In my last post, chapter 28 of the book If God Is Good by Randy Alcorn concerned Heaven. Chapter 29 focuses on a very real but unpopular subject; Hell: An Eternal Sovereign Justice Exacted Upon Evildoers. Although you may want to skip what some find a disturbing subject, please resist this tactic from the demonic realm. After all, one of the greatest strategies is convincing humans that Hell and demons do not exist.
You can find posts of previous chapters under the heading Bible Studies in the menu above. Unless otherwise noted, the Scriptures Alcorn uses are from the NIV Bible.
If Heaven did not exist… Followers of Christ would never receive any lasting compensation for evil and suffering. If Hell did not exist…there would be no justice.
When most people speak of what a terrible notion Hell is, they talk as if it involves the suffering of innocent people. That would indeed be terribly unjust. However, nowhere does the Bible suggest the innocent will spend a single moment in Hell.
Without Hell, justice would never overtake the unrepentant tyrants responsible for murdering millions. Perpetrators of evil throughout the ages would get away with murder, rape, torture, and every evil.
Even if we may acknowledge Hell as a necessary and just punishment for evildoers, we rarely see ourselves it’s worthy of help. After all, we are not Hitler, Stalin, Pole Pot, Bundy, or Dahmer.
In Romans 3:10-12 God responds,
“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
As we saw in chapters 7-9, in our unredeemed state, we remain alienated from God, the source of all goodness. And while by his common grace, some of his goodness leaks both onto us and into us, our predominant condition is far from good.
In his book The Nazi Doctors, Robert Lifton coined the phrase “the normalcy of evil.” Evil permeates the human condition. The Nazi doctors were respectable, educated people who loved their families yet thought nothing of performing sadistic experiments on Jewish children.
They considered themselves good people...We consider ourselves good people...We are wrong.
Guilty people can always rationalize sin...Hell exists because sin has no excuse.
To see the face of evil, we need only to look in the mirror…If we don’t see evil’s reality in our lives, it’s no surprise…Evil people typically don’t.
A Good God Must Punish Evil
Hell exists precisely because God has committed himself to solving the problem of evil. Hell is not evil; it’s a place where evil gets punished. Hell is not pleasant, appealing, or encouraging. But Hell is morally good because a good God must punish evil.
Hell will not be a blot on the universe, but an eternal testimony to the ugliness of evil that will prompt wondrous appreciation of a good God’s magnificence. That sounds like nonsense to Hell-hating moderns, but it makes perfect sense when we recognize and hate evil for what it is.
We each have our preferred ways of sinning, whether as prostitutes, porn addicts, materialists, gossips, or the self-righteous.
We all are sinners who deserve Hell.
We hate Hell precisely because we don't hate evil.
We hate it also because we deserve it.
We cry out for true and lasting justice, then fault God for taking evil too seriously by administering eternal punishment. We can’t have it both ways.
Sin is evil; just punishment of sin is good. Hell is an eternal correction of and compensation for evil. It is justice. To fear and dread Hell is understandable, however, to argue against Hell is to argue against justice.
Hell is the Only Just Alternative
If this short time on earth were our only life, for there to be justice, all evil would have to be judged here and all goodness rewarded here. Christianity teaches that one’s life in this fallen world will give way to unending life, either in Heaven or Hell. That life, not this one, will bring perfect justice.
Atheists consider the world terribly unjust, for they think that only in this life can any retribution for good or evil take place. However, the Bible teaches that God will exercise justice in a never-ending afterlife. At the end of this fallen world, just before the inauguration of the New Heaven and New Earth, God will, at last, bring ongoing justice to both unbelievers and believers (see Revelation 20).
Hell is the only just alternative to Heaven. Fallen angels along with humans who haven’t accepted God’s gift of redemption in Christ will inhabit Hell.
2 Peter 2:4 – “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment;”
Revelation 20:12-15 – “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done.Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”
After Christ returns, believers will be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven while unbelievers will be resurrected to an eternal existence in Hell. Jesus said,
“Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out… and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.” – John 5:28-29
God will judge the unsaved for their sins, and Christ will say to those who don’t know him,
“Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” – Matthew 25:41
Jesus and Hell
In the Bible, Jesus spoke more about health than anyone else did. Jesus referred to Hell as a real place and described it in graphic terms.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Hell.” – Matthew 10:28
“As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” – Matthew 13:40-42
“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into Hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into Hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Hell, where ‘the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched.’”– Mark 9:43-48
Jesus spoke of:
a fire that burns but doesn’t consume,
an undying worm that eats away at the damned, and
lonely and foreboding darkness.
Christ says the unsaved “Will be thrown outside, into the darkness, while there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 8:12
Jesus Speaking of The Rich Man and Lazarus
Jesus Speaking of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, taught that an unbridgeable chasm separates the wicked in Hell from the righteous in paradise. Moreover, the wicked:
suffer terribly
remain conscience
retain their desires and memories
long for relief
cannot find comfort
cannot leave their torment
have no hope.
Our savior could not have painted a bleaker picture of Hell.
The biblical teaching on both destinations stands or falls together. If one is real, so it’s the other. If one is a myth, so is the other.
The best reason for believing in Hell is that Jesus said it exists.
“There seems to be a kind of conspiracy to forget or to conceal where the doctrine of Hell comes from. The doctrine of Hell is not ‘medieval priestcraft’ for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin…. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.”[1]
“There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that he believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”[2]
Who should we believe? Jesus Christ or Bertrand Russell?
“There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”[3]
We cannot make Hell go away simply because the thought of it makes us uncomfortable. We should weep over Hell, but not deny it. If there isn’t an eternal Hell, Jesus made a terrible mistake in affirming there is. And if we cannot trust Jesus in his teaching about Hell, why should we trust anything he said, including his offer of salvation?
We may pride ourselves in thinking we are too loving to believe in Hell. But in saying this we blasphemy, for we claim to be more loving than Jesus. More loving than the one who with outrageous love took upon himself the full penalty for our sin.
Who are we to think we are better than Jesus? Or that when it comes to Hell, or anything else, we know better than he does?
We Must Choose Heaven
God determined he would rather endure the torment of the cross on our behalf than live in Heaven without us. Apart from Christ, we would all spend eternity in Hell. But God so much wants us not to go to Hell that he paid a horrible price on the cross so we wouldn’t have to.
Jesus asked a haunting question in Mark 8:36-37. “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?”
The price has been paid, but we can’t benefit from forgiveness unless we choose to receive it. A convicted criminal may be offered a pardon but if he rejects it, he remains condemned.
By denying Hell’s reality we lower the stakes of redemption and minimize Christ’s work on the cross. Moreover, if Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection didn’t deliver us from a real and eternal Hell, then his work on the cross is less:
“The doctrine of Christ’s vicarious atonement logically stands or falls with that of eternal punishment.”[4]
Annihilation
The Bible teaches Hell is a place of eternal punishment, not annihilation. Jesus said,
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” – Matthew 25:46
Here in the same sentence, Christ uses the word eternal (aionos) to describe the duration of both Heaven and Hell. Thus, according to our Lord if some will consciously experience Heaven forever, then some must consciously experience Hell forever. Despite the clarity of Matthew 25:46, even some evangelical Christians have affirmed that upon dying, or at the final judgment, those without Christ will cease to exist.
“It’s time for evangelicals to come out and say that the biblical and morally appropriate doctrine of Hell is annihilation, not everlasting torment.”[5]
Pinnock makes a revealing statement:
“I was led to question the traditional belief in everlasting conscious torment because of moral revulsion and broader theological considerations, not first of all on scriptural grounds. It just does not make any sense to say that a God of love will torture people forever for sins done in the context of a finite life.”[6]
Note that Pinnock admits he reached his conclusions about annihilation “not first of all on spiritual grounds.”
“Emotionally, I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain…. Scripture points in the direction of annihilation.”[7]
But would John Stott have ever said scripture points toward annihilation if it were not for the emotional strain put upon him by the passages that clearly appear to teach everlasting punishment?
Revelation 20:10 says not only that Satan, but also the beast and the false prophet, “Will be tormented forever and ever.”
Revelation 19:20 shows the beast and false prophet are humans, put in Hell 1000 years earlier. Hence, we at least know that Hell for humans cannot mean immediate annihilation at death.
The most graphic New Testament statement of the eternal suffering of the unrepentant simply says, “The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever and they have no rest, day or night.” – Revelation 14:11
It’s hard to imagine a more emphatic affirmation of eternal punishment.
If we are going to discard the doctrine of eternal punishment because it feels profoundly unpleasant to us, then it seems fair to ask what other biblical teachings we also will reject, because they too don’t square what with what we feel. And if we do this, are we not replacing the authority of Scripture with the authority of our feelings, or our limited understanding?
Annihilation is Senseless Considering Revelation 20
One popular annihilationist position maintains that unbelievers cease to exist when they die. But if they no longer exist, then how can they be raised to stand at the Great White Throne Judgment of Revelation 20? Would God recreate them to stand before him in judgment? After this judgment, Revelation 20 says they will be cast into the lake of fire. Would this be a second annihilation?
Another view states that unbelievers are destroyed not at death but sometime later. They suffer some punishment appropriate to their offenses, some shorter and some longer, then are snuffed out of existence.
If there’s an eventual end to people suffering in Hell, where is that indicated in Scripture? Why Christ’s emphasis on “eternal punishment” and fire that isn’t quenched and a worm that doesn’t die?
Alcorn states: “Annihilation is an attractive teaching compared to the alternative. I would gladly embrace it, if it where it taught in scripture. But though I’ve tried, I just can’t find it there.”
Annihilation is not a Solution
Annihilation is no solution to the injustice of evil and suffering. If it were true, annihilation might itself raise a serious moral problem. It suggests that our sins are not so grievous and the consequences for committing them are painless, or at worst exist only for a limited time.
Although the doctrine of annihilation continues to gain ground among believers, Christians must realize that embracing this doctrine minimizes, or worse, eliminates altogether the horrors of Hell. This doctrine in its most popular form merely confirms what most unbelievers already think. Their lives will end at death, and therefore there’s nothing to be concerned about. In contrast, the Bible speaks of an eternal Hell as something that should motivate unbelievers to turn to God and motivate believers to share the gospel with urgency.
Is Hell a Problem or a Solution?
Many see Hell as the ultimate cruelty and injustice. Jesus said God prepared Hell “for the devil and his angels.” – Matthew 25:41
Humans go there only as they align themselves with that cosmic minority of fallen angels who reject God. Many atheists believe early Christians invented Hell as a doctrine to frighten people into conversion. But Christ’s followers merely repeated their Lord’s teaching. They didn’t make it up.
Doesn’t our main objection to Hell center in the belief that we are far better than we really are? We may accept in theory that we’re sinners; we may even be able to list some of our sins (though we can give quite good reasons for many of them). However, we do not even begin to see the extent of our evil in the sight of an all-holy God.
If we regard Hell as the divine overreaction to sin, we deny that God has the moral right to inflict ongoing punishment on any humans he created to exist forever. By denying Hell, we deny the extent of:
God’s holiness
our evil
the extreme seriousness of sin
And most of all we deny the extreme magnificence of God’s grace in Christ’s blood, shed for us on the cross.
A Better Understanding
If we better understood both God’s nature and our own, we would not feel shocked that some people go to Hell. (Where else could sinners go?)
Rather, we should feel shocked, as perhaps the angels do, that any fallen human would be permitted into Heaven. Unholy as we are in ourselves, we are disqualified to claim that infinite holiness cannot demand everlasting punishment. The more we believe in God’s absolute holiness and justice the more Hell will make sense to us.
Are you tired of all the evil and corruption in this world?
Do you long for a world in which such things don’t exist?
Then you long for a Heaven without evildoers. And that requires either that God forces everyone to repent and come to Christ and embraces righteousness or that God provides an alternative residence for those who do not. Hell is that place.
It should sadden us to think of people suffering forever. But if there were no Hell, that would diminish the very attributes of God that make Hell necessary and Heaven available. Should we want Hell eliminated if our righteous God determines it should exist? I believe we should leave Hell in God’s hands, trust him, and submit to his judgment not our own.
God Doesn’t Ask for Our Vote
Some people in ancient Israel claim the way of the Lord was not just. God replied, “Is it not your ways that are unjust?” And then he reiterated that everyone would die for his own sin (see Ezekiel 18:25-29).
Just because I don’t like the idea of Hell doesn’t make Hell unjust. Of course sinners oppose the idea that they deserve eternal punishment, just as a child opposes the idea that he deserves punishment because he hit his little sister.
Why do we have more difficulty accepting the doctrine of Hell than ancient people did? Perhaps because our tolerant, therapeutic, positive thinking culture assumes our basic goodness. But scripture disagrees with that assumption.
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.” – Mark 10:18
“There is no one righteous, not even one; …there is no one who seeks God…There is no one who does good not even one.” – Romans 3:10-12
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.” – Psalm 14:1-3
In a day of television and Internet news polls that determine what percent of the population approve of certain issues or candidates it’s easy to think that our opinion about Hell carries weight that. However, God doesn’t take opinion polls and he doesn’t give us a vote. He refuses to adjust his revelation about Hell to fit our modern sensibilities.
Degrees of Punishment
All whose names are not written in the Lambs Book of Life will be judged by God in relation to their works, which have been recorded in the books of Heaven (Revelation 20:12-15 ). The severity of punishment will vary with the amount of truth known, and the nature and number of sins committed (Luke 20:45-47; Romans 2:3-6).
Jesus said the Day of Judgment would be more bearable for some than for others (see Matthew 11:20-24 and Luke 12:47-48).
Hell is not one-size-fits-all. Revelation 20 explicitly says that God records all human works so that all punishment will be commensurate to the evil committed (Revelation 20:12-13, see also Matthew 5:21-28, Matthew 12:36, 1 John 3:15).
Eternal Punishment is not Disproportionate
People commonly ask, “Why would God inflict infinite punishment for finite sins? Isn’t that disproportionate punishment and therefore unjust?”
Scripture nowhere teaches infinite punishment; Rather, it teaches punishment proportionate to evil committed. The confusion comes from mistaking eternal for infinite. No one will bear in Hell an infinite number of offenses; they will bear only the sins they have committed.
“And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books….each person was judged according to what they had done.” – Revelation 20:12-13
Since the absence of God is the absence of good, Hell is a place without the slightest trace of good. In Luke 16 Abraham and Lazarus dwell together in paradise, but the rich man stands alone in Hell.
Expect no comforting company in a place for which God has withdrawn. Hell is horrible because it means being locked out from God’s presence.
“They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” – 2 Thessalonians 1:9
Many more Americans believe in Heaven than in Hell. The vast majority of those who believe in Hell do not believe they are going there. For everyone who believes he’s going to Hell, 120 believe they’re going to Heaven.[8]
Heaven is not our Default Destination
Our culture considers Heaven the default destination. This optimism stands in stark contrast to Christ’s words in Matthew 7:13-14:
“…Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God: – Romans 3:23
“Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.” – Hebrews 12:14
Hell is Our Default Destination
Hell isn’t simply a sentence that falls upon us; It is the inevitable destination we choose with every sin and every refusal to repent and turn to God for grace. None of us will enter the presence of an infinitely holy God unless something in us radically changes. Until our sin problem gets resolved, Hell will remain our true destination.
Hebrews 9:27 states: “Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.”
The believer in Christ Jesus has been granted an eternal identity with the nature of Christ, and this identity allows him to enter Heaven.
However, at death the unregenerate person, the unrepentant sinner, forever remains unregenerate. There is no longer the possibility of transformation. Hell’s torment may be to unendingly experience loss, greed, and other sinful desires with no hope of fulfillment, coupled with ongoing judgment for these ongoing sins.
No Second Chance After Death
Fairness doesn’t demand that God give people a second chance after death. Our Creator gives us thousands of chances before death. God grants every person a lifetime to reform, to turn to him for grace and empowerment.
For those who die young or otherwise lack the mental capacity to respond to Christ, many Christians throughout the ages have believed God may extend the atonement of Christ to cover them, as an act of grace. Randy Alcorn agrees with that statement as do I.
God gives people on this fallen earth adequate opportunity to turn to him in their “first chance.” He has revealed himself to us in the creation and in our conscience so that “men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
God gives us second chances and third and tenth and hundredth chances every day of our lives. Every breath is an opportunity to respond to a conscience that convicts people of their guilt.
The Redeemed and the Unredeemed
The Redeemed say: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11 ESV
However, the Unredeemed: “Called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!” – Revelation 6:16
Heaven and hell are places defined, respectively, by God’s presence or absence, by God’s grace or wrath. They’re real places, but also conditions of relationship to God. Whose we are, not where we are, determines our misery or our joy.
Three times in the final two chapters of scripture we’re told that those still in their sins have no access to heaven and never will (Revelation 21:8, 27; 22:15). The condition of the unbelieving heart remains unchangeable at death. God’s grace, even if offered, would remain forever repugnant to such a rebellious heart.
We live our present life between Heaven and Hell and so get foretastes of each, which prepare us for one or the other. Just as God and Satan are not equal opposites, neither is Hell the equal opposite of Heaven.
God has no equal as a person, and Heaven has no equal as a place.
Alcorn does not believe Hell is a place where demons take delight in punishing people, since Hell was made to punish demons, not reward them. Moreover, there will be no delight in Hell.
Our present suffering warns against the suffering of Hell; For unbelievers, the fear of Hell serves as a merciful call to repentance. For the Hell-bound, suffering can serve as a frightening foretaste of Hell. Suffering reminds us of our imminent death, the wages for our sin. In our suffering we should look at our own evils and failures and beg God for mercy.
Suffering can help those Heaven bound fall out of love with this life and live in the light of the coming one. The sufferings of the present give us a bittersweet reminder of the horrors from which God has delivered us.
Many speak of the fear of Hell as something wrong, primitive, and cruel. But Jesus said we should fear both God and Hell: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Hell.” – Matthew 10:28
If we reject the best gift that a holy and gracious God can offer us, purchased with his own blood, what remains, in the end, will be nothing but Hell.
Maranatha! Until next time, I am Passionately Loving Jesus, the Anchor of my Soul.
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