Over time some things lose their usefulness, they become obsolete. Just like 8-track tapes, Disneyland e-tickets, turntables, and typewriters. In our modern world these things have become artifacts of days gone by. And not only do things outgrow their usefulness, but ideas do as well. For instance, the idea of a flat earth is now obsolete. The idea that the universe revolves around the earth is now an obsolete idea that people no longer believe.
Today I’m going to talk about a topic that many people think is as obsolete as belief in a flat earth or an 8 track tape. Today I’m going to talk about hell. For many post-modern people at the end of the 20th century people, belief in hell is as outdated as being a part of the flat-earth society. University of Chicago historian Martin Marty has observed that the doctrine of hell has all but disappeared in contemporary society and no one really noticed it. Six years ago, when Britain’s Secretary of Education and Science John Patten suggested that the reason crime was rising was because the fear of hell was declining, the British newspapers thought he was nuts.1 John Lennon urged us to imagine that there was no heaven or hell, so the world could be as one. So we’ve reduced hell to a relic from the dark ages, something we joke about or make creative milk cartoons about. Woody Allen says, "Hell is Manhattan at rush hour."2
Yet despite this decline, many people in our culture today cling to the idea that hell is for real. In 1997 Time magazine conducted a poll where they found that 63% of Americans believe that hell exists as a place where people will be punished forever in the afterlife.3 Of course, only 1% of Americans believe they’d be in hell. So the doctrine of hell seems to be making a bit of a comeback.
We’ve been in a series on death and the afterlife called BEYOND DEATH’S DOOR. In this series we’ve been talking about what the Bible teaches about life beyond the grave, as we seek to peek beyond the curtain of death and catch a glimpse of what might lie beyond it. Today we’re going to look at the Bible’s teaching about hell, when the hereafter’s not so sweet. Let me first clarify that what I’m talking about here people’s ultimate destination, not what happens immediately after we die, but what happens after Jesus Christ comes again and judges the world. When people die today they go to a waiting place—-what theologians call the intermediate state—-and we’ll talk more about that next week. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that this temporary place--this intermediate state--has a place called purgatory, where Christians can become cleansed from any residual sins in their life--but that’s not what I’m addressing today. By talking about hell I’m talking about the final destination of those who reject God. Today we’re going to ask the question, "Is there really such a thing as hell?", "What is hell like," and "Why is hell necessary."
I. Is There A Hell?
Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr once cautioned, "It is unwise for Christians to claim any knowledge of either the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell."4 He’s right…we should realize that there is much more about heaven and hell that we don’t know than what we do know. But there are some things we can know—maybe not the temperature—but we can know whether it’s for real, what it’s like and why it’s necessary.
We start with the question, "Is there really such a thing as hell?" We start in a passage in the Old Testament book of Daniel that looks forward to the end of the age.
Daniel 12:2-- "Many of those whose bodies lie dead and buried will rise up, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (New Living Translation).
As Daniel looks forward to the end of the age, that moment that all human history is leading towards, God reveals through the prophet Daniel that there will be a resurrection, where everyone who’s died will rise up from the grave and stand before God in judgment. Some people--those who’ve loved and served God--will rise up to eternal life. But others will be raised up for judgment, what Daniel calls shame and everlasting contempt. The Hebrew word translated "shame" here describes an internal sense of disgrace and reproach.5 So the "shame" comes from within the person, as he or she realizes the utter finality of their choices on this earth; the regret from those choices wells up as disgrace, reproach, "shame." Throughout the Old Testament this sense of "shame" is the consequence of people standing under God’s judgment and realizing the utter finality of their failures.
The word "contempt" describes external aversion, the kind of "contempt" that comes from being a guilty criminal who stands convicted before a just judge. And this "contempt" is said to be eternal, never ending; it doesn’t peter out or diminish with time. I chose this passage in particular because some people claim that the Old Testament doesn’t teach anything about hell.
But now let’s turn from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and especially the words of Jesus.
Matthew 10:28-- 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 (NIV).
The single person most responsible for the New Testament doctrine of hell is Jesus Christ. Of the thirteen times the word "hell" is used in the New Testament, twelve come from the lips of Jesus Christ himself, and this text here in Matthew 10:28 is just one example. Jesus is contrasting our fear of people who can take away our physical life with the kind of concern we ought to have for God, since he holds not only our physical life in his hands, but our eternal life as well. Reading this text reminds me of the young Christian girl who was reading her Bible when the two gunmen started their rampage in Columbine, Colorado. When the gunman pointed his gun at her and asked young Cassie if she believed in God, I wonder if this verse passed through her mind. I imagine she realized that although her classmate could take her physical life, the couldn’t touch her soul, so she answered, "Yes, I believe in God." Our physical life can be taken away--Cassie is proof of that--but only God can deal with our soul.
Notice Jesus doesn’t say the soul can be killed like the body. Instead of saying, "fear the one who can kill our soul," Jesus says, "be afraid of the one who can destroy our soul." That word "destroy" means "to ruin," and it’s not so much talking about ceasing to exist as it’s talking about being rendered unfit for further use, no longer able to do what which it was designed to do, being utterly ruined.6 Hell is where a person is ruined, soul and body.
So in answer to our question, "Is there really such a thing as hell?" we come to a reluctant conclusion. A commitment to Jesus and to the Bible requires us to admit the existence of a final place of judgment.
Most of us can relate to C. S. Lewis when he said that there’s no other doctrine he would most like to remove from the Christian faith as much as the doctrine of hell.7 Christian theologian J. I Packer agrees that none of us can take pleasure in the thought of people being eternally lost, that if we want to see people condemned to hell there’s something wrong with us.8 Yet the price we pay for rejecting the Bible’s teaching about hell is the price of Jesus Christ being wrong, and if Jesus is wrong about hell, what makes us so sure we can trust him to be right about anything? Rejection of the things from the teachings of Jesus that we find troubling leaves us with a God without wrath saving people without sin through a Christ without a cross. So if we take the teachings of Jesus Christ seriously we must agree with C. S. Lewis, that as distasteful as the idea of hell might be, there is indeed a final place of judgment.
II. What is Hell Like?
But that of course leads us to our second question: What is hell like? Christians down through the ages have disagreed with each other on exactly what hell might be like. During the middle ages people speculated a lot about what hell was like, and they came up with R-rated images that were so horrific and graphic that they’d even cause Stephen King to wake up in a cold sweat.9 Dante’s classic work of literature The Inferno pictured hell as a horrible torture chamber where the devil tormented people while the people in heaven looked on in delight. On July 8, 1741 the American Christian theologian Jonathan Edwards preached his now classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," where he portrayed hell in such graphic terms that people literally ran out of the church with their hands covering their ears.
What’s hell really like? Once again we go to the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one we can trust, the one who conquered death on Easter, and he tells us.We learn from Jesus that hell is a place of judgment for Satan.
Matthew 25:41, 46-- "Then he will say to those on his left, ’Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels...Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life" (NIV).
This is the final part of a story Jesus Christ told to describe the final judgment. Those who refuse God’s love are consigned into that place of judgment we already talked about. But we learn here that this place of judgment was originally "prepared" for the Devil and his angels. This tells us that hell is not a place that was originally intended for people, that God didn’t create some people with the intention of sending them to eternal judgment. This place of final suffering was designed for Satan and the angels who followed Satan in rebelling against God. No human being has to end up there, it wasn’t created with people in mind, but--tragically--according to Jesus some will in fact end up there. So hell is a place of judgment all right--eternal judgment at that--but it’s a place of judgment for the Devil and his angels, not a place intended for human beings.
We also learn from Jesus that hell is like a burning garbage dump.
Mark 9:47-48-- And if your eye causes you to sin, 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 "’their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched’" (NIV).
Now this teaching of Jesus is not recommending self-mutilation as a means of getting to heaven; it’s merely using literary exaggeration to urge us to get ready of any excess baggage that would prevent us from being with God. Our eyes and our hands don’t cause us to sin, so wek know that Jesus is merely using a figure of speech to motivate us to do whatever it takes to make sure we’re right with God.
But here we find that word "hell" again. Now often people think that the Greek word hades describes hell, but it doesn’t. Hades describes a temporary place that we’ll talk more about next week. The Greek word translated "hell" here isn’t hades but gehenna. Gehenna is an actual place located in the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem. Gehenna was the place where the people of Israel in the Old Testament had rebelled against God and sacrificed their children to the pagan god Molech (2 Chron 28:3; 33:4). Because such horrible things had happened in this valley, it became symbolic for all that was evil, so the people of Jesus’ day turned the valley hinnom--or gehenna--into a garbage dump, a place where everything from refuse to animal carcasses were discarded and burned. There was a always a fire smoldering in gehenna as the garbage was consumed, and the worms--or more accurately maggots--had a field day. This image of a burning garbage dump became synonymous with the final place of judgment, gehenna, the place where those who reject God’s love are consigned to the worm that never dies and the fire that’s never quenched. This is the primarily image in the Bible of what hell’s like, a burning garbage dump.But we also find hell described as eternal darkness in the Bible.
Jude 13--"They are waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom the blackest darkness has been reserved forever" (NIV).
So Jude describes this place of punishment as the gloomiest darkness that can exist, an eternal absence of all light that lasts forever. Jesus also described this final place of punishment as "outer darkness" (Matt 22:13). So these three images of a place of judgment for Satan, a burning garbage dump and eternal darkness are the primary ways of describing hell in the New Testament.
Of course the question is how literal to take these images: are we talking about literal fire, actual darkness? Or are these images metaphors that describe a reality that’s much more horrible than literal fire and literal darkness? Christians have differed on this issue, with some like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon opting for a literal understanding, and other Christians like John Calvin, Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis viewing these images as metaphorical of something even more horrible.10
My hunch is that the fire and darkness are symbolic, but that they’re symbolic for something real, something far worse than literal fire and literal darkness. My reasons for this is are that literal fire and literal darkness would be mutually exclusive, because literal fire creates light. Also, literal fire would have no effect on the devil and his angels because the devil is not a physical being but a spiritual being, so the fire that brings judgment must be some sort of fire that inflicts judgment on non-physical beings. The 16th century Reformer Martin Luther said, "What hell is, we know not; only this we know, that there is such a sure and certain place."So whether the flames and darkness are literal or figurative, we’re forced to a second reluctant conclusion here. God has revealed that hell is an eternal place of conscious isolation and misery.
We learned from the parable of Jesus in Matthew 25 that hell is as "eternal" as heaven is, that it’s everlasting. We learned from the image of the burning garbage dump that hell is a place of misery. And we learned from the darkness that hell is a place of isolation from all companionship.
This tells us that some of the things we’ve heard about hell are not taught in the Bible. For instance the idea that hell is the annihilation of those who reject God can’t be true because Jesus called hell "eternal punishment" that lasts just as long as eternal life. And those who conceive of hell as a torture chamber with the devil and demons in charge are wrong, since hell is a place for the devil and his demons to be judged. Most of the medieval images of hell say more about the imagination of theologians with too much time on their hands than they say anything about the Bible.
So we’re forced to concluded that though there’s a lot we don’t know about hell, we can know that it’s an eternal place of conscious isolation and misery.
III. Why Hell?
That brings us to our final question: Why is hell necessary? Why would a God who’s good and loving create such a horrible place in the first place? Well the Bible offers some answers as to why hell is a necessary part of God’s creation.
The first reason is because God has promised that he will judge evil.
Colossians 3:5-6-- Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming (NIV).
The phrase "the wrath of God" describes God’s sure judgment on evil and sin in the world. You see, God is holy and just, so when evil things are done in our world--things like what happened at Columbine High School two weeks ago--these things must be dealt with. Often people to perpetrate evil in our world slip through the cracks of our justice system. Somehow it seemed unjust for the two gunmen in Colorado to take their own lives without having to answer society for their horrible deeds. We live in a world where all too often people get away with things, either by never getting caught, or by hiring an expensive defense attorney, or simply because our criminal justice system isn’t perfect. Life is not fair, if you haven’t figured that out yet.But God will deal with every wrong ever done, nothing slips through the cracks of God’s justice. The phrase "the wrath of God" is simply a description of the fact that God will make every wrong right, that every human being who’s ever lived will have to give an account before God. For those who’ve abandoned themselves to rebellion against God, the wrath of God sends them to a place of wrath, hell.
But hell is also necessary because human beings are truly free.
Romans 10:13--"Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (NIV).
This verse is a clear statement of human freedom, that God has given human beings the capacity to call on God and find salvation. Since God created human beings as free moral beings, able to choose God or to reject God, able to serve God or rebel against God, hell is God’s provision for those who freely choose the path of rebellion. This is why some people have called hell "the greatest compliment God has ever paid to the dignity of human freedom" (G. K. Chesterton). This is why C. S. Lewis says in his book the Great Divorce that in the end people either stand before God and say, "God, thy will be done" and God lets them into heaven, or they stand before God and God says to them, "Thy will be done," and they enter into hell. Hell’s been called "the last refuge for the sinner" because it’s the only place a person who refuses God and spurns God’s love can be in a universe that’s permeated with God’s love and God’s presence.If God is real and humans are truly free, there must be a place of judgment for those who freely turn away from God. If hell’s not real, then either God is not real or humans are not truly free. Thus hell is necessary because God created human beings--me and you--as free creatures.
I admit that hell is a distasteful subject that most of us prefer not thinking about. Yet the Bible tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to hear. We’ve learned today that hell is real, hell is eternal, and hell is necessary. We may not like it--it should in fact grieve our hearts--but this is the way life is.Maybe you’ve seen the famous sculpture "The Thinker," that was sculpted by the French artist Robin in 1880. What is the thinker thinking about? According to the artist "the Thinker" is sitting in mute amazement as he contemplates lost people in hell.11 Hell ought to cause us to think as well, to think about how God’s heart breaks for those who refuse God’s love and God’s provision.
The grim reality of hell makes many of us cry out in frustration, "If hell is so real, why doesn’t God do something?"12 Why doesn’t God do something to wipe out the sins of those who’re on a crash course with eternal destruction? Why doesn’t God give people a fresh start, no matter what it costs God, why doesn’t offering people miraculous help to prevent them from ending up in such a horrible place? But as soon as we ask the question we realize that God has done something, that he’s give all the had to give--his very own son--who died a horrible, cruel death in order to give all of us a new start, to forgive our sins, to provide a means so no one has to end up eternally separated from God. God has done all he can do short of turning us into mindless robots, and now he awaits us to respond.
ENDNOTES
1 Jerry Walls, "Can We Be Good Without Hell?" Christianity Today (3/28/99).
2 cited in Larry Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News (Bridgepoint, 1992), p. 15.
3 "Does Heaven Exist?" Time (3/24/97), p. 73.
4 Larry Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News, p. 20.
5 The New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), Vol. 2, p. 281.
6 Charles Hodge, cited in Larry Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News, pp. 78-79.
7 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Macmillan, 1962), p. 118.
8 J. I. Packer, cited in R. Richardson, Hell On Trial (Presbyterian & Reformed, 1995), p. 15.
9 Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News, p. 19.
10 For the literal view see John Walvoord, "The Literal View" in Four Views On Hell (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), pp. 11-18. For the symbolic view see William Crockett, "The Metaphorical View," in Four Views On Hell, pp. 43-76. Crockett lists the following evangelicals as holding to the metaphorical view: John Calvin, Martin Luther, D. A. Carson, Millard Erickson, Carl F. H. Henry, Roger Nicole, Ronald Youngblood, F. F. Bruce, Billy Graham, Donald Guthrie, Kenneth Kantzer, C. S. Lewis, Leon Morris, and J. I. Packer (p. 44).
11 Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News, p. 11.
12 C. S. Lewis cited in Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News, pp. 174-75.
