Presumption
One of the reasons people find it hard to believe in God is the idea that a good God would send people to hell. Truth be told, it is not that amazing people would end up in hell. The amazing part is that anyone is saved from hell. The problem is people don’t grasp sin. The idea that we are actively rebelling against God’s beautiful and loving plan for us.
The other day I heard a woman on the radio talking about her daughter who did drugs. She feared that she would get a call one day that her daughter had been killed or raped or arrested. She knew the her choice was a bad one. But this mother let her make it. Sure, she tried to convince her daughter to change her ways. But at some point she realized that was not going to work.
This is what sin is. God offers us something good and we choose something else. Then we blame God when we end up in a bad spot. The problem is we don’t see ourselves as sinners. We admit we sin but we don’t really see it. We don’t feel we deserve to end up in hell. So we presume, if there is a God, He will let us into heaven. We do commit sins. But we convince ourselves they are no big deal.
You often hear this presumption in both protestant and Catholic circles. Hell is rarely preached on. Funerals often feature someone declaring the deceased to be in heaven with no if’s, and’s or but’s. People don’t quite buy it. They try and muster up some hope but it is hard. Hope depends on faith and faith is destroyed by sin. So we settle for presumption. Maybe it will all be OK. But that isn’t the world we experience. We experience devastatingly bad news. Presuming things will be OK in the temporal realm does nto work. Why should we suppose it will work in the eternal realm?
What is really happening is a drift into atheism. GK Chesterton talked about truth as balancing on a log. A little to far in one direction or another and you end up in the water eventually. When we doubt the reality of hell we buy into just a little of the Problem of Evil argument. That is the idea that a good God cannot exist because there is evil and pain in the world. We give in a little bit by accepting that the ultimate and eternal pain of hell could not co-exist with a good God. The trouble is that once you accept the validity of that line of reasoning than you problems will never end. Suffering and evil abound in this world.
The truth is that life can only have meaning if there are eternal consequences to what we do. Otherwise once the temporal consequences ran out our whole life would become irrelevant from that point on. But if what we do matters then it has to be possible for us to do both good and evil. So God allowing us to influence whether or not we get saved and even whether or not others get saved is really the only way He could have given meaning and dignity to our lives.
So we cannot judge who is going to heaven or hell. Still we must never presume people are in heaven. We should never presume that things the church connects to salvation don’t matter. Don’t presume the lack of a true Eucharist is no big deal. Don’t presume things the church calls grave sins are no big deal. Don’t presume that the pain of contemplating this person’s soul in hell means they are not there. We need to have a heart for the lost. That starts with knowing that they really are lost.
