And I hated everything I’d accomplished and accumulated on this earth (Ecclesiastes 2:18 MSG)
Avid young golfers who love the game often dream of being wealthy enough to retire and play golf daily. The calculation in their mind is to gain success early, retire to a life of comfort and leisure, and play the game they love until they die. This is their formula for happiness.
While disciplined pleasures are a gift from God and part of a balanced life, devotion to self-satisfaction alone is the doorstep to hell itself.
In his allegory, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis portrays hell as a grayish city with endless, overcast skies. The city’s inhabitants are wispy souls (less and less real by the day) who prefer pleasure over virtue. They have chosen an existence of selfish wants over self-giving love.
Over time, the constant pursuit of self-satisfaction leads to growing discontentment and isolation. Those who have lived in the dark city the longest find themselves further away from the city’s center. Some are light years away from any form of community, endlessly chasing self-gratification into the eternal darkness.
The most alarming aspect of Lewis’s hell is that people choose to be there. Individuals are not locked in hell. But have locked themselves in it. It happens that hell’s doors latch from the inside, not the outside.
King Solomon, the second king of Israel, is a real-life example of Lewis’ allegory. Solomon (970-931BC) was the son of King David. His great success as king afforded him every opportunity and indulgence. After living a life of selfish ambition, Solomon reflects on his experience in Ecclesiastes 2:1-11:
Oh, I did great things: built houses, planted vineyards, designed gardens and parks and planted a variety of fruit trees in them, made pools of water
to irrigate the groves of trees. I bought slaves, male and female, who had children, giving me even more slaves;
then I acquired large herds and flocks, larger than any before me in Jerusalem. I piled up silver and gold,
loot from kings and kingdoms. I gathered a chorus of singers to entertain me with song and—most exquisite of all pleasures—voluptuous maidens for my bed.
So I hated life because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, chasing after the wind.
All the success and pleasures of the world proved to be meaningless at the end for Solomon—a “chasing after the wind.” And it grieved him.
Jesus was a King from another world. He left abundance and comfort to move downward into the fading and dark cities of planet Earth. The cities of earth, by comparison, wouldn’t fill the tiniest of cracks in the sidewalks of Jesus’ kingdom. Yet, he humbled himself by becoming a man, taking the nature of a servant, and dying on a cross. Jesus brought heaven to earth so that those on earth might not die alone with their selfish pleasures.
In this life, there are only two types of people. Citizens of the earth and citizens of heaven. Citizens of the earth choose to embrace the earth at the expense of heaven. In doing so, they eventually discover that life on earth was hell all along. Citizens of heaven, put earth second, making their life on earth the very threshold of heaven itself. “Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you get neither.” (C.S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian)
Prayer: Lord Jesus, help me to surrender what I cannot keep to gain what I can never lose.