Spoiler alert: This may change the way you think about heaven and hell, God and life.
Heaven is an amazing place. You can talk to God any time you want. You’ll be surrounded by people who love you, reunited with people you love. All broken relationships will be healed. Never once will you experience an unkind word, a thoughtless action, any sort of impatience. You’ll be forever young, pain free, healthy, energetic, working on important projects you love. Everything on your bucket list and more—all those unfinished dreams will now be available to you.
Do you deserve that? Have you earned it?
If you’re like me, you know the answer is no. I’ve tried to be kind to people, but I’ve failed. I’ve tried to honor God, but I’ve fallen short. It would be arrogant for me to pretend that I deserve heaven. I could not march into God’s presence and demand that He give me access to heaven because I’ve earned it.
It is an eternity I do not deserve. Neither do you.
Here’s where we enter murky waters.
Many people assume that we must deserve the other place. The wages of sin is death, right? That must mean that a holy God is required to sentence us to eternal torment even if we sin just once.
That’s what I thought for many years. But then I read and reread and reread the Bible, I experienced God, and a different picture emerged.
This too is an eternity I do not deserve. Neither do you.
Do we deserve a day in torment for our sins? Maybe. A month? A year? A thousand years? I don’t know. But I know this. No matter how evil you or I may be, we are not infinitely evil. There is a limit to our sins. Therefore, if punishment should be imposed, that punishment should be finite, limited, not eternal.
How then could a just God sentence anyone to this horrible eternity?
The answer is: He doesn’t.
We sentence ourselves.
Let me explain it with a story.
A mom told her little boy not to go out into the busy street. But the little boy disregarded her instructions and went out into the busy street anyway. Mom, filled with rage, beat the little boy so bad he had to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and in constant pain.
What do you think?
The mom is monster, right? She deserves to have her parenting rights terminated, and probably should go to prison.
But what if I told you I lied?
That’s not how the story went at all. The mom was doing her best to keep that little boy out of the street, but one day—despite her best efforts—he squirmed out of her grasp and ran into the road. There tragedy happened. He was struck by a car, and, as a result, had to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair in constant pain.
What do you think now?
Can you feel some of that mother’s pain?
Let me explain the parable:
Mom = God
little boy = you and me
busy street = sin
wheelchair and pain = hell
That place we don’t want to think about and talk about comes from sin; it doesn’t come from God. God is focusing all His efforts on keeping you and me out of there, and the only way to do that is to keep us out of the busy street of sin.
God is often portrayed as a criminal court judge who will—at the end of the age—sentence everyone to the eternity they deserve. But that’s not who He really is. He is instead the Physician who wants to remove the cancer of sin from our souls so that He can give us the gift of the good eternity that we also do not deserve.
When we invite Jesus into our lives, the contract we are signing is this:
Jesus, I choose You rather than sin. I don’t have the ability to remove sin from my life, so I invite You to come in and do it for me, and I’ll do my best to cooperate with you in that process.
And it is a process. It does take time. We are all a work in progress.
But that work will be completed before we pass through the gates of heaven because we cannot carry our sin with us into heaven.
Eternal life is a gift from God. It is ours if we’re willing to take the hand Jesus offers, invite Him in, and allow Him to remove everything connected with that place we don’t want to be.
Dwight
PS. This is a big topic, and I’m leaving questions unanswered. I go into it more deeply in some of my recent books such as Strap In! and Am I Going to Heaven When I Die? I’m planning to release a book with a deep dive into this topic in 2024.
Unsplash images by Danist Soh and Felix Weinitschke
