Why does anyone believe in hell in these enlightened days? Because Jesus plainly taught its existence.
He spoke more often about hell than he did about heaven. We cannot get around this fact. We can understand that there are those who do not like the idea of hell. I do not like it myself. But if we are serious in our understanding of Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, we must reckon with the fact that he said plainly that some people will spend eternity in hell. He knew that while this present life is important, it is not all-important. We face eternal issues, and it would have been no kindness had he left his hearers in doubt about that. He spoke plainly about hell as well as about heaven, about damnation as well as about salvation.
Is Hell A Place?
In the New Testament, the word for hell is Gehenna (Hades is also used, but it seems to be a general term for the abode of all the departed). The name is apparently derived from the expression ge hinnom, “Valley of Hinnom,” a valley to the south of Jerusalem. In ancient times it was linked with the practice of sacrificing children to the god Molech (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6; 23:10) and was thus a place of sin and of shame. Jeremiah said that in this very place, where Judah sinned so grievously, God would punish evildoers (Jer. 7:32; 19:6). Perhaps because of this, the term came to be used as a name for the place of final punishment, punishment in the hereafter. This was the way the term was commonly used in New Testament times, and Gehenna was viewed with horror, a place to be avoided at all costs: “If your hand makes you to offend, cut it off; it is good for you to go into life maimed rather than having two hands to go off into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43).
Jesus’ insistence on the reality of hell does not mean that his message was fundamentally negative or that he was trying to scare people into believing. No one who has read the Gospels can doubt that Jesus approached people positively, offering love, compassion, and healing, and forgiveness. He called on people to turn from their sin and their hypocrisy and to live lives of service to God, service that would inevitably mean that they would engage in service to other people. There is nothing negative in all this as there would have been had he simply told people to avoid evil lest terrible things happen to them. But, while Jesus did not use the possibility of hell as a stick to beat people into salvation, he made it clear that, in the end, sin reaps a dreadful harvest.
What About Hell’s Fire?
A good deal of harm has been inflicted by believers who speak too confidently about the nature of hell. It has been said that when some old-time preachers warned about the perils of damnation, the hearers could practically hear the flames licking round the front pews! We must be on our guard against this kind of certainty and dogmatism. The fact of hell is certain; the nature of hell is less clear. It is true that the fate of the finally impenitent is sometimes spoken of in terms of “the hell of fire” (Matt. 5:22). But it is also spoken of as “the outer darkness” (Matt. 8:12), and it is further described in terms of the “worm” that “does not die” (Mark 9:48). It is not always easy to connect the realities of fire, darkness, and a place where the worm does not die. And this is but the beginning.
The unhappy state may be called “destruction” (Phil. 3:19), and the destruction in question may be linked with separation “from the presence [or ‘face’] of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9). Sometimes there is a legal aspect, as when Jesus speaks of “the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:29) or of “the judgment of hell” (Matt. 23:33). Again he says that the wicked servant will be “cut in two” and have his portion “with the unbelievers” (Luke 12:46); that the servant will be “beaten with many blows” (Luke 12:47). There are references to “the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43) and to “perishing” (1 Cor. 1:18). Another way of looking at this reality is to say that “the wages of sin” is “death” (Rom. 6:23). Again, the person who concentrates on saving his life will lose it (Luke 9:24). There will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” among those who are ultimately not in the kingdom of God but are “cast out” (Luke 13:28).
In 2 Peter 2:4 there is an unusual expression for “sent to hell” (tartaro), a verb found only here in the New Testament. It refers to Tartarus, located by the Greeks as lower than Hades and a place of punishment. Peter takes up this Greek idea and uses it to name the place of the punishment of fallen angels. The Book of the Revelation brings us the concept of the lake of fire and the second death (Rev. 21:8). Jesus said hell will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for the people of his own time (Matt. 11:24), implying that there could be gradations of punishment. Some servants will be beaten with few blows and some with many (Luke 12:47–48). Punishment will be “according to their works” (Rev. 20:12–13).
From these images we can deduce that there is no stereotyped way of viewing the fate of the finally impenitent. Just to list these passages is enough to show that there is a wide variety of ways of understanding hell. It is a serious mistake to put all our emphasis on any one of them. But they are all unpleasant, underscoring the truth that the sin will not go unpunished.
Explaining Hell Away
It is perhaps unsurprising that some people have argued from the “destruction” passages that the finally impenitent will simply perish. Or that others have stressed the “all” passages (e.g., “in Christ all will be made alive,” 1 Cor. 15:22) and have reasoned that ultimately all will be saved. But this is to make essentially the same mistake as those who insist on hell as a place of fire. It is to emphasize one aspect of scriptural teaching at the expense of ignoring other aspects.
But we must beware of being so fascinated by one part of the Bible’s teaching that we overlook all the others. The Bible is not basically concerned to give its readers information about all the possibilities that await them after death. It is the book that conveys the message of salvation and gives guidance about how we should live. References to hell, or for that matter to heaven, are incidental. They are not for that reason unimportant, but we should not approach the Bible demanding that it give us information about things God has not chosen to make known.
God has chosen to make clear to us that Christ has made the atonement that opens up to sinners the way to eternal life. He calls us to repent and believe. He tells us to take the gospel message to the whole world. These are the important things. That heaven and hell are realities is made clear, but what exactly they are is not spelled out. We may ask, “Is hell a place or a state?” But the Bible does not answer. It concentrates on warning us not to be there.
It is inexpressibly sad that some people go through all of this life refusing to accept the love of God in Christ. But the Bible makes it plain that those who choose to live without God in this world must accept the results of their choice in the next.
The word eternal, which literally means “pertaining to an age,” “age long,” gives us no problem when it is applied to eternal life (John 3:16), or to “the eternal God” (Rom. 16:26). But we must not overlook the fact that the very same word is applied to eternal punishment; indeed, in the one verse the same adjective eternal is used of both punishment and life (Matt. 25:46). Elsewhere this word is applied also to an eternal sin, which presumably means a sin with eternal consequences (Mark 3:29); it is used too of eternal destruction or death (2 Thess. 1:9), and of the judgment of eternal fire (Jude 7).
It is not easy to see the fate of the wicked as anything less permanent than that of believers. While we rightly rejoice in the fullness of meaning involved in “eternal life,” we must not overlook the fact that there are also some very grim realities, such as eternal fire, eternal punishment, and eternal death. The use of the same adjective for all three means that the more meaning we put into “eternal life,” the more meaning we must put into these other realities.
There is a very similar significance in many passages that do not make use of the word etertnal. What else are we to make, for example, of Jesus’ words “it is better for you to enter life maimed than having two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43)? Or of his words about the sin that will not be forgiven either in this age or the age to come (Matt. 12:32)? The disputes of exegetes as to precisely what sin this is should not blind us to the fact that Jesus taught that sin can have consequences that never fade away.
Who Will Go To Hell?
It obviously is not man’s position to decide who goes to hell, but the Bible gives us clear teaching on this. Unbelievers certainly belong in hell (Luke 12:46); the person who does not believe is already condemned (John 3:18) and will never see life, but rather will know the continuing wrath of God (John 3:36). When Jesus was speaking about anger, he said that anyone who calls his brother a fool (presumably in anger) is liable to the hell of fire (Matt. 5:22). Similarly, he said it was better to pluck out an eye or cut off a hand than for the whole body to perish in hell (Matt. 5:29–39), which signifies that the eye or the hand can lead a person into the kind of sin that merits a place in Gehenna. We learn that anyone who believes in Christ “will not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16), which implies that those who do not believe will perish.
Placing a stumbling block before one of the “little ones” who believe is blameworthy (Mark 9:42), as is abusing the trust placed in one (Luke 12:45–48). “Those who have done evil” (John 5:29), “doers of iniquity” (Luke 13:27), and the “unrighteous” (2 Pet. 2:9) all face hell, and there is a list of those in the lake of fire that, interestingly, begins with “the cowardly” and ends with “all liars”; in between come “unbelievers, vile people, murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters” (Rev. 21:8). Paul says of those whose “end is destruction” that their “minds are set on earthly things” (Phil. 3:19). He also speaks of them as “the enemies of the cross of Christ” (Phil. 3:18), that they “do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thess. 1:8), and that they see the preaching of the cross as foolishness (1 Cor. 1:18).
Through all such passages runs the thought of alienation from God. Those who will be in hell will be there because in one way or another they have chosen it. They have rejected the love of God for them. They have opted to live for themselves. They have made self, not God, the center of their being.
Such passages make it plain that unbelief is catastrophic. All evil merits hell, but God sent his Son to make a way of salvation. Christ’s death puts away our sins, and those who trust him are delivered from the condemnation they would otherwise have faced. But those who refuse to believe are left with the consequences of the evil things they have done. That appears to be the basic New Testament position: The failure to believe, to trust Christ, results in hell as the ultimate destination.
What then of those who have never heard the gospel? This is one of the questions about which we are indescribably curious, but to which the biblical writers do not address themselves. The Bible is a practical book; it tells us what we need to know, but it does not answer all the questions we can think up.
But we can say one or two things about those who have not heard of God’s plan for mankind to escape hell’s horrors. One is that we can be certain that God’s wonderful love reaches as far as love can reach. Another is that we have the example of Cornelius (Acts 10), a man outside the recognized people of God but whom God called. Peter told him that God is no respecter of persons, “but in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:35). This surely means that people are judged by the light they have, not by the light they do not have. We remember, too, that Paul says, “it is accepted of a man according to what he has and not according to what he does not have” (2 Cor. 8:12). Long ago Abraham asked, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25), and we must leave it there. We do not know what the fate of those who have not heard the gospel will be. But we do know God, and we know that he will do what is right.
Is Hell Necessary?
Those who in modern times reject the whole idea of hell seem not to have realized the difficulties in dispensing with the concept. They cheerfully accept the idea of God and even the bliss of the righteous in the hereafter, but they cannot agree that evil will be punished.
In his Gifford Lectures, entitled The Human Situation, W. MacNeile Dixon looks at the consequences of such a belief by considering those he calls, “The kind-hearted humanitarians of the nineteenth century.” These people, he says, “decided to improve upon Christianity. The thought of hell offended their susceptibilities. They closed it, and, to their surprise, the gates of heaven closed also with a melancholy clang. The malignant countenance of Satan distressed them. They dispensed with him, and at the same time God took his departure.” He sees this as “a vexatious result,” but warns, “you cannot play fast and loose with logic.”
It is important to be clear where the arguments commonly used to get rid of hell logically take us. If logically there is no place for hell, then where is the logic of looking for heaven? I am not, of course, basing my understanding of hell on human logic. It is part of the revelation in Scripture and accordingly belongs among the doctrines that all who see Scripture as their final authority accept. But I am saying that those who reject Scripture and take what seems to those who live in a modern community to be a logical position must be careful lest their logic take them much further than they want to go.
And while we are on the subject of logic, we might well reflect that there is no good reason for thinking that those who reject the love of God in this life will welcome being placed in that heaven where love is supreme. As H. Maynard Smith says, anyone who goes to hell “will go because he will feel more at home there than in heaven.” This is not unlike T. F. Torrance’s view that “all who finally choose evil find it a burning Hell still to be grasped in the hand of eternal love” (The Apocalypse Today).
One more comment under this general heading. Bishop J. A. T. Robinson was no friend of conservative causes, and his Honest to God caused a flutter in many a traditional dovecote. He, of course, could not find a reason for holding to the accepted view of hell, but found it tragic that in modern writers “no effective translation into terms of the God ‘out there’ was found for the Devil and his angels, the pit and the lake of fire. This element therefore tended to drop out of popular Christianity altogether much to the detriment of the depth of the Gospel” (Honest to God, p. 16).
All this means that what the Bible teaches about hell is not to be dismissed with an airy wave of the hand as though it were no more than a barbarous doctrine belonging to a more primitive age, and which must suffer inevitable rejection in an enlightened age like ours. Putting aside the extent of the “enlightenment” of our day, it is not the case that we can do without the view that in the end evil will suffer decisive rejection. Hell in some form is part of the divine revelation. And if we reject it, we find ourselves with a shallow understanding of ultimate reality.
One final word. We remember that Jesus wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), and further that he counseled the “daughters of Jerusalem” to weep, not for him, but for themselves and their children (Luke 23:28). And we recall that, while Paul could be certain that Israel would suffer for its rejection of Christ, he spoke of the “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” he had because of this. He went so far as to say, “For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brothers’ sake” (Rom. 9:2–3).
That is the authentic Christian approach. To accept the plain teaching of the New Testament about final retribution does not result in complacency or in thinking oneself a cut above those who choose to cut themselves off from God’s salvation. It rather means entering in some degree into the mind of Christ. It means sorrow for those who are lost. It means a firm determination to give ourselves over to such prayer and promotion of evangelism that we will “by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).
