Thoughts on Hell

I recently received an email from a nice woman who lives in Eastern Europe, and she asked me a question about hell, of all things. I confess that I can't remember the last time I got asked a question about hell, but this woman seemed to be convinced that the Bible has a number of passages that refute the traditional view of hell as being (gasp) a place of conscious, eternal suffering and torment for people who never believe the gospel.

She presented me with a short list of several passages of Scripture that she believes support what I later discovered is an alternate teaching about hell that has been growing in popularity in recent years that holds that instead of suffering for eternity, unbelievers will simply be snuffed out of existence. According to this teaching, the human spirit is only immortal in the case of believers, and God is free to demonstrate His great mercy (and presumably the fact that He is not a cruel, bloodthirsty monster) by annihilating unbelievers, rather than forcing them to endure the unthinkable:

Conscious eternal torment in a literal lake of fire. Ouch!

She politely asked me if I could point out if and where she might have taken any interpretive wrong turns, so to speak, since she was aware that her view was a radical departure from the traditional one. I took the time to run through what I felt were several questionable interpretations of Scripture in the points she had outlined, and wrote what I thought was a friendly, polite summary of why I believe based on Scripture that the points she stated in her email were at odds with what I sincerely believe the Bible teaches in a relatively clear, straightforward manner.

As it turns out, however, she never bothered to respond to what I wrote—so I have no choice but to assume she completely disagrees with everything I said and has written me off as an unenlightened, "eternal damnation" hardliner. Oh well...been there, done that. It's like I always say:

It's part of the job description.

But the topic stayed with me like a wad of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of my shoe. It occurred to me that most people generally don't think all that much about hell—either believers or unbelievers. Most believers don't think about it all that much because we know we're not going there, and have far more spiritually productive things to concern ourselves with. Most unbelievers don't think about it all that much either, however, because most of them—if they think about it at all—casually assume hell is just an archaic myth intended to scare naive people into obediently towing some religious party line (as do some believers, it saddens me to say).

So in these modern times, you might say hell isn't exactly a hot topic (no pun intended, but I'll slip it in my back pocket). When people do talk about hell, however, we quickly discover there are a number of radically different views and interpretations of Scripture concerning hell and the general principles of what ultimately happens to those who reject the message of salvation through faith in the atoning work of Christ during their earthly lives.

My original idea for this article was to methodically go over in detail every view of hell in existence, but it didn't take me long to realize that such an article was overly ambitious...plus that wasn't really my goal. It occurred to me that my goal was not to educate you on a cornucopia of doctrinal error—my goal was to help you see a few key ways in which subtle errors can slyly subvert the truth of God's Word and mislead legions of good people.

So, what I want to do is pick apart several of the errant ideas that prop up some of the varying views of hell that certain groups of people have come to espouse, and look at ways in which certain passages of Scripture pertaining to hell are often misinterpreted or misapplied to support these ideas.

And not just hell as a place in and of itself, but the overall afterlife experience of those who die without ever coming to a saving faith in Christ. This can include such things as whether certain aspects of hell are literal or metaphorical, how long people have to stay in hell, whether or not it will even be a conscious experience for them, whether or not they can ever be released from hell, whether the purpose of hell is retributive or restorative in nature, and various other details related to the postmortem pastiche that unbelievers may encounter after they die and enter the spiritual realm.

I want to start off by briefly reviewing what is widely considered the traditional view of hell and the afterlife experience of unbelievers that has been held by the majority of Christians since the early days of the Church. I figure that way some of these variant ideas related to hell we will discuss afterward will stand out in sharper contrast to what the majority of born-again believers have long regarded as scriptural truth.

The traditional view of hell

The traditional view of hell, quite simply, presents it as a place of eternal conscious torment (often abbreviated ECT). This view of hell as a literal state of conscious suffering that lasts for eternity for those who refuse to have faith in God's provision for their salvation has been the established view of the majority of the Church ever since (and even before) the final and most authoritative canonization of Scripture in the late fourth century.

That is, with the noteworthy exception of the Roman Catholic Church, which ended up veering off in a different direction. We'll hit them later.

The traditional view of hell, which is based on the principle that God's Word should be interpreted as literally as common sense and context allow, holds to the fundamental belief that all men possess an immortal spirit which I believe was imparted to mankind at the moment of creation:

(Oh, wait...was that spirit God breathed into us really immortal? The vast majority of believers are convinced from Scripture that this is indeed the case, but later we'll meet some folks who disagree.)

Throughout Scripture, hell is characterized as a place burning with fire. Fire seems to be the primary motif, and common descriptions include a furnace, flames, a lake of fire, a lake that burns with fire and sulfur, etc.

That's hell—fire, fire, and more fire.

It is also characterized as a place of torment and suffering, clearly both physical and emotional—a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Here's one typical example that checks off the preceding boxes.

When Jesus explains the Parable of the Weeds (Matt. 13:24–30) to His disciples, He doesn't fail to include a graphic mention of hell and the emotional condition of its occupants:

Hell, Hades, whatever: One thing we should be a bit careful about is the distinction between hell and Hades (both of which are sometimes capitalized and sometimes not). Please...don't let yourself get into the habit of tossing these two words around as if they were synonyms—they're not. When we talk about hell, we mean the final destination of Satan and his demons along with all the unrighteous—the lake of fire where they will spend eternity. When we say Hades, we mean an intermediate holding tank for the unrighteous where unbelievers of all time will remain until the resurrection of the unrighteous to stand at the Great White Throne Judgment to receive their sentence. Only then will they be thrown into hell, where they will remain for eternity.

Darkness is also a frequently mentioned aspect of hell. For example, note what Jesus says in the Parable of the Wedding Feast (Matt. 22:1–14) concerning what is to be done with a man found without a wedding garment (i.e. Christ's righteousness imputed by faith in His work of atonement):

And not to make a parable walk on all fours or anything, but according to some commentators "outer darkness" could realistically be thought of as referring to Hades followed by hell, or just hell itself as an ultimate destination.

If the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is anything to go by, it sounds like there isn't a great deal of difference between the two anyway.

The Bible also makes it quite clear that those who end up in hell are all those who have refused to place their faith in God and His revealed promises, culminating in belief in faith in Christ's work of atonement for the forgiveness of sin in order to have Christ's perfect righteousness imputed to them. Verses? For heaven's sake...that's more or less the primary message of the entire Bible, Old Testament and New.

And there are plenty of verses that tell us point blank that hell is eternal, in spite of the fact that some people desperately toy with the meaning of Greek words translated as "eternal" or "everlasting" in order to try and force them to mean something a little bit less intimidating than "eternal" or "everlasting." We'll get into this later.

OK, so that's the traditional view of hell that has been well established in the Church virtually from the very beginning. The early Church Fathers pored over every word of what would become our complete Bible, and this is how most saw things. Emphasis on the word "most."

Variant Points

Of course, agreement wasn't universal—over the years disagreements over certain doctrinal points pertaining to hell have emerged. What I want to do now is discuss several variant points related to hell that have come to be believed by certain groups over the last two thousand years, and discuss why I believe they are in error and ways in which they lead people away from the truth of God's Word...often with great subtlety and grand, high-sounding motives.

This view that God mercifully snuffs unbelievers totally out of existence (possibly after a finite period of punishment depending on the seriousness of their sin) and only grants immortality to those headed for heaven is a view that has been growing in popularity in the last few years, and is sometimes referred to as ACI (Annihilation/Conditional Immortality). Although she never gave it a name, I would surmise that this is the view held by the nice Eastern European woman who emailed me. There are actually a couple of errors bundled up in this one, but let's dig out the primary culprit.

First of all, one of the key passages of Scripture these people point to is from the closing lines of Paul's first letter to Timothy:

In other words, these people claim that according to Scripture, only God is immortal, and that means man is not immortal...at least not inherently so. They believe God chooses to bestow immortality on those who qualify to enter heaven, but not on those who are bound for hell.

For one thing, I don't see any easy or obvious way to square this with what Genesis 2:7 says about God breathing the "spirit of life" into man at the moment of our creation. Animals are mortal, but man was created in the image of an immortal God, and God breathed an immortal spirit into us (otherwise, we're basically highly intelligent animals with emotions and opposable thumbs). This was the final step in our creation—and the one scientists invariably miss, since they don't have a fossil record of it and can't put it in a test tube.

As far as 1 Timothy 6:16 is concerned, the majority of Bible commentators agree that this verse should properly be interpreted as "God alone has an exemption from death," and that this is something God possesses as an inherent part of His nature. He didn't derive it from someone else—no one bestowed that upon Him. That's part of His essence. We, on the other hand, were given immortal spirits by that immortal God so that we, too, could exist in the spiritual realm for eternity...hopefully in His presence in heaven, rather than separated from Him in hell. But either way, man still possesses an immortal spirit given to us by an inherently immortal Creator God. OK, here we go...

"But Genesis 2:7 doesn't say anything about 'immortal'...you're just reading that into the text."

Actually, you've got a point—so I'll give you that one. So let's look at it from a different angle, and that angle is related to another point I want to discuss:

Translation: It must be translated that way because we've already made an emotional decision that punishment in hell simply can't be eternal.

It's true that aiónios can mean either "age-long" (as in finite) or "eternal" (as in infinite). Not only that, but this same situation comes up in Old Testament references to hell in Hebrew.

Although we certainly could, we really don't need to examine a whole lot of Scripture to see that such passages still require man's punishment in hell to last for eternity in the full-bore, never-ending sense. To see this with unflinching clarity, I chose two passages of Scripture—one from the Old Testament and one from the New that both accomplish the same thing:

The word translated "everlasting" is the Hebrew word olam, which can take on a variety of related meanings such as "forever," "everlasting," "permanent," "long in duration," etc.

But the precise translation you attach to olam here is actually only marginally relevant, because the exact same word describes the duration of the final state of both believers and unbelievers. That is, the prophet Daniel is clearly telling us that hell is 100 percent as "everlasting" as heaven. And I am hard-pressed to see any conceivable way to contort this to mean something different.

I don't believe the Holy Spirit is trying to pull a fast one on us.

Now let's check in with the New Testament. At the climax of the Sheep and Goat Judgment, Jesus has a parting comment that is equally telling:

The English renderings of this verse vary, but it doesn't make any difference because, again, the exact same Greek word (this time aiónios) is used to describe the fate of both the sheep and the goats. This is in no way unclear. The sheep are invited into the kingdom, and the goats are sent off to eternal punishment...the kind that lasts every bit as long as the eternal life in God's presence the sheep will enjoy.

Predictably enough, some people try to argue that the goats' punishment is only "age-long" (and so will come to an end), and as I said this is a legitimate translation of the Greek word aiónios. But again, same deal:

It takes a scriptural Houdini to slither out of the fact that the "punishment aiónios" of the goats lasts as long as the "life aiónios" of the sheep.

There are a number of other passages I could mention that clearly speak of eternal punishment, but some people will invariably reach for the argument that the word in Hebrew or Greek may conceivably be translated in a way that refers to something less than "eternal" in the literal sense. I specifically chose the above two passages because they mention the final state of both believers and unbelievers in the same breath, using the exact same word.

And that inconvenient fact makes these passages extremely difficult to twist into something more palatable to those for whom the idea of a hell that literally never ends is disturbingly distasteful. To such people, who seem to assume "eternal damnation" folks like me must derive some sort of sadistic pleasure from this truth, all I can say is this:

I was being facetious when I described a hell that literally never ends as "disturbingly distasteful." No...it's unspeakably, gut-wrenchingly horrifying. But that's exactly what Scripture says. If you aren't comfortable with that, then take it up with the Author.

This is the fundamental view of the Roman Catholic Church, and their marvelous little invention that supports this is known as Purgatory. According to them, Purgatory is a hellish but temporary place of suffering that is intended to give its occupants a spiritual attitude adjustment concerning their sin and their failure to live as good, faithful Catholics during their earthly lives.

I had never looked into it in much detail before, but as I wrote this my curiosity was piqued concerning how on earth the Catholics support the idea of Purgatory. So, I did some snooping around and this is what I found.

According to the Roman Catholic Church, the smoking gun that supports Purgatory is the following verse (drum roll, please...):

Wait a second...Macca-what?? Surprise...this comes from one of the books of the Apocrypha, a collection of writings nearly all of which the Roman Catholic Church places on par with the inspired, inerrant Word of God.

According to Wikipedia, the term Apocrypha...

Mercilessly long, complicated story made mercifully short and simple: The books of the Apocrypha, although not without historical and moral value, contain proven errors and contradictions that precluded their widespread acceptance into the canon of Scripture. But in spite of not being widely viewed as inspired, infallible Scripture, many translations of the Bible over the centuries have included them (including the venerable 1611 Authorized King James Version) as a special section between the Old and New Testaments.

Look, I'm not trying to be disrespectful to anyone, and I'm not saying the Apocrypha has no value. But straight up:

If you're going to establish a major Church doctrine and you have to resort to using the Apocrypha to back it up, a little alarm bell should go off.

They also claim 1 Peter 1:6–7 supports Purgatory (but for the life of me I don't see how), as well as 1 Corinthians 3:13–15, where Paul is talking about the bema (aka the Judgment Seat of Christ) where believers will be rewarded for their qualifying works after the Rapture. And that's not Purgatory.

My point is that it's a major stretch to see how they get the doctrine of Purgatory out of either of these two passages. I suppose that's why their go-to verse is 2 Maccabees 12:46—the Apocrypha is literally the best they've got.

A profitable doctrine: In spite of the dearth of scriptural support, the doctrine of Purgatory certainly had some value to the Roman Catholic Church. There was a time long ago when they would reduce your time in Purgatory (some sources say time in penance) by a generous amount for an equally generous donation to the church. To be fair, this was never official policy in the Roman Catholic Church. But it went on for several centuries, and even helped fund the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, begun in 1506 and completed in 1626. To his credit, Pope Pius V banned the connections to money in 1567.

But even though a few centuries languishing in Purgatory to clean you up and get your spiritual head screwed on straight followed by an eternity of heavenly bliss is a big step up, it's still too depressing for some. Some go all the way and simply dismiss the idea of a literal hell completely:

Sigh... Well, I guess if you're going to deny the truth of God's Word, you might as well go all out. Actually, it can be surprisingly difficult to put together a cogent argument against such extreme views that simply deny tons of clear scriptural teaching because such views have abandoned the world of cogency.

But people who support this view, which gained popularity in the sixteenth century, often leave an opening by stretching things just a tad too far. For example, people who support this view sometimes argue as follows:

Many verses claim that hell is a place of both darkness and fire. Well, darkness is the absence of light, and fire produces light. That's a logical contradiction, and that means at least one of these two images must be a metaphor. And if one of them is a metaphor, then both of them are probably metaphors. And that means all the other frightening images of hell in Scripture are most likely metaphors as well.

OK, here's what I want you to do: Go to Google and type in the words "sitting around the campfire." Never mind...I'll do it for you. Hey, whaddya know!

What these people are obviously doing is deliberately taking the word "darkness" and applying the most extreme literal interpretation of it humanly possible in order to create the illusion of a contradiction.

No? This doesn't necessarily prove anything, but consider: In the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the rich man was in Hades, which is a holding tank for the unrighteous that precedes hell and is described in much the same way. Oddly enough, the rich man doesn't seem to have any difficulty lifting up his eyes and seeing Abraham and Lazarus. Just saying.

In reality, even most people who cling to airbrushed views of hell and the torment inflicted on its occupants will admit they see hell as a real place. But some people, however, deny the idea that anyone will go there, ever.

And why exactly is that, one might inquire. These people point to the Sheep and Goat Judgment and note something Jesus said at its climax:

They focus on that last phrase, which reminds us that the primary reason God created hell in the first place was to have a place of eternal torment to send Satan and all the angels that followed him in his rebellion against God.

But they take this idea and force it to mean that nobody else can go there, ever. It was prepared for Satan and his angels and them alone, and insist this means that men cannot be sent there. It wasn't prepared for men—hell is God's private torture chamber reserved for Satan and his crew, and so we don't have to worry about ever being sent there because it was never intended for us.

Wow! And they accuse me of reading things into Scripture.

First of all, note the preposition Jesus uses in His statement:

"Depart from me, you accursed, into (Greek: eis) everlasting fire..."

The word eis can mean "in," "to," or "into," and is normally rendered in English as one of these—but which one depends on the context. Here, the translators chose "into" (suggesting entry) arguably because they felt it made the best sense. They didn't assume God would send the goats to just peek over the edge and get a glimpse of hell—they assumed they were going in there.

But even if people concede that the goats do actually enter hell, many will argue they won't stay there very long...and we're right back where we started, haggling over the idea of whether punishment in hell is eternal or not. But have no fear, because they've got another ace up their sleeve:

Two New Testament verses that are offered in support are as follows:

In both verses, the same Greek word is used: olethros (destruction, death, doom, ruin). However, according to Strong's Concordance, this word comes from a "prolonged form" and doesn't imply complete extinction or annihilation. Rather, it implies being ruined or destroyed in the sense of being damaged beyond hope and remaining in that ruined or undone condition indefinitely.

For example, note that Jesus says "everlasting destruction." Well, if a person is snuffed out of existence in the blink of an eye, why does He feel the need to modify it with the word "everlasting"? What, is He trying to reassure us they won't pop back into existence at some point? If people are snuffed out, using the word "everlasting" seems a bit redundant in my personal opinion.

Not only that, but if one is to be snuffed out of existence, then why the need for the phrase "from the presence of the Lord"? If you are annihilated out of existence, you will never again be "in the presence" of anyone or anything, ever again. So it just seems like overkill, and doesn't make the average reader assume He's really talking about total annihilation.

And then there are those who are convinced everyone will have a second chance to go to heaven, so no one will be stuck in hell for eternity:

Which I figure would be about 10 seconds, tops. This is Universalism, and I devoted an entire article to completely dismantling this idea back in 2018 entitled "When We All Get to Heaven." As the name suggests, Universalism teaches that the salvation of mankind is "universal" in the sense that none will be lost and all will be saved. Eventually. They have to take a pair of industrial pliers to Scripture to get there, but they manage.

But here's a quickie: Note one obvious verse of Scripture that essentially nips Universalism in the bud unless it is brutally bludgeoned into saying something completely different from what it clearly says:

Men die. Next on the agenda is judgment. The writer of Hebrews apparently failed to express this verse the way it was intended to read, which according to Universalists should have been along the following lines:

"And it is appointed to men once to die, but after this comes another chance to repent and believe in order to avoid being judged unrighteous...YAY!!"

I want to share with you one thing I did in the article I linked to above, and that's use the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus to amply illustrate the unscriptural folly of Universalism. Here's a brief excerpt:

If you believe people will have another chance to repent, have faith in God, and be saved after they die, then I have several questions about this parable for you to ponder:

• Why does the rich man beg Abraham to send Lazarus to testify to his five brothers so they will never have to come to such a place of torment? If they're all going to get a "Get Out of Hell Free" card at some point after they die, why the palpable sense of life-and-death desperation on the part of the rich man?

• Why doesn't the rich man tell Abraham, "OK, I believe, I believe!! Moses and the prophets were right! How could I have been so blind?! I'm sorry!! I repent!!" Why does he merely ask for his tongue to be cooled? And why doesn't he ask Abraham to let him go visit his brothers? Wouldn't that be more effective than sending Lazarus? Or...uhm, is it possible that he not only knew exactly where he was, but also exactly why he was there and that he would never be allowed to leave?

• Why does Abraham state that the rich man's brothers have Moses and the prophets with such a sense of finality, like that's all they're gonna get because that's all they need? Why doesn't Abraham go on to reassure the distraught rich man that even if his brothers don't believe Moses and the prophets during their earthly lives, it's OK because they'll have another chance to repent and believe after they die? If that were in fact the case, then Abraham is being at best disingenuous, and at worst sadistic...and disingenuous.

• Similarly, why does Abraham emphasize that if his brothers won't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't believe someone who rises from the dead? What does it matter? If they're all going to get a chance to repent and believe after they die, why all the drama?

• Finally, why would Jesus Himself teach this parable in a way that slyly conceals the fact that in reality He would never allow either the rich man or his five brothers to remain in that place of torment for eternity? Why doesn't Jesus use this golden opportunity to highlight His great love and mercy, and emphasize how He loves them so much and has such boundless mercy for them that even if they all foolishly spurn the message of Moses and the prophets throughout their entire earthly lives and callously blow off the God who miraculously delivered their ancestors from bondage in Egypt, He will lovingly and mercifully give them all another chance to repent and believe after they die so they can ultimately be freed from such hellish torment and be allowed to enter heaven?

That seems like a pretty important detail to leave out, wouldn't you agree? And it seems to me like this would have been the perfect parable to highlight this idea. Just saying.

In that article, I also talk about the issue of saving faith. It's like I always say: God just has a thing for faith. According to Hebrews 11:1, faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen, right? During our earthly lives in our bodies of flesh, we can't actually see the reality of spiritual things, generally speaking. That's precisely why we have to believe in God and His promises in faith.

But if we can see things clearly, who needs faith? That's the entire point: After a person dies and enters the spiritual realm, the reality of God, His Son, Satan, heaven, hell, and the truth of the gospel will be out in the open and readily knowable. These things will be clear and real—and as a result there not only will be no need for faith, there won't even be a basis for it. Thus, it makes no scriptural sense at all to assume people can have "saving faith" at any point after they die. (Or perhaps you think God will waive that faith thing.)

The verdict? Epic fail.

Deeper issues

After reading this article up to this point, you may feel as if you've been playing an old-style pinball machine:

And it's BINK...BONK...DINK...DOINK as the ball bounces back and forth from one bumper to another in an unpredictable fashion.

There are numerous interconnections between some of the ideas we have looked at, and so that ball has certainly been doing some bouncing.

But what I want to do now is examine a couple of the deeper, more fundamental issues that influence many good people to adopt some of the ideas we have discussed, typically while feeling as though they have seen the light and broken through to a deeper, more profound level of understanding and appreciation of God and His supremely loving, merciful nature—unlike traditional fire-and-brimstoners like me, who manage to make Him out to be a cruel, sadistic monster...shame on us.

Without a doubt, the primary, overriding issue that most troubles believers and sends many off searching for a different understanding of what the Bible teaches about hell and eternal punishment comes down to this:

OK, we're sinners. We get that. But God is supposed to be this loving, merciful Being who looks down on us from heaven with love, mercy, and compassion and wants us to love Him as well. But how can we possibly love a God who would send billions of people off to suffer horribly in a literal lake of fire for all eternity just for not believing exactly the right things, or for doing things that come natural to them. Infinite punishment for a finite number of sins just can't be right—it can't be fair! I mean, what kind of cruel, merciless tyrant is God, anyway? The loving, merciful God I believe in would never do such a thing, so these hardline "eternal damnation" types must be misinterpreting Scripture.

In other words, in the eyes of many good, sincere people, the problem comes down to this:

The traditional view of hell makes
God seem unloving and unmerciful.

And please don't think I'm getting ready to just slap these folks around. This involves some deep issues, the depths of which must be plumbed soberly and prayerfully. And we should do our utmost to digest some basic truths about three fundamental things and how they are interrelated:

• God and His nature.
• Man and his nature.
• Sin and its nature.

One of the basic issues in all this is the fact that it's not easy for us to fully grasp the true nature of God. We want to view Him as being loving and merciful—and He certainly is. We can understand that one. We get that.

But at the same time He is infinitely holy and righteous, and His justice is perfect and must be satisfied. And these fundamental characteristics of His nature all operate together in perfect harmony. That means one cannot trump or negate the others. For example, if God were to simply toss out blanket forgiveness to all men, it would certainly be loving and merciful. Unfortunately, it would violate both His holiness and His justice. No can do.

God's holiness is such that He cannot and will not tolerate sin. He loathes any and all types of sin (Prov. 6:16–19). His anger burns against the wicked and disobedient, including His Chosen People Israel (Isa. 5:25).

God exists outside of time, and when people sin that sin is directly against God alone (Ps. 51:4). God's justice is perfect, and all sin must be judged and its just punishment meted out (either upon Christ via substitutionary atonement or, failing that, upon the unrighteous individual himself). But it is only when that sin becomes fully atoned for by Christ's death on the cross that God is free to cast our sins as far as the east is from the west (Ps. 103:12, which I believe speaks prophetically to the cross although it was written prior to it) and remember them no more (Heb. 8:12).

Yes, God is supremely loving—so much so that He is love (1 John 4:8). But what a lot of people forget (or more likely have never stopped to consider) is that His mercy is not infinite. His mercy is subject to certain limits. He shows mercy to those who seek Him and turn to Him in repentance, and I want to let God's Word spell that one out for you because it is key:

Good but opposite: It's interesting how people often casually lump grace and mercy together as if they were the same thing. Most of us have probably been guilty of this at one time or another—I know I have. But note that grace and mercy, although both are good things, in a sense are opposites:

• Grace is giving someone something good they don't deserve.
• Mercy is not giving someone something bad they do deserve.

But people who are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal punishment in hell will invariably sound off on how this makes God seem "unmerciful"...and, if anything, God is infinitely loving and merciful, right? But as we just read:

Scripture makes one thing crystal clear:
God's mercy has conditions attached to it.

Man, on the other hand, is utterly corrupted by sin, and another fundamental part of this problem is that we are simply not equipped to conceive how God views our sin, or what an unspeakable offense it is to Him. I'd say calling it a nauseating stench in His nostrils barely scratches the surface. And as I said:

Our sin is against God alone, and it remains an
offense to Him until it is judged and punished.

And that punishment can fall upon Christ on our behalf, or upon us directly—it's our choice. But consider: God is an eternal and infinite Being, and man's sin is an intolerable offense to Him that must be judged and punished. That clearly suggests that the punishment for our sin must also be eternal.

That is, u-n-l-e-s-s . . . unless the duration of a man's punishment in hell is determined by the severity or number of his sins, rather than having anything to do with its infinitely offensive nature to a holy God.

But is it? This is another key point people sometimes miss. Our sin is against an eternal, infinitely holy, perfectly just God who lives outside of time. But what that strongly suggests to us is that a finite punishment doesn't cut it. If God punished the sin of the unrighteous with a punishment that ended after a finite length of time, then when that finite punishment was over, that sin would once again be before that eternal God. Yes, it was judged, but only punished temporarily. If that punishment were to end after a finite period of time, the intolerable stench of that sin would be able to drift right back into the face of that eternal, infinitely holy, perfectly just God.

God's got a long memory: I believe this is a key difference between sin that is forgiven and atoned for, and sin that is unforgiven and so is judged and punished on an individual basis. As we saw above, when God forgives our sins based on His Son's work of atonement, He remembers them no more. Well, what about people whose sins are not forgiven, and so must be judged and then punished? The Bible doesn't say anything about God "forgetting" unforgiven sins He must judge and then punish, so I am inclined to believe that the only way God can keep such sins out of His face, so to speak, is by the awareness that they are being justly punished and His perfect justice is being carried out. But if that punishment is temporary and comes to an end...and He hasn't forgotten such sins...would they not be right back in His face again? I am inclined to believe they would.

And this brings us to a fundamental truth:

The duration of a man's punishment
in hell is not based on what or how
many sins that man committed.

It is only based on who those
sins were committed against.

And that "who" is the eternal, infinitely holy, perfectly just God who lives outside of time I mentioned.

Duration, not degree: Note that I'm only talking about the duration of the punishment. Scripture makes it quite clear (Luke 12:47–48; Rev. 20:12; Heb. 10:29) that there actually are varying degrees of punishment in hell, essentially depending on what a person did with what they knew. Such passages, however, say nothing about the duration of that punishment, which I think is telling. And what it tells me is that the duration of their punishment is a given: It's eternal, just as stated clearly and repeatedly throughout Scripture.

Now, I can just hear some people out there:

"So His mercy is conditional on us seeking Him in repentance. OK, fine. But what about His amazing, overflowing love? He is love, and He just love love love love love loves us! I mean, seriously: How on earth is eternal punishment in hell loving? Answer me that, Eternal Damnation Dude!"

Yes, He loves us...more than we will ever comprehend. Enough to sacrifice His only beloved Son—His perfectly righteous, perfectly sinless Son—to satisfy His own perfect justice and allow Him to impute His Son's perfect righteousness to those who humble their hearts before Him and believe in faith.

So the next time you think about an eternal hell and catch yourself wondering if God is really loving, here's what I want you to do. Visualize this:

Christ nailed to the cross.

Then ponder the answer to one simple question:

Why did He do that?

I know full well that you already know the answer...but as always, the Word has the best answer of all:

*Note that the Greek word translated "perish" is a form of apollumi, which is basically a synonym of olethros, the word we looked at in regard to Matthew 10:28 and 2 Thessalonians 1:7–9 in point no. 6 above. Like olethros, apollumi refers to a condition of ruin or of being undone that lasts indefinitely.

This verse often gets tossed around in a fairly casual, almost robotic manner, as if it were the biblical equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. But therein lies the unsearchable answer to one of the world's most unsearchable questions:

Is God really loving?

This leads us straight to one last little gem to tuck away:

Christ's death on the cross was a
sacrifice of infinite worth meant to
spare us an eternity of God's wrath.

Consider this carefully: If God's punishment for our sin was anything less than eternity in hell...

Then why on earth did Christ have to die?! Why in heaven's name did God feel compelled to make the ultimate sacrifice of the life of His only Son?!

If our punishment was limited or finite in some way (and "limited or finite" certainly includes annihilation), that means the value of the blood Christ shed on the cross for the stated purpose of saving us from that punishment is also necessarily limited or finite in some way. In other words:

Maybe His precious blood isn't quite as "precious" as the songs say.

If that's what you think, then listen up. When God sent His Son into the world to live as a man in a body of flesh and die on the cross in our place to pay the penalty for our sin and satisfy His perfect justice on our behalf, that was a sacrifice of infinite value—that's why it has the efficacy to pay the penalty for our sin, which is a detestable offense against an infinitely holy God. But that means if the punishment He saved us from is limited or finite, then things just don't add up—things don't mesh. A sacrifice of infinite value to pay a finite penalty for sin?? All of a sudden things are out of balance.

And so it doesn't bother me one little bit to cut to the chase and go ahead and state the bottom line point-blank:

When you accuse a just, holy God of being unloving
because He sends the unrighteous to hell for eternity,
you are denigrating the cross of Christ and devaluing
the precious blood that saved you from precisely that.

Put another way:

If you believe Christ's death on the cross was only meant to save us from a limited or finite punishment, then God's plan of salvation was a bloody, ill-conceived, and grotesquely overstated waste of time.

This is the grand, enlightened result of refusing to interpret God's Word in a sensibly literal and contextually reasonable manner.

So here's a friendly tip:

And as far as signs of the times are concerned, there's certainly no reason anyone should be too terribly surprised to hear these kinds of softened, airbrushed, politically correct ideas concerning hell being spewed from woke, man-centered pulpits today. After all...

Eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire just doesn't fill the pews.

A pleasant topic

I am convinced that one of the underlying problems that causes people to reinterpret hell and the fate of unbelievers—and it's the same problem that underlies many other doctrinal errors—is that many people have a tendency to allow their very natural, very human feelings and emotions to take precedence over what God's Word clearly says. They allow their own ideas about how things in the spiritual dimension ought to be run to cause them to push, shove, bend, and twist God's Word to conform to those feelings, emotions, and ideas to the greatest extent possible.

But when people do this, it can easily result in them placing themselves in a position where they are effectively judging God and questioning His plans, actions, and motives.

This is extremely dangerous territory to be in, however, because when people persist in forcing God's Word to conform to their feelings and emotions and their own ideas and opinions long enough and with sufficient resolve, the end result is predictable:

They become their own gods.

This is man's primary weakness, and Satan has been playing it for all it's worth ever since his encounter with Eve in the Garden of Eden to steer people clear of and blind them to the truth of what God has said and promised, and ultimately the truth of the gospel.

And that's precisely why letting one's feelings and emotions trump what God's Word clearly says should be anathema to believers.

Rather than forcing His Word to conform to our feelings and emotions and our sense of how things ought to be, we need to be subject to what God has clearly revealed to us in His Word.

On the bright side, however, our view of hell is not a salvation issue (although some would argue that Universalism coats the gospel with sugar and spice and everything nice). There is always room for some differences of opinion among believers who sincerely seek to know what God's Word says and means when it comes to secondary issues like this, so don't think I'm out to hammer people into submission. This is just how I see things—how you see these things is completely up to you.

But no matter how I see it, how you see it, or how anyone sees it, hell is certainly not a pleasant topic. I'm convinced, however, that it was intended to get our attention—and I might even say it was meant to put a healthy fear and reverence of God in us. And there's a good reason for that:

God sacrificed the very best He had—the life of His perfect Son—to satisfy His perfect justice on our behalf in order to give us an opportunity to escape His just, holy wrath that our sin so egregiously provokes.

In other words, it's an understatement of massive proportions to say that God takes hell seriously. So rather than finding ways to soften, mollify, or wiggle around the harsh scriptural realities of hell, we should be singing His praises, magnifying His holy name, and worshiping His glorious majesty for what He did to make it possible for us to completely avoid it.

Because if you believe in faith in what He did, you will.

And that is a pleasant topic.

Greg Lauer — JUL '24

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