It has appeared to me, from conversations over time, that many people have one issue that sours any legitimate meditation on God and salvation. That issue is eternal punishment in hell. Using common sense, it just seems utterly inconceivable that sins committed in a lifetime of 20. 50 even 80 years would justly result in a punishment of, well millions upon millions of years. End of story! I agree with this logic. Only, a truer description of punishment is no better, maybe worse.
We need to understand that "time" is a created entity. One moment after its creation, all three elements existed, past, present and future. Time will come to an end someday. That's the easy part, the hard part is conceiving of the alternative. I have no idea, nor am I able to understand. One thing is certain and that is that the aforementioned concept of "millions upon millions of years" is not what will happen. Some have said that we live in "time" as a fish lives in water. Sounds good to me, as far as it goes. There is a story in the Old Testament where the Sun stood still for a period of time in order for the Israelites to win a battle. First of all, we know it as being more accurately described for us today as the earth standing still, but a more likely reason would be that "time" stood still for everyone except those on that battlefield.
Now, I would ask non-believers to think about eternal punishment in the realm of possibilities and not to ask them to believe this in order to continue with the conversation. Getting back to my point on time spent in Hell, there is another description of this punishment where one does not need to enter into the extremities of the imagination and that is where the Bible says that at this time there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Everyone can relate to this concept and I don't think that anyone can say that it is anything but something that we would not want to do. Over time, many people (in an unenlightened age) did not need to go any further with this thinking for they merely saw punishment in Hell and believed it. Today, the perception of eternal punishment rears it ugly head to such a progressive and advanced people! There is no gospel in this paragraph, only one concept and that is punishment. It has nothing to do with why or from whom. If you will not consider punishment because of the "time" element, you might want, for the sake of discourse alone, to consider punishment without the problematic specifics. This one point I'm trying to make proves nothing. The only thing that it might do is take away one obstacle from continuing the conversation.
We need to understand that "time" is a created entity. One moment after its creation, all three elements existed, past, present and future. Time will come to an end someday. That's the easy part, the hard part is conceiving of the alternative. I have no idea, nor am I able to understand. One thing is certain and that is that the aforementioned concept of "millions upon millions of years" is not what will happen. Some have said that we live in "time" as a fish lives in water. Sounds good to me, as far as it goes. There is a story in the Old Testament where the Sun stood still for a period of time in order for the Israelites to win a battle. First of all, we know it as being more accurately described for us today as the earth standing still, but a more likely reason would be that "time" stood still for everyone except those on that battlefield.
Now, I would ask non-believers to think about eternal punishment in the realm of possibilities and not to ask them to believe this in order to continue with the conversation. Getting back to my point on time spent in Hell, there is another description of this punishment where one does not need to enter into the extremities of the imagination and that is where the Bible says that at this time there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Everyone can relate to this concept and I don't think that anyone can say that it is anything but something that we would not want to do. Over time, many people (in an unenlightened age) did not need to go any further with this thinking for they merely saw punishment in Hell and believed it. Today, the perception of eternal punishment rears it ugly head to such a progressive and advanced people! There is no gospel in this paragraph, only one concept and that is punishment. It has nothing to do with why or from whom. If you will not consider punishment because of the "time" element, you might want, for the sake of discourse alone, to consider punishment without the problematic specifics. This one point I'm trying to make proves nothing. The only thing that it might do is take away one obstacle from continuing the conversation.
