How could I speak of Hell?
That place so monstrous and deep?
A pit of fire? An eternal scream?
It is a place I wish, so often
Did not exist...in this world or the next.
And yet, exist I know it does,
For I have lived it here on earth,
And it is ugly. Ugly to experience
The just wrath of a perfect God
Poured out on his well-deserving creation.
It's the thing that we don't want to think,
Speak, talk or even...write about.
But we must because, it is real and it is there.
Oh horror of all horrors, real terror.
Terror that makes the worst horror film seem...quiet.
We think that terror is...what? Zombies?
Dead who bite and turn you into them?
Vampires were once terrifying but now they're...
So Romantic, we write movies and books about them
Some dream of being them...the eternal dead, alive eternally.
But the truth is, they appeal because they are here...
Living half-lives, the fiction of avoidance.
The Fictional turning away from reality,
Self-preservation from the unruly truths that
We want to keep ourselves protected from.
So we preserve ourselves from the thing we know,
That Hell exists and it, in truth, is terrible.
And yet we know it's real, we see it's echoes everywhere.
We glimpse it for an instant, then it's gone
Dissolved into a faded fiery mist on the outskirts.
You can hear it, in the subtle voice within your mind,
That says..."What if you die? You should die...Kill yourself."
Hell, Hades, Infernus. It speaks to us, even in our dreams.
"Die! You should die." It says. Drawing us ever downward
Into an Abyss of self-pitying doubt, inward, ever inward.
We see it in the woman, left torn and bleeding, alone...
Left by what she thought was love...but was really hatred.
In the man, abandoned by all hope, sitting in his tragic despair
Alone. Unfriended. Without defense or reason to live.
Gehenna, the place of eternal fire. Burning, burning, burning.
But God couldn't...wouldn't...if he's really good then
He would never...would he? Could he? But why? Why?
And we want to lean into our own goodness, in order to
Preserve our own precious life, and by that one effort
We condemn ourselves forever, forgetting forgiveness.
We seek to preserve ourselves but condemn others,
Making forgiveness conditional only to ourselves.
If there is a Hell, God must forgive us, we haven't hurt anyone...
Not really anyway. But him? Her? That person over there who...
Well, maybe, but I'm not as bad as they are...they are terrible. Really.
We want justice to exist on earth, but no in heaven. Not eternally.
Eternal justice offends our sense of propriety, of right and wrong.
But here on earth, we want the justice done. The man to hurt
For how he harmed the broken woman, bleeding on the ground.
To pay for the child, robbed of innocence too young. Justice.
Justice for the man, attacked and beaten, bruised and broken.
For innocent blood spilled onto dying ground. We want it then...
But when we die? How could we want it when we die? That would mean...
It would never end, once sown, on and on it would go....without escape.
In never-ending waves and throng on throng would fall....unthinkable.
So we turn away from the just God, whose hand is held out to
Pull us up to Heaven, if we will only take that hand held out.
The hand that is the pure, unblemished, Holy Son of God, who died in agony,
Bleeding through the many wounds of crucifixion. Crying out,
Forsaken by perfect love for that moment of immeasurable agony.
But we want our lives to be our own, and so we turn away.
Turn to an eternal grave for the sake of a few short moments in time.
Rejecting the sacrifice of agony and pain, for the sake of ourselves...
Condemning ourselves for all time...because we can...because we simply
Want to live our lives ourselves, for ourselves, forsaking perfect justice already fulfilled.
Instead, we walk through year-by-year lived just for us alone. Rejecting God.
Backs turned, we live a lie. A lie we don't even really believe.
That truth is not true or real or right or even there. But that we make our own
Reality from a fictional world existing only in our minds. And when we are jolted
Out of our own sense of self-importance by the reality of horrific acts of sin...
We shake our heads and bury them in the sand of self-justification.
And still, God reaches down his hand, called Christ. And the Spirit of God
Goes out from one end of the world to the other, calling, ever calling.
To those who will come and be saved. To come to Grace and stand with God,
And watch the burdens of their own reliance and disgrace, melt into the eternal
Love of a righteous, holy, just and angry God.
