arts and culture on Heaven and Hell

I once heard a description of what meals are like in heaven. The saints are seated on either side of a four-foot-wide banquet table. The table is set with delicious foods on every plate. The only thin...

There’s a story of a young girl on a plane who was reading her Bible, and there was a businessman sitting next to her. He looked over to her and he said, you don’t really believe that do you?” And she...

When [Abraham] Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being “a scoffer at religion,” wrote the historian William J. Wolf, because he belonged to no chu...

I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration...

15 percent of everything Christ said relates to this topic [of money and possessions]—more than His teachings on heaven and hell combined. Why did Jesus put such an emphasis on money and possessions? ...

My friend Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute once used the following example to demonstrate how important frames are if we are to make sense of reality’s puzzle. This may seem like a head scratcher...

Let us begin with a question. Do you really know how to enjoy the world? Do you know how to enjoy yourself? One of the greatest parables in the New Testament has to do with the search for enjoyment an...

It was Easter Sunday and the pastor gathered the children at the front of the church to ask them about the meaning of Easter. The pastor was disappointed as he listened to the first response: “Easter ...

Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Most of us want to have enough... good works to get into heaven, but enough bad works to be fun.

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothi...

In her short story Revelation, Flannery O’Connor describes a woman sitting in a Doctor’s office, gossiping away without concern for who hears her questionable commentary: This woman says to hersel...

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory. Let me lear...

Jesus warns us against our self-righteousness in the most dire terms. (He uses the word hell a lot more often than most of us are comfortable with.) He’s quite aware that while we humans have seemingl...

There are only two kinds of people: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history…the unifying testimony of the human heart through history is belief in life after death. Anthropological ev...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep. And God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters. In ...

Whenever I am traveling, I constantly look forward to the moment when I will return home. Even if I’m very busy and preoccupied, in the back of my mind one thought is always present: “Soon I’ll be goi...

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult...

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cru...

The Sabbath is the link between the paradise which has passed away and the paradise which is yet to come.

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

Satan blinds hearts by filling eyes with worthless things. His veil over human hearts today is a veil of pixels, and the chains of his spiritual bondage are tethered to the world’s theater.

That he is There (oh heavenly theme!) is as certainly true as that Bread naturally taken removes my hunger—so this Bread of Angels removes my pain, my cares, warms, cheers, soothes, contents and renew...

The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

Praise is the rehearsal of our eternal song. By grace we learn to sing, and in glory we continue to sing. What will some of you do when you get to heaven, if you go on grumbling all the way? Do not ho...

Leader: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, Darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. People: Centuries before Jesus walked among us, Th...

O heavenly Father, the author and fountain of all truth, the bottomless sea of all understanding, send, we beg you, your Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understandings with the beams of y...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...