Jesus clearly states that after any human dies you live eternally either in the blessed presence of God and His saints in a perfect state of perfect love, joy, and honor called the new heavens and the new earth…or…you will in a place characterized by an intense physical and emotional torment as Jesus describes it five times in Matthew “a place of weeping (emotional pain) and gnashing of teeth (physical pain) Like, what sound do you make when you get a pin poked in the end of your finger, you suck air through your teeth, right?, There…that’s the meaning of this imagery).”
Both realities are real, unavoidable, will be experienced consciously, and will be eternally experienced consciously. And will be coming soon to you. It is always interesting to see how modern folk inside (and outside) the church like to deny that there will be an eternal experience of judgment (some say that lost people will fall out of existence somehow), but those same people never seem to have any qualms about God giving people an eternal blessedness and joy. Interesting, huh?
Well, here is a quote by Jonathan Edwards talking about the same (as we see now…un-modern) disdain for the biblical doctrine of hell that people had three hundred years ago. I guess people really don’t change that much over the centuries.
“God aims at satisfying justice in the eternal damnation of sinners; which will be satisfied by their damnation, considered no otherwise than with regard to its eternal duration. But yet there never will come that particular moment, when it can be said, that now justice is satisfied. But if this does not satisfy our modern free-thinkers who do not like to talk about satisfying justice with an infinite punishment; I suppose it will not be denied by any, that God, in glorifying the saints in heaven with eternal felicity, aims to satisfy his infinite grace or benevolence, by the bestowment of a good infinitely valuable, because eternal: and yet there never will come that moment, when it can be said, that now this infinitely valuable good has been actually bestowed.”
What a joy it is to know that you have eternal life! Think about it….eternal life! Eternal life! A life that is a permanent display of the goodness of God. As Paul says in Ephesians, “so that in the coming ages he (that is, God) might show the riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” A prize and joy obtain only by faith in Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.
