Reading a book called "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism," by Timothy Keller. It is a mind-waker-upper (if there is such a phrase). An excerpt grabbed my tired mind as I was laying in bed reading and kept such hold on my thoughts that I had to get up and write it.
A God of Judgment Can't be a God of Love. "I always start my response by pointing out that all loving persons are sometimes filled with wrath, not just despite of but because of their love. If you love a person and you see someone ruining them—even they themselves—you get angry. As Becky Pippert puts it in her book Hope Has Its Reasons:
'Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it.…Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference.…God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer …which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.'"
Under the subtitle "A Loving God Would Not Allow Hell," He writes:
"A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire. Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: 'What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends into eternity?' Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.…What is astonishing [referencing Luke 16:24-31, Lazarus and the rich man], is that though their statuses have 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 a personal name. He is only called a “Rich Man,” strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than on God, once he lost his wealth he lost his sense of a self.
"In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity. We see this process “writ small” in addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, and pornography. First, there is disintegration, because as time goes on you need more and more of the addictive substance to get an equal kick, which leads to less and less satisfaction. Second, there is the isolation, as increasingly you blame others and circumstances in order to justify your behavior. “No one understands! Everyone is against me!” is muttered in greater and greater self-pity and self-absorption. When we build our lives on anything but God, that thing—though a good thing—becomes an enslaving addiction, something we have to have to be happy. Personal disintegration happens on a broader scale. In eternity, this disintegration goes on forever. There is increasing isolation, denial, delusion, and self-absorption. When you lose all humility you are out of touch with reality. No one ever asks to leave hell. The very idea of heaven seems to them a sham."
