Dear Friend,
Hmm, now isn't that an interesting title? But you know, there is something positive about hell. Here, let me try to explain.
Let's take a moment and look at Mark, an imaginary person for the sake of this story, and I've named him after me so as not to offend anyone else by any other name! So back to Mark; he's a person that likes to do everything that Bible says not to do, and he really hates to do anything the Bible says to do. The short of it, he's a very selfish and self centered man, only focused on himself and his wants, desires, and goals. Everything that has to do with Christianity really annoys him. The closest you'll find him to a church is when he goes to the funeral chapel to pay his respects to a friend that has died, and the ten minute talk by the minister is about ten minutes too much. It grates him almost to insanity to be around Christians, and whenever he finds a Christian he makes sure to make their life miserable. Surprisingly, he does believe in God, he says he believes He exists, but he's mad at Him. "If He's so strong and loving, why doesn't He do something about this mess? He's never helped me out anyway." As he gets older, there's no point changing his mind. He actually gets more upset about the people who talk to him about God then when he was younger. When he's in his early forties, he gets into a fight over someone who dinged his car outside a restaurant. He picked on the wrong person though, because they pulled a gun on him and shot him point blank in the face. The doctors said he was dead before he hit the pavement.
Now, what's God going to do with Mark? Send him to heaven? I'm sure he'd be happy to be there, right? Or would he? If he can't stand even hearing about Christ down here, why would he even want to see Him? If he can't stand Christians on earth, would it be nice of God to put him with Christians for eternity? If his worst nightmare is listening to gospel music about God on his radio, what would he do for eternity listening to people sing about God?
Now, what would a loving, compassionate God do? Forcing Mark to live in heaven would literally be hell for him. Or God could lovingly do something else. And that something else is what the Bible calls hell. But the Bible has a very different description and definition of hell than most people know of. Let's look at what the Bible says about hell next week. I'm sure it will surprise you!
Mark
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