Rusyinni's Library

The Reason for God

Timothy Keller

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008

CHAPTER 5: How Can a Living God Send People to Hell?

Pg. 77

Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, a self-absorbed, self-centred life, going on and on forever.

Jesus’s parable of Lazarus and the Rich man in Luke 16 supports the view of hell we are presenting here. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. They both die and Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven ‘ín Abraham’s bosom’:

²⁴ So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

²⁵ “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. ²⁶ And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

²⁷ “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, ²⁸ for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

²⁹ “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

³⁰ “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

³¹ “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” (Luke 16:24-31)

What is astonishing is that though their statuses have now been reversed, the rich man seems to be blind to what has happened. He still expects Lazarus to be his servant and treats him as his water boy. He does not ask to get out of hell, yet strongly implies that God never gave him and his family enough information about the afterlife.

Commentators have noted the astonishing amount of denial, blame-shifting and spiritual blindness in this soul in hell. They have also noted that the rich man, unlike Lazarus, is never given the personal name. He is called a ‘Rich Man’, strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than God, once he lost his wealth he lost any sense of a self.

In his fantasy The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. There they are urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell – but they refuse. Lewis’s descriptions of these people are striking because we recognise in them the self-delusion and self-absorption that are ‘writ small’ in our own addictions.

The people in hell are miserable, but Lewis shows us why. We see raging like unchecked flames their pride, their paranoia, their self-pity, their certainty that everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is an idiot! All their humility is gone, and thus so is their sanity. They are utterly, finally locked in a prison of their own self-centredness, and their pride progressively expands into a bigger and bigger mushroom cloud. They continue to go to pieces for ever, blaming everyone but themselves. Hell is that, writ large.

CHAPTER 10: The Problem of Sin

Pg 166.

As a pastor at my first church in Hopewell, Virginia, I found myself counselling two different women, both of whom were married, both of whom had husbands who were poor fathers, and both of who had teenage sons who were beginning to get into trouble in school and with the law. Both of the women were angry at their husbands. I advised them and talked (among other things) about the problems of unresolved bitterness and the importance of forgiveness. Both women agreed and sought to forgive. However, the woman who had the worst husband and who was the least religious was able to forgive. The other woman was not. This puzzled me for months until one day the unforgiving woman blurted out, ‘Well if my son goes down the drain then my whole life will have been a failure!’ She had centered her life on her son’s happiness and success. That was why she couldn’t forgive.

CHAPTER 12: The (true) Story of The Cross

Consider parenting. Children come into the world in a condition of complete dependence. They cannot operate as a self-sufficient, independent agents unless their parents give up much of their own independence and freedom for years. If you don’t allow your children to hinder your freedom in work and play at all, and if you only get to your children when it doesn’t inconvenience you, your children will grow up physically only. In all sorts of other ways they will remain emotionally needy, troubled and overdependent. The choice is clear. You can either sacrifice your freedom or theirs. It’s them or you. To love your children well, you must decrease that they may increase. You must be willing to enter into the dependency they have so eventually they can experience the freedom and independence you have.

Chapter 14: The Dance of God

Pg. 220 The future of the dance

How, then, will the story of human history end?  At the end of the final book of the Bible, we see the very opposite of what other religions predict. We do not see the illusion of the world melt away nor do we see spiritual souls escaping the physical world into heaven. Rather, we see heaven descending into our world to unite with it and purity it of all its brokenness and imperfection. It will be a ‘new heavens and a new earth’.

Pg. 221 Returning to the Dance.

However, when we discern Jesus moving toward us and encircling us with an infinite, self-giving love, we are invited to put our lives on a whole new foundation. We can make him the new center of our lives and stop trying to be our own Savior and Lord. We can accept both his challenge to recognize ourselves as sinners in need of his salvation, and his renewing love as the new basis of our identity. Then we don’t need to prove ourselves to others. We won’t need to use others to bolster our fragile sense of pride and self-worth. And we will be enabled to move out toward others as Jesus has moved towards us.