I’ve been reading a lot about visions of Heaven and visions of Hell lately. So much so that I’ve been dreaming about it, and it has occupied my thoughts. I also keep seeing people “jokingly” make comments about Hell where they seem to think that it will be some decadent party with an orgy. The idea that Hell has any enjoyment has to be one of Satan’s greatest deceptions ever pulled over humanity. I’ve even seen the comment that if this or that isn’t in Heaven, I don’t want to be there. Remember this, God is everything good and right, and Hell is the absence of God.
The idea that Hell is some orgy might not be far from the truth. All of the actions that are here will be mimicked, including sex, but in a depraved and twisted way. So take your experiences now, remove everything good about them, and imagine what you have left. When we choose to remove God from the equation, sex becomes devoid of pleasure, love, joy, and intimacy. What does that leave you? (Trigger warning.) Rape, injury, lack of consent, fear, doubt, uncertainty. All the bad experiences we want to forget, those are what the devil and his minions have to offer you.
Then there is the idea that Heaven is a banquet of bland, healthy foods, and the decadent ones are in Hell. We’ve seen this imagery time and again. Again, all that can exist are negative experiences. The food that made us sick, the steak that tasted worse than anything we ever had, the pie from the market that was filled with mold when bitten. We would not get any gustatory enjoyment of sensual pleasure from the texture or flavor.
That’s Hell in a nutshell. It’s not exciting but boring. A rejection of God is a choice to spend eternity in the absence of every positive emotion and feeling we can experience. Heaven though! Heaven is experiencing all the good things we have here, but entirely! God is the source of all the things that we enjoy. In a way, every pleasure, every sensation that is pleasant, is simply a ripple throughout the universe, a reflection of who God is. I get chills (in the right way) sometimes when I ponder what that will look like.
The creamy, velvety feel of my favorite foods is but an inkling of what real pleasure feels like. When I look at my wife across the room and feel the love in my heart, I sometimes have trouble envisioning how I could ever love her more. My heart may feel as if it would burst with tenderness for her, but I still have not experienced all the love God has in store.
A good meditation on this is to sit down, choose something you enjoy doing, and write down every positive word you can think of about it. Then in a second column, write down the antonyms for those words. Please realize that the first column is what it would be like to do that activity in Heaven. The second would be a description of it in Hell.
Choose carefully. Hell is a choice we make now. God has given us a blueprint of how to live our lives fully, to live our lives in a way that not only brings us happiness now but gives us hope of being with Him in the afterlife. Eternity is on the line, and for some of us, the end of our lives could be today. Please don’t wait until it’s too late.