Whether in the mind or the heart or in reality, hell is not a place that anyone wants to be.
But people go there. By the busloads. Every moment.
And no one, not even God, is sending them to hell.
Hell is “the greatest monument to human freedom,” C.S. Lewis says. The occupants of hell are getting what they wanted, and want.
To be an occupant of heaven, well, you have to want to be with God. You have to want the joy that he offers. You have to want the love that he gives.
But how is the bus to heaven missed?
In self-centered pride.
There is no humility in hell. Both the travelers to hell, and the occupants of hell, as Tim Keller says, exist in the “delusion that, if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom.”
The attraction of hell is that greatness is arrived at by pursuit of self. Hell is a lonely place full of self-absorbed people clutching at themselves.
But, people go there. By the busloads. Every moment.
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Photo credit: Carol Mitchell via Flickr.
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