Hell is like New York City

I don’t mean to offend anyone from New York (we know how you guys are.)?What I mean is something else.?

In the early 1980s (the decade of everything good), there was a science fiction movie released called “Escape from New York”. ?In this dystopic future society, society has found a final solution to deal with criminals once and for all.?New York City and the entire island of Manhattan are transformed into a giant maximum security prison.?Something like Alcatraz used to be in San Francisco bay, but with one important difference: there are no prison guards.?There are no cells, no visitations, no supplies from the outside (like food and clothing.)?Once condemned to a life sentence (however long that is), the prisoner is simply dropped on the island by helicopter and left to fend for themselves.

While this may at first seem cruel, it does solve other problems, like capital punishment.?The State doesn’t need to execute the prisoners, and it doesn’t have to take care of them either.?They are all left to their own devices to survive, which they do, in a very twisted and dark fashion, as the biggest and baddest struggle to survive the ultimate Darwinian cage.?Only “Snake” Plissken can navigate this place, whose odyssey takes the viewer through the labyrinth of the prison of NYC.

The plot is fairly irrelevant to my point though, because we are talking about hell. I’ve heard people over the years, even self described Christians, say “I can’t understand how a loving God would send anyone to hell and torture them forever.” ?It’s actually very popular now to claim there is no hell, and probably no devil either.?If we are to look at this logically, we might really be asking the question, how could a loving God not send someone to hell??Let’s think it through.

Let’s say you are a loving father, and you have a lot of children.?Some love you, some hate you, and some are indifferent to you.??As a loving father, you desperately want to have a relationship with every one of your children.?You want them to love you, and you want them to know they are loved.?But some simply choose not to, either not to love, or not to believe their father loves them.?What can you do?

You also want them to live with you in your home (let’s just say it’s a really big home, maybe a castle or a palace.)?But those who don’t want to have a relationship with their father choose not to live there.?Some of them are also violent and would do harm to the others in the house.?What can you do??You can try to force them to live with you, but that’s not respecting their free will, and honestly, it’s not love if you have to force them to be with you.?Most people would call this a prison, even if it’s a beautiful prison, and will try to escape it repeatedly.

The only option you have for those children you love, if they choose not to love you in return, is to provide an alternative place for them to live away from you and their other siblings.?That home can be a palace or an island or a giant white box, it doesn’t matter.?You have to live somewhere, and if you refuse option 1, you are left with option 2, which your loving father provided for you.

What happens to those children who chose to live away from their father??All those children can create a place that fits whatever they want.?This is exactly what the criminals in “Escape from New York” did.?Given free reign and no rules, they created a city that reflected all their greed, malice, hatred, murder, and violence of very sort.?The guards didn’t make it that way, the prisoners did.

In the same way, the prisoners of hell make it the place that it is.?Nowhere in the Bible does it say God designed hell to torment people forever.?The Bible describes a horrible place of fire and torment, where “The worm dieth not”.?But it never says He created all of those features.?Indeed, the times when Jesus discusses hell with His listeners, He does so as a warning to them not to go there.?He does this because He is a loving Father, and wants us to be with Him, not in torment.

It’s the people there who make it hell.?For all those who reject their loving Father, who reject holiness and love itself, hell is the place they chose to be, away from God.?And just like prison, it’s the biggest and the baddest who run the place. ?Unfortunately, for humans, that means the fallen angels who revolted and followed Satan when he fought against God.?Revelation says that hell was created for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41, 2 Peter 2:4).?Satan and all of his followers are cast into hell at the end of the battle with God, as described in Revelation 20:10.?Even the demons are afraid to go there, as the gospels also describe demons begging Jesus not to cast them into “the Abyss” (Luke 8:31).

In many accounts of near death experiences, those who have seen a glimpse of hell describe it as a place where the demons are eternally tormenting the humans there.?Now they can eternally pour out their hatred for humanity, something driven by envy perhaps because we are created in the image of God.?We don’t know for sure, but clearly it is the demons that are tormenting humans in hell, not God.

The main point I’m trying to convey from my analogy is this: that we will all get what we want.?Those who wanted to spend eternity with their Father, basking in His love and goodness, will receive it, as He said, “I go to prepare a place for you… in my Father’s house are many mansions”.?

Those who don’t want to spend eternity with God will also get what they want, although they will certainly not want what they get.?