Love

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.…The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

--CS Lewis

How Can A Loving God Send People To Hell?

More From Tim Keller:

Modern people inevitably think that hell works like this: God gives us time, but if we havn't made the right choices by the end of our lives, he casts our souls into hell for all eternity. As the poor souls fall through space, they cry out for mercy, but God says "Too late! You had your chance! Now you will suffer!" This caricature misunderstands the very nature of evil. The biblical picture is that sin seperates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy, and indeed of all love, wisdom, or good things of any sort. Since we were originally created for God's immediate presence, only before his face will we thrive, flourish and acheive our highest potential. If we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell - the loss of our capability for giving or receiving love or joy.

A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire. Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: "What if when we die we don't end, but spiritually our life extends into eternity?" 

Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.

Jesus' parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16 supports this view of hell. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. They both die and Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven 'in Abraham's bosom':

--So he called to him "Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire." But Abraham replied "Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross from over there to us." He answered, "Then I beg you father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment!" Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them." "No father Abraham," he said. "but if someone from the dead goes to them they will repent." He said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."--

What is astonishing is that though their status's have now been reversed, the rich man seems to be blind to what has happened. He still expects Lazarus to be his servant and treats him as his water boy. He does not ask to get out of hell, but strongly implies that God never gave him or his family enough information about the afterlife. Commentators have noted the astonishing amount of denial, blame shifting, and spiritual blindness in this soul in hell. They have also noted that the rich man, unlike Lazarus, is never given a personal name. He is only called "a rich man", strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than on God, once he lost his wealth he lost any sense of a self.

In short, hell is simply one's freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity.

We see this process 'writ small' in addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and pornography. First, there is disintegration, because as time goes on you need more and more of the addictive substance to get an equal kick, which leads to less and less satisfaction. Second, there is isolation, as you increasingly blame others and circumstances in order to justify your behavior. "No one understands! Everyone is against me!" is muttered in greater and greater self-pity and self absorption. When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing - though a good thing - becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy. When you lose all humility you become out of touch with reality. 

No one ever asks to leave hell. The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham.

In his fantasy, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. They are urged to leave behind the sins that trapped them in hell - but they refuse. Lewis' description of these people are striking because we recognize in them the self delusion and self absorption that are 'writ small' in our own addictions. Lewis writes:

"Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others...but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. There will be no YOU left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God 'sending us' to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE HELL unless it is nipped in the bud."

The people in hell are miserable, but Lewis shows us why. We see raging like unchecked flames their pride, their paranoia, their self pity, their certainty that everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is an idiot! All their humility is gone, and thus so is their sanity. They are utterly, finally locked in a prison of their own self centeredness, and their pride progressively expands into a bigger and bigger mushroom cloud. They continue to go to pieces forever, blaming everyone but themselves. Hell is that, writ large.

That is why it is a travesty to picture God casting people into a pit who are crying "I'm sorry! Let me out!" The people on the bus from Lewis' parable would rather have their 'freedom', as they define it, than salvation. Their delusion is that, if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a supreme and tragic irony, their choice has ruined their own potential for greatness. 

Hell is, as Lewis says "the greatest monument to human freedom." As Romans 1:24 says God "gave them up to...their desires." All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair than that? Lewis writes:

"There are only two kinds of people - those who say 'Thy will be done' to God or those to whom God in the end says 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell choose it. 


Without that self choice, it wouldn't be Hell.

Sunday-Day of rest?

Today has been incredibly frustrating. I couldn't sleep last night at all. I wasn't dealing with any particular anxiety concern...I blame it mostly on a dinner of coke and junior mints. We had family movie night last night. I took the wife and kid to see the new Narnia movie.

So I was up very late, probably fell asleep at about 2am. Then the wife, being th gem that she is...(I'm incredibly blessed to have that woman in my life)..allowed me to sleep in until 830. Church starts at 10am. I muddled around a bit and finally was ready to go at 9:40. Perfect timing.

Then I couldnt find the car keys. Anywhere. I have to admit, I lost my cool a bit. I wasn't the prefect model of Christian temperance and patience. I started blaming everyone around me for why they had disappeared. Everywhere I looked that was a pile of something. This drives me nuts. Piles of magazines, bills, papers, food, trash etc. When I do set something down somewhere, it can get sucked in to a black hole of piles. Why is it so hard to throw things away? So mostly it was my wife's fault for the lost keys. Had I been able to see a counter or table top, I probably would have been able to find the keys that I had placed somewhere I shouldn't have placed them.

Then it became my son's fault, because he had probably run off with them or stashed them in an insane place in the disaster area of a room he keeps back there. So for over an hour, I fumed around looking in impossible places, digging through a disgusting bag of garbage, and generally cursed my lot in life. I began to wonder how I was going to make it to work the next day. To top it off, I'm driving a rental car because my car is in the shop. (I forgot to put on the parking brake and it rolled through two neighbors yards into a copse of trees. I like to say the word copse.) So then I started thinking..if I've lost the rental keys I'm really in trouble. We have a single car driveway, and I had blocked my wife's car in with the keyless rental car.

Things were starting to look bleak.

Then I found them. Someone had put a loaf of bread on top of them right next to the sink.

OK...I calmed down...I moved on with life, I finished cleaning the house since I had started to organize our lives whilst going room to room trying to find the keys. Thankfully, my son had been an angel all morning and pretended he was a ninja outside in the yard.

So I rolled to work. I had some catching up to do. I wasn't meeting any clients so i dressed like a thug from Baltimore. Deep down, thats what I am. A street smart white kid from B-more. I wore some urban jeans and put on a hoodie. I had to close a deal, but all that was getting done over the phone. I rolled through the back door at the office and set the alarm off. No big deal...I just needed to click the remote switch I keep on my car keychain. I looked down at the rental keychain I had in my hand. The alarm kept going. The 30 second mark hit and the place went nuts. In about 3 minutes the police had arrived, hands on glocks, and I was dressed like I just broke into the place.

The day just kept getting better.

Well, I'll spare you the details, but it took showing the cops the pic of me and the wife I had sitting on my desk to calm them down. Now I'm home and I want to make two points from this story. The first one is this. I went from happy to victim mode in all of one second today. I was so mad at the world for making me miss church, when in reality, I'm the only person responsible for not putting me keys on the table by the door. I had just read recently, that one of the greatest obstacles to holiness is discouragement, and an exaggerated sense of anxiety. Man did I go there fast today. I need to do better.

My second point is this. I don't know who is making these CS Lewis movies, but I'm so happy and pleased to watch a Christian theme on the big screen. In fact, every time I sit through one of those flicks I tear up. It's very emotional to me to watch Lewis' work come to life in a way thatI think he'd be proud of. You know, I read those books as a kid, and even made believe that I was in Narnia etc. but I never understood the depth of the Christian theology at work in those stories. As an adult, it blows my mind. For example, Edmund and Lucy are told that they have ourgrown their time in Narnia, (which always made me sad as a kid when I read those books), so Aslan comforts them saying: "In your world, I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." That's the kind of stuff that makes me cry a bit in a kids movie. Because someone in Hollywood was brave enough to put that in there. It was nice. But I drank too much soda.

For a great article on Christian references in The Dawn Treader, check this out:

http://www.gotquestions.org/Narnia_Voyage-Dawn-Treader.html