Velvet Elvis
If you do any reading on what happened in Rwanda, the word that you'll read most often used to describe it is HELL.
A hell on earth.
When people use the word HELL, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter - they are all hell on earth.
Jesus' desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth.
What's disturbing then is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth. Poverty, injustice, suffering, they are all hells on earth, and as Christians, we oppose them with all our energies. Jesus told us to.
Jesus tells a parable about the kind of people who will live with God forever. It is a story of judgement, of God evaluating the kind of lives people have lived. First, he eals with the "righteous", who gave food to the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoner. These are the kind of people who spend forever with God. Jesus measures their eternal standings in terms of not what they said or believed but how they lived, specifically in regard to the hell around them.
The judge then condemns a group of people because they didn't take care of the needy and naked and hurting in their midst. They chose hell instead of heaven, and God gives them what they wanted.
For Jesus, this new kind of life in him is not about escaping this world but about making it a better place, here and now. The goal for Jesus isn't to get into heaven. THe goal is to get heaven here.
Jesus tells another story about a rich man and a beggar who lies outside the rich man's gates. The rich man dies and goes to hell,while the beggar dies and goes to "Abraham's side", a Jewish way of describing heaven. This is the one story Jesus tells in which somebody is actually in hell after they have died. What is the reason? According to the details of the story, the rich man refused to be generous with the poor man, letting him live a hell on earth right outside his front door.
On another occasion, Jesus is asked to mediate in a monetary dispute between two broters. Jesus uses the moment to tell a story about a man whose crops do well and who becomes rich. He then decides not to share the bounty but to build bigger barns for storage and then take it easy for the rest of his days. Jesus told this story at a time when many of his countrymen were losing family land and having trouble feeding their families. Being hungry was a very real issue for a lot of people. In the story, God is so offended by the man's selfish actions that his very life is taken from him that night. It is one of the only places in all of Jesus' teachings where someone does something so horrible in Jesus' eyes that they deserve to die right away. And what is this horrible thing the man did? He refused to be generous. He brought hell to earth.
A hell on earth.
When people use the word HELL, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter - they are all hell on earth.
Jesus' desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth.
What's disturbing then is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth. Poverty, injustice, suffering, they are all hells on earth, and as Christians, we oppose them with all our energies. Jesus told us to.
Jesus tells a parable about the kind of people who will live with God forever. It is a story of judgement, of God evaluating the kind of lives people have lived. First, he eals with the "righteous", who gave food to the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoner. These are the kind of people who spend forever with God. Jesus measures their eternal standings in terms of not what they said or believed but how they lived, specifically in regard to the hell around them.
The judge then condemns a group of people because they didn't take care of the needy and naked and hurting in their midst. They chose hell instead of heaven, and God gives them what they wanted.
For Jesus, this new kind of life in him is not about escaping this world but about making it a better place, here and now. The goal for Jesus isn't to get into heaven. THe goal is to get heaven here.
Jesus tells another story about a rich man and a beggar who lies outside the rich man's gates. The rich man dies and goes to hell,while the beggar dies and goes to "Abraham's side", a Jewish way of describing heaven. This is the one story Jesus tells in which somebody is actually in hell after they have died. What is the reason? According to the details of the story, the rich man refused to be generous with the poor man, letting him live a hell on earth right outside his front door.
On another occasion, Jesus is asked to mediate in a monetary dispute between two broters. Jesus uses the moment to tell a story about a man whose crops do well and who becomes rich. He then decides not to share the bounty but to build bigger barns for storage and then take it easy for the rest of his days. Jesus told this story at a time when many of his countrymen were losing family land and having trouble feeding their families. Being hungry was a very real issue for a lot of people. In the story, God is so offended by the man's selfish actions that his very life is taken from him that night. It is one of the only places in all of Jesus' teachings where someone does something so horrible in Jesus' eyes that they deserve to die right away. And what is this horrible thing the man did? He refused to be generous. He brought hell to earth.