This brings me to another common objection.  How can Heaven be paradise if some of our loved ones are in Hell?  It does seem quite difficult at first, after all, how can any eternal destiny be pleasurable whilst we know that people we love and care about greatly are spending eternity in misery?  But I think those who ask such a question are guilty of subordinating their reason to their emotions; that is, their earthly desires and feelings are causing them to overlook the fact that Heaven would not be Heaven if it were conditioned by our previous earthly imaginations. 

 

If we are thinking about Heaven in the right way, there are two things which render this objection unpalatable.  In the first place, God has a greater claim on each individual than we do.  Our loved ones are far more God’s than they are ours.  In fact, you are far more God’s than you are yours.  Everything you have is both God’s, and yours because of Him.  In your Heavenly status you will be shown that that which was yours on earth now belongs fully to God.  And wherever our loved ones end up - whether it be Heaven or Hell, their real position in relation to us and Him will surely be something of which it is not possible to understand at present. 

 

In other words, the real relationship between ourselves and our loved ones will be reflected perfectly from Him; we will no longer see things through a mirror darkly, we will see with perfect clarity that our loved ones were God’s gift to us on earth, and that, in our Heavenly position, any knowledge of their eternal torment, cannot, in any way, cross into the paradisical realm that we are experiencing with God.

 

And again, this is not very often congenial to the modern minds, but I doubt whether everyone (including some husbands and wives) will continue to know each other in Heaven as they do on earth.  In assessing this, we are really looking at a demarcation between love in a somewhat naturalistic sense and love in the eternal sense; for I suspect that any love on earth which did not consist of two people united in Christ and brought together in the divine sense, would not really have any place in Heaven.  It would be like meeting in adult life the boy or girl you had a crush on in middle school; he or she would now be a total stranger, in your mind, divested of anything that resembled that schoolboy crush.  All loves and friendships that did not have about them an eternal dimension will have, I presume, passed away.  The central parts that make love truly special are the parts which make room for Christ to do His work; the parts where we are able to appreciate fully, the Christ in our beloved - and they are, by their very nature, the parts that are Him.  I should imagine that we cannot see fully what we are loving, either through our beloved or through His presence inside us, until we get to Heaven; that is, in Heaven we shall know fully what we, at present, only know in part.

 

In the second place, we should realise (particularly if my first point seems unsatisfactory or displeasing), that God and, indeed, Heaven will be so awesome (and beyond our current imagination) that we will not have any awareness at all of those existing in the bad place; that is, our current perception of ‘co-existence’ will be swept away into something more magical than that which linear concepts currently elicit.  Heaven cannot, as far as I can see, be anything else, for if, in Heaven, there was any knowledge of our loved ones in Hell, I do not see how it could be perfect.  The very essence of Heaven must, as far as I can see, consist of a perfect harmonisation of our own spirit being and of God’s presently indescribable perfection.  In which case it will, I presume, be impossible to imagine any other existence outside of the perfect paradise that we are experiencing. 

 

You will be, in one sense, nothing at all like your present earthy being - you will be purged of your empathy, sympathy, worry, and situational concern, because you will not, in your Heavenly status, need them anymore.  If you are a non-Christian and this offends you, do not be so surprised; for in one sense, only those who know God can have a proper sense of what is to come.  In the same way, a man cannot appreciate the true delights of literature or poetry until he has learned to read properly.  The very fact that Heaven will render much of our earthliness unrecognisable is no reason to reject it.  It is the truest fact that to be in God’s presence will be so awesome that our earthly existence cannot really be recognisable.  And of course, to admit this does not mean trivialising our earthly existence, for in fact, earth is a wonderful taster and a glorious preparation for an even fuller knowledge of God. 

 

At the back of this discussion there lies a call for all of us to piece together our earthly wisdom so that we can remove all the obstacles that stand between ourselves and God.  If either Heaven or Hell is our real destination, then this truth, like any other, must be faced.  If anyone feels that Heaven is a mere bribe, it is not so.  Heaven offers paradise only to those who have heard faint echoes of it on earth.  Those who every day recede from it do not see it for what it really is.  To have heard briefly the echo of Heaven in your own heart is to have been blessed in a way that has set all motives aside; for we do not desire Heaven the same way that a gambler desires to be rich. 

 

To know firstly that it is promised and, secondly, that you re going to attain it, is to know that your righteous acts are like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).  If that which we see as good through our own perception is merely a filthy rag, the love and grace which is bestowed upon us - from Him who loves us even more than we love ourselves - cannot be tainted by our own earthly motivations.  It is pure Heaven the moment it is realised; the moment salvation occurs; the moment Christ comes to live inside us.  Love, by definition, seeks to delight in its object - and that is what God does inside us.  Any earthly pleasure does not come close to it.

 

Our earthly perception, in relation to our Heavenly status, is the most important perception of all; therefore it must be sound.  I believe that in our heart of hearts we have never wished for anything else.  It may not always be tangible, but all the things that have ever subliminally affected your soul have been but indications of it - thwarted sightings, promises, expectations never quite reaching fruition, smells that drift away just as you were beginning to enjoy them.  But if the wind were ever to blow into the soul; if there ever came a smell that did not drift away but stayed in your presence, the delight itself, you would certainly know it.  Without any reservations, you would excitedly proclaim, ‘This is why God created me’.  All the things that influence us on earth are merely things which God is using to preserve our soul.  Both joy and tribulation are the tools He uses to fix us; for every moment of pain, disobedience, anxiety, laughter, pleasure, and love, He is making us into the creatures that He wants us to be. 

 

If you are a Christian you know as well as I do that God is your first love.  If you are not a Christian you are, as I remember when I was a non-Christian, fully aware of something quite similar.  God is not, at present, your first love, He is that which currently manifests itself as what you might call ’hope beyond your wildest dreams’.  Every day of your life a euphoric intangibility has been present within your own recesses; it has lingered just beyond the clutch of your awareness.  And this is precisely what our creaturely position is in relation to God. 

 

We do not have to earn salvation; our eternal destiny is conditioned by our own attitude towards salvation; by our own efforts to know the One who created us.  That is why our final judgement is going to be necessary; for only then will we be fully aware of our eternal destiny.  Either Heaven will be ours - it will be ours in the sense that we knew all along that we had it - the faint smell will become a garden of paradise; or else, we will see that we never made the effort to know Him, and, similarly, we will know that the Heaven which should have been ours but was lost was never very far from us when we were on earth. 

 

At present, you have experienced only the desire of it.  Nothing you have ever witnessed has been anything more than an abstraction of Heaven - a thought or emotion that could connect you to the Spirit inside you.  Even if you are a non-believer, you will know exactly what I am talking about; for this starved organism is calling you out of your earthly self.  It is not like the feelings a man might have for his earthly beloved - you cannot try to keep it, you cannot try to treasure the feeling; for as soon as you try, it will be gone.  Remember, the thing I am talking about is not an experience; it is a brief hint of the dialectical relationship between yourself and God.  And the moment you have smelt it for the first time is the moment the philosophy is (briefly) suspended; for that is the moment at which self-surrender is the only way forward.  Only with the right fuel can you light this fire.  If you relax and go back into a regressive state, you will be left, once again, with cold air.

 

It is sometimes quite difficult to identify with what is to come when we go to Heaven.  We suppress our desire for something better after, and take what we can now.  Offer a four-year-old child the choice between two sweets now, or six sweets one hour later, and the child will go for the two sweets now.  Offer a work colleague £20 today or £30 in six months time and he or she will probably be inclined to choose £20 today.  Discounting the future is something we teach ourselves to do.  There is also the risk factor - ‘What about if Heaven is not real, why would I want to miss out on all the things I could do?’  But thinking this way is not going to be very helpful in the long run, for everyone who knows God knows that anybody who reaches Heaven will find out that what they sacrificed on earth was worth sacrificing a million times over.  The kernel of what we were really seeking on earth will be waiting for us in Heaven in all its majesty.

 

Just like a city cannot be seen in its entirety unless viewed from above, the earthly desires which are most beneficial to us can only really be known when we know God.  And here is another one of those paradoxes in Christianity; the freedom of questioning must continue to grow within the mind, but those who do not know what it is that they are questioning, will be those who plan their lives around transient moments, thus impeding the growth.  There is something stifling about the idea of finality, because there is nothing more soul-destroying than being in a state of stagnancy and inertia.  And I’m afraid, abstract intelligence will never be enough.  For those who intellectually abstract their emotions for the pleasurable purposes of self-denial have really overlooked the true delights of the revelations that follow. 

 

This is little part of what Christ meant when He said that we must become like children; the instruction is twofold.  Firstly we should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and secondly, we should enquire just as children enquire about the world they live in.  Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3) - for they are the ones who have best co-ordinated the reliance and the enquiry.  That is why you see certain Christians growing and growing every week, while others remain spiritually static.  It has nothing to do with their self-surrender (that has already happened), it has nothing to do with the strength of their faith (faith and action are not inextricably linked - although they are often interrelated), it has nothing to do with their conduct (our conduct is filthy rags in comparison), it has everything to do with reliance and enquiry, for both, if used together in the right way, will bring about constant growth in Christ.  The desire to grow in Christ will be augmented by His willingness to give abundantly; if it is not desired it cannot be fully given. 

 

With this in mind I want to encourage all of us to eagerly search for wisdom and spiritual blessings, for we all know that a lack of progression on our part does not occur because of Christ’s unwillingness to give, it occurs because of our unwillingness to ask, and because of our temperable tendencies. 

 

In writing this message I must thank God for helping me through it.  The subject of Hell has not been an easy one, but I hope I have not left too many people feeling short changed. 

 

There are certain aspects of Heaven and Hell that we do not yet know about, but equally there are many that we do know about.  Most important of all, we know that God has given us this life on earth; it is His first special gift to us.  Heaven, which is the second gift, is even better, but the second depends on our realisation of the first gift.  That is the excellence of free will; that is the grandeur of causality.  The choice of Heaven or Hell is ultimately up to us; our eternal destiny is, for now, still in our own hands.  It is up to us to make the right choices.