Ha-ha, Fire & Damnation

One of the issues which sometimes vexes the people of God is how the citizens of paradise can remain perfectly happy and content knowing that others languish in hell, whatever form that takes. I cannot solve that conundrum, sorry, but I have learned that my inability to remove tension between two 'competing' concepts does not mean that both cannot still be true. God will provide His redeemed people with perfect bliss when they go to be with Him, while those who reject Him will endure a dreadful eternity, ‘at the same time’.

At a number of National Trust properties, including Chirk Castle where I called this week, is a ha-ha. This is a sunken fence used in landscaped gardens and parks popular in the eighteenth century which allowed the viewer the illusion of an unbroken, continuous rolling lawn, whilst excluding deer and grazing livestock from the gardens. The beasts behold a wall which they cannot surmount, while the gentlefolk on the other side see nothing but farmland. Gardening enthusiast Dezallier d’Argenville in his La Theorie et la Practique du Jardinage (1747) (‘The Theory and Practice of Gardening’) describes the invention, attributing its name to the cry one made when seeing it for the first time.

Somehow, the hellish recipients of God’s wrath will see from afar the outer walls of paradise but those within shall be neither troubled nor moved by those without. Nothing will defile their new home, and they will laugh and smile as they walk its avenues and enjoy its vistas, untroubled and unnerved by the fate of the wicked.

And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life. Rev. 21:26-27