THE TEXT
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”
INTRODUCTION
As human beings, we struggle to even comprehend the meaning of the word “eternal.” To begin, we need to make some distinctions. First, we need to distinguish God’s eternity from our eternity, or timeless eternity from everlasting eternity. His life is so full that he doesn’t experience it in a succession of moments like we do. Our eternity is better thought of as everlastingness. Everlasting means that we will last forever. We never get outside of time; we live within time forever.
But, more than that, we will exist either in a state of everlasting joy and life, or in a state of everlasting destruction and death. The Scriptures (Matthew 25, Revelation 20) teach that at the end of history, Christ will return, raise the dead, and execute a final judgment. At that time, the righteous—body and soul—will enter into the Joy of God forever, and the wicked—body and soul—will enter into Misery forever. The common names for these two eternal destinies are Heaven and Hell.
I want to focus on two issues. One is a fear we have about Heaven and one is a concern we have about Hell. Our fear about Heaven is this: we worry that we will be bored. We know that we are promised unending joy, but we struggle to believe it because we fear that having “arrived” at Joy, Joy will grow old and stale to us. Our desires always outrun their satisfaction. Desire dies in its fulfillment. We get what we want, and we find that it’s not enough. And our repeated experience of this phenomenon, in every aspect of our lives, creates the fear in us that Heaven will be no different.
THE PROBLEM OF HELL
The concern about Hell is this: Hell sounds to us like Cosmic Overkill. God is pouring out infinite punishment for a limited and finite amount of sin. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.
In response, consider: 1) The greatness or heinousness of evil depends on the one sinned against, either the worth and value of the person, or our relation to him. 2) God is the most valuable, important, and worthy being in reality. What’s more, he stands in the highest and nearest relation to all of us. Both of these mean that our obligation to God is an infinite obligation, because he is infinitely worthy of all honor. 3) Therefore, to reject God and despise God and disobey God is to commit an infinite offense. A small sin against an infinitely worthy Being is an infinite sin, 4) Finally, an infinite sin requires an eternal punishment.
Let’s consider three biblical images for Hell through the lens of one question: Is Hell God-inflicted or self-inflicted? Image 1: The Bible presents Hell as banishment or ultimate exile (2 Thess. 1:9). This is the outer darkness, outside the City of Joy and Life, where morning never comes, where we are utterly and completely alone. Image 2: The Bible depicts Hell as the pouring out of God’s wrath on sinners. The wicked store up wrath for the day of judgment (Romans 2:5). They fill up the cup of God’s wrath and he makes them drink it and they stagger and fall. Image 3: The Bible depicts Hell as eternal destruction. “The worm does not die; the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). The smoke goes up forever and ever (Rev. 14:11). Eternal death is eternal dying.
All three of these images accent that Hell is God-inflicted. We are “thrown” into the outer darkness, cast outside of the city, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. The pouring out of the wrath of God is his all-consuming response to human rebellion and pride. The fire of eternal destruction is sustained by the God who is a consuming fire. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Heb. 10:29).
But it’s also true that “men loved darkness and hated the light and would not come to the light, lest their deeds be exposed” (John 3:19-20). Those who are banished from God’s presence may hate Hell, but they hate God more. Their exile is, in some sense, self-imposed. When God gives a person or a people over to their rebellion, the Bible calls that “the wrath of God.” As C. S. Lewis once noted, “God says to us, ‘Thy will be done.’”So is Hell self-inflicted or God-inflicted? Yes. It is both. We cannot out-horror Hell.
THE PROBLEM OF HEAVEN
What about Heaven? What about our fear of disappointment and boredom? First, our disappointment in this life in some ways actually points to the surpassing glory of Heaven’s joys. Lewis called this the Argument from Desire: We were made for God. The best joys here can only awaken and stoke the flames of our deepest and ultimate desire; they are pointers to a joy that is deeper and higher and wider and longer than anything that we can imagine.
God is infinite—infinitely valuable, infinitely worthy, infinitely desirable, infinitely satisfying. And therefore, in Heaven, we will arrive at Infinite Joy, and never stop arriving. Just as a finite creature cannot receive an infinite punishment unless they have an infinite amount of time, so also a finite creature cannot receive infinite joy without an eternal amount of time. “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has the mind of man conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Just as we cannot out-horror Hell, we cannot out-hope Heaven.
THE CHOICE
Here we live in the world of the Choice. For much of the time, eternity feels distant, far away, out of sight, and out of mind. The reality is that, for all of us, it is always just around the corner. It is as near as death, and our lives are just a vapor. There is no turning back; you are here and now. You are alive and you are heading in a particular direction. This sermon is a fork in the road.
You will cling to something forever. There will be something that you will seek to satisfy the ache and longing of your soul with forever. It will either be God, or it will be yourself. You will either come out of yourself into the clear sky of God’s glory and gladness and find your heart filled to overflowing, or you will curve inward on yourself, trying to satisfy your soul’s thirst on broken pieces of clay that turn to ash in your mouth.
In a moment we’ll come to the Table. When Jesus died, he swallowed Death and Hell. On the cross, he endured the infinite wrath of Almighty God on behalf of sinners. He took our banishment, our wrath, our destruction. And in doing so, he opened a way out of the prison of Self into the bright, blue sky of God’s goodness and joy. At this table, we eat and drink to proclaim the good news that we need no longer fear eternity. In his presence is fullness of joy and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore.