EssentialSacrifice wrote:The post keeps getting buried and i don't want B.W. to miss or forget. Aren't you interested in this too ?
I'll bet the answer is interesting, more so than we expect.
Haven't forget, just getting over a bad cold and cough.
I'll post a revised answer I gave Annette in a PM on the same question as you:
Question:
Could you please help us with this ? Could you tell, when you experienced hell, if there was the presence of God. Is God in hell ?
Hard to explain - his presence of love is not there but the separation from it is felt and makes known what a person freely chose instead of his love. It is banishment by and from his presence of Love. Totally alone never to experience the objective reality of compassion, mercy, love, hope, goodness from and by God.
Again, it is the wrath of rejected love is there, this wrath is not like ours so we cannot equate it in logical way because it, it, enacts by what one sows they also reap in a form of self-torment on those there that I can't explain very well. I tried in the book the best way I could.
I mentioned in book and when I speak on subject - one is banished away from God's love and that a whispering abeyance of God is there revealing to those there who and what they are really like. Other than that, can't explain it any better.
People there know full well why they are there. The true them was completely revealed and all reasons why and what for reveled while compared to who God is and what he did for them.
At the time, for me, it was like I just mentioned above - never to experience the objective reality of compassion, mercy, love, hope, goodness again, and I can’t express the feeling in words, other than it was a reflection of what I produced in those around me with my then atheists ideas and live for the now gusto and all silly justifications I lived by.
I thought I was living a good life but instead, I produced in people in various ways: no hope, no trust, no mercy, no grace, no love, no goodness unless there was my strings attached to feed me but then again, I symbolically strangled folks with my strings. I see this is people today, desiring to take away hope, joy, compassion, godly dignity, faith, etc and etc from people thinking they are doing a noble good in doing so. They do not realize the extent of what they are really doing, blind to it all.
Take a look at Isaiah 59:2 and notice that our iniquities separate us from God and sins keep him far from us. That is in this life, so is God still here seeing all we do and hear all we say and think? Yes...only in this life can we call out to him to surrender and become his own.
However, in the afterlife in hell, one's sin nature is sealed forever to a person and thus one's iniquities separate one from God and one's sins keep his presence of mercy, love, goodness, compassion, hope banished away forever and ever. God gives them over to a debased mind takes on a more profound meaning to me than most. He lets folks reap what they sown - it is what they want.
However, to experience the living God's objective reality of compassion, mercy, love, hope, goodness revealed from the message of the cross and experienced when one is born again, gets you through life most difficult times. As Christians, we get to experience this and learn of Him and recognize all the times he intervenes in this mortal life. Why anyone would desire to keep all their strings is so foreign to me now that all I like to do is cut them free.
I have an eternal perspective: this mortal life is thankfully temporary and designed for us to grow into the one to come which is far more real than this one.
Here is a poem I wrote about heaven I would like to close out on... so forgive me of the mushy stuff here.
Heaven is my home now
One day I long to reach
To walk again in the trees
That meadow land,
Where tears all wiped clean
Golden roads, streams flow
Grand estates, music, company
Taking care as designed to be
Learning there what,
We missed while earthbound
The fragrance of those flowers
Animals all splendidly pure
A grand city being prepared
Oh the banquet table,
In the great hall
Heaven is my home now
Thru the gate chiseled by nails
That I drove in his wrist and feet
He forgiven me of this,
And I deserved it not
Now into the land
Of His Liquid love
O long to go but
Must wait till his,
Task assigned I complete
Bryan W Melvin or B. W. to you all!
Blessings!
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thanks for getting so may balls rolling.