Privation, Punishment, and Pain: Thoughts on Hell, Part 2

Introduction

If you’re watching this sermon, you’ll see the stage is set for Vacation Bible School (VBS). Our children will be talking about “True North,”¹ and they’ll be exploring the Gospel of Matthew. In the last verse of Matthew, Jesus says to His disciples, as He’s preparing to leave the earth, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

This verse will not only be a focus at VBS, but it speaks to our current topic in our Oracles of God series: eternal judgment (this is the sixth and final “elementary principles of the oracles of God” mentioned in Hebrews 5:12–6:2).

Jesus’s words speak to eternal communion with God. They speak to the promise of presence, and to the promise that this world is operating according to a timeline—God’s timeline. There are ages; there are ages to come, ages that will end; there are periods of time that arrive on history’s scene and then are over.

The task before us is to contemplate the opposite of the things that are in the last verse of Matthew: rather than eternal communion with God, we will be considering eternal separation from God, away from His presence. What happens at the end of this age? What is there then?

So we continue our study on Hell (begun in my previous sermon), and we do so with a measure of humility and understanding that it’s not an easy topic for the world to accept. It’s not even an easy topic for some Christians to accept.

GraceLife is by no means a “turn or burn” church, and I am not a fire and brimstone preacher. But we must embrace what we can from God’s instruction on the topic and try to understand what Jesus means when He speaks of “eternal fire.”

The title of my last sermon borrowed a phrase from Peter Kreeft, “Burdensome to Believe.” Hell is, indeed, a doctrine that is burdensome to believe.

We also looked at C.S. Lewis’s work called The Problem of Pain. And as Lewis so adeptly indicates, eternal judgment is not just a Christian problem in terms of punishment. Where people cry foul is how to make this fit with our insistence that God is a God of love.

The World’s View of Eternal Judgment, in Memes

Let me give you an example of some ways the world lives with this idea.

We are a meme culture, and sometimes memes are able to say things succinctly. There are truths and falsehoods underlying memes. I’m going to show you a couple that will be irreverent, but the point is to show you how some in the world look at this topic of Hell and eternal punishment.

In this first meme (above), God is depicted as hovering somebody above fire and saying, “Tell me you love me. And make it sincere.”

This second meme (above) speaks to the world’s view of God’s judgment and Hell with an analogy to the flood of Genesis 7; “God is Love” has an asterisk by it, noting “Terms and conditions apply.”

This third meme (above) uses a famous painting of Jesus knocking on a door; He is shown as saying, “Let me in!” Someone replies, “Why?” He responds, “So I can save you.” The reply comes: “From what?” Jesus is shown as responding, “From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in.”

These memes are clever, even irreverent (as I warned you), but they begin to cause us to think about serious issues when it comes to Hell. There’s eternal torment, and this idea of God inflicting it. There’s an idea that He’s going to save us, but He’s saving us from this thing He made anyway. So, as we study Hell, we also look at it with an understanding of how the world might see it but also wrestling with the things about the doctrine that make us uncomfortable.

Lewis writes:

The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin. That would be the problem if we were [Muslims]. Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous—a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power. I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay “any price” to remove this doctrine. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact. And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is Hell.²

Lewis goes on to say, “I am not going to try to prove the doctrine tolerable. Let us make no mistake; it is not tolerable. But I think the doctrine can be shown to be moral, by a critique of the objections ordinarily made, or felt, against it.”³

Our goal is not to make the doctrine of Hell seem moral. Categorically, I have an issue with trying to assign morality to God. It makes sense for us—to compare to some sort of standard (to which we fall short). But “moral” is a category we can’t apply to God. He’s not moral in that sense: To what are you going to compare Him? He’s moral because He lines up with something?! No, that doesn’t work with God.

What Lewis is getting at is the idea of what we would think moral beings—or perhaps a better term would be good beings—would do; he wants to defend God’s goodness, and he makes an important observation. He talks about the critique or objections against it, but also, he gets at how this doctrine makes us feel. Why are we uncomfortable with this doctrine? And when we live in this uncertainty or discomfort about the doctrine, we want to have the surety of the Scriptures. We want to engage that exercise of loving God with all of our mind so that we may also love Him with all of our heart. And that’s a good exercise to undergo for the sake of others as well—to help them answer the questions, “Why do you have a hope?” and “Why do you hope to be with the God who says some people won’t be with Him in this terrible place we’ve given the name Hell?”

The Nature of Hell

If I could give you a synopsis of Hell—one description of it—it would be this: Hell is away from God.⁴ This is the answer to all of the big questions you have or could have about it:

Where is Hell? (It is where God isn’t.)
What is Hell? (It is life apart from God)
Why is there Hell? (Because people have chosen to separate their lives from God.)

Where Is Hell?

What about a specific location? Where is Hell—where is this place that is “away from God”?

Let me supply some Scriptural descriptions of this answer, but please understand it can become difficult to say from the beginning, “This is a verse about Hell,” because of the terminology used. In my last sermon, I discussed one term that gets translated as Hell, and it’s a geographical location from the time of Christ, “Gehenna,” and from before, in the land of Israel, the “valley of Hinnom.” It gets translated “Hell” because Jesus uses it to reference eternal condemnation. Sometimes we see the word “Hades” or “Sheol,” as we saw in the Old Testament (Sheol also means “grave”). So, when studying the Scriptures, you have to look at all of the evidence and then decide contextually what the passage is talking about—is it talking about Hell or not, based not so much on the word as on the context.

Maybe a better way of saying it is, let’s look at how the Bible describes either a judgment of condemnation or how it describes the state of death of the wicked or unbeliever.⁵

So where is Hell, according to the Scriptures?

“Under the Earth”

We get one description of it being under the earth (see Philippians 2:10).

I want to get behind the symbolic designations when discussing this. I’m not saying the term “under the earth” is merely symbolic, because symbols are meant to describe something to us.

There are those who will insist that this description is literal. But I think the more important aspect is what it begins to indicate to us about the kind of “life” or existence that it refers to. To say that Hell is “under the earth” is a designation of the grave. When we bury people, we put them under the earth as a reminder that there’s no escape from death. Hell is the lack of an escape from death.

Another reason that I think we can consider the symbolic meaning of this location is that, in the beginning, the earth is that which we (humans) were supposed to subdue (see Genesis 1:28). But to be placed under the earth is the idea that it has subdued us. We have not fulfilled what it is to be human.

To be placed under the earth is the idea that it has subdued us. We have not fulfilled what it is to be human.

Another symbolic gesture of this idea is the idea that those who exist in Hell are less than human—less than what humanity should be. What I mean is that we were made from the dirt or the earth,⁶ and so the idea of our final resting place being beneath even that captures the idea that we’ve stooped to a level of dignity that is unbecoming of humanity. We become, in a sense, even lower than what we’re made of.

“Outside the Gate of the Heavenly City”

The Bible also describes Hell, or the place of eternal judgment, as outside the gate of the heavenly city. Look at these verses from the final chapter of the Bible:

“Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying. (Revelation 22:12–15)

As with many of the things we understand about God, we can begin to get a sense of what something is by understanding its opposite. Sometimes the best we can do is say, “Well, it’s not this.” And if the place of eternal judgment/condemnation is outside of the heavenly city, then we can say it’s a place of:

No reward
No access to the One who is everything—the One who is the Alpha and the Omega,⁷ the beginning and the end (there’s a finality to this place)
Dirtiness, unpreparedness, and nakedness (their robes haven’t been washed)
Lifelessness (no right to eat from the tree of life)

In these verses of Revelation 22, we also get a descriptor of who is there in Hell: dogs, sorcerers, immoral persons, murderers, idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying. (Careful with this verse: You might be saying, “Hey, I like dogs and wizards!” but the last verse tells you what’s happening in this place—it’s full of people who love and practice lying. And remember, you may love lying, but you don’t like being lied about—that’s a hard existence for you to talk into a room full of people who have been telling lies about you. Now imagine an eternity of living with no one but liars!)

The main idea is not that you’re at the gate, able to peek over and see what’s happening there. You’re left out, outside the city—you’re not there at all.

Outer Darkness

Let’s look at a description of the city, and then consider its opposite for more understanding. In Revelation 21:23–27, we read:

And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. In the daytime (for there will be no night there) its gates will never be closed; and they will bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it; and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

So the heavenly city is a city of light. The opposite, of course, is darkness. The place of eternal judgment is a place that is dark—you’re living away from the light. Other places in the Scripture describe it as the “outer darkness.”⁸

What must that mean that it’s dark in Hell? Is it just annoyingly dark, and you’re going to bump into things?

This play between light and dark is a major theme in Scripture—you could argue that it is the theme of Scripture, when you consider how Scripture began (moving from darkness in Genesis 1:2 to God declaring “Let there be light” in Genesis 1:3) and how it ends (beckoning us to come to the city of light, as described in Revelation 21).

The absence of light means:

A lack of knowledge (Christ has come into the world as the Light that enlightens every man, while Hell is a place of unknowing)
A lack of warmth
A lack of glory

The Activity of Hell

So, what happens in this “life in darkness”?

Peter Kreeft categorizes Hell as punishment, pain, and privation.⁹ We’ve discussed privation already (the idea of being away from God—of being in His absence). Let’s turn to punishment and pain. Because those who object to the doctrine aren’t upset with the privation aspect as much as the punishment and pain aspects. After all, for those who don’t know God, big deal if they’re away from God. That’s what they want—or at least what they think they want. (“We didn’t really like Him anyway, don’t really even think He exists; and we hear He’s kind of boring.”)

Again, this is how those who don’t know God would see it. If they did know Him, they’d know that the punishment and pain exist precisely because that is what it is to live away from God’s presence. Absence from God means punishment and pain.

Absence from God means punishment and pain.

We saw these ideas in C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, and now we’ll revisit them in more detail.

Retributive Punishment

We can describe Hell in ways that avoid this idea of Hell as a penalty or punishment, but Scripture does also declare that Hell is a penalty. It does so in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. Paul is speaking of the people who do not know God:

For 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, emphasis mine)

This passage shows that Hell is a penalty of sorts, and it is reasonable and right to call it so. We usually think of a penalty as something you’re paying because of a wrong done.

If you want to think of it in terms of law, you’re paying because some law has been broken. And if you look at theories of law and justice, you will encounter this notion of positive law and natural law. Positive law is the notion that there is a penalty in place enacted by one who has created the penalty and will put that penalty upon you for breaking the law. It’s called a “positive” law because it’s an active punishing.

Natural law, on the other hand, has more to do with the idea of what follows naturally—what’s going to follow according to the way things are.

Eternal condemnation has both positive law and natural law elements. Positive law says, “I will make this happen,” while natural law says, “This will happen.”

We saw the penalty in terms of positive law in 2 Thessalonians. In Romans 6, we see the natural law sense of the penalty.¹⁰

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:23)

This verse is saying, in a sense, “This is just the way life is—if you sin, you will die. If you sin, you will bring about death. You will reap what you sow. Destruction will follow bad decisions.” Now some may say, “Yeah, but this is God’s world, so natural law might as well be positive law, because He’s the One who made everything like this.” How do we wrestle with that question? We answer it like this: “Hell was never made for us. It’s not God’s design that humans would have spent eternity apart from Him.” Consider Matthew 25:41:

Then He [Jesus] will also say to those on His left, “Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels …”

In this verse, Jesus Himself tells us that Hell was not created for humanity. It was created for “the devil and his angels”—humanity’s enemies.

Hell was not created for humanity. It was created for “the devil and his angels”—humanity’s enemies.

What is the penalty, then? Why do people go to hell?

The Reason for Hell

There are several reasons for this punishment—or perhaps a better way of putting it is that they go to Hell for one ultimate reason, but we’re going to look at it from several different perspectives.

Perspective #1: Punished for What They Don’t Do

People go to Hell for what they don’t do: a failure to trust the Son for life. As John 3:18 says, “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”

People go to Hell for what they don’t do: a failure to trust the Son for life.

We use slang a lot as Christians, and this phrase of “not believing in His name” has a particular meaning. To believe in Jesus’s name means:

To believe in His salvation because His Name means “God saves” (Matthew 1:21)
To believe that He is God incarnated, God in the flesh, because His name means “God with us”¹¹ (Matthew 1:23)
To believe in the hope that He offers: “in His name the Gentiles will hope” (Matthew 12:21)

What happens when you believe in His name?

Judgment is removed.
He gives new birth.

Let me explain a bit more: We are all born into judgment, but we escape it when we trust in the name of Jesus. But something is also added to us. We could even say we get a new name when we trust in His name. As John puts it: “To as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12–13).

Perspective #2: Punished for What They Don’t Have

Given all this, we could also say, then, that people go to eternal judgment because of what they don’t have.

What is it that people don’t have? They don’t have the new life talked about in the New Testament.

Jesus answered and said to him [Nicodemus], “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3)

We often think of this verse as meaning that God would not allow some to see His kingdom, but what if Jesus isn’t talking about allowance but ability? What if you can’t see God, unless you have new life? And so it is the case that, not only are those assigned to Hell not allowed into heaven, but they wouldn’t have the ability to enter because they don’t have the kind of life that it takes to get in.

Consider Revelation 20:15, where John (the book’s author) picks up on the idea of “name” again: “And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”

This verse shows that a reason people go into the lake of fire is for what they don’t have—they don’t have life, as evidenced by the fact that their name is not written in this book of life. The brightness of the heavenly city would penetrate their being, thus being an intolerable light.

People go to eternal judgment because of what they don’t have … new life [in Christ]. … The brightness of the heavenly city … [for them would be] an intolerable light.

Perspective #3: Punished in Accordance with What They’ve Done

Since those who are assigned to Hell lack the life that is necessary to move into eternity with God, they are judged by a different standard.

We’ll get into the multiple judgments in a later sermon, but in short, it seems that those who are not in the book of life are judged based on their works—what they’ve done—in addition to being judged based on what they’ve not done and do not have. Consider these earlier verses in Revelation 20 combined with the one we just looked at:

And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (vv. 12–15)

So it seems to be that if you don’t have life, you were assigned to the lake of fire. How bad is the lake of fire? Speculation (and I think it’s reasonable) is that the intensity of the punishment is going to be based on who you were in this life and what you did do. Are there degrees of punishment? I think so. Justice seems to demand that.

There are some hints in Scripture. At times, Jesus says it’s going to be better for a certain group of people in the day of judgment than for the audience He’s addressing (e.g., Matthew 10:15; 11:22, 24). When He’s on trial, He talks about someone being guilty of “the greater sin” (John 19:11). And just as there seem to be degrees of reward for those in eternal blessedness, there seem to be degrees of punishment (based on what people do) for those in eternal judgment or condemnation.

Just as there seem to be degrees of reward for those in eternal blessedness, there seem to be degrees of punishment.

How Is This Fair?

At this point, you might ask, How is any of this fair if we’re born sinners? The Bible clearly teaches that we’re born into sin.¹²

The Scriptural answer to this objection is pretty straightforward: Be born again.¹³

A couple of decades ago, one of my favorite apologist philosophers, John Lennox, was one of the few people who would debate Richard Dawkins during his heyday after publishing The God Delusion. (The two men were colleagues at Oxford University; Lennox was also a scientist and mathematician.) When the topics of pain, punishment, suffering, evil, and Hell inevitably came up, Lennox would frame the issues like this: We live in a world of beauty and bombs. He would explain that what mathematicians do when there’s a problem they can’t solve, they begin to ask other questions. So we can complain all the time about the world being this way and how we don’t like that; but, given that this is a world of beauty and bombs, Lennox says, is there some explanation for why the world is this way—is there some explanation that could give us satisfaction, some “explanatory power”? And what we’ll find in the Scriptures is that even in the things that we don’t like, there’s the opportunity to escape them—a way to avoid that which we hate. There’s a way for that world that we don’t like to not be that way in the end.

We’ve already discussed that Hell is not a place designed for human beings. What we should add, too, is that God doesn’t want anyone to perish. We know this because it says it in multiple places in Scriptures.

In the Old Testament, we read this (God is giving instructions to Israel in this passage):

“Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, each according to his conduct,” declares the Lord God. “Repent and turn away from all your transgressions, so that iniquity may not become a stumbling block to you. Cast away from you all your transgressions which you have committed and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! For why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies,” declares the Lord God. “Therefore, repent and live.” (Ezekiel 18:31–32, emphasis mine)

We find the same message in the New Testament. Remember, we’re building the case against the idea that this retributive punishment is somehow wrong or unfair—rather, God does not want to enact this punishment, and He did not originally design it for us. Paul says, in 1 Timothy:

This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying) as a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. (1 Timothy 2:3–7, emphasis mine)

This passage tells us that God desires people to be saved and to know the truth. He hasn’t said, “Here’s this complicated formula for you to escape this punishment”; He says there’s one thing—one Mediator between God and man—Jesus Christ. The payment He paid wasn’t for just a select few. He gave Himself as a ransom for all. The timing was right, the timing was perfect; it’s a “testimony given at the proper time” (v. 6), and Paul says he’s devoted his life to this (teaching not only his own people, the Jews, but also the Gentiles/the whole world).

God does not want to enact this punishment, and He did not originally design for it for us.

The same message about God’s desire that people would not receive eternal punishment is found in Peter’s second letter as well:

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9, emphasis mine)

Notice in that last verse the appearance of both eternal judgment and repentance—the last and first elementary principles, respectively, that we’ve been studying from Hebrews 5:12–6:2 in our Oracles of God series. These principles work in tandem.

This is a life of beauty and bombs, death and life. The Scriptures tell us over and over again to choose life.

This is a life of beauty and bombs, death and life. The Scriptures tell us over and over again to choose life.

Look at these next verses in 2 Peter 3:

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.

Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat! But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells. (vv. 10–13)

There are other verses we could turn to. Acts 17:30–31, for example, also gets at this idea of God not wanting anyone to perish.

Disproportionate Punishment

Let’s talk about this idea that there’s a punishment or penalty at all. For others, they’re bothered by the fact that this penalty is eternal—they see that as “too much.”

A common answer to this objection is that an offense or wrong done against an eternal being demands an eternal consequence. I’m not saying that answer is insufficient, but it has some problems, not the least of which is how we understand the idea of “eternal” as it applies to people versus God.

So let me give you a few other answers to that may sit better.

There’s a man named Glenn Miller; he’s not well known (I’m not talking about the famous band player). His website is christianthinktank.com. It’s a deep dive—not designed for a quick perusal. It gets at this idea of disproportionate judgment—the fact that just a sin in this short life causes us to have eternal punishment. He says that that assumes that sin is finite; yet, it has a rippling affect in the life of the sinner and in the life of those they sin against. Some wrongs that are perpetrated against others just last. So it’s a wrong assumption that the effects of sin just go away.

Additionally, Miller makes this important observation: It assumes that sin ceases in the next life. It’s we who believe in Christ, we who are saved from the presence of sin. We see in this life what sin does to a body after roughly a century. What would sin do to a person for eternity? If a little yeast affects the whole batch of dough (1 Corinthians 5:6) in this life, what’s the effect of sin that grows into eternity?

Another answer to this is that our understanding of eternity may be different than what is real. And I question whether to even go into the relativity of time, but here’s what C.S. Lewis said about this topic:

But I notice that Our Lord while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity usually emphasises the idea not of duration but of finality. Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story—not as the beginning of a new story. That the lost soul is eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt: but whether this eternal fixity implies endless duration—or duration at all—we cannot say. Dr. Edwyn Bevan has some interesting speculations on this point.¹⁴

Edwyn Bevan, whom Lewis references in this quote, was a British philosopher and historian in the early twentieth century who specialized in the Hellenistic world; he wrote a book called Symbolism and Belief. In his writings, Bevan mentions fairy stories or tales of science fiction where perhaps someone wanders off into the woods, and they’re listening to the song of some bird, or they fall into some hole, and they think they’ve been gone about five minutes, but they come back to discover that the world has aged a hundred years. He uses this example to speak of this concept of eternity—and how, from the perspective of the person in Hell or heaven, time will be on a different order. What does all this mean? I don’t know except that time will pass differently in our eternal state than it does for us now. (It may be a hard thing for us to understand in this life.)

Dr. Bevan was writing around the same time that Albert Einstein was proposing his theories of special and general relativity. By no means am I an expert in relativity, but let me relay this famous example of the way this works: It has to do with light and time and movement. It gives you some idea of how the world may be different one day.

An Illustration of Time, Movement, and Light

Einstein’s theory would say that if you were on a platform looking at a train, and the train passed by, and if—the moment when you were right in the middle of where the train is—lightning were to strike two ends of the train, and you were equidistant from the lightning strikes, you would say that those strikes happened simultaneously from your frame of reference.

But it is also true that, if you were a passenger in the train, and your frame of reference is just the train (this train being “the world you live in”—so you’re not observing movement at all; only someone else outside the train knows that you’re moving), then if the lightning strikes occurred at both ends of the train, you would say one struck ahead of the other. Why? Because that speed of light is constant, and you’re moving toward one end and away from the other, so they would appear to you as though they happened at different moments. And you’d be right.

Time and space even now operate mysteriously, especially when we consider the idea of the speed of light.

Time, eternity, a God who is light, a light in a life that’s lived away from the light … all of this is to say that this concept eternal destruction, of eternal flame, may differ based on our perspective.

For one, it may be an agonizing moment that seems to last forever for someone observing it. It may be like the person at the beginning of the black hole, and they seem to be just stuck there.

In summary, that time will operate differently in the eternal order.

Time will operate differently in the eternal order.

Why No Second Chances?

Given that we have an eternity of time, why doesn’t God make reform an option? Eternity is a lot of time just to be able to change your ways! C.S. Lewis again assists our understanding:

A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second chance. I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. But a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again. Finality must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when.¹⁵

Scripture tells us that this is the time of chances. Verses like 2 Peter 3:9 and 1 Timothy 2:4 tell us that, in this life, the chances are good, because God Himself—the omniscient and powerful One—wants everyone to be saved (as we just saw).

Scripture tells us that this is the time of chances. … [I]n this life, the chances are good, because God Himself … wants everyone to be saved.

Norman Geisler, in his Systematic Theology, writes: “How can a place devoid of God’s mercy¹⁶ accomplish what no measure of His grace … accomplish[ed] on earth?¹⁷

Intensity of Punishment

We’ve touched on retributive punishment and disproportionate punishment, both raised by Lewis in his Problem of Pain. Now let’s answer the question about the intensity of the punishment.

Scripture describes Hell as a place of flames and rotting worms.¹⁸ So one thing we may wonder is if those are physical things. If Hell was made for angels, and angels aren’t physical beings, what do these descriptions mean?

The fire is another seemingly physical description. We see it in judgment all throughout Scripture, but sometimes it’s fire that is purifying while other times it’s fire that consumes and destroys.¹⁹

Here’s something to think of in terms of torment versus torture. Geisler writes: “It is noteworthy that Scripture nowhere describes hell as a torture chamber … That a loving God will not torture anyone does not mean hell is not a place of torment.”²⁰

What would cause torment? If it’s not active torture, what it is?

In his book The Great Divorce, Lewis has this idea that, the life of the unredeemed is hellish because of the nature of what they are. So even if they were able to escape into the next life, as Lewis depicts in The Great Divorce, the very blades of grass in Heaven would hurt their feet. Heaven would be a tormenting existence for them because of what they’ve become. This intensity of the punishment could be because of their hatred for the light.

This intensity of the punishment could be because of their hatred for the light.

In answering the accusation that God is a God of “wrath and vengeance and hate,” Kreeft writes:

But this conclusion does not follow from the premise of hell. It may be that the very love of God for the sinner constitutes the sinner’s torture in hell. That love would threaten and torture the egotism that the damned sinners insist on and cling to. A small child in a fit of rage, sulking and hating his parents, may feel their hugs and kisses at that moment as torture. By the same psychological principle, the massive beauty of an opera may be torture to someone blindly jealous of its composer. So the fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, or rather by the damned’s hatred of that love.²¹

Conclusion

The love of God is intense. For those who refuse to become more like Him, it will be tormenting. Either because they live apart from it or because they are unable to bear it, it will be eternal. But for those who do become like Him—those who become His children—the promise is that we will become even more like Him. We will be united to Him, which is the ultimate expression of love.

To experience love is to be united with the good, and God as the ultimate good offers us the ultimate pleasure: unity with Himself.

There’s an intensity and an eternity to God’s love. It is disproportional to what we’ve done in this life. And that is the grace in which we hope.

There’s an intensity and an eternity to God’s love. It is disproportional to what we’ve done in this life.

John captures this love and hope well:

See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. (1 John 3:1–2)

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