May 4 2022
HEAVEN AND HELL.
Every May I am reminded of May 1945, when my city, Groningen, the Netherlands, was freed from German occupation, after a battle that destroyed a major portion of its historic centre. On May 5 1945, a peace-deal was signed, changing ‘5 years of hell’ to ‘heaven’: a despotic and cruel regime replaced with a viable democracy, and a new future.
However, this week’s theme of ‘Heaven and Hell’ deals not with heaven in contemporary terms, or hell experienced in many places, but concerns the eternal state, expressed in biblical concepts. Today’s ‘heaven concept’ is colored by ancient Greek mythologies, forever living in the presence of gods, while hell is seen as their absence. Both are ideas derived from a “meme“.
A ”meme”?
A ‘meme’ is a small unit of information that can easily move from one human mind to another. It is the virtual equivalent of a virus in the sense that it “infects” people and influences their behavior. “Heaven” is a good example. The idea that we, upon death, join God in heaven, is so ingrained in church and society, that it has become a ‘meme’, a fact without any foundation.
When Jesus had a conversation with that aristocratic theologian, Nicodemus (who later lent his own grave-sepulchre for Christ’ burial), Jesus told him that ‘nobody has ever gone to heaven, except the one who come from there, the Son of Man.” Yet, the notion of ‘joining one’s loved ones in Heaven’, reigns supreme.
That same chapter (John 3) also tells me that, “God loved the cosmos (the world we live in) so much that he allowed his Son to be the sacrificial Lamb to buy it back from the Devil”.
That’s why our humble earth is and forever will be our home.
I have experienced this ‘meme’ theme in real life. For 10 years I wrote a weekly column for a daily newspaper. My editor liked my writings, but the publisher did not, because I often was critical of religion, and he was a devout Roman Catholic. When I wrote that the greatest win Satan ever scored, occurred when the church adopted ‘heaven’ as the saints’ ultimate destination: that was the last straw, and he terminated my tenure.
The Presbyterian Record once published an article in which I explained my ‘heaven’ views. In a subsequent issue, ‘a letter to the editor’ called me ‘a heretic’.
Heaven is an easy sell.
Of course, heaven is an easy sell: regarding Creation as HOLY and live accordingly, is difficult and clashes with our ruling religion, Capitalism, now the very source of our climatic ills.
I hardly ever watch TV, but somehow, I did see Larry King interview Billy Graham. In it, Larry asked: “Tell me, Billy, what happens when you die?” Billy: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God.”
The famous Billy, still Christianity’s leading light, conveniently forgot 1Timothy 6: 16, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen or can see.” Yet the belief that we go to heaven when we die, has so penetrated secular and religious thinking, that, I believe, “Climate Change” can be directly traced to this erroneous belief: “Why care for the earth when we leave it anyway?” Had the church insisted on Earth’s Holiness, Global Heating may not have taken place.
And that brings me to HELL.
If Heaven is not our destination, where does that leave HELL?
That is a tricky question. Jesus mentions it, so, yes, there is such a concept as ‘hell’. Where is it? It reminds me of 1 Samuel 28 where King Saul consults a medium, the Witch of Endor, who saw a Spirit coming out of the ground, Samuel, the priest.
This makes me suppose that, after death, the Spirit lives on, either awaiting full life in the Lord, or facing hell with personal recollections where ‘in the spirit’, our flagrant sins committed against God’s creation and God’s creatures, are recalled. It makes the PURGATORY premise more plausible. This period, asleep as Jesus calls it, also gives us time to reflect. To a Hitler and a Stalin, this entails a constant review of the innocents killed by their actions, for others to become what they are: ready for the New Creation.
In short: heaven is being with Christ on this earth, living and experiencing LIFE TO THE FULL, as Jesus taught us in John 10: 10, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. Going to heaven is a take-off from Greek paganistic thinking, modeled on Socrates and Plato, while hell takes its cue from the Greek ‘Hades’ concept. While Hell could well be a painful reliving of one’s life, in isolation, and varying in severity for each person.