Elijah … said, How long will you falter between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him, but if Baal, follow him.
1 Kings 18, 21
When king Ahab and his heathen wife Jezebel ruled over Israel, the people constantly wavered undecidedly between the idol Baal and the true God. At that time the prophet Elijah stood up courageously for God and His honour and called upon the people to change their ways. Faltering between two sides is frequently seen today, too. An elderly lady, for example, once said very determinedly, “I don’t want to go to heaven. I should have to work there, cleaning the Milky way. I have worked enough in my life; so I would rather be with my colleagues in hell.” Yet that same woman liked to go to church to find peace and quiet … and to pray to God. What led to such incongruity? She obviously had a very distorted conception of heaven and hell, as her derisive statement shows. We can be sure that the devil was particularly interested in furthering her opinion.
God tells us the truth about life beyond the grave in the Bible. His eternally valid Word. There we read that hell is not a place of jollity and conviviality, but of eternal torment. Heaven, on the other hand, is the place of rest, happy fellowship and eternal joy (cf. Matthew 25, 46; Hebrews 4, 3; Revelation 21, 3.4).
So listen to the urgent exhortation of the Lord Jesus Christ: “No-one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6, 24).