17 April 2024 John 6:30-35
Hell is not something that happens to you. Hell is something you choose.
Hell is like driving on an interstate and wondering if you should take the next exit. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s not the right one,” you say to yourself, and in your indecision you drive past it. Not deciding becomes deciding. If you don’t choose heaven, you are choosing hell.
Hell is something you choose.
It isn’t that people say to themselves, “Yes, I think I prefer an eternity of fire and torment, weeping and gnashing of teeth.” No one in his right mind makes a choice like that. Hell is rather more subtle. Nobody chooses misery, but they want to bring some token of misery along with them wherever they go, even into the afterlife. All of us like some of our sins, and cannot imagine ourselves without them. “You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “On one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind” (The Great Divorce, p. viii). Hellish things cannot “develop” into heavenly ones – they can only be cut out, often very painfully, and abandoned. Some people cannot imagine being without some of the hellish things that they keep on the end tables, the night tables, or the kitchen tables of their lives, and resent the preaching that they must. “God won’t mind this little bit,” they say to themselves. “After all, it is a vital part of who I am, and God loves me just as I am, right?”
They are choosing hell. For the sake of holding on to even tiny bits of hell, they reject heaven.
Heaven is also not something that happens to you. Heaven is something you choose. But it has to be a serious choice. You cannot choose heaven while you are on the wrong road. It was never true that all roads lead to Rome, and it is not true that all roads can lead to heaven. You choose heaven by getting off the wrong road and getting onto the right one, and it can be a very difficult choice, because the wrong road never tells you it is the wrong road. It is the nature of temptation to be subtle. The wrong road is flat and straight, with few signs, and no warnings. Jesus said as much: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it” (Matthew 7:13-14). Not only that, but there is only one way off the wrong road, and that is to go back to the place where you got on. There is no access to heaven from anywhere the wrong road goes. So if you began on the wrong road by stepping away from going to Church, you have to go back to that place, and start again. If you began on the wrong road with a distorted relationship to wealth, you have to go back to that place, and start again. If any sin has been knitted in, anywhere, all the rows have to be ripped out until you get back to the sin, and then you start knitting again.
Heaven is not something that happens to you. Heaven is something you choose. But it has to be a serious choice. You have to be willing to do a lot of starting over.
“I will not reject anyone who comes to me,” Jesus says, but he won’t meet anyone half way. You can’t stay a little lost. You can’t give up most of the wrong road. Jesus doesn’t save from afar – you have to come all the way in.
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