Wise and helpful, brother
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Simple comment, but there are times I have evil dreams and other times blessed ones. When I have evil dreams, I do not awake convinced Iām will-less, and therefore not culpable. I may have a sense of oppression but I never feel guiltless. Oppositely, when I awake from blessed dreams, I feelā¦ Blessed. I donāt awake and congratulate myself on my dreamās testimony to my growing sanctification. Doesnāt mean what I think is right, but thought Iād mention it because I thought others here would say likewise. Love,
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Over the decades when my mother was homeless, I would occasionally visit her when she let me know where she was. I cannot describe how tedious an experience it was to talk with her. My mother had become a shell of a person. She would politely listen to me tell her about her grandchildren but actually had no real interest in them. One might think a homeless person would have some interesting stories to share, but my mother was so self-focused that there was no room for anything in her mind except herself. And hearing her talk about herself and the people who had done her wrong was excruciatingly boring.
Iāve long held the view that my mother must be a picture of what it is to be a damned soul ā entirely focused on self, closed off to all good, perpetually gnawing over grievances, and self-righteously insisting they deserved nothing of what came to them. I donāt think people in Hell experience any regret that they did not repent when they had in chance, because in order to have that feeling there would need to be something left in them that was not yet utterly depraved. Instead, I imagine they are like my mother ā choosing to live in misery while keeping herself the arbiter of all things rather than admitting fault, submitting to God, and living with her loving family.
Towards the end, I tried sharing the Gospel again with my mother, and in return received rage and mockery. But during a couple of later visits she did let me pray for her, and I tried to get as close as I could to praying the Gospel for her, and if she agreed with my prayer, perhaps my mother entered Paradise at the last moment, like the thief on the cross. And in Godās mercy, the last visit of my family with my mother before her passing was halfway pleasant. My kids brought pictures for her to hang in her room at the nursing facility, she told a couple real or imagined stories from her childhood, I went out and bought her some cigarettes, which made her happy, and when we left we told her we loved her and she told us that she loved us.
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This is strikingly similar to a homeless person in my family.
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Reading through these posts is jarring all sorts of memories of a few individuals (family, friends) whose last days were rendered nightmarish by a mental disintegration that turned them temporarily (episodically, really) into monsters. All were at least lifelong nominal Christians; a couple of them - Mom and my mother-in-law - had made clear professions of faith, been baptized, etc.
It puts me in mind of an observation made to us by an aged seminary professor whoād also been in pastoral ministry for decades. His theory is that in the last stages of mortal life, when the body is growing weaker and weaker, something paradoxical occurs, to wit: the mind begins to ādisintegrateā pretty much as the body is doing, but what you see is the essential character of the person, though it may be āconfusedā in its functions and preoccupations.
So, for example, a man who has harbored licentious and perverse meditations, hidden from outside observers, will continue those kinds of things as his mind/body become less and less able to mask them from outside observers.
If this observation is true, it gives me interesting, sometimes horrific or pitiful clues, to the interior life of some people whom Iāve attended in the closing months of their lives. On the other hand, an old man or woman whose increasingly confused thoughts are richly tinctured with Scripture, concepts from the Bible, bits and pies of hymns and such, reveal where their thoughts have been wandering in their interior lives in previous years and decades.
As to homeless people, one of them is something of an informal ward of our parish (actually, several congregations in our town). He is pitiful in many ways - beset with bona fide health problems that render him truly disabled. A local pharmacy charges him pennies on the dollar for his meds; a back surgeon has performed several back surgeries for no cost. A local attorney tends to some of his minor legal matters pro bono. Heās an independent cuss, which is possibly why he lives as he does.
His independent streak no doubt impacts him spiritually. Is he āspiritually disabled?ā God knows.
Iām so terribly sorry Joel. May God bless and comfort you, dear brother. Preached on Romans 8:28 the past two Sundays (two different churches) and said no bitter person is a Christian. No matter how much they talk about people, their rage is always against God. The Church has many, many such people and it makes me tremble. Love,
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Thanks, Tim. Itās definitely Godās grace that I did not become embittered myself. As I grow older, I become ever more convinced that Rom. 8:28 is no platitude but applies in every area of life. I suppose you wonāt be surprised to hear that I spent a lot of my young adulthood feeling sorry for myself and asking God why He didnāt give me a better family, but as I came into middle age I realized that going through that crucible gave me strengths I never would have obtained otherwise and likely spared me from spiritual dangers I would likely have fallen into.
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Thanks for this, I am beginning to see what CS Lewis was getting at in these remarks:
Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming othersā¦ but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God āsending usā to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
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Yes, The Great Divorce was pretty influential in developing my thoughts on the matter.
And it seems really true that Hell is as insubstantial as Lewis suggests in the book. While I grieve for what my mother could have been, I did not much grieve over her eternal destiny as she actually was, because there was no real person really left in her.
Dear Joel,
No, youāre taking your reasoning the wrong direction. Say rather that if this is how horrendous the godless can make his own life here and now, how much more awful if he doesnāt repent must be the fire and brimstone and eternal torment that God has for him on Judgment Day, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched, as the Scriptures say.
Love,
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Daniel,
That you write this suggests to me that you have not read The Great Divorce yet nonetheless see fit to comment without understanding the context of my statement. In that book the question is posed concerning whether the blessed in Heaven can be truly happy while knowing the torments of the damned in Hell, or in my particular case, whether I can be truly happy in Heaven knowing the likely eternal fate of my mother. The answer is that Hell is certainly substantial enough from the perspective of the damned, but it is practically nothing from the perspective of those who are in Heaven.
Christians are often disturbed by the thought of a loved one in Hell, but I think that is because they remember the loved one at a time when that person by common grace still had some remnant of good left. What they do not realize is that those in Hell have no remnant of good left and therefore are not the same as they remember. By Providence, I was given an opportunity to see what a person looks like farther on the path towards utter depravity, which left me much less disturbed by my motherās passing than one might expect. The reason is that my mother in her last years was hardly a real person anymore, and therefore much less an object of pity, or at least it felt so to me. I expect that when I get to Heaven it will seem to me as if the one who bore me in the flesh was nothing but a vague shadow of memory and that my true mother will always have been the Church.
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Well, āthe gates of Hell are locked from the insideā. Reading that line for the first time really did leave the fear of God in me. No doubt it has for others.
What is true for disease is also true for head injury survivors. There was a case in the nineteenth century in which someone who had been badly injured that way displayed a total change in his personality - as if all the natural āboundariesā to some very bad behaviours had all been removed.
For the record, if this sort of thing happened to a natural introvert, I would expect of them to withdraw; pretty well totally, because the learnt behaviours that normally keep them engaged with people could not now be sustained. Some interesting questions of brain/mind interaction involved here, I must say!
This calls to mind a book I frequently recommend: Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It is an immensely fascinating account of various cases from the 50-year long career of a neurologist, recounting the bizarre psychological consequences - many times misdiagnosed as purely mental illnesses - that resulted from purely physical, biological causes.
I recommend the book not only for its entertainment value, but mostly to give documentation to the interplay between the material and immaterial aspects of our being. We are apt to easily credit bodily illness that arises from spiritual misbehavior (e.g. ulcers from unnecessary and excessive worry). We are not so apt to think of our body generating freakish psychological illness. Sacksā book shows how this was the case in some of his patients over the years.
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This kind of blunt straightforwardness is really encouraging. I pray for those times when I stand behind the pulpit that I would always be more fearful of Godās displeasure than manās. It is a faith and sight thing. It is always so tempting and easy in the moment to buckle when you start seeing huffs and eye rolls and pinched faces out there in the congregation. By Godās grace I do not think Iāve done this yet but it might be different for me if I depended on a church for a salary. Thank you Tim this is why I come to this site.
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Although I was preaching out of town last Sunday, I heard of Pastor Curellās sermon on bitterness yesterday from several in our congregation and commend it to readers.
About Hell, while sympathizing with our desire to resolve the matter of possible awareness of Hell while in the presence of the Lord, Lewis is always fiddling around the edges of orthodoxy, which is the reason Dad warned us not to get our theology from him, but from Hodge (for instance). Hell is not manās choice. It is Godās decree and no one there has locked himself from the inside. God has locked him there from the outside. The language here of Lewis (and more popularly today, of Keller) in making much of manās agency, will, and decree in connection with Hell, and thereby inevitably a concomitant minimizing of Godās Own agency, will, and decrees, is no doubt seductive to us. (Read our series on Baylyblog about Kellerās errors concerning Hell, for instance.) In this connection, itās interesting to note that Calvin thought the Rich Man and Lazarus account was historical, and not a parable.
Generally, we in our day have to be very careful not to allow our own pride and self-will and self-assurance to infect our doctrine. Tim Kellerās errors on Hell quite predictably grew to maturity in Manhattan. Love,
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Thanks Fr Bill. I really need to read this book, my wife also recommended it. She is a neurologist and also worked in psychiatry. She met quite a few patients with ābarriers removedā: cursing everything, old preple using cuss words they never used in their entire life. I recently thought that maybe they lost the ability to ātake their thoughts captiveā. Probably also a function/capability of the material mind as opposed only the immaterial.
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Certainly the description of the Lord separating the sheep and goats gives us no cause for thinking that people in Hell choose or chose to be there.
Then they themselves also will answer, āLord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?ā Then He will answer them, āTruly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.ā These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.ā
ā Matthew 25:44-46
And even more clearly, the attempted choice here is clearly the opposite of Hell:
āNot everyone who says to Me, āLord, Lord,ā will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, āLord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?ā And then I will declare to them, āI never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.ā
ā Matthew 7:21-23
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Dear Joel,
Iāve read The Great Divorce. Iām sorry about your mother.
Love,
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I think it is not helpful to juxtapose Godās decree against manās choice. God carries out His decrees through secondary causes, one of which is manās choice. My mother was the exemplar of the need for Godās sovereign regeneration of the heart, but if He did not do so, how could we say that my motherās self-righteousness and lack of repentance were not her own choice? After all, at every fork in lifeās road, and at the most ultimate fork, she appeared to choose one way and not the other way. No one forced her to do one and not the other, unless we say she was out of her mind and not responsible for herself.
Superficially, you are correct. But note that both examples involve blindness and self-deception. It is often the case that we say that we are choosing X when really deep down if we are honest with ourselves we would admit that we are really choosing Y. If you share the Gospel with someone and he declines to turn to Christ in faith, then he is choosing Hell, whether he agrees with that or not. And is he making that choice out of ignorance or out of depravity? Iād say the latter. The biblical testimony is that spiritual blindness is the outcome, not the cause, of a choice against God. My mother would argue that she didnāt choose any of the adverse events that befell her, when in reality it was quite apparent that her own choices brought on most of them.
When the Day comes that the sheep are separated from the goats, are the goats going to say to the Lord, āYes, you are correct. I see now that there were all those times when I did not take care of You.ā? Or will they instead harden their hearts and accuse God of unrighteousness? And are those who prophesied and cast out demons and performed miracles going to say to the Lord, āYes, you are correct. I see now that I was a practitioner of lawlessness all along.ā? Or will they instead harden their hearts and become even more embittered? It is on the Last Day that the true choice will be revealed.
Of course, those in Hell would prefer to return to the life of common grace they had on Earth, but thatās not an option. The only other option is Heaven, and my assertion is that even if given the opportunity to enter Heaven, none of the damned would do so because they would see it better to stay in torment in Hell than acknowledge God as the rightful sovereign. Iām not certain of the eternal fate of my mother, but if she was willing to undergo terrible physical privation in order to maintain her self-righteousness and self-will, why would I expect anything different in eternity when common grace is removed?
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