This is my opinion of hell, and this is only an opinion...Hell maybe a complex place and full of eternal agony and/or eternal pain...It maybe many things and all of the things of hell maybe terrible...Life on earth sometimes gets complex, and hell may also be a complex place...We are not given a lot of details in the Bible on hell (we also are not given a lot of information and details on heaven), but we know hell will be agonizing place and there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth...Jesus told us that there is be a great chasm between heaven and hell...
When I think about the opposite of hell, I think of heaven...Then naturally, I think of God in heaven...I also think of Jesus in heaven...God and His Son are Both in heaven...The Spirit of God is in heaven...Since God is LOVE, I think of LOVE in heaven...God is also Spirit...I think and believe that LOVE and love are all around in heaven...LOVE is everywhere in heaven...Heaven is all about an eternity with God and Jesus...Heaven is where we have accepted and believe in the eternal Truth, and the Absolute Truth...Heaven is a place of pure LOVE and pure Light, and God is there, His Spirit is three, and His Son is there...God and His Son and the Holy Spirit will always and eternally be there...I believe that the greatest thing on earth is love, and I believe that LOVE is eternally greater and infinitely greater in heaven...So, I believe, that LOVE is much, much, much, much more in heaven, when we compare the loves we have on earth...
God created us and He knows what our desires our and what our loves our...He knows what are pleasures are...He created us in His Image...He wants us all to be saved and go to heaven...How we feel and the thoughts we have, is most often what we think we want...If we feel happy, we think we are happy...If we have sad thoughts and negative thoughts, then we probably feel sad...Sometimes we may think that one of life's goals on earth is to constantly be thinking and searching for happiness or to satisfy one or more of our desires or to find a pleasure or find something that pleasures us...Man is a function of his own thoughts, feelings, and his senses...And we see and feel creation through our senses...We think we know what we want, but we don't as we read in Matthew about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and His Sermon on the Plain turns our thinking of happiness upon its head...Maybe fulfilling our desires and pleasures is not or should not be a lifetime goal...God gives us complete and unfettered freedom, and freedom in our daily choices...These choices are what we do each and everyday...We seem to want to be able to fulfill our earthly desires and pleasures, and often forget about God and Jesus...We seem to examine our "how we feel, our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions regularly"...But we do not examine our hearts and our souls, near as often as we do these earthly desires...We think and feel much more about this earth and the flesh, than we do about heaven and the Spiritual Things of an eternal life with God...And we know that Jesus teaches and taught the eternities as He walked the earth...The Bible and Jesus spoke often about our hearts...So in the four gospels, Jesus teaches and taught us the eternities and about God, His Father...The heart maybe the Spiritual Center in all of us...Our hearts have the ability to know and feel Jesus' LOVE...We know we should be good but we are not good...We know we are to be perfect, and we are not perfect...Jesus says only God is good (Matthew 19:17)...Jesus also teaches us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is Perfect (Matthew 5:48)...So we are taught to be good and perfect, but we cannot be good and perfect...We struggle with our sins every day...What a wretched man I am...Thanks be to God, for Jesus Christ our LORD that He came down to die for our sins (Romans 7:7-25)...He sent His Son to save us, not condemn us...He is our hope for heaven, the Kingdom of God, our way to eternal LOVE, and our way to avoid hell, if we believe in Him and the One He sent...He LOVES us this much (John 3:16)...
God is Almighty, is LOVE, is humble, is holy, is good, forgiving, merciful, and is perfect...God is Absolute Truth...He is always living the eternal fruits of the Holy Spirit of LOVE, joy, kindness, faithfulness, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, and self-control...He is our Creator and we must recognize and realize this...We must seek Him or we may not find Him...We need Him...We need to find out more about Him...Finding out more about God, maybe one of our purposes on earth...But it seems that God giving us freewill to do our own thing, gets in the way...
So with the knowledge of God and His Characteristics He will be the One who will be our Perfect Judge for heaven and hell...God wants us to live a peaceful and quiet life in all Godliness and holiness...For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the Truth...
Hell will be as much about ourselves, as it is will be about God...One will be agonized in hell, based on how one will feel there...So, what if hell and heaven were one and the same?...Heaven might be hell for those who do not feel or believe that our Father is Almighty...What if you are in a place where your ideas, your interests, your thoughts, and your beliefs are not the same (or anywhere near) as all the others all around you?...How do you feel about those places today, where you have absolutely nothing in common with that person or group?...What if you are somewhere where you hate the smells, hate the sounds, hate the feel, hate what you see, hate what you hear, hate what you touch, and hate what you sense?...What about ones, who do not believe that God is the Truth, and the Light?...Let's say, you must spend your eternal life in a place where there is only LOVE, goodness, perfection, and His Light, and you do not believe in those things...So, if you do not want to be obedient, to LOVE, to have humility, grow to perfection, to abandon all wickedness, and see the Light, this might be a form of hell?...Let us also say, you do not feel you have a need for God, or any of these things...Then, this might be your hell...
In the introduction of second Thessalonians verses eight through ten, St. Paul gives us a glimpse of hell:
8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our LORD Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the LORD and from the Majesty of His power 10 on the day He comes to be glorified in His holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed...
Heaven, in contrast to hell, then as described by St. Paul is a place of an eternal marveled joy and we have the Presence of God, a fellowship with Him...Hell then is seen as the opposite - a state of everlasting separation from that joy and Presence of God, that fellowship of God...A place that shuts out God and being with Him...
Eternal hell maybe this simple, and not complex at all, as St. Paul explains...Hell maybe when we are (just) apart and away from God, away from His Presence and His LOVE, and away from His Son...Those in hell have refused the eternal Truth and see no eternal Light...So if there are a number of times and in different and various ways, that God reveals Himself to us in our lives—whether through the works of others or just listening to others as they speak of God, or the hearing the stories of Christmas and Easter, or through the experience of awe when we see a beautiful dawn, a radiant rainbow, the vastness of Spiritual-ness in the oceans, a heavenly sky full of beautiful clouds, or a majestic mountain range, or through the whisper of our own conscience...But in each of these times we turn away from those talking to us, those sacred and spiritual sights, or that quiet whisper of God calling us to seek Him, to thank Him, to worship Him, and believe we can and want to do all things for ourselves then hell is near...If in each of these times we do not allow God in our lives, then we are living a life without God and in this life without God, this separation from God is our hell...We may be punished just by being shut out and away from the Presence of our LORD, and His Son...Hell may be this separation from God...The chasm, this separation, this being shut out between believing and not believing in these eternally Good and Greatest Things too wonderful to understand - may be what hell is about...Life without Jesus and His Father is literally hell...
Another different thought on this comes to mind in the Book of Job...Job has all these questions of why he is suffering on earth, and he knows that only God can answer his questions about his sufferings that he has been going through...God comes out of a storm and Job listens and feels His Presence...God is very near Job...For the first time in Job's life he has felt God and now has been near Him...God does not answer ONE of Job's many questions about his sufferings and tragedies...But after hearing and feeling God's Presence, Job is satisfied...God never answered any of Job's questions -not one...Instead God comes from out of a storm and asks Job His Own questions...After reading all the lengthy Book of Job, one might wonder why Job is so quickly satisfied, with no answer (at all) to any of his suffering questions and only gets questions (from our LORD)...It is because, Job had never experienced anything so GREAT in his life and nothing is like the Awesome Presence of God...Job feels and has felt GOD's GREAT GLORY...Job feels an Almighty and Eternal Presence...Job knows now God is Infinite and Eternal, and he himself is finite and limited...Job has actually somehow, in a human type way heard, felt and sensed God and His Presence...
On judgment day, we will too will come and we will meet Jesus and God...Jesus tells us that He is the Only Way to God...Jesus said and believed that eternal life is to know God and the One He sent...God does not want us to perish, but to be saved by His Son and reborn...Saint Peter believed this and said salvation is found in no other man than Jesus...Saint Paul said God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4)...The Christian Faith is our belief in Jesus...So if you believe St. Peter and St. Paul we need to be saved to make it into heaven and to believe in Jesus and God...If we do not believe Jesus and St. Peter and St. Paul, then are we the one that sends our own souls to hell?...In heaven there may be something like the twelve pearly gates made of a single pearl that we read about heaven in Revelation...And we get to meet Jesus (and may be we get to meet God, too) on the gold street of the pearly gates...If He and His Son are not in our hearts and we do not believe, we may not get to stay with Them...We may be sent elsewhere, away from God and His Son...But in heaven are ears will have heard Him, and now our eyes have gotten to see Him as Job did (Job 42:5)...There will be no greater glory than this ever again in our lives...This event of meeting God and His Son will now be the GREATEST THING we have ever experienced in our life, wherever it takes place...It will be like our greatest desire and all desires now have been satisfied...Divine Truth is our hearts deepest longing...Now we will have seen Divine Truth and felt the Greatest Emotion of Pure and Perfect Love...We now will have experienced this GREATEST BEING ever in the universe...We have now gotten to experience the GREATEST EXPERIENCE EVER in our lives...We will get to experience our hearts most deepest longing...There will be nothing else ever like it that we have ever seen or felt...We have met the ONE who is COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING...
Now, let us say you will not be able to see or feel this again -the GREATEST BEING EVER again now in your eternal life...You will not even be able to imagine this seeing, feeling, and this experience of meeting Jesus and His Father, after you depart from Their COMPANY...God created us...This feeling and being with the Father and His Son are the purpose of life...If He sends us where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, we will never get to feel, sense, and experience His Presence again...After having the most Almighty Experience the Best Experience ever in the universe....We now will never get to experience this again...On our Judgment Day what we have seen, heard, and sensed (as Job did) is this Presence, God's Presence...We are now told (at the Pearly Gates) we will never get to experience our heart's deepest longing, our very purpose of life and eternal life, ever again...That, to me, would be hell...As stated earlier, a life, this type of eternal hell is life without Jesus and His Father and His Spirit...Hell is forever being without Jesus and His Father and the holy Spirit...So missing out on the GREATEST LOVE and ONES one has ever experienced would be an eternal hell...
Man needs things that are Sacred and Holy...God and Jesus are Holy...The Hebrew definition of Holy is to be set apart for a specific purpose...The Hebrew word for “holy”, kodesh, comes from the root word “Kadash”...Kadosh is Hebrew Word for "Sacred"...Sacred also means to be set apart...Sacred also describes something that is dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a Deity...And the Hebrew God is God. the One True Living God...
God and Jesus are in Heaven and are both Sacred and Holy...If you feel you have no need for the Holy Two then you are destined to be in the darkness...The eternal punishment for sin is separation from God...Believing in Jesus and that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life - and that no one gets to God except through Him -means Jesus is our Way to God and to Heaven...We do not want to be separated from God or His Son, the Holy Ones...We need Jesus to help us not to be separate from God...The separation from the two most Holy of Holies would be and is hell...