If heaven is to be a place free of sadness, pain and suffering, then how can you be happy in heaven knowing that the vast majority of humankind is painfully burning for eternity, especially when some of them may be your loved ones?
possibility boldly suggests that this awareness will be a cause for joy and praise rather than pain. Shocking though it may sound, this position has been defended by many theologians including Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards and, more recently, J. I. Packer. As Edwards put it, the redeemed “will not be sorry for the damned; it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them; but on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises.”
Grisly though this may sound, it has some impressive scriptural support. The imprecatory psalms (such as Psalm 139:21-22) seem to anticipate with great relish the demise of the wicked. And one might reasonably infer that the saints who plead for their blood to be avenged (see Revelation 6:10) will extract satisfaction once this judgment on “the inhabitants of the earth” is underway.
The thought of being apart from your friends and family who do not know the Lord is a heart wrenching thought. But God assures us in His Word that in Heaven our joy will be absolutely full.
Psalm 16:11 says, “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; in Thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore.”
All who go to Heaven will experience “fullness of joy.”
Revelation 21:4 tells us, “He [God] shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
Quoting C. S. Lewis again, “If you are concerned about your loved one’s that won’t be in Heaven, the most irrational thing you could do if you are truly concerned about those on the outside is to remain outside yourself.”
The best thing you could ever do is to make sure you’re going to Heaven and then do all that you can to help wake up your loved ones!
How can people be happy in Heaven, knowing that their unsaved loved ones are suffering in Hell?" Those who ask question such as these fall into the category of those who asked Jesus a similar question. They said that a certain woman had seven consecutive husbands, whose wife will she therefore be in Heaven (Mark 12:23)? Jesus answered them by saying that they neither knew the Scriptures nor the power of God. The unregenerate mind has no concept of God’s mind or His infinite power. If God can speak the sun into existence; if He can see every thought of every human heart at the same time; if He can create the human eye with its 137,000,000 light-sensitive cells, then He can handle the minor details of our eternal salvation.
As for me, personally, my answer would be close to what Mr. Comfort stated. Quite frankly, I don’t know for sure… And neither does anyone else.
But what I do know is that for the longest time, I thought that God was a lie. I thought that Jesus was an invisible friend for weak-minded fools that were too weak to face life without some invisible friend helping them along. I thought that the Bible was a bunch of hooey, made up by a bunch of creeps that wanted to manipulate people for their own gain.
And I was wrong. God has proved Himself to me in ways that I would have never imagined. He has earned my trust. His word is trustworthy, and if His word says we’ll be happy in Heaven, even with the knowledge of our loved ones suffering, I trust Him. I trust His word.
I know that the above is not going to be satisfying on any level to an atheist. I realize what it sounds like, but for some questions, there are no easy answers. Sometimes the only correct answer is “we just don’t know for sure”. But to make it a “Christian answer” we have to allow for that component of faith that says that even if we don’t know, we trust in God.
he exercise of justice is joy for the righteous, But is terror to the workers of iniquity. -Proverbs 21:15
Example: In the Book of Revelation we see God’s judgment poured out upon Babylon. Here is the angel’s instructions to the saints concerning this matter:
Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you saints and apostles and prophets, because God has pronounced judgment for you against her.” -Revelation 18:20
This final judgment will be a final justice… a final settling of accounts… a final granting of eternal separation for those who ultimately were unwilling to be reunited to their God. Those who embraced God will be granted ultimate embrace by God. Those who refused Him will be granted ultimate separation.
Scripture does not present the coming judgment of God as an embarrassment, or as something the saints should be sad about, or reluctant about proclaiming to the world. It is coming. Saints: Praise the Lord. Sinners: Repent.
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The answer is very simple: despite dying as an atheist, if you wind up in hell, it will not be due to your being an atheist, but due to your being a totally evil, obnoxious, arrogant, life hating, love hating person. If that is not your character, then presumably, when you come face to face with the reality of the love of God, you will willingly and happily embrace it. Otherwise that same love will torment you. If the reality of God becomes ‘hell’ for you, then your mother, I am sure, will be glad to see the back of you, because there will be nothing left of you but evil and arrogance. Certainly no mother in her right mind would want to have anything to do with a son like that, especially considering that you would hate your mother anyway, due to your rejection of the source of all true love.
One thing is, in my view, certain. You will not go to hell through having failed to “tick the right religious boxes” before you die. I know that this is what so many evangelical Christians believe, but it is an insult to God to assume that he deals with people in this manner. When Jesus spoke about the “sheep and the goats”, He was referring to two sets of people with completely different natures, as if they were, in fact, two different species. The sheep embrace the reality of the love of God, but the goats reject it. It is therefore wrong to assume that there will be essentially ‘nice’ people in hell, who are only there, because they failed to become Christians. Eternal reality is rather more profound than that!