Faith and Doubts M4 (May 10, 09)
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Faith and Doubt M4 2009 05 10
Hold off on the slide until I announce it…
Title: Would a Loving God Send Someone to Hell?
Text: Luke 16:19-31
Do NOT use the PowerPoint title slide today—I’ll introduce the title at the end of my intro.
Big Idea: Hell is one’s freely chosen destination apart from God.
(intro paragraph for morning services only) Today is Mother’s Day. Some mothers have been candid with me, “If there’s one thing I hate about Mother’s Day it is the traditional Mother’s Day sermon.” “What do you hate about the Mother’s Day sermon?” “The message from Proverbs 31 about the ideal wife and mother.” And it’s worse if the one who’s giving it is a man… We’re going to go in a different direction today.
I remember Tony Campolo, the popular sociologist and pastor, who recalled doing an internship at a church when he was a young man. It was Mother’s Day and he was called upon to read the scripture. He was supposed to read from 2 Timothy Chapter 1 where Paul says, “I thank God and I am reminded of your sincere faith which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and I am persuaded now lives in you also.” But instead of reading the verses from 2 Timothy, Tony Campolo accidentally read from I Timothy where Paul says, “We know that the law is made for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and the sinful, for those who kill their fathers or mothers.” Tony was thinking, “Boy, this is Mother’s Day, but the pastor is really going to sock it to them.”
This morning, as we continue our series on faith and doubt, we are going to look at a question which many of us have likely thought about, and which, at least at first glance, may seem way too intense for Mother’s Day.
Now what I am about to say is not a mistake—though you may think so…
The question is and here comes the speed bump: “Could we believe in a God who would actually send people to hell?
Before we explore this question, let us look at some of the things the scriptures teach us about the character of God.
The scriptures teach that while God transcends gender, God is like an ideal mother and father.
In the book of Isaiah we find pictures of God as being a mother unable to forget her child (Ch. 49) and a mother who comforts her child (Ch. 66).
In the Gospel of Mathew we read about how Jesus looks out over Jerusalem with sadness and cries out, “How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you are not willing.”
The scriptures also, of course, portray God as an ideal father.
When we pray to God, Jesus instructed us to pray, “Our Father… our Abba, or our Daddy…”
In Luke 15 we have a beautiful picture of God, as a father who sacrifices his dignity by doing something that no self-respecting Jewish man over 25 years of age would do. He sees his estranged, rebellious son in the distance, and he picks up edge of his flowing robe and runs after him, in the original language the word can be translated “race” after him, so that his legs show, which in his culture would have been painfully humiliating.
Some of you have had pain in your heart because your father has not pursued you; and in Luke 15 we have a picture of God who pursues you.
God is a being who transcends gender, but the scriptures portray God as an ideal mother and an ideal father.
Part of what constitutes the character of an ideal mother or father would include the qualities of discipline and justice. In Hebrews 12 we read, “God disciplines those he loves and chastens everyone he accepts as son or daughter.” The writer of Hebrews says we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it; and so will God who is our heavenly father. The writer of the book of Hebrews says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time but later on produces a harvest of love, righteousness and peace by those who have been trained by it.”
In Psalm 89: 14 we read that righteousness and justice are the foundation of God’s throne. Part of what we would expect and want in a God who is an ideal mother and father is not only love, but also discipline and justice.
When I was a young boy four or five years old living in London, England, I remember how I got into a fight with my older and younger sisters—boy against the girls. I remember running upstairs grabbing a hold of my older sister’s chest of drawers which had a large mirror attached to it. I pushed it over and the mirror ended up shattering. I remember that I was disciplined for that by not being allowed to eat dessert for a long time—a month I think.
As a teenager I remember well when I had been caught shoplifting, my parents sat me down, and my dad explained to me how I had hurt them and brought shame on our family by doing what I did. I also remember clearly how he struck me a couple of times, and I remember how I was punished in a way that would have created the most difficult time for me as kid who loved to go out—I was grounded for several months. I was taken by my dad on a field trip to the BC Provincial prison in New Westminster (at the time)… I recall looking through the bars and seeing the bullet holes in the wall. Dad said, “I just want you to see your future home.”
If my parents had not disciplined and punished me for breaking my sister’s mirror, for shoplifting, they would have been, in that respect, less than complete parents.
We expect a good referee to call a penalty when a player has violated the rules and created a situation that has given his or her team an unfair advantage. If a member of the Chicago Black Hawks skated in Roberto Luongo’s goal crease and then turned around and high-sticked him by breaking his stick over Luongo’s face mask, we would be outraged if the referee saw it and didn’t call a penalty.
I recently saw the movie Changeling. In the movie Changeling, Angelina Jolie plays a mother whose 10-year-old boy Walter is abducted by a man named Gordon Northcott—the movie is based on a true story. There are about 20 boys that Northcott abducts. Near the end of the movie Northcott is caught; the evidence against him is overwhelming; he is declared guilty by the jury; and he is sentenced. If the judge had not sentenced Gordon Northcott in some way, people would have said the judge miscarried justice.
Those of us who live in the West and who have never really been directly exposed to large scale brutality and violence can tend to get upset with the idea that God is just, and that he might actually one day exercise judgment against people.
But if you have faced horrible violence, because you have lived in the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur, then, unlike us, you tend to want to believe in a God who judges.
Miroslav Volf, the Croatian theologian who teaches at Yale, has seen great violence in his homeland; and he finds that he needs to believe in a God who not only loves, but also judges.
He writes in his insightful great book, Exclusion and Embrace (and I have quoted this passage before) He says, “If you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped, then the only way that you will be prevented from picking up the sword and judgment yourself, is to believe in a God who will exercise divine justice.”
Volf says his thesis that belief in a God who will exercise divine judgment will keep a person from picking up the sword of vengeance will be unpopular with many in the West …. [but] only in the quiet seclusion the suburbs can you believe that non-violence is the result of a belief that God will never judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in blood of the innocent, that idea will invariably die…
So part of the character of God as an ideal Mother and Father is that God is a figure of extraordinary love, but God is also as an ideal mother and father--a person of justice, who will bring judgment. We don’t know exactly how God will exact judgment in the world to come, but as Abraham points out in Genesis, we know “the judge of all the world will always do what is right.” (Genesis 18:25)
Now we may say that exacting discipline and punishment against injustice is one thing, but a loving God would never, ever send anyone to hell. That’s quite another thing. The Bible teaches that we human beings have an eternal destiny. Some will experience that eternal destiny with great joy, fulfillment, and beauty with God. Others will experience their eternal destiny without God—an existence where joy is absent, a place where there is regret, and no beauty. Rachel Barkey describes hell as a place where you hear no laughter of children and where it never rains.
Some people don’t believe in hell because they have in their mind a distorted image of what hell actually is. Perhaps they picture Dante’s inferno--hell as a place where there are literal flames. And they imagine these pitiable creatures that are tossed into the fire--because their bad deeds outweigh their good deeds--and they are crying out to God saying, “Have mercy on me,” but God says, “It is too late. You’ve had your chance, now you will suffer.”
But the language of hell fire, I believe, agreeing with most commentators, is metaphorical.
What then is hell?
The Bible teaches the essence of sin is a choice to build our life on something or someone other than God.
We tend to think of sin perhaps as breaking some kind of moral code… whether it is murder or oppressing a minority group or marring the environment… these of course are all manifestations of sin.
But the heart of the biblical definition of sin is well captured by Soren Kierkegaard in his book, Sickness Unto Death. In that book Kierkegaard defines sin as building our life on something other than God—putting our identity in some thing or some one: our family, education, our career, our money, our appearance, pleasure. Sin is making a good thing, our ultimate thing.
Since God is the source of all joy and love and peace and wisdom and beauty, if we were to lose his presence completely that would be hell.
Hell is simply a soul that has been built on something other than God that goes on forever and ever.
In Luke 16, Jesus gives us a parable about a poor man named Lazarus and a rich man, who goes unnamed. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. Both die. Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks and sees Lazarus in heaven on the bosom of the great father of faith, Abraham: So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire…’
Commentators have noted that Lazarus in the parable has a personal name, but the rich man is only called “the rich man.” Lazarus has a name, an identity. The rich has no name and no identify. This suggests that since the rich man built his identity on wealth, rather than on God, in the life to come once he has lost his wealth, he has also lost any sense of himself.
Given the culture that the rich man lived in, it is almost impossible that he would have been an atheist. He would have almost certainly believed in the existence of God and may have kept many of God’s laws, but he built his life on something other than God—money--and when he lost his money in his life after death—he lost himself.
If we are eternal creatures, and build our lives on something other than God… whether it’s money (prop), education, career, looks, power, some human relationship, approval, comfort… when those things are gone… in the life to come… we will find ourselves going on forever, but surfing on a sea of nothingness.
Tim Keller, one of my teachers, has said, “Hell is no less than a freely chosen identity, based on something else besides God, going on forever.”
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy or eighty years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever.
If we are building our lives on say our selfish desires—a kind of life which leads to bitterness, envy, and anxiety--then the gradual increase of selfishness in eighty years may not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, as Lewis says, if Christianity is true, Hell is precisely the correct technical term for what it would be.
C.S. Lewis’s powerful fictional work, The Great Divorce, is about a dream in which the narrator suddenly, and inexplicably, finds himself in a grim and joyless city (the "grey town", which represents hell).
He eventually finds a bus for those who desire to go on an excursion to the foothills of heaven.
He enters the bus and talks with his fellow ghost-like passengers as they travel. When they get to the outskirts of heaven, shining figures of men and women whom they have known on earth, come from heaven to meet them, and try to persuade them to repent, turn to God and enter heaven, but almost all of them refuse. The people in the bus from hell in Lewis’s parable would prefer to have their “freedom,” as they define it, rather than God. They live with the delusion that if that they glorify God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a tragic irony, their choice ruins them.
In The Great Divorce the narrator asks the guide about some peevish ghost-like woman in Hell (not sure if she’s still a human being in any meaningful sense, asks): "Is she a grumbler or now (reduced to) only a grumble?”
The guide says, “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, and you yourself are still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. And you in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. But, you can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no 'you' left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”
NT Wright says, “It is possible for human beings to continue down this road so that they refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way. So that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that were once human, but now are not; creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all.”
Lewis says, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'THY will be done.' All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek, find. To those who knock, it is opened."(The Great Divorce)
C.S. Lewis says, “Hell is the greatest monument to human freedom.” People, who persistently refuse God’s overtures, will find themselves living out what they most deeply wanted—a life free from God.
Lewis says, "In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of Hell is itself a question: 'What are you asking God to do?' To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary (on the cross). To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what he does." (The Problem of Pain, Ch. 8)
There are some of us who believe that if we follow God, we will somehow lose our true self; that we will lose our freedom; that we will miss out on pleasure and joy.
But the exact opposite is true.
The Psalmist says (Psalm 115) says, “We become like what we worship.”
If we worship money we will become like money: soul-less, lifeless, inanimate.
If we worship God, we will become like God, who is the perfect mother and the perfect father…
In the Great Divorce we read about how people on the bus from hell meet people from heaven…
We see a scene a procession with boys and girls singing and musicians playing…
and after them there was a lady in whose honour all this was being done.
There was this dazzling woman… of astonishing beauty...
‘Is it?... is it? (was she featured in People as one of 50 most beautiful people in the world?)’ I whispered to my guide.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith (ordinary name, ordinary person in many ways) and she lived at Golders Green.’
‘She seems to be... well, a person of particular importance?’
‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’
‘And who are these people who are dancing and throwing flowers before and who are all these young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’
“And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into all creation.”
As we love God as Sarah did, and out of that love people--we don’t become God, but we become like God.
The things that are best in us flourish and we experience great joy and delight in God in this life and in the life to come.
Which path will you choose?
A path built on God that leads to joy, fulfillment and beauty or
on something other than God that goes on forever and ever on a grey sea of nothingness?
The choice is yours.
Let us build our lives not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Let’s pray:
Perhaps you’re here and you’re not sure whether you’re really building your life on God or something else. Maybe like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, you believe in God, you’re a pretty good person, but you’re building your life on something or someone other than God.
If that’s you and you’d like to commit to building your life on the foundation of God, please pray with me.
(As someone has said, if you can still hear God, you’re not in hell yet).
God, you are like a loving father and mother…
I don’t understand it all, but from today forward with your help I want to build my life on you.
Please forgive me for building my life on __________.
I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose again so that I could be forgiven and experience a new beginning with you.
God, I want to build my life on you and experience eternity with you.
Thank you for making it so.
(invitation to stand or raise hand).
Faith and Doubt M4 2009 05 10
Hold off on the slide until I announce it…
Title: Would a Loving God Send Someone to Hell?
Text: Luke 16:19-31
Do NOT use the PowerPoint title slide today—I’ll introduce the title at the end of my intro.
Big Idea: Hell is one’s freely chosen destination apart from God.
(intro paragraph for morning services only) Today is Mother’s Day. Some mothers have been candid with me, “If there’s one thing I hate about Mother’s Day it is the traditional Mother’s Day sermon.” “What do you hate about the Mother’s Day sermon?” “The message from Proverbs 31 about the ideal wife and mother.” And it’s worse if the one who’s giving it is a man… We’re going to go in a different direction today.
I remember Tony Campolo, the popular sociologist and pastor, who recalled doing an internship at a church when he was a young man. It was Mother’s Day and he was called upon to read the scripture. He was supposed to read from 2 Timothy Chapter 1 where Paul says, “I thank God and I am reminded of your sincere faith which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and I am persuaded now lives in you also.” But instead of reading the verses from 2 Timothy, Tony Campolo accidentally read from I Timothy where Paul says, “We know that the law is made for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and the sinful, for those who kill their fathers or mothers.” Tony was thinking, “Boy, this is Mother’s Day, but the pastor is really going to sock it to them.”
This morning, as we continue our series on faith and doubt, we are going to look at a question which many of us have likely thought about, and which, at least at first glance, may seem way too intense for Mother’s Day.
Now what I am about to say is not a mistake—though you may think so…
The question is and here comes the speed bump: “Could we believe in a God who would actually send people to hell?
Before we explore this question, let us look at some of the things the scriptures teach us about the character of God.
The scriptures teach that while God transcends gender, God is like an ideal mother and father.
In the book of Isaiah we find pictures of God as being a mother unable to forget her child (Ch. 49) and a mother who comforts her child (Ch. 66).
In the Gospel of Mathew we read about how Jesus looks out over Jerusalem with sadness and cries out, “How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you are not willing.”
The scriptures also, of course, portray God as an ideal father.
When we pray to God, Jesus instructed us to pray, “Our Father… our Abba, or our Daddy…”
In Luke 15 we have a beautiful picture of God, as a father who sacrifices his dignity by doing something that no self-respecting Jewish man over 25 years of age would do. He sees his estranged, rebellious son in the distance, and he picks up edge of his flowing robe and runs after him, in the original language the word can be translated “race” after him, so that his legs show, which in his culture would have been painfully humiliating.
Some of you have had pain in your heart because your father has not pursued you; and in Luke 15 we have a picture of God who pursues you.
God is a being who transcends gender, but the scriptures portray God as an ideal mother and an ideal father.
Part of what constitutes the character of an ideal mother or father would include the qualities of discipline and justice. In Hebrews 12 we read, “God disciplines those he loves and chastens everyone he accepts as son or daughter.” The writer of Hebrews says we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it; and so will God who is our heavenly father. The writer of the book of Hebrews says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time but later on produces a harvest of love, righteousness and peace by those who have been trained by it.”
In Psalm 89: 14 we read that righteousness and justice are the foundation of God’s throne. Part of what we would expect and want in a God who is an ideal mother and father is not only love, but also discipline and justice.
When I was a young boy four or five years old living in London, England, I remember how I got into a fight with my older and younger sisters—boy against the girls. I remember running upstairs grabbing a hold of my older sister’s chest of drawers which had a large mirror attached to it. I pushed it over and the mirror ended up shattering. I remember that I was disciplined for that by not being allowed to eat dessert for a long time—a month I think.
As a teenager I remember well when I had been caught shoplifting, my parents sat me down, and my dad explained to me how I had hurt them and brought shame on our family by doing what I did. I also remember clearly how he struck me a couple of times, and I remember how I was punished in a way that would have created the most difficult time for me as kid who loved to go out—I was grounded for several months. I was taken by my dad on a field trip to the BC Provincial prison in New Westminster (at the time)… I recall looking through the bars and seeing the bullet holes in the wall. Dad said, “I just want you to see your future home.”
If my parents had not disciplined and punished me for breaking my sister’s mirror, for shoplifting, they would have been, in that respect, less than complete parents.
We expect a good referee to call a penalty when a player has violated the rules and created a situation that has given his or her team an unfair advantage. If a member of the Chicago Black Hawks skated in Roberto Luongo’s goal crease and then turned around and high-sticked him by breaking his stick over Luongo’s face mask, we would be outraged if the referee saw it and didn’t call a penalty.
I recently saw the movie Changeling. In the movie Changeling, Angelina Jolie plays a mother whose 10-year-old boy Walter is abducted by a man named Gordon Northcott—the movie is based on a true story. There are about 20 boys that Northcott abducts. Near the end of the movie Northcott is caught; the evidence against him is overwhelming; he is declared guilty by the jury; and he is sentenced. If the judge had not sentenced Gordon Northcott in some way, people would have said the judge miscarried justice.
Those of us who live in the West and who have never really been directly exposed to large scale brutality and violence can tend to get upset with the idea that God is just, and that he might actually one day exercise judgment against people.
But if you have faced horrible violence, because you have lived in the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur, then, unlike us, you tend to want to believe in a God who judges.
Miroslav Volf, the Croatian theologian who teaches at Yale, has seen great violence in his homeland; and he finds that he needs to believe in a God who not only loves, but also judges.
He writes in his insightful great book, Exclusion and Embrace (and I have quoted this passage before) He says, “If you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped, then the only way that you will be prevented from picking up the sword and judgment yourself, is to believe in a God who will exercise divine justice.”
Volf says his thesis that belief in a God who will exercise divine judgment will keep a person from picking up the sword of vengeance will be unpopular with many in the West …. [but] only in the quiet seclusion the suburbs can you believe that non-violence is the result of a belief that God will never judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in blood of the innocent, that idea will invariably die…
So part of the character of God as an ideal Mother and Father is that God is a figure of extraordinary love, but God is also as an ideal mother and father--a person of justice, who will bring judgment. We don’t know exactly how God will exact judgment in the world to come, but as Abraham points out in Genesis, we know “the judge of all the world will always do what is right.” (Genesis 18:25)
Now we may say that exacting discipline and punishment against injustice is one thing, but a loving God would never, ever send anyone to hell. That’s quite another thing. The Bible teaches that we human beings have an eternal destiny. Some will experience that eternal destiny with great joy, fulfillment, and beauty with God. Others will experience their eternal destiny without God—an existence where joy is absent, a place where there is regret, and no beauty. Rachel Barkey describes hell as a place where you hear no laughter of children and where it never rains.
Some people don’t believe in hell because they have in their mind a distorted image of what hell actually is. Perhaps they picture Dante’s inferno--hell as a place where there are literal flames. And they imagine these pitiable creatures that are tossed into the fire--because their bad deeds outweigh their good deeds--and they are crying out to God saying, “Have mercy on me,” but God says, “It is too late. You’ve had your chance, now you will suffer.”
But the language of hell fire, I believe, agreeing with most commentators, is metaphorical.
What then is hell?
The Bible teaches the essence of sin is a choice to build our life on something or someone other than God.
We tend to think of sin perhaps as breaking some kind of moral code… whether it is murder or oppressing a minority group or marring the environment… these of course are all manifestations of sin.
But the heart of the biblical definition of sin is well captured by Soren Kierkegaard in his book, Sickness Unto Death. In that book Kierkegaard defines sin as building our life on something other than God—putting our identity in some thing or some one: our family, education, our career, our money, our appearance, pleasure. Sin is making a good thing, our ultimate thing.
Since God is the source of all joy and love and peace and wisdom and beauty, if we were to lose his presence completely that would be hell.
Hell is simply a soul that has been built on something other than God that goes on forever and ever.
In Luke 16, Jesus gives us a parable about a poor man named Lazarus and a rich man, who goes unnamed. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. Both die. Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks and sees Lazarus in heaven on the bosom of the great father of faith, Abraham: So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire…’
Commentators have noted that Lazarus in the parable has a personal name, but the rich man is only called “the rich man.” Lazarus has a name, an identity. The rich has no name and no identify. This suggests that since the rich man built his identity on wealth, rather than on God, in the life to come once he has lost his wealth, he has also lost any sense of himself.
Given the culture that the rich man lived in, it is almost impossible that he would have been an atheist. He would have almost certainly believed in the existence of God and may have kept many of God’s laws, but he built his life on something other than God—money--and when he lost his money in his life after death—he lost himself.
If we are eternal creatures, and build our lives on something other than God… whether it’s money (prop), education, career, looks, power, some human relationship, approval, comfort… when those things are gone… in the life to come… we will find ourselves going on forever, but surfing on a sea of nothingness.
Tim Keller, one of my teachers, has said, “Hell is no less than a freely chosen identity, based on something else besides God, going on forever.”
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy or eighty years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever.
If we are building our lives on say our selfish desires—a kind of life which leads to bitterness, envy, and anxiety--then the gradual increase of selfishness in eighty years may not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, as Lewis says, if Christianity is true, Hell is precisely the correct technical term for what it would be.
C.S. Lewis’s powerful fictional work, The Great Divorce, is about a dream in which the narrator suddenly, and inexplicably, finds himself in a grim and joyless city (the "grey town", which represents hell).
He eventually finds a bus for those who desire to go on an excursion to the foothills of heaven.
He enters the bus and talks with his fellow ghost-like passengers as they travel. When they get to the outskirts of heaven, shining figures of men and women whom they have known on earth, come from heaven to meet them, and try to persuade them to repent, turn to God and enter heaven, but almost all of them refuse. The people in the bus from hell in Lewis’s parable would prefer to have their “freedom,” as they define it, rather than God. They live with the delusion that if that they glorify God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a tragic irony, their choice ruins them.
In The Great Divorce the narrator asks the guide about some peevish ghost-like woman in Hell (not sure if she’s still a human being in any meaningful sense, asks): "Is she a grumbler or now (reduced to) only a grumble?”
The guide says, “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, and you yourself are still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. And you in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. But, you can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no 'you' left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”
NT Wright says, “It is possible for human beings to continue down this road so that they refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way. So that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that were once human, but now are not; creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all.”
Lewis says, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'THY will be done.' All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek, find. To those who knock, it is opened."(The Great Divorce)
C.S. Lewis says, “Hell is the greatest monument to human freedom.” People, who persistently refuse God’s overtures, will find themselves living out what they most deeply wanted—a life free from God.
Lewis says, "In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of Hell is itself a question: 'What are you asking God to do?' To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary (on the cross). To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what he does." (The Problem of Pain, Ch. 8)
There are some of us who believe that if we follow God, we will somehow lose our true self; that we will lose our freedom; that we will miss out on pleasure and joy.
But the exact opposite is true.
The Psalmist says (Psalm 115) says, “We become like what we worship.”
If we worship money we will become like money: soul-less, lifeless, inanimate.
If we worship God, we will become like God, who is the perfect mother and the perfect father…
In the Great Divorce we read about how people on the bus from hell meet people from heaven…
We see a scene a procession with boys and girls singing and musicians playing…
and after them there was a lady in whose honour all this was being done.
There was this dazzling woman… of astonishing beauty...
‘Is it?... is it? (was she featured in People as one of 50 most beautiful people in the world?)’ I whispered to my guide.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith (ordinary name, ordinary person in many ways) and she lived at Golders Green.’
‘She seems to be... well, a person of particular importance?’
‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’
‘And who are these people who are dancing and throwing flowers before and who are all these young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’
“And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into all creation.”
As we love God as Sarah did, and out of that love people--we don’t become God, but we become like God.
The things that are best in us flourish and we experience great joy and delight in God in this life and in the life to come.
Which path will you choose?
A path built on God that leads to joy, fulfillment and beauty or
on something other than God that goes on forever and ever on a grey sea of nothingness?
The choice is yours.
Let us build our lives not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Let’s pray:
Perhaps you’re here and you’re not sure whether you’re really building your life on God or something else. Maybe like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, you believe in God, you’re a pretty good person, but you’re building your life on something or someone other than God.
If that’s you and you’d like to commit to building your life on the foundation of God, please pray with me.
(As someone has said, if you can still hear God, you’re not in hell yet).
God, you are like a loving father and mother…
I don’t understand it all, but from today forward with your help I want to build my life on you.
Please forgive me for building my life on __________.
I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose again so that I could be forgiven and experience a new beginning with you.
God, I want to build my life on you and experience eternity with you.
Thank you for making it so.
(invitation to stand or raise hand).
posted by Shigematsu at 12:43 PM
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