God is good. Everything God does is good. This never changes. Any theology which sees God anything short of perfectly good is no theology at all.
Yet, we are confronted with the fact that Jesus frequently warned others about Hell. Scripture teaches that the unrighteous (that is, those who were never made righteous by the grace of God) will be consigned to various types of imagery. They will be “burned,” “consumed,” “destroyed,” and brought to “outer darkness.” Some have taken this imagery to mean a kind of annihilation, where the unsaved are completely wiped from conscious existence. As a doctrine of Hell, that is much easier to swallow. However, other passages demand that we understand this imagery of Hell to entail conscious punishment. It is an eternal place of eternal punishment of “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Luke 16:19-31 tells a story of a man who is conscious in Hell. And Jesus, knowing that Judas would betray him, says that it would have been better for him if he had not been born. Passages like these are difficult—if not impossible—to understand if Hell makes it as if you were never born.
What do we make of all this? Hell is a very difficult subject and must be taught with both conviction and care. I’ll never forget when I opened a book by Francis Chan defending the Biblical doctrine of Hell and the first thing he says there is this “If you are excited to read this book, you have issues.” Hell is a tough subject! But I do believe there are some things which can help us reckon with the idea of eternal punishment.
Imagine that you are walking down a path and you come to a fork in the road. At that fork you see two signs. One says: “This way to Hell: Eternal divine punishment and separation from God.” The other sign says, “This way to Heaven: Eternal glory and fullness of life with God.” Anyone in their right mind would go straight to Heaven without a second’s thought. And we think it’s that simple.
What if you are standing at the fork in the road and God is there? As you look at God, you see the intense, infinite glory and light and holiness of His majesty. At the same time, your eyes are opened to see—clearly—the extreme darkness and depravity and wretchedness of sin which you have committed against this Holy God. You would be like the prophet Isaiah when he saw the glory of God and cried out “Woe to me… am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isa. 6:5). It doesn’t matter who you are; without any sense of God’s grace, this would well up so much grief and guilt and shame. In that place, I struggle to think God would need to send people to Hell. I think we would escort ourselves.
People often ask: Why would a good God send people to Hell? That’s a legitimate question. But in the New Testament, that is not the question the authors are asking. Rather, they ask: Why would a Holy God allow someone like me into Heaven? The answer to this is much easier to find. It is the cross of Jesus Christ. It’s as if God the Son looked at eternal Judgment, he looked at Hell, and he said “over my dead body!”
Hell should disturb us. I think God made us that way because the prospect of Hell for any human being disturbs Him too. We learn from Matthew 25:41 that Hell was not made for people; it was made for Satan and his demons! That isn’t to say nobody goes there, but God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and desires that all of us would choose Him and be saved.
Whatever you conclude about this place, it is so important to remember that if you have faith to believe what the Bible says about Hell, we also can believe what the Bible says about God: He is good, loving, perfectly just, and that His ways are infinitely higher than ours. The judge of all this universe is going to do what is right.
