If there is no hell, Good Friday makes no sense
No one wants there to be a hell. CS Lewis once said that if he could get rid of any doctrine in Christianity, it would be that one. I think most of us feel the same way. No one wants to imagine the possibility of ending up there, and no one wants to imagine the possiblity of anyone we know going there. And no one finds it easy to reconcile the idea of a loving and merciful God with a God who (in the understanding of many) sends people to eternal conscious torment.
And so it is extremely tempting to dismiss the notion of hell as an antiquated doctrine based on an outdated understanding of God. The Bible depicts God as our heavenly Father, yet what kind of father would send his children to a place of eternal torment? No earthly father could imagine doing that. As someone I recently heard put it, if that’s the kind of Father God is, then he, a human, is a better father than God.
The idea of hell, at least the way most Christians think of it, does have some very serious difficulties, and anyone could easily come up with several: that it’s disproportionate, unloving, coercive.
We should all be able to agree that our just and loving Father is not disproportionate in his justice, and that he is more gracious and merciful than we could ever be. Yet Jesus and the apostles warned about hell all the time, and spoke of it in the strongest possible terms. Jesus compared hell to a squalid garbage dump, with weeping and gnashing of teeth; the apostles variously depicted it as a prison, a gloomy place of despair, blackest darkness, and a lake of fire. Jesus depicted the wicked at the judgment being told, “Depart from me” (Matt 7:21), and said that “they will go away into eternal punishment” (Matt 25:46). So what do we do with that?
What many Christians have done today, and really throughout the last few centuries, is turn to universalism — the idea that everyone eventually goes to heaven, that it really doesn’t matter what you believe, and you should focus on making this world better rather than preparing for the next. Universalists vary on the particulars of how they arrive at this conclusion and how exactly everyone ends up being saved, but the effect is pretty much the same: Universalism makes God’s love better fit our picture of what we would like it to be. That’s why so many people embrace it. As Rob Bell famously put it in the title of his book, “Love Wins.”
Except it doesn’t — not if universalism is true, anyway.
An essential part of love is choice. Because God loves us, he gives us a choice of whether or not to love him back. And some people want nothing to do with God. Even many who believe in God don’t actually want anything to do with him. Eternity in the kingdom of God means the loss of many things on earth. It means the loss of our money, our social status, our pride, our sexual relationships (see Matt 22:30), our accolades and credentials. To someone who loves God, the loss of those things is no loss at all, at least not compared to what’s being gained (Phil 3:9-10).
But to many, the loss of those things would be terrible. They wouldn’t want that. Indeed, some people’s conception of heaven is where they have as much of those things as they want! They wouldn’t want to live as citizens of the kingdom Jesus came to inaugurate. Heaven would not be eternal bliss. It would be torment. It would be like a father locking his children in a room with him and never letting them leave, ever, no matter what. At some point, that’s no longer a loving act; it’s just brute force. On a human level, we would consider such behavior child abuse. Yet if everyone is saved, that’s what God would have to do. Anyone who knows what it means to love knows that sometimes loving means letting go.
And that’s exactly what the Bible depicts God as doing for his children who want nothing to do with him. Romans 1 repeatedly says of humanity that “God gave them up” to their sinful desires. God has paid the highest price to win his people back to himself. He gave up his own life. No stronger statement could he have made to show his love for each of us. You can’t do anything more than giving up your life. Yet people insist on doing what they want. They don’t want a relationship with God for who he is. They might want a God who acts like a genie to fulfill their wishes, or who promises them the few things in life they really want, or even who gives them eternal life. But they don’t love God for who he is. They don’t love a God who would take away from them their pride, accolades, possessions, sexuality, and dreams. They want a god they make in their own image who will give them those things. And there comes a point, in the life of every person, where God lets go.
And this, I think, is what hell really is. The Bible uses horrifying imagery to describe hell: Fire, outer darkness, prison, the “second death.” Jesus called it by the name of an infamous garbage dump outside Jerusalem (Gehenna). These things, it’s agreed by most scholars, are probably symbolic, but the things they symbolize are no less terrifying. Fire consumes and mars and mangles and destroys, and darkness is a place of shame, isolation, and despair. It’s not some torture chamber God sends people to. It’s what happens to the human being who refuses to be changed by God. It is self-destruction, self-chosen. It’s what happens when God honors the insistence of humans to be independent from him.
The Bible speaks of hell as destruction. Think of what destruction is. When a building is left on its own, unmaintained and unprotected, it’s eventually destroyed. That doesn’t mean the pieces are thrown into flames that burn forever and ever. Nor does it mean the building vanishes out of existence. It means that the building crumbles and falls and becomes a heap of rubble, only a crumbled remnant of what it was designed to be.
The Bible also speaks of hell as the “second death.” We tend to equate death with the loss of physical consciousness, but that’s just a byproduct of the cessation of the natural functions of the body. When the body dies, it doesn’t blink out of existence, but it is destroyed; it slowly decays into a shell of what it once was, before being broken down into scattered bits of matter over the millennia. This process of decay has already begun for living humans, but for now we’re able to stave it off by maintaining our bodies; at death, we no longer can do that. Unless God intervenes, the body can never be what it was designed to be again.
The Bible uses these images to illustrate what hell does to the whole person. We all have self-destructive tendencies within us: the tendency toward selfishness, materialism, anger, discontent, the pursuit of pleasure. Left unchecked, these things would destroy us. We would never be satisfied, never feel like we had enough; we would want more until we couldn’t have any more, and we would eventually be consumed by those desires. That process has already begun — the process of death and decay and destruction — and unless God intervenes and performs a miracle, we can never be what we were designed to be, and will only decay and disintegrate. God wants to intervene and reverse that process, but if some insist on remaining independent, God’s love does not force them to do otherwise.
Hell is what happens when God honors the human desire for independence. CS Lewis puts it like this:
Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
So what did God do to rescue us from this? He would not coerce us, which would be unloving, or reprogram us to love him, which would remove our free choice. So instead, he sacrificed for us. He paid the highest price possible, about 1,988 years ago yesterday. He became a man, came to earth, lived a perfect life, and sacrificed himself in our place. He endured hell for us, and he paid our debt to God for our contribution to the corruption on this earth. And he has opened the door wide for anyone who wants to accept this payment, be reconciled to God, and have that process of death and decay reversed.
God himself died to rescue us from the destruction we would bring on ourselves. If there is no hell, then what did his sacrifice actually accomplish? If the cross is, as some say, just a moral example of love, we can find just as powerful an example in anyone else’s sacrificial death. God could have sent a prophet or used any peaceful figure to accomplish that goal. What Jesus came to do was accomplish something only he could — pay the penalty for sin, reverse the process of death and corruption, and win us back to himself.
The impact of God’s greatest act of love is severely diminished if there is no hell. It cost God to save us. But if there is no hell, God’s love for us cost him nothing because he doesn’t have to save us from anything. Tim Keller puts it so well that I feel compelled to quote him at length:
Fairly often I meet people who say, “I have a personal relationship with a loving God, and yet I don’t believe in Jesus Christ at all.” Why, I ask? “My God is too loving to pour out infinite suffering on anyone for sin.” But this shows a deep misunderstanding of both God and the cross. On the cross, God HIMSELF, incarnated as Jesus, took the punishment. He didn’t visit it on a third party, however willing.
So the question becomes: what did it cost your kind of god to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this god agonize, cry out, and where were his nails and thorns? The only answer is: “I don’t think that was necessary.” But then ironically, in our effort to make God more loving, we have made him less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all. The worship of a god like this will be at most impersonal, cognitive, and ethical. There will be no joyful self-abandonment, no humble boldness, no constant sense of wonder. We could not sing to him “love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” Only through the cross could our separation from God be removed, and we will spend all eternity loving and praising God for what he has done (Rev 5:9-14.)
If we deny the existence of hell, we deny Christ the impact of his greatest act of love, and our ability to love God is impaired as a result.
We, like God, should want everyone to be saved. We can and should hope that hell is empty. We should be, as Baptist pastor Randal Rauser puts it, “hopeful universalists.” But denying the existence of hell or insisting that all will be saved does no service to God or people, and even fails in its objective to exalt God’s love. It renders the sacrifice of Good Friday nonsensical and unnecessary.
So on this Easter weekend, we must remember the sacrifice God made on Good Friday, the sacrifice he made to save us. And on Easter Sunday, we must remember the resurrection that he accomplished to lead us into life along with him.
