For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.
He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit
1 Peter 3:18

John Muir, famous explorer and naturalist,  tells an amazing story in his book, Travels in Alaska of the Thlinkit and Sitka tribes, two tribes that readily accepted the preaching of the gospel in Alaska in 1879. He writes:

The Thlinkit tribes give a hearty welcome to Christian missionaries. In particular they are quick to accept the doctrine of the atonement, because they themselves practice it.... As an example of their own doctrine of atonement they told Mr. Young and me one evening that 20 or 30 years ago there was a bitter war between their own and the Sitka tribe, great fighters, and pretty evenly matched. After fighting all summer, fighting now under cover, now in the open, watching for every chance for a shot, none of the women dared venture to the salmon streams or berry fields to procure their winter stock of food. At this crisis one of the Stickeen chiefs came out of his block-house fort into an open space midway between their fortified camps, and shouted that he wished to speak to the leader of the Sitkas.

When the Sitka chief appeared, he said: "My people are hungry. They dare not go to the salmon streams or berry fields for winter supplies, and if this war goes on much longer most of my people will die of hunger. We have fought long enough; let us . . .

In the early 1400?s Spain controlled both sides of the narrowest part of the Strait of Gibraltar , where the two land masses of Africa and Europe almost meet. The two large and rocky land points on either side of the strait were called the ? Pillars of Hercules ? and it was here that a marker was set up. It carried a three word Latin saying chiseled into stone: NE PLUS ULTRA, meaning, ?No More Beyond.? It referred to the belief that beyond the landfall of this rock marker as you looked westwards into the Atlantic , there was no more land ever. To venture out into the ocean was to invite disaster as you would eventually come to the edge and fall off. After Christopher Columbus?s discovery of the reality of a new world beyond Spain , it transformed the way people thought and acted. Statues were cast that depicted a lion tearing the Latin word ?Ne? from the phrase. It was pressed into its currency as coins were struck with the simple Latin phrase, ?PLUS ULTRA?, or ?More Beyond.? Coins in circulation in Florida in 1796, still had that slogan!

Perhaps this is a good picture of how so many people are having their view of life revolutionized by the discovery of the reality of heaven and of hell. In much of today?s world heaven is like the stereotype of a naive blonde, nice enough but not credible, and hell is like an obscene phone call, distasteful but able to be hung up on. Neither of these two has any real impact and the only reality left that is to be feared or sought after is the here and now. What would happen to my life if my sense of . . .