In my journey of faith, I’ve
many times been helped by the writings of C. S. Lewis. While reading The
Problem of Pain, I made a giant step in understanding Hell. Later, in his
book The Great Divorce, I found these words that many will recognize:
“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.”
Before ever seeing that
popular quote, I heard a sermon on the “love of God” which downplayed the
reality of “hell.” During the message, I thought about how the words of Deuteronomy 4:24, “For the LORD your God is a
consuming fire, a jealous God,” related to 1 John 1:5 and 1 John 4:8, where John says, “God is love,” and “God
is light.” I got this sudden insight on Hell: God, as Light and Love, reveals
the truth and is so passionately jealous of its integrity that He consumes
the darkness of lies. Our God of fiery Love is also the God
of consuming Light. Hell is not the result of His absence, but an effect
of His ongoing presence. Love and Light are omnipresent.
Later, when studying the
doctrine of Hell in graduate school, these previous meditations congealed into
the following poem that describes God from two opposite perspectives:
HEAVEN AND HELL
“Consuming Fire, Eternal Light,
Who shines Your grace to heal our sight;
Life-giving Flame and Loving Blaze,
Our open hands to You we raise,
Secure within Your purging gaze,
With joy we praise: we sing our praise!”
“Unquenching Heat, Infernal Light,
That fries our souls, disrupts our night;
Tormenting Blast and Burning Fate,
Our fists we raise in stern debate,
Enraged beneath your scorching Weight,
In pain we hate: we scream our hate!”
— David L. Hatton, 3/8/1983
(in Poems Between Heaven & Hell
© 1991 by David L. Hatton)
As C. S. Lewis explains, Hell
is God’s last mercy to the unrepentant sinner. The perpetual pain of Hell is
Love’s endless commitment to teach the truth to free moral agents who forever
choose to ignore or deny it. Ignorant skeptics may zealously hate the concept
of Hell. But in His own perfect hatred for it, God confronted the realistic
results of humanity's misuse of free-will with the only remedy that could
maintain human freedom: His personal incarnation, death, and resurrection in
Christ. At His own expense, God offers us an escape from the self-made choices
which brought Hell into existence and make it such a hellish place.
So, the familiar question
stands: “Where will you spend eternity?” The Gospel of Jesus Christ lays
the ultimate responsibility on each human soul for individually determining the answer.
[One of the best sermons I've heard on this subject, from a totally Biblical viewpoint, is "Hell Explained" (a bit over 40 minutes long, but well worth listening to). ALSO, see my other blog article: "A HOLY HELL, NO LESS..."]
