Bonus Lesson: Revisiting Hell

Recommend Resources:

Compelled: Speaking and Living the Gospel - Tim Mackie (The Bible Project), video

Isn't the Idea of Hell Just Plain Mean? - Luke 16 (Tim Mackie), video

Jesus Says This ONE Thing Could Send You to HELL. Here's How to AVOID It! (Brandon Robbins), video

The Myth of the Burning Garbage Dump of Gehenna – Todd Bolen, article

What in Hell is Hades – Brian Godawa, article

Where in Hell is Hell – Brian Godawa, article

Sheol, the OT Bad Place -Michael Heiser, article

Hell (1): Paul, James, and Jesus on Gehenna -Marg Mowczko, series of articles

Key Points:

• Our idea of what it means to be a Christian has a lot to do with what we think hell is like. Go ahead, try to explain why someone should be a Christian without mentioning hell. It’s harder than you’d think. Our entire religious identity is wrapped up in our concepts of hell. Yet while we tend to begin our stories, testimonies, and gospel presentations with sin and hell, God doesn’t. This does not mean that hell is unimportant or nonexistent. It does mean that we might need to reevaluate the prominence we’ve given hell in our doctrinal discussions and Sunday sermons.

• The Bible begins with a good creation. Genesis 1:1 does not say that God created earth, heaven, and hell. Hell does not show up anywhere in Genesis. Genesis introduces us to nearly every major theme in the Bible, yet hell is an expansion pack, a late-comer to the narrative.

• According to Jesus, the gospel doesn’t have to begin with (or possibly even include) a threat of hell. Note Mark 1:1 and 1:14-15. If anyone could tell us what the gospel is, it would be Jesus. You don’t get a clearer synopsis of the gospel than Mark 1:14-15, yet Jesus doesn’t mention hell. God begins our story with Eden. Jesus begins His message with an offer to return to Eden. His definition of the gospel is that Eden is returning if you’ll start living like it. And He doesn’t feel like He needs to bring up hell in order to make that offer.

• Jesus did not talk about hell more than any other topic. We only have 15 recorded times when He used the word “hell” in any form (all in Matthew-Luke; He doesn’t talk about hell in John). Some of those instances are parallel passages, so the actual number is even less. Yet in the first 10 chapters of Matthew alone, He mentions heaven over 20 times.

• In the Gospels, Jesus never mentioned hell when He was talking to the lost. The only people He ever threatened with hell were the religious people, the fundamentalists of His day, the people who already believed in Yahweh but were not living in love for God and others.

• Paul, arguably the greatest theologian of the Christian faith, never once mentions hell.

• The Bible as a whole mentions hell a total of—well, it depends on what version you’re using. And no, that’s not because modern versions are removing verses or trying to destroy the doctrine of hell. It comes down to how you translate Hebrew and Greek words. The KJ translates 4 different words as “hell,” 1 Hebrew (Old Testament) and 3 Greek (New Testament). The only problem is that they don’t exactly mean hell the way we tend to think of it.

• Sheol is the Hebrew word often translated “hell,” but it doesn’t mean “an eternal place of torment for the lost.” It just means “the grave.” It’s where all people go when they die—righteous or wicked.

• The Jews, even today, have a very different idea of the afterlife than what we’ve been taught. There is no clear description of a place of fiery eternal torment in the entirety of Genesis – Malachi. In the 400 years between the testaments, Greek mythology began to influence Jewish thought, and the Jews adapted the Greek concept of Hades.

• In Greek mythology, Hades is the same thing as Sheol—the grave, the realm of the dead. The Greeks believed it had 3-5 sections. The Jews simplified that to 2—a place for the righteous and a place for the wicked. When Hades is referenced, it means the same thing as Sheol. It’s still not a burning forever abode of the damned. It’s just the grave.

• Jesus used the word Gehenna eleven times (including a few parallel passages), and James referenced it once. Gehenna is the closest concept in the Bible to what we normally think of when we hear the word “hell.” Gey ben Hinnom (shortened to Gehenna as it crossed into Greek and then English) means “the Valley of the Son of Hinnom” in Hebrew. It was an actual physical valley near Jerusalem where King Ahaz brutally sacrificed babies to pagan deities. The valley quickly became associated with evil and God’s judgment. It’s existence was a constant reminder of the evil and death that had happened there and how God dealt with it. So when Jesus came along and started threatening Gehenna fire for people who mistreated other humans, the Jews would have been thinking of the actual valley just a few miles away and all that had happened there. It would be like if someone showed up around Chernobyl and started saying, “Y’all need to treat each other better or you’ll become just like they are” and then gestured toward some rubble.

• Peter references Greek mythology in 2 Peter 2:4 by saying that God locked up fallen angels in Tartarus for later judgment. Many English versions translate this “hell,” but Tartarus was not hell. It was a supernatural prison (think Phantom Zone from Superman), Alcatraz for rebellious gods and spiritual beings. Whether Peter was saying that Tartarus is real or if he was just referencing the pop culture of his day is a matter of debate.

• Hell is not just an eternal destiny matter. It’s a present reality. Both Jesus (Matthew 23:15) and His brother James (James 3:6) act as if you can draw on the power of hell to affect life on earth at this very moment. It’s like tapping into the Light or Dark Sides of the Force in Star Wars. Every decision you make is bringing a little piece of the future reality of heaven or hell into the present reality. Are you treating people right now the way they will be treated in heaven or hell?

“Christianity asserts that we are going to go on forever...Now there are a great many things that wouldn’t be worth bothering about if I was only going to live eighty years or so, but I had better bother about if I am going to go on living forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are getting worse so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable but it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact, if Christianity is true, hell is precisely the correct technical term for it. 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 to even enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on and 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.”

— CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

• No one ends up in hell who doesn’t want to be there. In Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31, the rich man never asks to leave hell. Instead, he tries to drag Lazarus down with him. Hell is not God’s torture chamber that you need to fear accidentally ending up in. Many good Christians worry about having not said the right words or having not been sincere enough at the moment of conversion. They’re afraid God will send them to hell for not getting the password to heaven just right. But God doesn’t work that way. Hell is not a surprise sprung on you at the end of your life. Hell is separation from God. Only people who willfully chose to separate from God’s way in this life will be separated from Him in the next. Hell is not punishment you fall into. Hell is God’s last and greatest monument to human dignity. If you didn’t want His way in this life, He’s not going to force you to live it for all of eternity.

“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

-C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

• The concept of a Lake of Fire shows up in 4 verses in Revelation only. Similar to Peter’s mention of Tartarus, John was drawing on Greek mythology. Many people are familiar with the River Styx in Hades, but the Greeks believed Hades had 5 rivers. One of them was Phlegethon, the River of Fire. John adapted that imagery to be a lake of fire.

• Plenty of other Scriptures describe fire and judgment that do not mention the word “hell” specifically. But we have to be careful not to read into a passage what isn’t there. We tend to see a description of fire and automatically assume hell because, well, hell and fire, duh. But we don’t do that in real life. There are several different types of fire that serve several different purposes. You can lose your life in house fire, but in a camp fire, you might just overtoast your marshmallow. A car fire destroys, but fire on a stove can make raw food safe to eat, providing sustenance. Fire serves different purposes in different circumstances. And in an Iron Age culture, fire would have been seen as purifying as well. Fire was used to refine metal, to remove the impurities, not to destroy the metal.

• “It is not our responsibility to determine the temperature of hell or the attendance list of heaven.” -various