“Imagine there’s no heaven…it’s easy if you try…no hell below us…above us only sky…” So sang songwriter, former leader of the legendary band The Beatles, rock-and-roll guru, and peace activist John Lennon in the opening lines of his internationally-celebrated anthem Imagine from his 1971 album of the same name. According to Lennon, the song was inspired by several poems from his wife Yoko Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit together with a Christian prayer book given to him by comedian Dick Gregory.
Lennon said the concept of the song was one of “positive prayer” in which “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion, but without this my-god-is-bigger-than-your-god thing, then it can be true.” Lennon composed Imagine at home on a Steinway upright piano one morning in early 1971 and then recorded it in his own Ascot Sound Studios with a cast of supporting musicians on May 27, 1971. Strings were later added to the recording on July 4, 1971 at the Record Plant in New York City.
The emotional appeal of Imagine is undeniable. It genuinely tugs at the heartstrings of caring people everywhere who long for a world at peace characterized by universal brotherhood, love and no schisms over the seemingly unimportant doctrines that so often divide religious denominations. But “no heaven”? “No hell below us”? “Above us only sky”? And later in the tune, “And no religion too”? The world Lennon imagined was apparently not one of brotherhood, love and peace based on a unifying, non-denominational understanding of God, but rather a world with no God and no moral accountability to Him at all.
According to the Bible, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ [Those who say this] are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none who does good,” Psalm 14:1. But John Lennon arrogantly rejected all religious authority as divisive and denied the God of the Bible throughout his life. A close examination of Lennon’s life also reveals that rather than serving no god at all as he professed, Lennon actually believed in and served himself as God. But what if Lennon was wrong, and there is a God other than Lennon himself?
Imagine, if you will, that John Lennon, the man who admitted being a troublemaker and rebel from his youth, was an angry and jealous former woman beater who neglected his first son Julian, and a man who relentlessly abused his body through alcohol, LSD and heroin, is now facing the very God he denied during his lifetime.
Imagine that Lennon, who repeatedly ridiculed former Beatles manager Brian Epstein with vile epithets for his homosexuality and Jewish ethnicity, and yet may have experimented with homosexuality himself during a getaway to Spain with Epstein in 1963 (said Lennon, “It was almost a love affair, but not quite”), has passed into eternity where the God of the Bible dwells.
Imagine that Lennon, who said of the Beatles in March of 1966, “Christianity will go…We’re more popular than Jesus now…,” who cheated on his first wife Cynthia Powell Lennon with Yoko Ono, and who later cheated on Yoko with their personal assistant May Pang, is now in the presence of an utterly holy, righteous, and just God who judges and renders to every person according to his works.
Imagine that Lennon, who in 1968 appeared with Yoko on the cover of the notorious Two Virgins album in full frontal nudity, in 1969 wrote a skit called “Four in Hand” about group masturbation among teenagers, and recorded songs with lyrics like “Whatever gets you through the night is alright” and “Instant Karma’s gonna get you…you better get yourself together—pretty soon you’re gonna be dead,” is now very much alive in the hereafter and facing the consequences of his own works whatever they are.
Imagine that on the very day he was murdered, December 8, 1980, Lennon once again posed in the nude for the cover of an issue of Rolling Stone, and then later that night suffered his own fateful encounter with Instant Karma and stumbled into the presence of the Almighty mumbling, “I’m shot…” Certainly none of us is Lennon’s judge, but where do you imagine he is now?
In terms of fame and fortune, Lennon seemingly once had the entire world within his grasp. But at Mark 8:36, the Bible asks, “What does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and forfeit his own soul?” If the Bible is true as this blog insists, then wherever John Lennon is now, he is not imagining it: he knows for certain what comes after one’s physical death, he is very keenly aware of his environment, and none of his dreamy, wishful thinking can change it.
Don’t you be so foolish as to stumble into eternity unprepared to meet an uncertain destiny.
Do You Want to Be Made Well? 