this book in school. It is increasingly marginalized in school curricula because many deem it a racist book. There isn’t a more anti-racist book in the American Canon than Huckleberry Finn.  If you don’t believe me read chapter 30 when Huck decides to go to hell.

            Huck Finn has escaped an alcoholic, abusive father at the same time Jim has escaped slavery in Miss Watson’s house. They head down the Mississippi River on a raft, encountering the full panorama of America along the way – and grow to love each other as deeply as friends can.  In chapter 30 Jim has been snatched and sold to a farmer, Silas Phelps. Huck has to finally come to grips with the fact that he is doing something illegal, something every authority figure in his life has told him was a sin. He is helping a slave to escape.  Does he write home to tell folks where Jim is? Does he do nothing? Does he help Jim to escape the Phelps farm? This latter option, Huck has been told, will result in damnation.  But everything inside him tells him his real responsibility is to his friend. Although he is afraid of hell, he makes the decision to rescue Jim:

            I was trembling…because I’d got to decide. And then I says to myself, ‘alright then, I’ll go to hell.’

            I don’t know that there is a moment of greater moral choice in all of fiction – not even Robert Jordan,  staying behind at the bridge at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls compares. I never read this passage dry-eyed. It is  a moment of  triumph for  moral sense against all the lies society tells us.

            I believe that we are born with a moral sense, and that the existence of it is a great proof of God’s existence .  C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity:

            Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two make five….human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can not really get rid of it. (chapter I)

Or, as Paul asserts to the Romans:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived since the foundation of the world in the things which have been made – and so they are without excuse. (Romans 1.19-20 ESV).

            The tough thing then, is not so much to know what the right thing is – no matter how many lies one is told – but the determination to do that  right thing.  We know this. We are truly, as Paul says, “without excuse.”

            Huck is motivated by a sense of right which is in no way abstract.  It is wholly personal. Huck loves Jim, and cares deeply about his future with his wife and children. Love leads to righteousness.  Love is the source of obedience.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14.15 ESV)

            Of course we know that already too.

            The beauty of the passage in Huck Finn is that Huck has not chosen hell at all, but righteousness. Sometimes such a course is chosen with much trembling.  But in the end, God has given us the resources to know right from wrong. The variable is our own courage and commitment to do what we know to be right.

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