Locked From the Inside
RED CLAY GOSPEL, THE DOORS TRILOGY: a door locked from the inside, a door the wind found, a door a father refuses to lock. Shut, entered, waiting. redclaygospel.com
Some things you write and forget by morning. I wrote this in 2005, and it has followed me for twenty years. I am still not sure I have the right to feel comforted by it.
Few subjects have started more fights than this one. Hell clears a room or fills it with shouting. So it is worth walking slowly.
The parable does not answer every question we bring to hell. It answers a harder one. It tells us something true, and unsettling, about the human heart.
Hell is not only a sentence handed down. It is a choice made permanent.
The rich man never asks to be with God. He asks for water. He asks for comfort. He asks for Lazarus to serve him one more time.
Even in the fire, he does not repent. He never says, “I was wrong.” He still sees the beggar as a man who should be fetching his drinks.
That is the terror the parable hands us. Not the flame. The unchanged man inside it.
The chasm between heaven and hell did not open after death. It opened years earlier, at a gate, where a hungry man lay covered in sores while another man stepped over him and did not look down.
This is the quiet violence of sin. It does not arrive as a monster. It trains the heart, one small refusal at a time, to love itself more than God. Until the heart can no longer picture wanting anything else.
Abraham’s answer still carries across the centuries. “They have Moses and the Prophets.”
And Jesus was about to add something greater. Someone would rise from the dead. And many would still not believe.
God takes no pleasure in any of this. Scripture says He wants no one to perish, but everyone to come home. The cross is the proof. Heaven has done everything love can do without ceasing to be love.
Because love does not break down the door.
The doors of heaven open to those who want the King.
C. S. Lewis once wrote that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. Scripture never puts it in those words. But the parable does.
A man can spend a whole life saying, “Not Your will, but mine.” He can say it at the gate. He can say it in the fire. He can say it until God, at last, lets the choice stand.
The doors were locked from the inside long before they were locked forever.
Boutwell Jones
redclaygospel.com
RED CLAY GOSPEL, THE DOORS TRILOGY: a door locked from the inside, a door the wind found, a door a father refuses to lock. Shut, entered, waiting.
redclaygospel.com
Sobering thoughts