Hope of heaven

The deep reason why we all apprehend death is that we fear some kind of judgment in the next life. People of various religious or philosophical persuasions do all sorts of difficult things to try and free themselves from that fear. Both the anxiety and the religious or mental effort we expend on this issue testify to two essential truths.

First, we understand in our conscience that evil ought to be punished. This intuition comes – whether we realise it or not – from the fact that we humans were originally made in the likeness of a good and holy God. He endowed us with an understanding of good and its opposite, making us conscious that we are responsible to him for our behaviour.

The second essential fact that this fear communicates is the realisation that we have done reprehensible things. Our conscience is not clean; this should instruct us that we need forgiveness, and only God can forgive.

God did not create us with the total freedom to potentially commit all kinds of misdeeds without ever facing any kind of divine assessment with some corresponding sanction. This is built in to who we are: we are God’s creation, answerable to him for our lives. We are not chance by-products of a haphazard impersonal explosion of material substances; that kind of philosophy leads logically to moral chaos and is unliveable. Fortunately, God himself has told us, by sending his Son, Jesus, that “the Creator, at the beginning, made man and woman” (Matthew 19.4). The same Jesus informed us also that there would be a day of reckoning.

Now it is of the utmost importance to be ready for that Day of Judgment, because it determines our destiny for ever and ever. It will either be bliss or horror. There is no half-way house. The invention of “purgatory” was an erroneous idea of some early Christian thinkers, but it has no basis in the sacred Scriptures. On the contrary, Jesus taught that at the last Day, when all will be gathered for the final judgment, there will be only two camps – the saved who are “blessed” to enter into God’s glorious kingdom, and the lost who Jesus said “go away into eternal punishment”, describing it as “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25.46, 41). 

Those who receive the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour, in a decision of repentance and faith-commitment to follow him, may legitimately nourish the hope of “eternal life” because Jesus made that formal promise in the Gospels. Listen to his words and pause to take them in: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (John 5.24). Did you get that? No judgment – that is, no punishment, no hell. Passed from death to eternal life. Wow! That’s worth having! How? By faith in Jesus and in the Father who sent him to be our Saviour.

Jesus says again, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3.16). That’s how to be sure of not perishing in eternal punishment – by entrusting yourself to Christ as Lord and Saviour, to believe in him, to follow him, and obey his teaching. Jesus added, that “whoever believes in him is not condemned” – there is that assurance again – no hell. Instead, “the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6.23).

Clive Every-Clayton