The Skeletons in God's Closet: The Mercy of Hell, the Surprise of Judgment, the Hope of Holy War

God’s purpose is not to get us out of earth and into heaven; it’s to reconcile heaven and earth.

Both in our churches and in our culture at large, we talk about “heaven and hell” as if they are two coequal counterparts competing for our eternal destiny, and we assume this is the way the Bible talks about them too. But this is simply not the way it talks about them.

In a strange reversal of the gospel, the people are the ones pursuing God and God is the one unwilling to be found. Jesus apparently loves us enough to die for us, but hates us enough to lock us in a torture chamber, throw away the key, and plug his ears to our cries once the stopwatch runs out.

Like the prodigal son in Jesus’ most famous parable,11 we asked the Father for our inheritance (the earth he gave us to rule), not to enjoy it together with him, but to squander it on ourselves in distance from him.