Hebrews 3:12-19
“Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.”
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As you drive from Chicago down to Indianapolis on I-65 (which I do too often), there is a billboard about halfway between the two cities which states “Hell is Real”. The question I ask myself when I see this sign…“Is it?”.
If you decide to accept the premise that Hell is real, the next question which comes to mind might be, “What is Hell?”. Is it Dante’s Inferno? Is it evil, demons, torment and pain? Or, is it something different from the traditional imagery we have been exposed to over time, but no less scary? Conventional thought tells us that if we do evil things, if we are unkind, if we do not live a “good” life, if we do not accept Christ as our Savior, we are certainly damned to an eternity in Hell. But, is Hell a place…a state of mind…or a state of being?
I don’t really buy into the concept of Hell being a place to which we could go after we die, dependant on how we lived. I believe Hell, simply, is being apart from God. There are lots of ways to be apart from God, but they all have a common thread: the absence of love. When we love, we are in communion with God. When we are jealous, envious, hate, indifferent to the pain in others…things which are not founded in love…we move ourselves away from God, pushing ourselves into a personal Hell.
Why do we “feel like hell” when we do things not founded in love? Is it nature or nurture? Is it as simple as the fact that we have been taught throughout our lives that certain things are “bad” and that we should “feel bad” when we do them? Maybe… But, there is also the premise, that when Jesus fulfilled the Law, and we were no longer bound by it as the means to gain salvation, God wrote the Law on our hearts. When we turn away from God, when we do not “live love”, our hearts feel the pain of that turning away. Our hearts and souls desire communion with God and the absence of this communion causes pain each time we turn away from God and from Love.
So, take care…don’t put yourself through hell…not because of some traditional fear of fire and brimstone, torture and damnation…but because we are meant to love and every act of love we live leaves Hell behind as an ever-diminishing landmark in our rearview mirrors.
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