I’m not completely comfortable with the doctrine of hell. I don’t think it should. I’m a bit wary of those who are fine with the idea of eternal punishment for others; I wonder if they are also comfortable with the idea of eternal punishment for themselves.
My comfort, or lack of comfort, with any doctrine, however, does not determine its reality. To think that it does is the religion of wish-fulfillment, which has little to do with faith in the Father of Jesus Christ. Faith takes God at His word. Faith submits itself to God’s word trusting that He truly does know better than we do. That is and must be the case when it comes to hell.
Last week we studied the basics of hell. Today we are going to deal with just a few of the matters that make us uncomfortable about hell. We will do so in three points. First: the justice of hell. Second: squaring the love of God with hell. Third: the warning of hell.
First: the justice of hell. We have a hard time understanding how the sins we commit can warrant eternal punishment. This difficulty shouldn’t surprise us. It shouldn’t surprise us because we are not in the position to judge. We don’t have the proper vantage point to make the assessment. Think of it in terms of a line judge in tennis. That line judge has the vantage point to see what the players cannot. They are in the game. The line judge is removed from the game and can make a clear assessment. God made this point when speaking with Job. Rather than answering each of Job’s objections, God reminded Job that their vantage points were different. He asked Him, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” God asked that and other questions to underline the fact that Job simply could not grasp what He could grasp. The same goes for us and therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that hell doesn’t make complete sense.
So we don’t have the proper vantage point to make a proper assessment on hell. We also lack the moral credibility to make an assessment on hell. We have real skin in this game because we are sinners. Think back to the line judge. That line judge is a disinterested party. She can accurately assess the situation because she is neither helped nor hurt by the verdict. We are uncomfortable with hell, in part, because we are not disinterested parties; we are sinners. Another of God’s questions to Job should put us in our place, “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?”
So we’ve seen that some of us are tempted to condemn God for the existence of hell and a couple of reasons why such condemnations fall short. Now we see that some of us are tempted to try and get God off the hook for hell as if He has nothing to do with it. It is possible to talk about hell as if God has no role in it. Jesus didn’t do that. He said, “do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: fear Him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him.”
Jesus thought that people should have a healthy fear of God. In our evangelism, we often try to make hell the problem that must be avoided; when it fact we should be making God’s wrath the outcome to be feared. People need to properly fear God not improperly fear hell. As Michael Horton puts it, “The problem here is that hell, rather than God, becomes the object of fear.” If there is a fear of hell with no fear of God, there is no understanding of guilt or God or grace.
People also try to get God off the hook for hell by referring to hell as merely the absence of God. We talk about hell almost as if God were unaware of it. However, listen to Revelation 14:10, anyone who receives the beast’s image “will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” Hell isn’t the absence of God in the complete sense in which some people talk about it. The active wrath of God is the stuff of hell. What is true during the opening of the scrolls in Revelation is true of hell, ‘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!”’
This active wrath isn’t a sign that God is vindictive or sadistic. Rather it is just John 3:20 stretched out into eternity, “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” In hell, there is no hiding from that light. Now in heaven there is no refuge from God, but that presence is experienced as bliss; in hell there is no refuge from God and that presence is experienced as wrath.
Hell is the natural consequence of an unwillingness to repent. Those who spend their lives refusing to repent spend eternity refusing to repent. As CS Lewis put it, “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebel to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
We need to understand this rebellion. We tend to imagine that it is sins that send a man to hell—as in one or two or a thousand. That seriously underestimates the depth of depravity within each of us. Romans 8:7 tells us the depths, “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.” The problem is that people don’t and won’t submit to God. That runs much deeper than anything that can be gossiped about.
We are rebels. If you take a step back, you can see that such rebellion stretched into eternity must warrant the active wrath of God. How could a soul that won’t accept grace from God experience His presence with anything other than fear and self-loathing? That is the human condition. It takes a new heart to change that condition which is why Jesus tells us that we must be born again. We must be changed because without that new heart we would turn heaven into hell.
Sin is far more consequential and deep-rooted than we understand. God is also far more just than we understand. That’s what Moses said, “the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.” We show partiality. God does not. Our justice is suspect. His is absolute. As Psalm 11:7 puts it, “the Lord is righteous, He loves justice.” It’s hard for us to understand the justice of God because we are not like Him. As Balaam prophesied, “God is not man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that He should change His mind. Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?” God does everything He says. In other words, He is perfectly just.
Hell is part of that justice. That is what Satan deserves. Can we get agreement on that? Would everyone here say that Satan deserves hell? What about those who throw in their lot with Satan? Now we tend to think that such a group of people is limited to Satanists, but those who refuse to throw in their lot with God are those who are rebelling against God in ways scandalous and in ways that are quite respectable to sinners like us. Those who have thrown in their lot with Satan by rebelling against God will receive what Satan receives. “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” as the king in Jesus’ parable puts it.
There is a justice to hell. What’s unjust is the cross. “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer…” That’s unjust, and that’s what makes it possible for any of us to stop following the trajectory of our sin. If you want only the justice you deserve, hell should make some sort of sense to you; it is the cross that should surprise you.
You need the sort of mind that wonders more about the injustice of the cross than the justice of hell. Have a mind like Isaac Watts; “thus might I hide my blushing face while His dear cross appears. Dissolve my heart in thankfulness and melt mine eyes to tears.” To come at it another way, when you think of hell, remember that it is the nail-pierced hands that, “hold the keys to death and hades.”
That’s our first point: the justice of hell. Now we turn our attention to love and hell. How do we square the love of God with the reality of hell? That’s our second point. To even talk about the love of God with any integrity, we need to first acknowledge that we don’t understand love all that well. What Paul said in the chapter of love is certainly applicable to all of us, “now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” We now see only a reflection. We now know only in part. We should be very careful about setting ourselves up as experts in love.
We should be particularly careful to avoid setting ourselves up as more loving than God. The older I get, the more I realize that He is long-suffering while I can be quite quick to anger. He is compassionate while I can be merciless. As Paul put it, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
With that in mind, let’s consider how to square the love of God with hell. We tend to think of love and wrath as mutually exclusive but is that the case? Consider the riots in Sioux Falls this summer. Did that anger you? If so, why? Why not just enjoy the show? Because you love people. You love people who own small businesses. You love particular police officers, and you imagine what it would be like for them in that situation. You love this region of the country. Or consider the riot in the capitol this past week. Did that anger you? If so, why? Why not just enjoy the descent into chaos? Well, you love the rule of law. You love children and want them to grow up in a stable culture. You love the church and do want to see it connected with all that. Your love drives you to anger and will continue to drive you to anger as long as there is injustice.
God cannot look at injustice without anger. That’s Habakkuk 1:13, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.” That’s true not because God is morally uptight, but because God loves. If you want a God without wrath, you are left with a God without love. You are left with a God who doesn’t who doesn’t care enough to get angry. That’s not the God of the Bible. He loves, and so He opposes that which harms people meaning that He opposes sin. All sin is a breakdown of love because love is the fulfillment of the law.
Perhaps a picture will help. Pull up that picture.
What you see here is from the Syrian civil war, which is still underway. This child is recovering from the effects of a chemical attack. That picture makes me angry. The fact that there was an chemical attack makes me angry. If you aren’t angry at this, that is a sign of a lack of love which probably comes from a lack of identification with that child or parent.
God doesn’t lack such willingness. He doesn’t lack love. He was and is terribly upset about the harm done to that child and the harm done by all sin. He sees the effects of all your sin the way that you effects of that chemical strike. He doesn’t overlook your sin any more than you should overlook what happened to that little child. Love doesn’t overlook. Love doesn’t sweep such matters under the rug. That’s how you square the love of God with hell.
You also see the love of God in the fact that God would forgive the perpetrators of that attack. He would forgive them even if the parents of that little girl wouldn’t, but that forgiveness would entail repentance and that repentance would need to be from the heart. The same is true with your repentance.
Without this repentance there can be no enjoyment of heaven. Those who are in hell wound not enjoy heaven. In preparation for this message, I scanned an article in Salon about how the Christian view of heaven is really hell because, in the author’s mind, it is all about God. In a way she’s right. She wouldn’t enjoy heaven. She couldn’t enjoy heaven. She wants it to be about her, and that carries the seeds of hell.
So we’ve seen a bit about God’s justice. We’ve seen a bit about God’s love. Now when you put those two together, you get warnings. That’s our third point: warnings about hell. People tend to think that hell makes God a sadist, but if God were a sadist, He wouldn’t speak of hell at all. He warns because He loves. “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?” Does that sound sadistic or loving?
Now that you have that in mind, does this sound sadistic or loving? “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire”? What about this, “Return, Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall”? If you understand the intentions of these warnings, you come to see they are expressions of love. It would be cruel to omit them. CS Lewis saw that. He said, “the safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, the sort underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Think of Scripture’s words on hell as those signposts.
God warns about hell because He loves. He also warns because He is just. Some people think that hell is all bluster. They think that God is much more bark on this matter than bite. They think hell in the same way they think of the threats of a father at his wit’s end; they think He will never actually deliver on the punishments He threatens. That’s not the case. Remember Numbers 23:19, “Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?” To forfeit that is to forfeit any assurance in the promises of God.
Why do you lay out consequences for others—in hopes that they will suffer those consequences or in hopes that they will do right and so avoid those consequences? Why do you tell your children to be home by a certain time—so you can stick it to them when they disobey or so they will obey and avoid the consequences? Now if you who are evil know why you lay out consequences, how much more does your Father in heaven know why He lays out consequences?
That’s why God warns. What does it mean to take those warnings seriously? It means you take the justice of God seriously while taking the love of God seriously. That’s what Hudson Taylor did. “Would that God would make hell so real to us that we cannot rest; heaven so real that we must have men there, Christ so real that our supreme motive and aim shall be to make the Man of Sorrows the Man of Joy by the conversion to him of many.” Until you can say that with Taylor, hell will be uncomfortable in all the wrong ways. Once you can say that with him, hell becomes uncomfortable in all the right ways. Amen.
“Job 38:4, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.”
Job 40:8, “Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?”
Luke 12:4-5, “do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: fear Him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him.”
Revelation 14:10, “they will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.”
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!”’
John 3:20, “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”
Romans 8:7, “The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.”
Deuteronomy 10:17, “the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.”
Psalm 11:7, “the Lord is righteous, He loves justice.”
Numbers 23:19, “God is not man, that He should lie, or a son of man, that He should change His mind. Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not fulfill it?”
Matthew 25:41, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Isaiah 53:7-10, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer…”
1 Corinthians 13:12, “now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
Romans 5:6-8, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Habakkuk 1:13, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.”
Ezekiel 33:11, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?”
Matthew 7:19, “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Hosea 14:11, “Return, Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall.””