Hey Mom: thanks for teaching me about Hell!

Last updated on: May 2, 2015 at 7:07 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Hey Mom: thanks for teaching me about Hell! 2015-05-02T19:07:42-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I am thankful that my mother taught me about all of reality. She never pretended every prayer got answered the way I wished and I knew, given our finances, there would never be a pony for Christmas. She did not pretend that she had all the answers and modeled Socratic questioning long before I had a clue that Greece existed, let alone Socrates. Mom told me that the world was a big place full of complications and part of reality was death.

Mom pointed me to Paradise, warned me of Hell.

Being a pastor’s kid living just up the hill from a mortuary kept death from seeming foreign to human existence. It was there at the bottom the driveway. What happened after death? Mom was candid: you could go to Heaven or to Hell. She was right. I don’t say this just because she is my mother, but because best reason and experience have convinced me that she was right. So thanks, Mom, for making our house a warm and loving place, but also a place for truth including the truth that one could choose to be damned.

As Mother’s Day approaches, my gratitude toward my truly saintly mother might seem odd, but it is real.

The idea of Hell has done me nothing but good. It was good of her to bring it up because Hell is real. God is no stalker. He knows that “no means no.” If I do not want eternal bliss on His terms, I can reject eternal bliss. Of course, the problem is that God is perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, and perfectly true. To reject God is disguised as many things, but it will end in the rejection of goodness, beauty, and truth.

From an early age, she read C.S. Lewis with me so I understood that Hell was God’s judgment on our bad choice. A loving Father desired life for everyone, but not everyone wanted life. God would not damn anyone from ignorance or from misplaced virtue. A loving God could come to anyone, even one who had never met Him, at the moment of death and make all things clear. We could then, if we chose, keep choosing our errors over the truth, but nobody had to do so. The character Wither in the novel That Hideous Strength is given such mental clarity at the moment of his death, but Wither had grown to love ambiguity over logic and so chose damnation. There was no place else for him to go.

No means no.

Like every person I know who really knows God, she told me that many “God talkers” were fakes and many people who seemed to reject God actually loved Him. They had been scarred by false Christianity and rejected the names we gave things, but loved the reality and so we would be pleasantly surprised by those we saw in Heaven! On the other hand, she told me about “Gospel singers” who used the ministry for personal gain. They said the right words while hating the reality of the Good News. We would be surprised at who would not be in Heaven.

And this is where she reminded me that while Heaven was perfectly joyous, no gratuitous suffering there, that there would be sorrow. We will be sorry if beloved relatives reject the good, truth, and beauty and so are damned, but we will also be beyond any manipulation. We will know they chose and the result of their choice was just. We would not wish for their will to be destroyed nor would we wish that Paradise be corrupted by their evils.

We will be sorry for their choice, but glad that God respected it. We will turn from that sorrow, a real sorrow, and be bathed in the knowledge that the pain is meaningful. God honors His beloved but allowed for eternal, ultimate rejection. If this rejection is wholly unpleasant, we cannot blame God. He warned us. You cannot hate beauty and then demand that the place you are sent out of that hate be beautiful anyway!

In fact, I became convinced that Heaven was Hell for those who would not see.

Hell scared me, but not in a way that kept me from thinking. I remember wondering if Mom was wrong and if Hell was unreal. That was one way to escape fear. Somethings I was afraid of in childhood were not real fears . . . like my irrational fear of red spiders. Mom used logic and facts to help me escape bad fears, but Hell was not one of those. Fear is not, after all, always bad. Some kinds of fears keep me from avoidable pains! I was afraid of fire, not inordinately so, and that fear served me well.

I feared Hell, but when I decided it was real, that reality motivated me to action. I suppose any parent can use some feature of reality to instill bad fears! Hell is a powerfully bad place and so instilling fear of Hell fire can be and I know has been abused by tyrants and manipulative people to get control. That is very, very bad, but no more an argument against the existence of Hell than the abuse of anti-Communism by extremists proved that the Gulags did not exist.

Joe McCarthy did not make Stalin better.

One day I decided that Hell was not the place for me. I wanted to be changed so Paradise was possible and my parents led me to Jesus. As I got older they encouraged me to challenge my faith and let me wander far away when I did not wish it to be true. Sadly for non-Christian me, Christianity was true. I knew God would not damn me for wrong beliefs sincerely held, but God would not ruin Heaven by letting hatred, selfishness, lust, or any other kind of vice into the party.

I had to change. Mom was there when I did not wish to change, but preferred pig styes to home. Mom was there when I did not want to accept the results of reason and accept the fact that God is real and that He had a plan for every human life including my own. Mom was there when I came home constrained more by duty to the truth than by desire. Mom never wavered on the bad news, Hell was there for the choosing, but she always hoped for the good news for me: Heaven was real as well.

Thanks, Mom. I owe you a hug.

Spiritual Reflections

Previous Post

May 1, 2015

If I Should Die Before I Wake . . .

Next Post

May 3, 2015 Passive Aggressive Dissent: It's a Trap

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Apologetics Art Culture Education On Books On Education Philosophy Politics Pop Culture Spiritual Reflections Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 July 2025 June 2025 September 2024 July 2024 June 2024 December 2023 June 2023 September 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus to be crucified?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Pontius Pilate Felix Agrippa Herod

Books by This Author John Mark Reynolds

See All Titles »