Thursday, June 3, 2010

Is God in charge of Hell, and just WHO is He watching?


Hell is defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 1033) - Wikipedia:

We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: "He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him."610 Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren.611 To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self- exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called "Hell." (Wiki)

“Presently the Roman Catholic Church teaches that neither Heaven nor Hell is, in the proper sense, a place, created or uncreated, and that each is a question of one's personal relationship with the Trinity.” (Wiki)

The Protestants have their own views. One Protestant view of Hell is expressed in the Westminster Confession (1646):
"but the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments, and punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power." (Chapter XXXIII, Of the Last Judgment-Wikipedia)

Author Peter Chopelas is quoting saying that “the idea that God is an angry figure who sends those He condemns to a place called Hell, where they spend eternity in torment separated from His presence, is missing from the Bible and unknown in the early church. While Heaven and Hell are decidedly real, they are experiential conditions rather than physical places, and both exist in the presence of God. In fact, nothing exists outside the presence of God. This is not the way traditional Western Christianity, Roman Catholic or Protestant, has envisioned the afterlife. In Western thought Hell is a location, a place where God punishes the wicked, where they are cut off from God and the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet this concept occurs nowhere in the Bible, and does not exist in the original languages of the Bible.” http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html

The question is, who gets into hell? There are many scriptures that clearly state the only way to avoid “hell” is by not denying God and His word. As in John 5:24 - "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life." And Luke 12:10 - “And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.”

My personal belief is there is no place where Satan stands high on a cliff waving his mighty pitchfork commanding the wicked to shovel more coal into the fire. But, rather a presence of a place. First of all, God created this spiritual place of condemnation, not Satan, so therefor shouldn't God be in hell just as He is in heaven? My depiction of Hell is much more than a physical location. I believe it is a crushed, spiritual sensation within the tormented or condemned, and the relationship the ill-fated have (or don't have) with God. Maybe it is a subconscious "place" for those who deny God's grace, and are sentenced to eternal condemnation; to be consciously aware of the tedium of pain, and of a literal or subliminal fire, boredom and suffering. This is not to say that I do not believe in "hell", but would a loving God of creation truly condemn His creations to eternal "torment"? God did say, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ezekiel 33:11)
Possibly only a sentence of a conscious death, as in Rom 6:23—"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

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