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- God and Hell (Part 2)
Welcome back!
If you actually enjoy reading these (weird, right?) please go tell a friend about it. This little blog of mine has, what, twelve of you readers? Let’s see thirteen of you by the end of next year. That would be so neat.
In this post, we’re continuing our conversation about Hell. It’s a short one today.
I’ve asserted in my title that Hell is a Bell, and it sounds like your heart. I’ll explain what I mean.
Hell is a Heart of Stone
Hell is nothing less than the darkness within us, fully grown and realized in such a way that it becomes an oppressive reality, particularly for the one it began in.
You are always feeding your heart. It either gets God, or it gets some other crap. Whatever you are feeding your heart, if it is apart from God, it fuels nothing but pride. It teaches your heart that it doesn’t need God (who, remember, is the source of Life and Goodness). It teaches your heart to live without real Life, real Goodness, or real Truth or Beauty or anything else that God actually is. If you let that heart be, allowing to grow apart from it’s Creator, you will watch it mature into a fully hardened stone.
I don’t know if you know this, but stones sink.
Your heart without God will do the same.
In a way, the human heart is a reflection of the sum of everything it ever desired. The heart that does not desire God is left alone. It is handed over to the things it loves, and those things in turn consume it.
In this way, the heart becomes its own reality. It makes itself a cage, locked from the inside.
Whoever is in Hell is there because they want to be. It is a cage of their own making, welded together by their own desires.
Depending on how far down this road anyone has gone, it can be difficult to get them to turn around.
They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
Hell’s Bells ring to the tune of a heart set on itself.
Setting the Heart Free
Hell is the emerging reality of the depths of a foolish heart. Again, this is why repentance is so essential to the Christian faith.
Lewis writes in an essay, “The Trouble with X,” that “It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”
Hell is just sin fully grown. If you don’t deal with it, it conquers you, and you go on forever defeated, sulking and consumed by it.
But we are more than conquerors through Christ. Through Him, the tables are turned and we are made to rule over sin.
This theme traces back to Genesis. After feeling sorry for himself, Cain is gearing up to commit history’s first murder. God meets him in his anger, and says this:
If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it
A character in Steinbeck’s East of Eden gives us the following commentary:
The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?
Hell is a choice because sin is a choice. If it isn’t dealt with, it matures into Hell.
I’m not saying Hell is not a real, physical place. God surely has a dungeon for the devil somewhere in the universe. If you miss Christ, however, then it will turn out to have been made for you, too. Your experience with it just depends on how its roots took hold in your heart, and whether they were ever able to be cut out.
The Final Offer
In short, Hell is the world that we insist on keeping for ourselves when we stubbornly refuse to let God in. It’s the leftovers of a world you’ve locked Beauty, Goodness, and Truth out of. It’s your sin, all grown up.
But, praise be to God, there is One who endured everybody’s sin. Enduring everyone’s sin, He endured everyone’s hell.
Jesus took it all on Himself, let it kill him, and resurrected again. He defeated it.
Hell’s Bells were silenced.
Yes- your Hell was conquered on the cross, if you choose to accept that (Timshel).
If you don’t, very well. No one is stopping you from keeping it for yourself.
Recommended Reading
God in the Dock by CS Lewis
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis
The Last Battle by, you guessed it, CS Lewis
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