Burdensome to Believe: Thoughts on Hell - GraceLife Church of Pineville

Introduction

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!

In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:7–12)

This passage is a fitting opening for a Father’s Day sermon, is it not? It’s an inviting teaching of Christ—a warm description of a benevolent and generous Father who wants to replicate benevolence and generosity in the world.

Except (sorry), I made a small omission when I read the passage. Let’s look again at Matthew 7:11 (the previously omitted words are now in bold): “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children …”

Those two words of description, “being evil,” change things. In fact, reinserting that omission shifts a worldview; it alters completely everything in this passage.

Let’s live in that verse for a moment. There’s a deep dive in theology just in the phrase “If you then, being evil, know how to give good.” It raises these questions:

How can someone evil know what’s good?
How can someone evil procure what is good?
How can someone evil give what is good?
Do we live in a world of evil and good?
How is it that the Father in heaven even has evil children? How can they be evil and still be His?

A passage like this causes us to ask the important questions of our relationship to God (“our Father who is in heaven”). And this reminder of where He is from (heaven), tells us the sort of things we can and should seek:

Father, give to us from heaven.
Father, give to us of heaven.
Even, Father, give to us heaven.

But there’s more theology here to be worked out. What business does the good heavenly Father have in giving what is good to those who are evil? The Scriptures answer that question for us in other familiar passages, like John 3:16. For God loved so loved the world that He gave the ultimate good to His children—He gave His child. For God so loved the world that he gave His unique son, that whoever believes in Him won’t perish, but will have eternal life.

And so again, we see these positive bookends: love and life. But there alongside them we see these other elements that cannot be ignored. We see that the giving of the Son as a gift was a giving up of life. It was death for death. Why is that gift necessary? What is this world in which we would perish without that gift? It’s the world described in the next few verses of Matthew:

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it. (7:13–14)

The bookends of all these passages tell a wonderful story—a story of the giving of gifts and treating people well; a story of a God who loves and gives life; the story of a gate that leads to life—and you can find it, and just knock, and the door will be opened.

But all of these passages contain this stark contrast that we cannot skip: evil present in the world—evil present even within ourselves; the possibility of perishing; the broad way of destruction.

These are all of the elements we must consider in our final topic of the elementary principles of the Oracles of God—the topic of eternal judgment.¹

A Doctrine Many Wish to Skip

In this sermon, we begin looking at the aspect of eternal judgment that, in some ways, I wish to skip. We look at the existence of evil, the prospect of perishing, the direction toward destruction that is so easily found by many. We then begin to look at the doctrine of Hell. What happens if the eternal judgment the Scriptures speak of is a negative judgment?

A few sermons ago, I provided a flowchart² in which we asked simple yes/no questions: Is there life after death? Is there judgment? If there is judgment, is it positive or negative? What happens when the judgment is negative?

Regarding this doctrine of eternal judgment, and specifically eternal condemnation and the idea of Hell, two Christian philosophy professors at Boston College (Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli) write this:

Of all the doctrines in Christianity, Hell is probably the most difficult to defend, the most burdensome to believe and the first to be abandoned.³

That statement is from an apologetics handbook defending the doctrine of Hell. Philosophy professors usually aren’t so inclined. You’re more likely to find arguments like the one put forward by 20th-century English philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay “Why I Am Not A Christian.” Russell wrote:

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment …

I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

So much for God the Father having given us a good gift in the person of Christ, Russell would argue. This doctrine of Hell is enough for him to consider Christ not the remedy for cruelty, but the perpetrator of it.

Russell’s characterization of Christianity in this essay—if you were to read the whole thing—is lacking on several fronts, but he does at least correctly ascertain that the Gospels present a Christ who taught the existence of Hell. This teaching, present in the Scripture, leads Kreeft and Tacelli to conclude: “If we drop hell because it is unbearable to us, that presupposes the principle that we can change whatever doctrines we find unbearable or unacceptable; in other words, that doctrine is negotiable. Christianity then becomes a human ideology, not a divine revelation.”⁴

Personal Inventory

As in other sermons on eternal judgment, I’m going to begin to ask you, the reader or listener, to think about your own thoughts on the matter. Think about how you think about Hell; think about how you should think about Hell. Be careful here: This sounds like a philosophical exercise, but I think in light of what both Christian and non-Christian philosophers have written, we’re right to consider also how we feel about Hell—and why.

So take a moment now to consider:

How do you feel about the doctrine of Hell?
Why do you feel that way?

I’ll bring in another English intellectual at this point. As with many subjects, C.S. Lewis is helpful.

Similar to Russell, Lewis became an atheist in his teen years. Unlike Russell, Lewis abandoned his atheism. Here’s what Lewis said in a chapter on Hell in his book The Problem of Pain:⁵

Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture…⁶

For some, this approach to the doctrine of Hell will seem too soft. Some claim that not only does the doctrine have the full support of Scripture, but teaching about Hell was on the lips of Jesus more than teaching about Heaven. I can’t square that math, but I think there are some who wish that to be the case.

There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power.
~C.S. Lewis

There can be an almost perverse desire to hear the sermon on fire and brimstone. To revel in the doctrine of Hell—to long to hear it on the lips of the revival preacher.

So here’s a taste of the other side. Probably the most famous example of such preaching comes from the early American revivalist Jonathan Edwards. In his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he said:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.⁷

Beware of taking delight in such things. Beware of misplaced confidences.

I am by no means trying to diminish the truth of the doctrine or tamp down God’s justice or take anything away from His holiness or mollify our view of rebellion against God. But as with other elements of eternal judgment, let’s make sure we understand what the Scriptures say.

Principles of This Sermon

Let’s review some organizing principles of this sermon—and others to come, since it’ll take more than one sermon to cover this topic.

Principle #1: Distress over the doctrine of Hell is biblically acceptable. An uneasiness about this topic is normal.

Principle #2: The doctrine of Hell is established in both Old and New Testaments.

Principle #3: What we think about Hell will be determined by our approach to Scripture.

Conversely, you could say that what we think about Hell will also be determined by a lack of approaching or probing the Scriptures.

As a corollary to this third principle, we will talk about lessons in literal interpretation. So much of what we say about eternal judgment is going to have to do with how we approach the Scriptures in terms of interpretation.

And then we do need to wrestle with these ideas that are in The Problem of Pain:

Retributive punishment (i.e., the idea of punishment as retribution)
Disproportionate punishment
Intensity of punishment (“the fiery hell” spoken of in Scripture)

We’ll talk about all of these elements over the course of this and a couple more sermons.

A Doctrine Established in Both Testaments

Let’s turn to Romans 9. I turn to this passage first not to enter into the Scriptural account of Hell or justification for it, but rather to gain insight into Paul’s heart on the matter. It’s not surprising that an atheist philosopher would find the doctrine detestable. And we might feel uncomfortable reading that Christian philosophers, theologians, and thinkers would admit it “burdensome to believe.” But the sentiment to want things to be another way finds support even in the Scripture.

Paul writes:

I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart.⁸ For I could wish that I myself were accursed,⁹ separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises, whose are the fathers, and from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 9:1–5)

You see, the prospect of unsaved fellow kinsmen is burdensome to Paul. But you will note that his pain is founded in both the reality of the condition of his fellow man and in the truth of the Scriptures.

The prospect of unsaved fellow kinsmen is burdensome to Paul. … [H]is pain is founded in both the reality of the condition of his fellow man and in the truth of the Scriptures.

In the next verse, Paul goes on, “But it is not as though the word of God has failed” (Romans 9:6a). In this verse, we see a balance between pain and reliance on the truth of the Scriptures. And I think it’s reasonable and good to find ourselves in the company of such men in the faith when it comes to how we think and feel about Hell.

It’s okay to admit the burden of divine revelation, like Kreeft; to desire, like Lewis, to dispense with the doctrine; to be pained, like Paul, over the prospect of condemned countrymen. But, like these men, we must consider these burdens, desires, and pains in light of Scripture.

Consider Daniel 12. Everything you’ll see in the first verses of this chapter will continue the theme of having to deal with the reality of good and evil. You will see distress and rescue; death and life; that which is life indeed, compared to that which is contemptuous (abhorrent).

Now at that time Michael, the great prince who stands guard over the sons of your people, will arise. And there will be a time of distress such as never occurred since there was a nation until that time; and at that time your people, everyone who is found written in the book, will be rescued. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.¹⁰ (Daniel 12:1–2)

There’s so much to unpack in these two verses with respect to eternal judgment: angels; end time events related to both individuals and nations; world distress; debates over who the people of God are; judgment based on books; metaphorical descriptions of death and life. If you get into verse 3, you’ll find the doctrine of rewards and the nature of eternity. Verse 4 touches on the mystery of prophecy.

For this sermon, we’ll anchor in this idea that there is established from the Old Testament the idea of a resurrection to everlasting contempt.

From our study on the resurrection, specifically its treatment in the Old Testament (OT), you may recall that this passage is as clear as it gets in the OT. Everything else is sort of a mystery of “Sheol”/the grave: Where are the dead? Where do they go? What about the righteous dead? What about the wicked dead? Is there a difference? Daniel makes it quite clear that there will be a resurrection for some to eternal contempt.

Let’s grab a New Testament passage from the Gospel of Matthew, which is a sort of twin Gospel that is often paired with Daniel. He writes:

Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes!

If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than to have two hands or two feet and be cast into the eternal fire. If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell. (Matthew 18:7–9)

The eternal nature of Hell and the tormenting nature of Hell are established in both Old and New Testaments.

Approaching the “Problems of Pain”

So let’s talk about some of those problems, those ideas, in Lewis’s The Problem of Pain: retributive punishment, disproportionate punishment, and intensity of punishment.

Have people really done something so bad as to deserve Hell? To answer this question, you need to know something about the nature of people, but you also need to know something about the nature of God. What kind of God sends people to Hell? What kind of God creates Hell? What kind of God creates people He knows will go to Hell?
What about the idea of punishment and its seemingly disproportionate nature? The Bible says we stumble in many ways, and we should try to avoid it. But is eternal punishment—punishment that lasts forever—really fitting with occasional stumbling?
Does the punishment have to be so intense? Eternal fire sounds pretty intense … just slightly painful!

Our ideas about all of these things are going to be shaped by our interpretive approach.

The Intensity of Eternal Punishment

Let’s talk about the third idea, that of the intensity of punishment—of what Scripture calls a fiery hell.

Is Hell literal flames? We have to at least entertain the possibility that it is.

There are some who will say that you absolutely have to take this description literally. I know a lot of people who claim it is literal flames. I have observed that all of them also still have both eyes and both hands and both feet. You see, we tend to be selective in what we take literally. Those who are willing to see the literal flames usually say, “Well, you know, when He’s talking about plucking your eye out, He doesn’t mean really, literally, pluck your eye out.” But why is one statement literal and one not? Can you do that? Can you do this with the same verse—say this part of the verse is literal, but this is not?

Those sorts of question we’re going to have to deal with in eternal judgment. Is the Millennial Kingdom literal? Does it refer to a literal thousand years and a literal kingdom? Or is it a literal kingdom but not a literal millennium—or maybe the reverse, a literal millennium but not a literal kingdom? How are we going to make that call?

You at least need to know that you’ll have to wrestle with some paradox.

Paradox #1: Fiery Yet Dark

In Scripture, Hell is described as fire.¹¹ Fire is bright. But in other places in Scripture, we see the idea of punishment and darkness.¹² How can you have both eternal flames and utter darkness?

Speaking of fire, we know water and fire usually don’t mix, but we have this mixed metaphor of eternal condemnation being a “lake of fire.”¹³ And yet it’s also described as a “bottomless pit”¹⁴—and lakes need bottoms.

One reason Hell is called fiery is because the word translated as “hell” (in verses like Matthew 5:22, 29, 30; 18:9) really isn’t the word “hell.” The word translated as “hell” was a common place that everyone in Israel at the time would have known. A more literal translation is “the fiery Gehenna” or “the fiery Valley of Hinnom.”

What does that mean?

Gehenna was a place in Israel that had been there since Old Testament times, and it was a place where OT kings offered children to the false god Molech. They weren’t the only ones doing it, but the Bible reports that these kings of Israel were doing it because it is reprehensible that they were doing so—participating in pagan sacrifices. They made their children walk through the fire!

There’s a lot of speculation about what that offering was like. Some think it was like it sounds and was a test of some sort, in which children had to walk through fire with the prospect of falling into it. Some think there was a giant statue there that would’ve been heated, and a child would have been placed on the hot arms of the statue and sacrificed to it, to this god of Molech.

Later on, it became a rubbish heap—a place where trash was thrown and incinerated. This common practice meant that the fires there never went out. It was a place for refuse, the community septic tank. You can see why it was a hellish place.

But even there, it’s interesting because Gehenna became a term that was used for a place where the guilty would be punished—while it was originally a place where the innocent suffered in acts of child sacrifice.

But wait, there’s more.

Paradox #2: Torment In & Away from His Presence

We see a second paradox in 2 Thessalonians 1. In this passage, we get the justification for Hell and some description regarding the nature of eternal judgment and condemnation. Paul writes:

After all it is only just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to give relief to you who are afflicted and to us as well when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power. (2 Thessalonians 1:6–9)

I think that this description of Hell as “being away from the presence of the Lord” is about as good as it gets.

But let’s look at Revelation 14:

Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night, those who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.” (vv. 9–11)

So, to get this straight, Hell can be described as the absence of the presence of the Lord, or it can be described as being “tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.”

So, which is it? How is the fire and brimstone in the presence of the Lamb (Jesus) happening if Hell is away from His presence?

I’m not trying to frustrate your view of eternal judgment or of Hell or of the end times. There are hard things to understand—we’ve been warned about that in Scripture.¹⁵ I’m urging us to base our view on Scripture, and I’m demonstrating that the Scriptures themselves need careful handling.

There’s an analogy of taking a jigsaw puzzle and dumping all the pieces on the floor, and then beginning to piece them together. I am doing that in this series on Hell and eternal judgment just as we have done in other recent studies—for example, on repentance from dead works and faith toward God.

I want our study of Hell in particular to be a careful one, because it’s a painful doctrine for believers. It’s a confusing and painful doctrine for unbelievers. And I hope you live your life in such a way that you have an opportunity to tell unbelievers about eternal judgment—that they are asking you about the hope that you have.

Application: Some Questions to Ask

I want you to think about the following questions as we continue this study.

*What do you think Hell is?

Is it conscious torment?
Is it physical torment?
Is eternal destruction annihilation—does it mean being destroyed forever? (Is there room for that idea in Scripture?)
Is there a chance to escape it (a chance to leave Hell)?
If not, should God give second chances? This life is short, after all; does everything we do here really shape the whole scope of eternity?

*From where do you get those answers?

*What is the justification for Hell? Consider how you would answer the person who says they have a moral issue with a God who would send people to Hell.

*How would you answer the problems of pain:

Retributive punishment
Disproportionate punishment
Intensity of punishment

*How do you square the idea of Hell with a God of love?

Those are the sorts of questions we will begin to answer. I hope you have the spiritual patience first just to sit with the questions a little bit, if you’ve never done that.

Conclusions

To close, let’s return to Matthew 7.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!

In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

We can make a few conclusions even amidst this time of asking questions.

God desires to give us good things. God desires to give you good things. You can be so bold as to individualize that.

God isn’t just going to give good things to the Church or to everybody in heaven. The analogy He draws here is the individual father to his son. And you may think, “But I don’t deserve good things.” Well, that’s okay—because that’s not the name of the game, thank God!

God desires to give us good things. God desires to give you good things.

Part of the good that God wants to give you is the revelation of Scripture. Pray through these topics. Pray for your own understanding and for an ability to help others understand them. Let this topic refine your sense of good and evil. (“If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children …”). No other topic will refine that understanding like this one. But I must remind you, as the passage in Matthew does as well, that it’s not just good and evil in this world, and it’s not just good and evil as it relates to others, but it’s the good and evil that dwells in you.

C.S. Lewis concluded his chapter on Hell in The Problem of Pain like this: “This chapter is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me.”

Hell makes us uncomfortable because of what it does to people. If we know how to treat people the same way we want to be treated, then God certainly knows how to treat people. And we are sure there is a path to destruction, but it doesn’t exist without also a path to life.

“Hell is not fair,” some might say. Neither is the other option. But you have that option. The world has that option.

“Hell is not fair,” some might say. Neither is the other option.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”¹⁶ Praise God for that gift.

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