Arnold Schwarzenegger gets emotional when he talks about people who believe in heaven.
Danny DeVito, who chatted with the ex-governor for Interview Magazine, didn’t even bring it up. He asked the big guy what he thought the future of our species would hold, and the Terminator turned on a dime:
“It reminds me of Howard Stern’s question to me. ‘Tell me, governor, what happens to us when we die?’ I said, ‘Nothing. You’re 6 feet under. Anyone that tells you something else is a f***ing liar.’”
Entirely unprompted, this emotion pours out for several paragraphs, a sloshing mix of anger at those “liars” who defend heaven and sadness that this beautiful life ever has to end.
Obviously, it is rude to call people who disagree with you liars. But I didn’t take it as rude. It was just an outburst of emotion and a poor choice of words. I do not think Arnold would look me in the eye and call me a liar to my face if I explained my belief in heaven to him. I don’t believe he’s that kind of a jackass.
His emotion, to be fair, seems to come from a feeling that people like me are cheating.
Life, as he sees it, is terribly, terribly sad. It ends, and this ending is brutally unfair. By asserting the reality of heaven, people like me slip out of something that he believes we have no right to slip out of—something he cannot slip out of—the experience of the ultimate sadness of life.
I don’t know why he is so certain in his despair. He admits he is no expert on “this spiritual stuff,” but his admission seems to embolden more than humble him.
In this, Schwarzenegger shares with many “practical” modern people an impenetrable circularity of thought: the “spiritual stuff” is not real, so I won’t look into it, and by not looking into it, I stay rooted in what’s real.
OK. Not much we can do about that, except to say that there are a million reasons to trust the Lord Jesus who has made us the promise of heaven. He is very, very real, and he will keep his promise . . . if we let him.