Wednesday 27th May - Rethinking heaven & hell – It’s not just streets of gold or lakes of fire!

DAILY BYTE

What we often tend to forget when speaking of heaven and hell, is that the writers of Scripture were attempting to express to us what actually defies description. For example, if you had to describe a car to someone who lived thousands of years ago, how would you do it? Well, you would have to use symbols.
“It’s something like a giant metal box that glides along on four smooth, round objects,” you might well say.

You would have to use images of what they know, to convey something that they don’t know, (and even then your description would probably fall short of fully describing what a car is really like).

This is precisely what the authors of Scripture are attempting to do when it comes to heaven and hell. They make symbolic attempts to express the inexpressible. C.S. Lewis reminds us that if we want to take these symbols literally, and complain that heaven is nothing more than sitting around on clouds playing harps, then we might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, he intended for us to lay eggs.

So when some common images are used of heaven, like streets paved with gold, pearl-lined gates, or casting crowns, then we are being reminded that heaven is inexpressibly beautiful, and all that is truly worth something in this world will be found there too.

Remembering of course, that the treasures in heaven Jesus commanded us to store up have far more to do with relationships and love than with actual silver and gold. Thus, images like the streets of gold are symbolic attempts to express the incredible beauty of the joyful relationship with God and others that we will know in heaven.

As soon as we move onto some of the hell imagery in Scripture, we might begin to grapple with another very common human question, which is:
‘Why would a loving God allow hell to exist?’

Again, let’s not forget that these hell images are attempts to explain the unexplainable. The lakes of fire and places of total darkness, are actually meant to be symbols and metaphors of what life will be without God’s saving and loving presence – of being burnt up by regrets that you are no longer in a position to resolve, or of suffering in the darkness of your own pride and selfishness.

Today’s focus reading reminds us that God is not willing that any should perish, but would have all come to repentance. God will always be trying to reach us and to connect with us, BUT he will never take away our choice to say ‘no’ to him because that would defeat the framework of true love ... free choice.

So it is possible to be cut off from God, not because he is unloving but precisely because God IS loving. To take away our choice to decide for ourselves and to force us into relationship is no relationship at all. That’s called abuse. God will not do that.

As C.S. Lewis points out, on judgement day we will either say to God ‘your will be done,’ OR God will say to us ‘your will be done.’ Lewis goes onto affirm that God sends no one to these places of emptiness, but that we choose them for ourselves. The only lock on hell’s door, Lewis maintains, is on the inside.

Just as heaven involves images like streets of gold and pearly gates to reflect the wealth of love and relationship, so the images of hell are opposite – destroyed cities, burning fires of regret, and the empty wastes of self-imposed loneliness.

We are being asked to imagine being so locked up in our own pride and self-centredness that we become incapable of meaningful relationship.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Lord God, help me to move past any cartoonish images of heaven and hell I might have, and to understand more clearly the images and symbols that Scripture uses in a way that deepens my faith and enlarges my heart. Amen

FOCUS READING

2 Peter 3:9

The Lord is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.