You Really Don’t Want To Go There

It was announced this week that Charles Manson died.  The acts that he was charged with happened long before I was aware.  Over the years, I suppose at anniversary dates, I’ve heard bits and pieces of the story.  A quick review of any article about him shows just how evil he truly was.  His lawlessness started when he was 9 years old. At one point he claimed to be Christ making is second coming. He led a cult in which he had them kill 8 people in the most horrific way possible. One of the dead was an almost full term baby.  I found the events of his life to be downright sickening, but isn’t that what sin is really about? Sin is simply when we fail to adhere to God’s commands.  It is a failure of man to reflect the righteousness of God.  God has promised that all unrepentant murderers (and many others) have their place in the Lake of Fire. Presuming Manson’s fate is sealed for eternal punishment, does that not add another reason why we really don’t want to go there?  If the fear of eternal torture is not enough, if the disgust of spending eternity with Satan is not enough, how about spending an eternity in the presence of a Charles Manson, or any other sickening evil doer that we see among us.  All the unrepentant pedophiles, rapist, murderers, etc. will spend eternity in this punishment.  Who is not there? God is not there.  Our heavenly Father, our Savior, and the Spirit are all absent from the realm of eternal punishment.  This means an absence of righteousness, light, sympathy, love, mercy, relief, and escape. It is really hard to imagine how evil eternal punishment will be. We live in a world where we can find all these things if we look for it, but in eternal punishment, these things cannot be found.  Eternal punishment is not just a place for the really evil, it is a place for any who do not follow God’s will.  At times we have a really bad habit of categorizing sin, meaning we perceive one sin to be less heinous than others.  Sometimes we think, well I’m not as bad as…, insinuating that we are surely worthy to enter heaven, after all, so and so is much worse than I am.  This type of attitude leaves us comparing ourselves against others but not against God’s pattern. God does not categorize sins like we do! He has his own standard that only He is qualified to establish.  God does not ask us to just be better than others, He commands that we be transformed, Rom 12:2, and that we “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness”, Eph 4:24. If we fail to do this, it means we remain worldly, in a sinful state, a state opposed to God.  This is missing the mark, the very definition of sin.  Scripture states that sin leads to death, Rom 3:23, and that the reward for sin is death, Rom 6:23.  This is not talking about physical death but spiritual death.  A death that lives forever in hell. Eternal punishment is a place devoid of our Father, our Savior and his Spirit and of all the blessings that come through them.  It is a place devoid of righteousness. Needless to say, we really don’t want to go there.