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If you’re choosing between Jesus and something “immoral” but loads of excitement and fun, I encourage you to choose Jesus. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. You will find a deeper, more life-filled life when you choose Jesus’ way.

Seriously, Jesus is the smartest guy who’s ever been on the planet. And if you read his stuff, he really knew how people ticked. And if he’s calling us to “holiness” in some capacity, then it’s not so that we would just get in line, it’s because he loves us too deeply to let us settle for something less than the best.

His vision of life for us is actually far more life-giving than even what we tend to dream for ourselves. We tend to dream too small, looking for what we want, instead of having vision for being the kind of people who can love deeply and sacrificially. The kind of people who actually become the kind of good they want to see in the world.

Here I go quoting Lewis again: “Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

How do you feel about that?

Steve, I met a friend of yours, who was also your best man at your wedding. I think he’ll be in touch with you!

Chris, I don’t know if I’m answering your question rightly, since I haven’t heard back from you. But since Steve sent something, I feel like it would be good for me to continue …

I agree with what Steve has to say.

I think I would add that C. S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

“All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations.”

So, our present life is a preparation of the one to come. And being with God when our time on this planet is done is one of service, love and worship. If you haven’t been doing that now, I doubt this place is where people who don’t want to worship God want to be.

And an afterlife without God is where others are: living for themselves without regard for others, without love, without care. It’s will be a nightmare. Will there be pits of fire? Perhaps. But living with these kinds of people (or in avoidance of them) for eternity without any hint of a good God will definitely feel like the hell of our worst fears.

But people are preparing themselves for these ends, now.

What do you think?

I don’t have definitive answers… just a couple of ideas.

I suppose one place for me to start is with the caricatures. Just as the cloven-hooved red-track-suit image of the devil and the old white-haired grandpa-in-the-clouds image of God and the streets-of-gold and pearly-gates image of heaven are persistent yet inaccurate… the whole dantes-inferno image of hell may also be worn-out, unbiblical and living a bit past its expiration date.

I think a good place to start stripping away the caricatures is to say that heaven is simply the place where God is and hell is the place where God is not.

Then the question that I wonder about is simply, “If God exists… would he or should he force people to be with him in heaven?” I think God would be less than loving if he were to force people into his presence forever.

The way I read the Bible, God doesn’t seem to punish people by sending them to hell… it seems like a natural consequence of not being in the presence of God. You see, God is limited by reality and logic like you and I. He can’t make a square circle. He can’t just overlook wrongdoing and remain just at the same time. And he can’t allow sinners into his presence without an atonement covering.

Why? Because the natural result of a sinful being entering into the presence of a holy God is to be consumed in the same way that walking off a building causes you to fall… in the same way that opening a hot furnace causes you to be burned.

Hell is God’s merciful way of allowing sinners to be separate from him. The pain of hell and the saddness is the result of God’s presence no longer being there as it is on earth. I am prepared to suggest that the conditions may be very wonderful otherwise.

Just food for thought…

Nice to hear from you.
Thank you for your comments. Parts of your United States are surely beautiful too – as my ex girlfriend tells me…

(Sorry for the delay James…just no time just at the moment.)

I’ll be interested to observe the dialogue between you and Chris, assuming it takes place on this page. (Chris, I visited NZ for a week many years ago and have always said if there was one place I could go back to again … it would be there!)

Thank you for your thoughtful comments! And all the way from New Zealand as well! Very cool.

It sounds like your questions revolve around the word, sin. And it seems like you have the most trouble with the idea of some sort of eternal damnation — a punishment put upon us on top of the “injurious” results of some of these things. And you find a great disconnect between these so-called sinful acts and the idea of hell. Is that right?

Just wondering before I jump in …