What is Hell?

I find it sadly ironic that many of us reject hell while at the same time live within it. 

The Christmas Vacation movie, starring Chevy Chase, has a great illustration of everyday hell-on-earth. After disaster upon disaster occurs during the days leading up to the Griswold family Christmas celebration, Clark responds to his wife’s advice that everyone go home before things get worse:

“Worse! How could they get any worse! Take a look around you, Ellen, we’re at the threshold of hell!”

Hell is our personal separation—here on earth—from the receipt of sincere love, the affirmation of parents, understanding between ourselves and others, vital health, what we imagine “success” to be: in general it is a separation—here on earth—from peace and contentment in all circumstances.

If any one of us cannot say we have been in our own personal hell—be it an addiction; a stalemate with a spouse; rejection in job, friendship or romance; a physical illness or disability; impending death for ourselves or the death of a loved one; the loss of a home through foreclosure or natural disaster; being wrongly accused be it on a grand or small scale; estrangement….If we can say we have not experienced hell on this earth then I think we are not cognizant of what hell really is. 

Because nobody escapes the above list of possibilities in life. 

Sure, there are ranges and degrees, and what may not seem like hell to others, may, due to our current mental and physical state, indeed be hell to us. 

The reason that all of the potential hellish states of being exist is due to our ultimate separation from God.

How do I mean that?

I mean that, even though those states of hell-on-earth exist and do not go away—even when we desire and include God in our life, those states of hell-on-earth become other than hell-on-earth.

God removes the hell of it all by staying with and getting us through the physical, emotional, and mental crisis or breakdown.

A beautiful example I always go to is this:

A meek, sincere, mature, quiet, physically hard-working Godly man in his 60’s was diagnosed with late stage melanoma. 

After months of undergoing treatment, he said something I have never forgotten and which brings me genuine comfort and confidence:

“The Lord will work a miracle. Either He will cure my cancer, or He will take me home.”

This man lived in the peace and contentment of Christ that kept hell at bay.

Jesus Christ…His peace, His gentle yoke is what keeps us out of hell, here on earth, here and now. 

Copyright Barb Harwood

“Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me.” John 14:1

“…the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you. Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.” John 14:26-27

Where is the Beauty in All of This?

In all of life, where, and what, is beauty?

Where is it to be found?

And must we visit it a while, and then depart?

Isaiah 52:7 captures beauty where we may not:

“How lovely on the mountains

Are the feet of him who brings good news,

Who announces peace

And brings good news of happiness,

Who announces salvation,

And says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’”

In all the world and universe, there is no greater beauty than this.

We strive our entire lives to locate, create, promote, and travel to beauty.

Notice how, in the above verse, beauty is not found in the mountains, which are, no doubt, lovely. 

Beauty is not found in the person traversing the hills and natural peaks of nature. Otherwise, the verse would stop at “feet” instead of going on to describe what makes those feet lovely: good news, peace, an announcement of happiness and salvation. 

That is what makes the feet walking upon the mountains lovely: feet shorn of the Gospel of God in Christ.

This is available anywhere, lying in wait for sober, yet eager, takers. 

We need not compete through levels or acquire credentials before attaining it. We need not ask or earn the permission or approval of any person. We need not require our own “self-betterment” first.

We need only what Scripture itself ascribes:

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise” (Psalm 51:17).

Jesus Himself, in the New Testament, says, 

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Jesus’ feet are the lovely carriers of beauty to all corners of the earth, even to us. He is the One who keeps loveliness there, and in here—inside of our heart, mind, soul and spirit—through His grace and merciful transformation. 

It doesn’t matter where: this beauty, this loveliness, this Gospel of Jesus lives.

Those ensnared in darkness—through not yet being rent yet by contrition—miss it. 

“…the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light…” (John 3:19, in part).

This beauty is not visible to or perceived by some because it is overshadowed, nullified, marred, and blacked out by the darkness thoughtlessly and often unknowingly enforced, stipulated and promulgated by their incubation in it. 

Hence a bleak soot coats the world in a nebulous norm; an unnerving sense of “what’s it all about?"; an obsession with outward significance and often, in the end, a daily shrugging at and resignation towards the “crazy world we live in.” 

This beguiling yet treacherous obscurity of beauty does not require murder and flames of destruction. 

It’s very essence is often entirely the opposite, couched in a pleasant wink of elaborate and cunning opposition to grace and mercy, appealing to the inner places we deny are within us until they reveal themselves in support of what we criticize in others but now locate, to our horror, in ourselves.

This predisposition lives deep within us. 

C.S. Lewis describes it as indulgences in lust and anger, which we deem to be trivial.

It is from these so-called "trivial mis-steps,” left unchecked, from which each individual goes on to lose future, and more daunting, battles for good and loveliness. 

Beauty, in the scheme of things, is not the absolute absence of evil, but its reigning over evil where it continues to exist.

Even in the starkest hour, beauty can be found alive, in the articulation of Christ who holds out His hand to the “worst” perpetrator (and there is no partiality with God, that we can excuse ourselves: 1 Samuel 16:7; Romans 2-3; 1 Corinthians 10:12). 

It is this Gospel—this Good News of Jesus Christ—that aids the injured, heals the spiritually damaged, affirms the overlooked, hears the lost and suffering, and comprehends the grieving and inconsolable. 

It is this Gospel that grants all who are caught up in frustration, who mentally struggle or suffer complacency, who show no regard for others or even themselves, a garland instead of ashes, gladness instead of anguish and remorse, encouragement instead of perpetual accusation—so that we may be “oaks of righteousness” planted by the Lord, that He may be glorified (Isaiah 61:3).

This, then, in all of life, is what beauty is and where it is to be found.

This, then, is the beauty in all of this.

Copyright Barb Harwood