(OPINION) CT – The other day I found myself talking to a bunch of sixteen-year-old girls. The conversation started quiet; I asked them about their faith, what they believed in. That day I pushed myself to be a lot bolder than what I am comfortable with, so when a few of the girls mentioned they weren’t really ‘anything’ I pushed myself to ask the question, ‘What will happen to you when you die?’ There was silence, and then the answer I hear all too often: ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’
The topic of salvation makes a lot of people squirm in their boots. And I get it. If you are not confident about where you are going after you die, whether that be Heaven or Hell or a butterfly on earth, then there is an assumption that once you start to ask those questions, you might become quickly overwhelmed.
I get shivers when I read Scripture about eternity, and I’ve come to an understanding that this is okay for me: there is a holy fear in salvation, but this fear should be causing us to press in more to discover the truth about it; rather than passively ignoring its existence.
In a society where everyone’s right and no one likes to accept the fact that there are ‘corrects’ and ‘incorrects’, I’m standing out on a limb and stating that Heaven and Hell are real.
I love the idea that perhaps Hell doesn’t exist, or that everyone’s religion could be right for them, or if you’re a good person in this life then you’ll go to Heaven, but the more I read the Bible the more I know this just isn’t true. In all of my idealistic hopes for eternity, I simply can’t stray from the fact that Heaven is real, and Hell is too. And we’re going to one of them.
Whilst there are pictures in our minds of what these two places may be like, we can see, clearly in the Bible, that the reality of those places is something of utter significance.
‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world…READ MORE
