Hudsonville Christian was a rather large school, and my class was especially large. For sixth grace, I had Mr. Los. We were 6-E, the fifth section of the sixth-grade class and we were out in the portable classroom. That was the year that I bought bulk candy whenever we bought groceries and then sold that candy piece by piece to the other kids during recess for a tidy profit. That was also the year my bulk candy business was shut down by the powers that be. It was also the year that I told a girl named Robyn to, and I quote, “go to purgatory.”
I wanted to say H-E-double-hockey-sticks, but I knew that would land me in big trouble; so I said what, in my sixth-grade mind, seemed to be the next best curse. Mr. Los heard it and it wasn’t particularly impressed by my creativity. He punished me as if I had damned her because, of course, that was my intention.
Now ask yourself, why was I hesitant to say, “go to hell?” Well, I knew that I should take hell seriously. Why was I punished as if I had said, “go to hell?” Well, that school took hell seriously. Mr. Los took hell seriously. He knew that I wasn’t wishing purgatory on Robyn and he wanted me to see how wrong it was to wish hell on her. He didn’t want to see one of his students in hell. He didn’t want to see any of his students wish others were in hell. He saw that hell was horrible. He wanted us to avoid it at all costs. Hell is horrible. Avoid it at all costs. That’s for Robyn. That’s for me. That’s for you and that’s the claim of this sermon: hell is horrible. Avoid it at all costs. We will see that in four points. First: the reality of hell. Second: the finality of hell. Third: the anguish of hell. Fourth: the duration of hell.
First, let’s look at the reality of hell. Scripture has a good deal to say about hell, and the first truth we are noting is that it is real. Hell is not a metaphor for a season of anguish—as in “how was your weekend?” “Oh, it was hell.” Or, “oh, I’m not afraid of hell. I’ve already been there after my divorce.” Now seasons of life can certainly be horrible, but that’s not hell. Hell is the eternal state of those who oppose God. Hell is no metaphor. This needs to be emphasized; Millard Erickson was right to say that hell, “together with angels and demons, is often one of the first topics of Christian belief to be demythologized.” As for hell, people want to turn it into a metaphor because its reality seems too awful to consider. Some Christians want to turn hell into a metaphor because they find the notion embarrassing.
If you take the Bible seriously, however, you need to come to terms with the reality of hell. The Scriptures treat hell as dreadfully real. Daniel 12:2, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” Shame and everlasting contempt are real. Isaiah 66:24, the redeemed in the new creation “will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.” That’s no metaphor for going through a rough patch. That’s a circumstance in which people really exist forever.
Jesus would agree. He warned people to avoid this circumstance at all costs saying, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” You only say something like that if you think there really is a hell and that it really is worse than gouging out your own eye.
Many of Jesus’ parables include warnings of hell; the parable of the rich man and poor man—“Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.” The parable of the weeds— “They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The parable of the unfaithful servant—“the master of that servant will come on a day when [that servant] does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus treated hell as a reality. It would be strange to be a follower of Jesus and not follow your master’s thinking on this matter.
We need this reminder because the twenty-first century church is notorious for trying to be more Christ-like than Christ. We take what we like about Christ—his sympathy, his long-suffering, his compassion—and turn that into the north star that guides all our thinking. That’s why we love Jesus’ words, “come to me all you who are weary and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” and yet can’t make heads or tails about his teachings on gender and sexuality. That’s why we never tire of repeating, “in my Father’s house there are many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?” and yet are curiously silent about his repeated warnings about hell.
We would be much wiser to recognize that that you can’t be more Christ-like than Christ. His teachings all fit together. If you overstress some to the exclusion of others, they will all topple, and we see the toppling all around us. Don’t try to be more Christ-like than Christ. Jesus believed in a literal hell. If you are his follower, follow him assuming that he knows more about it, and about everything, than you do.
There really is a hell. Now we see that people who go there, stay there. That’s our second point: the finality of hell. In his Inferno, Dante pictured the gate to hell marked with the words, “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Dante was right. There is no escape from hell. The final judgment is final. “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” That leaves no room for re-examining one’s case after ten years. There is one judgment, and it is binding.
Those who are in hell will always be in hell. Those who are in heaven will always be in heaven. That is part of the logic of Jesus’ parable of the rich man and poor man. Abraham told the rich man in hell, “between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.”
So why is there a finality to hell? Why can’t anyone cross over? Why can’t God give the damned a chance to repent, or to put it more pointedly why won’t God give the damned a chance to repent? Those questions arise in part from the assumption that those in hell would repent if only they had the chance. Now it is true that those in hell want to get out of hell, but that doesn’t mean they would repent. Look at Jesus’ parable of the rich man who treated the poor man Lazarus like trash. What does the rich man say to Father Abraham while he is in hell? He doesn’t say, “Father Abraham, I was a sinner. If only I had the chance to treat Lazarus with love.” He says, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.” In other words, he kept treating Lazarus like trash. He kept acting as if everything—including Lazarus—revolved around him. People in hell don’t want to die to themselves. They want to live as they see fit but without the consequences for their sin because that, after all, is how they lived their entire lives.
Consider how the damned experience God. They don’t think of God as the love they missed out on. They don’t think of Jesus as the one they wish they could serve. Revelation 6:16 tells us how they experience God, ‘They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!”’ They want nothing to do with God. They flee from Him like creatures scurrying from the light.
There are no second chances when it comes to your eternal state so you would do well to consider whether or not you will, in fact, “receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”, as Peter puts it. You would do well to consider whether you are adding to your faith goodness, and to your goodness knowledge, and to all of this love because Peter says that this transformation process is what proves that you are born again and will indeed receive a rich welcome into God’s kingdom rather than spending eternity scurrying from the light of God.
An eternity scurrying away from God is an eternity of anguish. That anguish is our third point: the anguish of hell. Hell is full of unspeakable anguish. It is truly unimaginable. Systematic theologian Millard Erickson was right to say that, “The nature of the future states is far more intense than anything known in this life.” Just as we saw that the glory of heaven is far more intense than the glory of this life, so the anguish of hell is far more intense than the anguish of this life. The worst season of your life wasn’t hell or isn’t hell. Hell is exponentially worse.
Now the degree of this anguish might vary from person to person. We see indications that there are degrees of hell in Jesus’ words, “the servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows,” and in his words to Capernaum, “if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” That seems to point to varying degrees of anguish, so it is very possible that Hitler suffers a greater degree of anguish in hell than some random secularist from Connecticut who would never submit to God but loved coaching for the neighborhood t-ball league.
So what is this anguish in hell? It is described in terms of fire and a lake of fire; it is described as worms eating flesh; it is described as weeping and gnashing of teeth; it is described as eternity swimming in filth. It is described in a variety of ways, but are those descriptions literal? Let’s just take Isaiah’s description of hell as being burned by fire and eaten by worms, “the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.” Why are those two images used? Those two images describe what happens to the body after death. A corpse is either burned, as in cremation, or eaten by worms, which is what happens in the grave. This seems to be a creative way of talking about the horrors that lie after death. It seems that these images function the same way as the images we studied with heaven; they are familiar realities that point us to what is beyond our comprehension. As Calvin puts it, “because no description can deal adequately with the gravity of God’s vengeance against the wicked, their torments and tortures are figurately expressed to us by physical things, that is, by darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, unquenchable fire, an undying worm gnawing at the heart.”
So if the suffering isn’t necessarily physical, what is it? It is the wrath of God. It is “shame and eternal contempt” in the words of Daniel 12. It is the “blackest darkness” in the words of Jude 1:13. It is an eternity of hating, being hated, hating yourself and hating all that is good, true, and beautiful. As the character John Ames put it to his Bible study in the book Gilead, “if you want to inform yourself as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.” Ponder that. Ponder an eternity in which your shame is uninterrupted, your self-loathing is incessant, your paranoia is unrelenting, you are always panicked, and hopelessness is all that’s left because God is against you and you are against God. That’s the anguish of hell. Ceasing to exist would be preferable. That brings us to our final point: the duration of hell.
Every so often there is a book published which argues against the eternality of hell. Rob Bell published one almost ten years ago called Love Wins. Edward Fudge published one fifteen years before that called The Fire That Consumes. In their own creative ways, these books argue that hell doesn’t last forever. They do so for understandable reasons. We can’t truly wrap our minds around eternal anguish. As we will see next week, we find it very hard to make peace with that idea of an eternity in hell.
Eternal anguish, however, is the reality of hell and, as always, we would do well to take the Scriptures and revolve our thoughts around them rather than trying to squeeze Scripture to fit our thoughts. Here are a sampling of Scriptures that teach the everlasting nature of hell. Matthew 25:41, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” 2 Thessalonians 1:9, “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might.” Jude 1:7, “in a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.” Revelation 14:9, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of His wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever.” It might be hard to wrap our minds around eternal anguish, but it is God’s mind that decides the matter. It makes sense to Him and He is clear about hell’s eternal nature.
That is the final circumstance of those who spend this life running from God, and if you aren’t running toward God, please recognize that you are running from Him and toward hell. Many people are running from God. They are choosing this final circumstance of hell. Most people are choosing it. Jesus meant what he said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Most are choosing eternal anguish, which means you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a great number of people you know are choosing eternal anguish.
Now since that is the case, the most loving action would be to warn people about hell. Don’t imagine that hell is on one end of a spectrum with love on the other end. You see the love in the warning. You see that love in the fact that nobody talked about hell more than Jesus. If you think that hell is unworthy of God, you have to reckon with the love of Jesus which you see in his suffering the consequences of sin for his people on the cross and in warning about the hell in store for those who die in their sins.
That’s how you see hell for as hellish as it is while seeing God for as loving as He is. Spurgeon was right, “when men talk of a little hell it’s because they think they have only a little sin and believe in a little Savior.” We’ve been studying this big hell because we have big sin and a big savior That’s why spent this past thirty minutes in study—not because we had a slot to fill on Sunday night but because this is real, and we are real people who live on the brink of eternity. Amen.
“Daniel 12:2, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Isaiah 66:24, [the redeemed in the new creation] “will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.”
Matthew 5:29, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
Luke 16:24, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.”
Matthew 13:24, “They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Luke 12:46, “the master of that servant will come on a day when [that servant] does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Matthew 25:41, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Luke 16:26, “between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.”
Revelation 6:16, ‘They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!”’
Luke 12:47-48, “the servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.”
Matthew 11:23-24, “if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”
Jude 1:13, “They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.”
2 Thessalonians 1:9, “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.”
Jude 1:7, “in a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.”
Revelation 14:9-11, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of His wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever.”
Matthew 7:13-14, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Proverbs 14:12, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”
John 3:16, “God loved this world in this way: He sent His one and only Son that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.”
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