Wednesday, August 8, 2018
The Two Kinds of People in the End
“Then the King will turn to those on the left and say, ‘Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his demons.’ ” (
C. S. Lewis wrote, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell.”
We can’t have an eternal Heaven without an eternal Hell. Both are taught in the Bible, and both last forever. Jesus described Hell as a place of “outer darkness” (see Matthew 8:12 nkjv). Some question how a God of love could send people to Hell. To the point, Hell was not made for people at all. According to Jesus, Hell was created for the devil and his demons.
By the way, the devil is not there yet, but he will go there one day. That is what it was prepared for. So how do people end up in Hell? They end up there by rejecting God’s offer of forgiveness and choosing to follow Satan, in effect. If someone ends up in Hell, God is, in reality, just giving them what they wanted.
We can’t cherry-pick the truths of Scripture that appeal to us and simply abandon the rest. As pastor and author Timothy Keller points out,“hell and heaven essentially are our freely chosen identities going on forever.”
If a person doesn’t want God in his or her life, He will not force Himself in. He will not force a person to be forgiven.
People are separated from God by sin, but God has given us the solution. God has given us the cure through Jesus Christ. But if someone rejects that solution, if they spurn that cure and end up in this place called Hell, then really, in the end, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Copyright © 2018 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.
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