{"id":3659,"date":"2016-07-13T19:27:18","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T09:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/?p=3659"},"modified":"2016-10-21T10:03:59","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T00:03:59","slug":"what-is-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/what-is-hell\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Hell?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Hell<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>By: Shenouda Girgis<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Talking about hell is a touchy topic and one that many people don\u2019t delve too far into. To be honest, I didn\u2019t know much about it before preparing for this blog. The study of hell is quite difficult to initiate- its oppressive, innately negative and lacks the lustre of delving into scripture or a juicy piece of theology. In short, studying it is a bit hard to justify. In fact, I could only nod my head in agreement in retrospect.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Imagine a person who says, \u201cI don\u2019t want to be friends with other people; I want to be alone,\u201d&#8230;<br \/>\nthey then take baby steps to sever themselves off from those around them&#8230;<br \/>\nand then eventually they take mammoth leaps to absolutely and decisively choose themself over all other people.<br \/>\n<strong>Then this is going to hell. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Said another way, the essence of sin is separation from God, the desire to achieve competency away from the divine. It is the urge to be self-sufficient, to be able to discern between good and evil apart from the Creator. Some call it self-righteousness. This is the ultimate denial of being a creature of God. Now, by correlation, sin and hell are the same thing, a separation from others and God. C.S. Lewis depicts hell in \u2018The Great Divorce\u2019 through a quiet, grey, overcast town where people keep moving further and further apart from each other.<\/p>\n<p>An old saying is that one would choose \u2018heaven for the climate but hell for the company\u2019. This is a deplorable myth. Hell is boring and uneventful to the extreme. But then how can heaven be interesting or exciting if we are reclining on marshmallow clouds, dipping our golden fingers in pristine rivers and tuning our ever new silver harps? But let\u2019s try to consider what it means for human beings to flourish. Just imagine what it would be like for yourself and for us as human beings to act together without the frictions and subtractions caused by sin. What potential? What excitement? What room for growth and prosperity? As St Paul says, \u201cfrom glory to glory\u201d; our limitations would be nullified, our potential limitless. C.S. Lewis leans forward on his Cambridge armchair and beckons, \u201cCome further up, come further in!\u201d (The Last Battle)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hell By: Shenouda Girgis Talking about hell is a touchy topic and one that many people don\u2019t delve too far into. To be honest, I didn\u2019t know much about it before preparing for this blog. The study of hell is quite difficult to initiate- its oppressive, innately negative and lacks the lustre of delving into &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/what-is-hell\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What is Hell?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5259,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions\/5259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}