“Not everyone who calls out to Me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of My Father in heaven will enter. On judgment day many will say to Me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in Your name and cast out demons in Your name and performed many miracles in Your name.” But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from Me, you who break God’s laws.’” (Matthew 7:21-23 NLT)
If you play a game that can’t be won or lost, why play? The challenge of being a human being is there is a “prize” to be “won” and a “penalty” to be “paid” if you lose. The irony is, we don’t “win” the prize, the prize has been won on our behalf, and the “penalty” isn’t “earned” by losing the game, it’s the default “prize” for not choosing to play at all.
C. S. Lewis put it this way: “There is no doctrine (the doctrine of Hell) which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.”
Everyone wants a heaven, but not many want there to be a hell, yet, how can you have one without the other? Most, whether believer or not, “if there was a heaven,” would want to go there. Only those who have no Biblical understanding of what hell is, believe it’s no big deal to go there. “After all,” they reason, “that’s where most people will be, so, I’ll have lots of company.” Sadly, that just isn’t true.
In Luke 16:23 we catch a glimpse of hell in a story Jesus told about a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. We can’t assume that this parable paints the full picture of hell, but it certainly helps us to understand that it’s a place of full awareness, complete helplessness, incessant regret, and anguish for our lost loved ones we left behind.
Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we’ll pass from physical life to physical death, back to eternal life in our eternal body in hell where we’ll have perfect insight and understanding of the truth of Scripture, full awareness of the opportunity we had, but ignored, and an everlasting, soul-wrenching regret that not only did we miss heaven, but those we love who are walking in our steps will miss heaven as well unless they listen to someone who tries to warn them.
It’s interesting to me that in Jesus’ story there’s no indication there will be any interaction between hell’s residents, thus debunking the oft used caricature of hell in the movies of being a continuation of what we experienced on earth – gathering in an eternal bar and commiserating with our drunken buddies how mistreated we’ve been.
With the epidemic of loneliness in our world today, it’s unimaginable to most people to realize they have no real concept of what eternal loneliness will look like: wishing to die, but realizing you’re already dead; longing for companionship, but realizing there will never be another person to be with, to love, to listen to or be listened to.
Compare that with C. S. Lewis’ description: “To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’ To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man – to be an ex-man or ‘damned ghost’ – would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.”
Heaven and hell are more real than the person looking back at you from the mirror, and the only opportunity we have to make our choice where we’ll spend eternity is while we’re residents of planet earth. Please, I’m begging you, Jesus has made a way for you to be in heaven, please take it. If you don’t know how, please click this link: The Bridge to God.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed
Walking With Jesus 