Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part Three

How Can Heaven Be Paradise If Some Of Our Loved Ones Are In Hell?
This may well be the hardest question in the whole of Christian apologetics, and I think there are bound to be aspects to this that we won’t yet understand (as one would expect). But I think what makes it hard is that it is asked with something vitally important overlooked – after all, nobody who really asks ever considers just how awesome and powerful God is, for in fact, those who usually ask are those who don’t believe in Him in the first place. I think that for the Christian who has experienced the supreme power and Omni-benevolence of God, this question isn’t so difficult. But this is only my opinion, I state with no authority, just as how I see the situation.

As I see things, Heaven would not be Heaven if it were conditioned by our previous earthly imaginations. If we are thinking about Heaven in the right way, there are two things which render this objection unpalatable. In the first place, and, I think, most importantly, God has a greater claim on each individual than we do – and if one thinks of Him not as a static outer-being but as a supreme personality, a vast mind with whom one can have a relationship, then clearly our loved ones are as created by Him as we are, and are therefore far more His than ours. In fact, you are far more God's than you are yours. Everything you have is both God's, and yours because of Him. In your Heavenly status you will be shown that that which was yours on earth now belongs fully to God. And wherever our loved ones end up - whether it is with our Creator or not, their real position in relation to us and Him will be closer to Him than to us In other words, the real relationship between ourselves and our loved ones will be reflected perfectly from Him; we will no longer see things through a mirror darkly, we will see with perfect clarity that our loved ones were God's gift to us on earth, and that, in our Heavenly position, any knowledge of their chosen separation, cannot, in any way, cross into the paradisical realm that we are experiencing with God.

Moreover, and this is not very often congenial to the modern minds, but I doubt whether everyone (including husbands and wives) will continue to know each other in Heaven as they do on earth – you won’t need to – it’ll all be about how awesome God is. In assessing this, we are really looking at a demarcation between love in an earthly sense and love in the eternal sense; for I suspect that any love on earth will have only a pale comparison to that in Heaven. I suppose in comparison, it would be like meeting in adult life the boy or girl you had a crush on in middle school; he or she would now be a total stranger, in your mind, divested of anything that resembled that schoolboy crush. What you’ve moved into far transcends anything once felt, and this must be infinitely truer with the heavenly existence.

And this may not be known by everyone in the earthly realm, but the supreme love of God must be in operation in areas of life that you or I cannot imagine. Central parts that make love truly special are the parts which make room for Christ to do His work; the parts where we are able to appreciate fully, the Christ in our beloved - and they are, by their very nature, the parts that are Him. I should imagine that we cannot see fully what we are loving, either through our beloved or through His presence inside us, until we get to Heaven; that is, in Heaven we shall know fully what we, at present, only know in part.

Moreover, I would also say that with the God we know in Christ (ever seen in the book of Revelation how stupendous His full glory will be?) Heaven will be so awesome (and beyond our current imagination) that our current perception of 'co-existence' will be swept away into something more magical than that which linear concepts currently elicit. So if a consistent answer is attempted one really ought to rephrase it not so much as ‘our’ loved ones in separation, but rather ‘God’s’ loved ones in separation. The very essence of Heaven must, as far as I can see, consist of a perfect harmonisation of our own spirit being and of God's presently indescribable perfection. In which case it will, I presume, be impossible to imagine any other existence outside of the perfect paradise that we are experiencing – yet also we would be in a state that experiences the full (and I mean FULL) nature of God’s awesomeness and therefore would have no reason to worry about the others He loves (which may have once been our earthly loved ones) who have chosen to be separated.

And just as a man cannot appreciate the true delights of literature or poetry until he has learned to read properly, how much more true that if one comes to know God he will realise the answers to the questions that bedevil him (pun intended)

I must say though, even though to be in God's presence will be so awesome that our earthly existence cannot really be recognisable, this does not mean trivialising our earthly existence, for in fact, earth is a wonderful taster and a glorious preparation for an even fuller knowledge of God if one chooses Him.

I believe that in our heart of hearts we have never wished for anything else. It may not always be tangible, but all the things that have ever subliminally affected your soul have been but indications of it - thwarted sightings, promises, expectations never quite reaching fruition, melodies that drift away just as you were beginning to enjoy them. But if the wind were ever to blow into the soul; if there ever came a sound that did not drift away but stayed in your presence, the delight itself, you would certainly know it. Without any reservations, you would excitedly proclaim, 'This is why God created me'. All the things that influence us on earth are merely things which God is using to preserve our soul. Both joy and tribulation are the tools He uses to fix us; for every moment of pain, disobedience, anxiety, laughter, pleasure, and love, He is making us into the creatures that He wants us to be.

Every day of your life a euphoric intangibility has been present within your own recesses; it has lingered just beyond the clutch of your awareness. And this is precisely what our creaturely position is in relation to God. We do not have to earn salvation; our eternal destiny is conditioned by our own attitude towards salvation; by our own efforts to know the One who created us. That is why our final judgement is going to be necessary; for only then will we be fully aware of our eternal destiny and how our decisions in life. Either Heaven will be ours - it will be ours in the sense that we knew all along that we had it - the faint sound will become a melody of paradise; or else, we will see that we never made the effort to know Him, and, similarly, we will know that the Heaven which should have been ours but was lost was never very far from us when we were on earth.

At present, you have experienced only the desire of it. Nothing you have ever witnessed has been anything more than an abstraction of Heaven - a thought or emotion that could connect you to the Spirit inside you. Even if you are a non-believer, you will know exactly what I am talking about; for this starved organism is calling you out of your earthly self. It is not like the feelings a man might have for his earthly beloved - you cannot try to keep it, you cannot try to treasure the feeling; for as soon as you try, it will be gone. Remember, the thing I am talking about is not an experience; it is a brief hint of the relationship between yourself and God.

Just as a city cannot be seen in its entirety unless viewed from above, the earthly desires which are most beneficial to us can only really be known when we know God. And here is another one of those paradoxes in Christianity; the freedom of questioning must continue to grow within the mind, but those who do not know what it is that they are questioning, will be those who plan their lives around transient moments, thus impeding the growth. There is something stifling about the idea of finality, because there is nothing more soul-destroying than being in a state of stagnancy and inertia. And I'm afraid, abstract intelligence will never be enough. For those who intellectually abstract their emotions for the pleasurable purposes of self-denial have really overlooked the true delights of the revelations that follow.

This is a little part of what Christ meant when He said that we must become like children; the instruction is twofold. Firstly we should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and secondly, we should enquire just as children enquire about the world they live in. Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3) - for they are the ones who have best co-ordinated the reliance and the enquiry.

That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. Romans 10:9-10

Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part Two - Talking Oneself Out Of Heaven

One of the feelings I’ve come across - a feeling which has been explored frequently, is the conviction of a man who says he rejects the Heavenly proposition because the thought of loved ones being in the bad place is too shocking a proposition to contemplate. To this I can only respond with the following: how on earth are we to know what another person’s relationship with God is like deep down? Consider yourself for a second, and then consider the person you think knows you best of all (call that person A). Now consider your own self-knowledge, your awareness of your real self and see how comparably meagre A’s knowledge of you really is. Your most personal and secretive thoughts, your inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, your proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams – who really knows the real you? Nobody but yourself and, of course God, who knows you infinitely better than you know yourself.

If there is on thing that is perfectly clear when contemplating God, it is that one must consider these things only in relation to how this truth affects the self, for you cannot possibly hope to know the truth of another person’s situation. An indignant man could reject God all the way because he can’t bear to think of spending eternity away from his loved ones, and yet never realise that they were going to be with God all along. In other words, he could stay away from the party He was invited to only to find that all those he cares about had accepted their invitations, but not in way that he could realise. The truth is, God's relationship with man (even those who we presume were unbelievers) is, I think, far more alive than our own imagination permits us to recognise. We all know that spark of hope that fires up in us the moment we think we’re onto some deep truth about ourselves and our own destiny – those fleeting moments that suggest this is only the prelude to a much more exciting eternal story, and that maybe, just maybe, there is part for us to play. And like I said, God is not some inert monument or static object out there – He is a personality (albeit a complex one) and if one wants to know Him and have revelation, He must be seen as He desires to be seen –and naturally that view of Him must be in accordance with our own personal journey and our own “..most personal and secretive thoughts, inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams” – not anybody else’s. You can only work out God in relation to your proximate distance from Him – there is no other way, for you have no real clue about what exactly (stress EXACTLY) is going on in someone’s else’s mind, and should not dismiss contemplation on these grounds.

Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part One - The Real Truth Explored

The first two columns I ever published on my page on Network Norwich and Norfolk were about Heaven and Hell, and although my views haven’t changed very much, where they have altered slightly is more in the direction of a better hell than is so often perceived. Of course, I might be wrong, but this is the only way I reconcile it with an all-loving supremely benevolent God – the God we see in Jesus Christ. Couple that with the fact that those who preach the worst kinds of hell are mostly those with the most hellish personality and I can quite happily stick with my view. Moreover I think history clearly shows that the idea of this eternal torment with literal pain and flame-fuelled suffering occurred when pagan religions became mixed into Christian cultures, and clearly draining this swamp has proved pretty difficult, particularly when so many power hungry control freaks try to keep it in for their own horrible personal gain.

But clearly, this is why Christ was so against religion, and His warnings so prescient, because God is love, and it is through a RELATIONSHIP with Him that this love blesses and develops, and it is through RELIGION that this blessing is retarded and disfigured. God is love, He is not the God of man's religion, the scriptures are very clear in speaking about all the apostasy of religion, because religion is modeled after man's disfigured perception of God used for their own ways, whereas relationship is modeled after God’s own heart for His people – those who have seen God in Christ have seen the real nature of the Father, not as some megalomaniac tyrant, but as a God of supreme love and grace – a God who would become what we are so that we could become like Christ.

I think hell, that is, the real reality of hell, will have nothing to do with flames and torture (that’s just a silly interpretation) the real pain of hell will be, I presume, rather like human heartbreak but on the grandest scale of all – a place absent of God, where one has chosen to live away from Him – a state of privation; a place where the true and real absence of God is fully realised, and where a person's creaturely position - that of being created to know God and to enjoy heavenly bliss - is made known. When it comes to fear of hell, I abhor all this scare-talk. I suppose the only thing I could say that would constitute a justification for some kind of warning would be that if God didn’t make it known what awesome potential we have with Him we would have no urgency to come to Him and perhaps even no tangible reason to think about our eternal destination. We do not have a docile Sky-Uncle who one can lock away under the stairs when the Christmas party starts, rather we have a supremely powerful Father God who has great things for us should we choose to accept them.

And presumably, the torment of Hell can only be quantified as a comparison to the glory of Heaven, just as the feeling of not being in love is only felt in its fullness when the absence of that love is most tangible. Only when the heart is broken does the absence of love become unbearable, and I presume the torment of hell will be of that kind.

Although the Bible clearly intimates that Hell will be an awful place, clearly only a foolish Christian would on the one hand think the God he worships is all-loving (as seen in the person of Jesus) and then go on to contradict himself by saying that such a God could subject finite humans to eternal torture. I’m amazed that so few Christians can see the contradiction here, particularly as so many atheists can see it quite clearly.

My view of what hell is like is the only way I believe the two can be reconciled; that is, how a God full of grace can send any of us to an eternal place that is wholly disconnected from Himself. Some ascetic Christians might claim that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) belies my claim, but I do not think that it does. Firstly, while there are several messages of edification in the parable, a description of Hell is not one of them. In this parable, the NIV translation 'Hell' is a little misleading - 'Hades' is more accurate. That the Rich Man's fate was a fixity of torment, we cannot doubt. But I strongly suspect that this is not the same description of the Hell that men and women will experience after mankind's final judgement, for in this situation, the Rich Man's despair was still, in one sense, a despair which involves the process of forward thinking (V.27). What the parable is saying is that those versed in OT scripture observing God’s activity throughout history leading towards Jesus should have enough to understand how to live in a manner worthy of God, and that those who didn’t act this way (including in this case the rich man who didn’t even know how to treat Lazarus, his fellow human) wouldn’t know God’s truth even if they saw the resurrection.

Look at God’s people from Exodus onwards – the amount of times He performed miracles to rescue them or help them in battle, yet how quickly they forgot about Him and hardened their hearts. The didactic lesson isn’t so much about snapping one’s fingers and hoping to see a miracle, it is how our own hearts are in relation to God, and whether we are humble. This, as we all know, is played out in earthly terms too – for we all know that the biggest hell on earth for us occurs when we’ve behaved contrary to what we know is true or good or decent or charitable or loving, or when we see others behaving that way – that is the closest thing to hell on earth that we perceive, so it’s little wonder that God seems so unclear to those who can’t face this or who have been led astray by horrible men and women.

What’s worse, there are some Christians who seem to take pride in the fact that those who reject God must face up to it with punishment, they quickly become indignant, and I have a suspicion that it is often because they like to think in the back of their minds that those who reject God on earth are fully deserving of their destiny, but needless to say, I hate this kind of viewpoint. Knowing as I do a God of supreme love and grace (that obviously far far far outweighs our own), I freely suspect that the lost are, in one sense, thriving outcasts, somehow content in their own existence; that their eternal fixity will be an adapted condition, just as an incarcerated criminal is able to make some sort of life for himself on the inside while still lamenting the loss of his freedom on the outside - or perhaps even better, in the case of many, just as a man who is consigned to his hospital bed for a lengthy duration adapts to his surroundings yet still longs for his good health and freedom.

In fact, I do not mean that the spiritually damned may not wish to come out of Hell, in the blurry, nebulous fashion wherein a jealous man 'desires' to be self-secure or an uncaring man desires to be more concerned about his fellow human - but once the world has ended they surely do not desire any form of escape from the position they have chosen for themselves. In that sense, despite being shut out from God, they will, I think, have found a way in which they are able to accept their eternal position with some degree of comfort. They enjoy forever the eternal experiences of being the creature that they themselves had chosen to be while still on earth. But just as those who know Christ will become free in His presence, those who rejected Him will remain self-yoked, forever on the outside of paradise.

One thing I ought to say, there are many people who demand that all this unfair, that in fact, God could wipe everybody's slate clean at the end - that He could have created a situation where all of us have the chance of a fresh beginning. But to this I can only remind you that He has done so already. The moment He carried His cross and died for us was the moment that all this happened. The second chance is here with us already. And others who know about it have the opportunity to have a fresh start - a new beginning where Christ’s spirit comes to live inside them.

St Paul says that we will only be judged on what we know, not that which is unknown to us. There are many people who will live on earth and never hear or read one word about Christ, and the God we see in Christ will not condemn them because of that. But any who have heard the name Christ, know that their sins are wiped out, and therefore know that a second chance is already in their grasp. In that sense, those who object to hell usually look past their own personal obligation to accept the glorious thing which Christ did for them. A corporate objection is not going to be enough to wipe the slate clean, for if our Lord created Heaven in order that we might share in His glory, there must, I presume, also be an eternal place for those who have rejected Him – but I do not think God SENDS anyone to the bad place - I believe those who are there will have freely chosen to be there (see 1 Corinthians 15:22 in Christ ALL will be made alive if they so wish – see also the parable of the Wedding Banquet – all are invited but those that do not make it are the ones that choose to stay away).

No Shame In Repenting

I was interested to read these words from the very talented polymath Stephen Fry:

"In Genesis, Humanity is in some senses literally finding its feet. God has just made us (essentially as decoration, as we would introduce petunias to a bare patch of garden) and pushed us into Eden; without very much knowledge of our capability. Being so introduced to this new and confusing world, Humans are given very little in the way of direction, other than "Don't eat that fruit over there". I call this direction, but this is misleading, because no sooner are we told not to eat certain types of fruit a snake wanders up and goes "It's cool guys, you can eat the fruit. It's super delicious". Being given such conflicting advice, we err on the side of the adventurous - and of course we eat the fruit. Turns out, not only was it super-delicious, but it gave us knowledge of good and evil, so it was a good thing then.

God, however, has other ideas. Being apparently otherwise occupied whilst all this was going on, he comes back to find us quivering and gleaming in the new sun, now complete with fig-leaf underwear. Long story short: God flips out, original sin is born, child-bearing becomes unbearable, working becomes hard work. Because of this misdemeanour at the beginning of time, every human being is created sick and commanded to be well. For this tiny and meaningless slight, every human being is meant to feel shame. I remember being told this story in Sunday school, and the optimistic God-fearing volunteer teacher would almost scowl at us at this point, willing us to feel guilt for these actions. We are humans, we are dirty, we are unworthy to have the Grace of God thrust upon us.

Well I'm sorry optimistic God-fearing volunteer teacher, but I couldn't then and I won't now. I refuse to be servile to the point of emancipation, and I refuse to feel any mote of emotion for any action I hadn't the slightest bearing on, nor could have. This, then, is original sin - for what we are all ostensibly to go to hell for? I will not take responsibility for what two strangers did six-thousand years ago, no matter how apparently bad it may be. If I am to share responsibility as a human, am I meant to feel shame for the atrocities of Hitler, or the Khmer Rouge? Of course not, judgement can only be given on actions that require some form of participation from the person, be it action or inaction. If neither is possible, then we do not judge. Consider five people dying in a car crash, and then a man who lived five hundred miles away being taken to prison for it. Would we consider this action a correct one? Of course not, it's morally condemnable to punish someone for something they could not have prevented; so why are we to believe that a Benevolent and Omniscient God would take joy in it?"

I think Stephen Fry has got this a little wrong – it is not as though God wants us to walk around feeling thoroughly ashamed of ourselves; the reality is that we are all fallen, in a state of ‘sin’, but that in Christ we have the answer for our salvation.

In actual fact, there is no reason why one’s state of being in sin should have very much bearing on their personalities if they are unaware of their position in relation to God. It is not for the Christian to tell another man to confess his sins to God, for he may have private reasons why he does not want to. But it would be good for himself if he could be aware of his wrongs and seek to put them right, even in his one private thoughts – for there is little worse than a wretched man who remains unaware of what a wretched so and so he is.

Of course, the world is full of people who go about their business being largely unaware of the state of being in sin, yet of course they are able to distill moral truths from their own consciences – but that does not of course mean that observing a world full of sinful people we would expect to see everyone distressed and miserable. So unlike Stephen Fry, I can see a way in which we can be mindful of our sin (and of course our ‘sins’) and yet know that the answer to our situation hardly warrants a world full of misery and pessimism.

For those who can’t observe the distinction I am making, imagine looking in at all the people on the Titanic a few minutes before it hit the iceberg. If you could see the whole picture, you would know that it won’t be very long before the ship crashes and sinks – but you would not look on all the passengers while they were still unaware of this and expect to see them all miserable and pessimistic. Yes they are heading for a nasty surprise, but they are not really sure of their true position in relation to the whole picture, and I suppose that is what much of humanity is like in relation to their own sin.

Their perceived future is only the tip of a much more significant iceberg, which will be seen in full on judgment day when Christ returns. And whether a man finds himself rescued or drowning depends on his own decisions and his own clarity regarding his state of sin.

Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Acts 2:38

Repent , then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you — even Jesus. Acts 3:19-20