…I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live… Deuteronomy 30:19
What a line! It’s the ultimate pick up line. Seriously, who could ever refuse such an offer? You would have to be crazy to choose a curse over a blessing, death over life.
It has been used countless times by preachers and travelling evangelists to make their point that you have a choice and that that choice involves life or death, Heaven or Hell.
In Heaven you will have eternal life, joy and peace. Oh and did I forget to mention, you will look great. Some holy Botox and sacred Lipo will have you looking divine for all of eternity. You didn’t really think you were going to be fat in Heaven did you? After all, Jesus wants you to be thin and hot! At least that’s what the Gospel Aerobics shows have been telling us!
On the other hand, in Hell you will either experience death or eternal suffering or both depending on the church you go to. Some view it as a lake of fire where you will be eternally tortured by little screaming monsters. Sounds a little bit like Nickelodeon but you get the idea. Some view it as being eternally separated from God, whilst others see it as the end of your existence. Game over if you will.
So let’s take a step back and take a closer look at the better of the two options: Heaven. In Heaven we are told that we will have eternal joy and happiness. It will be a place of blessing and peace where we will worship God and be one with God for all eternity. Sounds swell. It will be great to share this place with our spouses, our families and friends. But what if they didn’t make it? What if your husband, your wife, your child or your parent didn’t make it into Heaven? What if they chose death instead of life? I, for one, would mourn eternally if I made it into Heaven but my wife ended up in Hell. If anything, having any memory of any person who did not make it into Heaven would make Heaven Hell for me. For all eternally you would have to live with the fact that your loved ones are either suffering in Hell. The only solution to this would be to have your memories erased so that you can spend eternity with God without remembering the people that made your life on earth worth living. You cannot be allowed to remember your wife, your children or even your name.
The second thing that stands out about Heaven is that there will be no sin. We are told that we would not want to sin anymore when we are in the presence of God Himself. The desires which the Bible consider to be sinful would have to be extinguished. Desires such as sexual lust, greed, selfishness and pride could have no place in Heaven. The problem being that all these desires are central to our need for self preservation. As we need to preserve our existence and we need to procreate, hoard food and material possessions. It’s the very thing which causes us to survive and it’s the very root of our personalities. It’s our ego, our drive, the very thing that gives us our dreams and aspirations.
In Heaven this drive for self preservation, the cornerstone of our personality, would have to be disabled if we were to “lose the desire for sin”. The interesting thing is that medical professionals already have a term for this procedure: a lobotomy. Your personality, your drive and your ego would have to be disabled. As a result you will be like a zombie. Half dead. Worshiping a god for all eternity without having any identity, personality or free will. In addition, your memory would also have to have been removed in order to forget about your loved ones being tortured in Hell. You will be a machine, a shell of your former self, trapped in this state of eternal worship of a cosmic entity.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like Hell to me and the idea of an eternal slumber sounds well, like Heaven…
By Ruhan van Vuuren