Did the pope go to heaven or hell?

I’m sure most Catholics would confidently answer that he surely went to heaven. I’m also sure there are detractors who would consign him to hell.

I can say with equal confidence, based on the Bible, that neither answer is correct.

God’s original purpose for humans was clear: “Be fruitful and become many, fill the earth and subdue it.” (Genesis 1:28)

He also educated Adam about death: “. . .as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:17)

It was very clear: Adam and Eve were to live on the earth forever, 'subduing it', that is, turning the whole earth into a paradise like their garden of Eden. They need only worry about dying if they disobeyed God.

Ultimately they did disobey. Did they go to heaven or hell? No.

God told them what would happen next: “In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:19)

God is the ultimate definition of justice. If torment in hell awaited them for disobedience, wouldn’t God have warned them of that in advance? For that matter, if some blissful life in heaven, somehow better even than their life in their paradise garden, lay in their future if they were obedient, wouldn’t God have let them know about that?

They died disobedient, and they returned to the dust.

They had no offspring while they were still sinless in the garden. Cain, Abel, and their dozens of other kids and grandkids came along after Adam and Eve sinned. So the kids all inherited their parent’s imperfection. Over the past however-many-hundreds of generations since then, we all have inherited that imperfection. And every single human who ever lived died. It is such a normal part of life that, even though we hate death and the Bible rightly calls death an “enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26), it makes it difficult to get our heads around the basic fact that Adam and Eve had the prospect of never dying, living forever in paradise. They deprived us of that potential.

Does it make sense to you that, when Adam and Eve sinned, God would have said, ‘Okay, new plan: Good people will go to heaven when they die, bad people to hell, and we’ll just burn up the earth.’

Me neither.

So why do nearly all Christians believe they are going to heaven when they die? Why do so many believe that hellfire awaits them if they are bad?

We’ll get into that in Part Two. 

 

Feel free to leave a polite comment. To read another of my columns on a related subject, click here.

 

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several books, all available at Amazon.com. You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.