Can there be a loving God and a hell of eternal torment? This is crucial question because it is about the nature and character of God.
How could a loving God inflict eternal suffering and torment on people in hell and on their loved ones in heaven who know where they are? How could God inflict eternal suffering as punishment for a few decades of sin?
I have received lots of help and guidance from a teaching by Richard Fredericks of Damascus Road Community Church in Damascus, Maryland.
Charles Templeton, a Billy Graham associate and became an agnostic, is quoted in Lee Stobel’s book A Case for Faith: “I could not hold someone’s hand in a fire for a moment. How could God put people who don’t do what he wants into a fire for eternity?”
Many of us learned about hell in church. We may not have read the Bible much, but we heard about it in Sunday School or VBS.
When I was a college student, I heard a missionary to an African nation. He described a grass fire on an African plain. He went into great detail to describe the heat and horror of a prairie fire. Then he waned us that hell would be much hotter. What I came to see was that preachers use hell to try to scare people into heaven. The goal is to have people get so scared that they will come down the church aisle and say, “I don’t want to go to hell. Sign me up as a Christian.”
I don’t believe that approach to introducing people to God is in keeping with the Bible’s image of God. When we know God, 1st John says, we get rid of fear. Listen to 1 John 4:16-19.
“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us.”
Mark Twain, author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and other great American classics was friends with Harriet and Calvin Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mark Twain had three daughters. Two died young without making a decision to accept Christ. When he asked the Stowes where his daughters were, they told him they were burning in hell. He would not accept that a loving God would do that to his beloved children.
What does the Bible say about hell? What can we build our faith on from the Bible.
I want to look briefly at three words used in the Bible that get translated by the word “hell.”
Sheol means the grave or the realm of the dead. It is uniformly depicted in the OT as the place for both the righteous and the unrighteous. David, Job, the Psalms speak of sheol as the place where the dead are. It was not thought of as a place of torment. For instance Psalm 139:8 says, “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” Depths is the New International Version’s translation of the Hebrew word sheol.
Hades was the common Greek term for the underworld. This is used in the NT. For instance, Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus puts the rich man in Hades, looking up and seeing Lazarus resting beside father Abraham. Some try to use this parable as proof that hell is a place of eternal torment, because Jesus does say that the rich man was in torment. The problem with that argument is that the word is not hell; it is Hades, the place where the dead are in Hebrew thought. In Revelation 1:18 the resurrected, triumphant Christ says, “I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.” Hades cannot hold the dead because of Christ’s victory over it.
Gehenna was the name of the valley below Jerusalem on the SW side into which animal carcasses and garbage was thrown. It was full of maggots and smoldering fire all the time. It was a place of stench and revulsion. It was also known as cursed place because some corrupt kings in ancient times had sacrificed children there. It was an image of constant burning, smoldering fire and of endlessly rising smoke. Fires were burning up the trash in Gehenna. It was an image of where anything that was to be incinerated would be thrown, but it was never thought of as a place of endless torment.
None of the three words that get translated “hell” in the Bible mean a place of endless torment. So where did that idea come from?
The roots of the idea of hell as eternal torment is the idea that the Bible teaches that we all have an immortal soul that can never cease to exist. Some have believed that we all are immortal. We have it in ourselves to live forever. Every soul that has been in a human body is immortal and cannot cease to be. Is that what the Bible teaches.
Not one statement anywhere in the Bible says that human beings have immortal souls. The word immortal doesn’t appear at all in the OT. It is used 6 times in the NT. But not one time does the Bible say a human is immortal. Twice in 1 Timothy God is referred to as “immortal.” In fact the benediction in 1 Timothy 6:16 refers to God
“who alone is immortal….” What is a soul? The Hebrew word is nephesh. Gen. 2:7 says,
“God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life and man became a living nephesh, a living soul.” In Genesis 2:19 the animals are brought to Adam to name and in the Hebrew they are called nephesh. It is translated “living creatures” but it is he same word, nephesh, that is translated soul when it is applied to Adam.
A nephesh is any living, breathing creature. It does not have eternal life.
God says to Adam,
"You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:6-7). God did not say, “You have an immortal soul that will be punished.” God said, “You will certainly die.”
Ezekiel 18:4 says,
“Behold, all souls are Mine; The soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine; The soul who sins shall die.”In the New Testament the Greek word for soul is psyche. From it we get our word “psychology.”
Not once does New Testament say that humans have a soul that is immortal. It teaches that there is only one being who has immortality in his being, and that is God.
Does God extend this immortality to the wicked so that they can live and suffer in hell forever? No. Instead, God warns us that we can lose our souls, that our souls can be destroyed.
In Matthew 10:28 Jesus says,
“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.” The word translated “hell” is Gehenna. The issue in the NT is not how can God deal with all the immortal souls that have to go on forever. The issue is how can a living soul, which does not naturally have eternal life, gain eternal life and not die eternally?
Listen to Jesus in Matthew 16: 26-27.
“What good will it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul? Or what can you give in exchange for your soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward everyone according to what they have done.” Jesus is very clear. You can do things that can cause you to lose your soul.
The real issue in the New Testament is seen in John 3:14-16.
“. . . the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish (not die) but have eternal life.” Or John 6:40
“For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day."Just a few verses later, Jesus says, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . . Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.”
1 John 5:11-13 is states clearly that God is the giver of eternal life and that without having the Son you don’t have life.
“And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in (your immortal soul? No.),
this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” Eternal life does not come when you are born into the world because you are an immortal soul. Eternal life is the gift of God that comes because you believe in the Son of God.
The Bible does not teach that eternal life is in us because we have immortal souls.
Does the Bible say anywhere that we can be immortal? Yes.
When will we be immortal? Listen to 1 Cor. 15: 50-54.
"I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."When do we put on immortality? At the last trumpet, because of Jesus Christ. This is the gospel, the good news. We are limited, frail creatures destined to die. But God has come to us in Jesus in order to give us the gift of eternal life. I love 2 Timothy 1:10 the New Century translation: He destroyed death, and through the Good News he showed us the way to have life that cannot be destroyed.
As we embrace the good news of Jesus, we are given life that is eternal.
What does the Bible teach about what will happen to the wicked?
They will perish – John 3:16. The Bible says they will experience death. Romans 6:23. “The wages of sin is death.”
2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power.
John the Baptist said of Jesus, (Matthew 3:12)
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire. My theology professor Dale Moody used to say, “it is unquenchable fire, not unquenchable chaff.” What is in the fire is consumed. It is destroyed.
2Peter 2:6 says, God condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. . . .
John Stott, the Evangelical Anglican says, “The fire itself is termed eternal or unquenchable. But it would be very odd if what is thrown into the fire were to be indestructible. The purpose of the fire is to consume. Which is testified to by all of our incinerators.”
God does not send anyone to hell. God gives us freedom to choose to live our lives for him or for ourselves. Someone has said that the essence of sin is the statement, “This is my life and I will live it the way I dang well please.”
Some believe that hell is going on and on forever separated from God. If you say to God with your own free will, “God, I don’t care what you want me to do, I am going to live my life my way. I am not interested in having a relationship with you. I just want to do what I feel like doing.” If that is what you say to God he will let you have your way forever. C. S. Lewis said, “In the end there will be only two kinds of people: Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done.’ And those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’”
The image of spending eternity in some state of consciousness knowing that you are forever separated from God would be hell. Or as someone has said, “Hell might be having to stay in a small space forever listening to Frank Sinatra singing, “I Did It My Way.”
Romans 6: (The Message)20-21
As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you're proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end. But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.The cross of Jesus is the Bible’s ultimate revelation of hell. At the cross, God gave us the ultimate revelation of what hell is and of what heaven is. The cross is the final revelation of God who loves you so much that he will not let you die unless you choose it.
Christ took our place on the cross. The righteous for the unrighteous. He accepted God’s just punishment for our sins. (Isaiah 53)
He experienced the punishment of hell. Hell is absolute separation from God. As Jesus hung on the cross, darkness descended and Jesus cried out,
“My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
If Jesus is our substitute, then in order to take our place he needed not to go into hell and stay there forever. He died for us once for all. And God raised Jesus from the dead. He defeated death for us.
“He destroyed death, and through the Good News he showed us the way to have life that cannot be destroyed” (2Timothy 1:10 NCV).
We are either headed into eternal life because we have accepted the gift of God or we have refused it and have decided to go our own way.
As I look out at your faces, what I want for you is that you choose to live for God instead of for yourself. I want you to live listening to God telling you what to do, because to serve God is perfect freedom. I want you to give your life away serving God out of love for God, because to love God is perfect joy and the path to life everlasting.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
