What Did Jesus Do for Us? The Future that He Has Won for Us
When we are involved in evangelization, we don’t want to just talk about what Jesus accomplished on the Cross, as important as that is, but we also want to look forward to the future that He won for us. He has provided for us hope in a beautiful reality, brought into existence through His atonement. We’re going to break that hope down into three different aspects to talk about. We’re going to talk about the Ascension, then we’re going to talk about the Second Coming, and finally Eternal life.
The Ascension is, in one sense, an historical event. In Acts 1:9, we read about Jesus being raised up in the sight of His Apostles. A cloud takes Him and He ascents to the Father. That’s described in Ephesians 1:20-23 as how God “raised Him from the dead and made Him sit at His right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” Likewise, the same Apostle says elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 15;25, “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet and the last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
The Ascension of Our Lord is the assumption of Our Lord’s kingship. Our Lord is king over all the spiritual powers of the cosmos and that’s what gives the Church the power of exorcism through the Sacraments and even through the specific Rite of Exorcism. We talked about this a little bit in the liberating aspect of the Paschal Mystery. Christ is King, He rules over all spiritual powers, all angels and demons. He has defeated all the demons and He has even defeated death and granted us eternal life. That definitive defeat of death was his own resurrection.
We can observe this triumph of Christ’s kingship in the Ascension as being manifested and taking place even now through the Church, in the Church, in her Sacraments, in her evangelization, in her prayer, in her liturgy. The Church is manifesting, that is making real, the reign of Christ from the right hand of the Father. The Church is conquering evil spirits. The Church is defeating death and communicating eternal life to people. That also speaks of what’s going to come in the final judgment. Let’s move on and talk about the Second Coming of Our Lord and the Final Judgment.
St. Paul promises us that this human history is not going to continue unchanged forever. In 1 Corinthians 15:51, St. Paul says, “Lo, I will tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed.” This is what we are looking forward to, there is going to be an end to human history. Christ is going to return. All are going to see Him and there’s going to be a judgment of all mankind. That judgment is going to be both just and merciful.
We see that reflected in the words of the book of Acts. We read in Acts 17:30-31, “God commands all men everywhere to repent because He has fixed the day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed.” Of course, we know that man is Jesus Christ. At that final judgment, every human being will get both what they want and what they deserve.
We’ll talk more about that in just a moment, but let’s read from St. Paul again, Romans 2:5, “When God’s righteous judgment will be revealed, He will render to every man according to his works. To those by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, He will give eternal life. But for those who are factious and do not obey the truth but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.” In a sense, yes, this is a judgment. This is a judgment on our actions and our life, but remember the actions in our life are expressions of our desire. First, we desire something in our will and then we act on it. The desires of our heart are expressed in our actions.
At the Final Judgment, those who love God and show through their lives that love in their actions, they will get what they love. They will get what they want. They will receive God. For those who love themselves and did not love God and showed through their actions that they love themselves, they will receive themselves, and having yourself for all eternity is what we call “hell.” Hell is the eternal punishment of the wicked in which they have definitively chosen against God. God casts them far from Himself and they have themselves for all eternity.
Let’s talk a little bit more about hell because hell is a topic that frequently arises when we’re doing evangelization. People have a problem with hell, they wonder how could a good God send anybody to hell, etc. Hell is described as a “lake of fire,” but also as “outer darkness” in Scripture (Matthew 8:12). The “fire” is a picture of the torments of those who reject God. We don’t hold definitively that these fires are physical. They might be or they might not be.
Personally, my understanding of the “fires of hell” is that these are the flames of our own lusts having lived lives of giving into our passions, of giving into our concupiscence. We are consumed with those desires, those passions, for all eternity. That’s one way of understanding it. The point about hell is that it is as far as possible from God. That is, in a sense, a mercy from God because God’s presence is painful for those who hate Him. We all notice that people who are far from God, that are living lives of rejection of God, they frequently don’t even want to get near a church, for example, because anything that speaks of God’s presence is really distasteful for them.
The Scriptures describe God as a “consuming fire” in Hebrews 12:29. God is a flame of consuming love that is incredibly bright and incredibly hot. The life of discipleship of following Jesus prepares us to experience the intensity of the light and heat of God’s love and just be ecstatic to be bathed in the fires of God’s love. When you are not prepared for that, through a life of discipleship, that is painful and so God, mercifully, sends you far from Himself into the outer darkness where you are not exposed the heat and light of His burning love and where you can have yourself, which is what you’ve been choosing through your whole life. I think these are ways that are helpful to explain hell when we’re dealing with people who may be troubled by this idea and what the Scriptural revelation is about it.
We don’t want to dwell only on the negative. Hell is the punishment for sin, but we hope for better things. We hope for eternal life in God’s kingdom. Revelation 21:3-4 describes that final state of eternal life. It says, “Behold the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them and they shall be His people and God Himself will be with them. He’ll wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be any more mourning or crying or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Likewise, St. Paul describes our eternal state in 1 Corinthians 2:9 when he says, “But, as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man concede, what God has prepared for those who love Him.”
This is important to emphasize with individuals as well. We are all looking for hope. We look around ourselves in the world. Everything seems to be in decay. There’s wars, famines, destruction, hatred and enmity between different groups. Is this all there is or do we hope for something more? That hope for eternal life really answers the desires of every human heart and our evangelization needs to focus on that hope. As they say, ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.’ It’s not so much the fear of hell, but the hope for heaven that can motivate individuals for that response of love that we’re really calling from them to enter into that relationship with God.