Why Does God Send People To Hell?

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, it’s good to see you all here. Thank you for joining us in worship.

I have a couple of announcements to mention as we begin. First, I hope you’re hungry because there’s BBQ warming back in the kitchen, and it smells so good I might rush through my sermon. Please join us in the fellowship hall after the service for food and fellowship. I’ll be blessing the food in our closing prayer.

It’s good to see our graduates here today (in their caps and gowns). We look forward to honoring you for this important time in your lives in just a little while.

The men’s group will meet this evening at 6:30. The men’s prayer breakfast will be next Sunday morning. All men are invited to those.

This Tuesday is our dinner for Love INC. Amy Campbell says she has everything she needs for that except help. So if you are able and willing, please give Amy a call or see her after our service.

Our monthly deacons meeting will be held tomorrow evening.

Please keep bringing in your toys for Operation Christmas Child. We’ll be collecting some new items beginning in June.

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Heavenly Father, we come before you through the name of our Lord Jesus, thanking you for allowing us to be here as we worship you. Thank you for each and every one of us for helping us to find time to come and hear your word. Fill us with the knowledge of truth. Give us the spirit of understanding. Teach us how to obey your word. Give us the wisdom that comes from you so that we can know how to love each other and to better serve you. We pray this through the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.

Sermon

This morning we’ve honored our graduates for the knowledge they’ve gained, but it’s a sign of our modern times that a lot of people don’t think they need to learn anything anymore. They don’t even think they need to remember anything anymore, because all the knowledge and memory they need is kept in their smartphones.

That’s what a lot of people depend on now to do most of their thinking. It’s just easier that way. Thinking deeply about something or trying to remember some fact that we learned years ago takes a lot of energy, and we only have so much of that, so we let our phones and the internet do that work for us. In a lot of ways we’re allowing smartphones to replace our minds, which gives us a pretty good picture of why the world is so screwed up — we’re keeping our brains back here next to the body part we associate with being the opposite of smart.

One interesting thing about the internet, though, is that now we can know what people are wondering without even asking them. If you have a question, Google’s just a click away. And those billions of questions people ask every day are tracked and ranked and sorted by artificial intelligence so that all you have to do is type a few words into your phone, and Google will give you the most popular questions that begin with those words.

And as it turns out, there are a whole lot of questions people are asking about God in general and Christianity in particular. That’s a good thing. But because the internet is filled with as many false things as true, sometimes the answers we get aren’t the right ones.

I read an article this week about how theologians and scientists went through about five years of internet search data to find the most-asked questions about God and the Bible. A lot of those were so good and so foundational to what Christians believe that I want to take the next month or so looking at them through what the Bible says. Because remember, these are the questions people ask most. That means they’re probably the same ones that your neighbors have, or your coworkers, or your children, or even ones you have. These are questions that are going to come up in your life at some point, so it helps to have an answer ready. It’s exactly what 1 Peter 3:15 says: “ … always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you … ”. That means knowing what you believe, and more importantly, understanding why you believe it.

The first question we’re going to talk about isn’t the one that’s asked the most often, but it is the one that touches on a lot of the other questions that are asked, things like Why does God allow evil? and Do we have free will? That question is this — Why does God send people to hell?

We don’t generally hear a lot about hell anymore, do we? A hundred years ago, especially in the South and New England, you could count on a minister preaching about hell at least once a month. But a lot’s changed since the early part of the twentieth century. Today about 87% of Americans believe in some sort of God. About 72% believe in heaven, heaven being described as “the place where people who had led good lives are eternally rewarded.” There’s a lot wrong with that statement; we’ll talk about that later though. But today only a little over half of Americans — just 58% — believe in hell. In fact, hell is one of the first doctrines given up by people who are moving away from a commitment to the Bible as being the Word of God. And that’s all because of what hell means.

Here’s the definition of hell: “A place of eternal conscious punishment for the wicked.” The problem people have is with two words of that definition — eternal, so having no end, and conscious, which means those in hell both experience and feel that punishment without end. So if God really is a God of love, and if God really is a God of forgiveness, how can he send people to eternal punishment?

It’s a good question, isn’t it? That’s why we don’t like to think about hell. We don’t like to talk about it. But the reality of hell doesn’t change just because the idea of it makes us so uncomfortable, and the Bible is very clear that hell exists.

There are over 160 references to hell in the New Testament alone. Over 70 of those were spoken by Jesus. In fact, Jesus talked more about hell than he did about heaven. If we believe that Christ is Lord, the eternal Son of God, that means every word he spoke is truth. So if we accept his words about the good things as being true — God is our Father, we’re going to enjoy eternal life with him — then we have to accept his words about the bad things as being true as well.

There’s one place in the gospels where Jesus goes into great detail about what hell is and how people get there, and that’s found in Luke chapter 16. Turn there with me now. We’ll be reading verses 19-31:

“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’

But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’

And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house— for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’

But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’

And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’

He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”

And this is God’s word.

We have two main characters in this parable, a rich man and a poor man. The poor man is given a name — Lazarus — which makes him the only person in all of Jesus’s parables who is named. The rich man isn’t named at all. That seems to turn everything on its head. Surely everybody would know the name of the rich man because of his wealth and status, but who would even bother knowing the name of a common beggar? So why does this rich man not have a name? And why does he end up in hell?

We get some clues in verse 19. Again, this man is very rich. He wears the finest, most expensive clothes. There’s nothing wrong with either of those. The problem is with that phrase at the end of verse 19 — he “feasted sumptuously every day.”

This man’s problem is that he’s allowed the good things that God has given him to become his most important things. All he cares about is getting and enjoying more. Nothing’s ever enough. He’s not laying up treasures in heaven because he’s too busy enjoying his treasures on earth — so much so that now this man’s purpose and all the meaning in his life is in his material possessions. His identity isn’t in God, it’s in his stuff. That’s why in verse 23, he dies and finds himself in hell — because he’s built his life on everything but God.

And notice how verse 25 is written. It’s in the past tense, isn’t it? “You in your lifetime received your good things … ” This man died and couldn’t take his good things with him. In life he’d placed all of his worth and meaning and identity in his worldly possessions. But now that those possessions are gone, his identity is gone too. He doesn’t have a name because there’s no “him” left.

We’re all driven to worship, every single person. That desire is like a fire burning inside us. We can turn anything, even good things, into little idols that we worship by giving them all of our time and focus and energy, but the only thing that can really fulfill our desire to worship is God. Anything else that we put first in our lives will never be enough to satisfy but will always end up as a disappointment, leaving that fire to burn and burn until it consumes us. That’s the rich man. He worshipped stuff instead of God, and so he spent his life burning on the inside. Because of that, now he’s going to spend his next life burning on the outside too. He’s in denial.

Even in hell, this rich man still won’t take responsibility for his bad choices. Even in hell, he’s still trying to treat Lazarus like his servant. He even suggests in verses 27 and 28 that God’s not doing enough to warn people about hell. And in both cases, the rich man is told, “No, you’re out of excuses. God gave you plenty of warning through the prophets.” Just like God gives us plenty of warning in the Bible. But we have to listen to those words. We have to accept those words as truth even when — and especially when — that truth makes us uncomfortable.

We can use this parable of the rich man and Lazarus to talk about some the biggest objections people have with hell, and we’ll start off by answering he biggest one first. Is God’s love for this rich man bigger than the rich man’s sin? Yes. So why would an eternally loving and forgiving God still send the rich man to hell?

“Abraham’s side” or “Abraham’s bosom” was a kind of pre-heaven. It was a paradise where the righteous people who were saved by faith went before the resurrection of Christ. In this entire parable, the rich man is talking to Abraham, who was the spiritual father for Israel. And like we’ve said, even in hell, the rich man is still trying to be the boss. And that is the answer to our first question. Because notice the rich man is asking Abraham to do all these things for him. In verse 24, he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool the rich man’s tongue. Then in verses 27 and 28, he asks Abraham to send a warning to his brothers. But never once in this whole conversation does the rich man ask Abraham for the most obvious thing. Never once does the rich man ask to be let out of hell.

Why would a loving and forgiving God send anyone to hell? That answer’s pretty simple — God doesn’t. He doesn’t send anyone to hell. Everyone in hell has sent themselves there.

What we have to understand is that hell is more than a place. Hell is a choice you make over the course of your entire life. If you didn’t have that choice, it wouldn’t be hell. There are people who place their faith in Christ and lean on the Holy Spirit to live a holy life and do their very best every day to say to God, “Your will be done.” And there are people who place their faith in anything else but God and go living the life they choose, and those are the ones to whom God finally says, “Okay, your will be done.”

It’s exactly what we talked about last week with that phrase “and it came to pass.” In the Bible, that phrase often means “the unavoidable result of prior choices.” If all your choices in life are to deny God, God must honor those choices when you die. He’ll give you what you wanted, which is a life completely removed from him. That’s why C.S. Lewis said, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” The ones who are there don’t want out. They don’t want to be with God. In fact, in hell they hate God even more than when they were alive in this world.

Now, some people will hear that answer and say, “Okay, maybe I can understand how our choices in life can lead to hell. But why does hell have to be forever?” That’s an understandable question, because hell is a place so bad it’s beyond our imagination. The Bible uses words like “fire” and “sulfur” and “brimstone” to describe hell. Jesus calls it “outer darkness.” He compares it to Gehenna, which was a giant garbage dump outside Jerusalem where fires always burned and maggots were everywhere. The worst part is that all of those words don’t really describe hell. They’re just the best that human language can do. Hell is actually a lot worse.

Look at this rich man. In verse 23 he’s described as “being in torment.” He asks for a drop of water on his tongue in verse 24 because he’s burning. He’s in anguish.

And according to Christ, this rich man is going to be that way forever. When he talks about the final judgment in Matthew 25, Jesus says that everyone who’s ever lived will be separated into two groups, the sheep and the goats. The sheep will enter into God’s kingdom, but the goats, Jesus says, “will go away into eternal punishment.” Paul says in 1 Thessalonians that those who don’t know God or obey Christ “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.”

Nowhere in the Bible is there any indication at all that hell is temporary, and that can really bother us too. Forever? Why would a loving God punish people in such a horrible way forever? Why punish people forever for sins that took place in just one lifetime — 70, 80, 100 years, many times even less? That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

That’s why you have some denominations and theologians now believing in what’s called annihilationism, which is the teaching that after the last judgment, everyone in hell including Satan and his demons will just cease to exist. God will put them out of their misery. They won’t enjoy eternal life, but they won’t suffer eternal punishment either. They’ll just be nothing nowhere. That seems like a better end, isn’t it? That’s fair. Because God is love, and God shouldn’t want anyone to suffer.

The problem with that — aside from the fact that the Bible doesn’t speak about annihilationism at all — is that our souls were made for forever. Over and over the writers of the Bible and Christ himself speak of the soul as being eternal. This world is just the first stop on a much longer journey. We’re going to go on from this life to another, and that other life won’t end.

There’s another point to make about this, though, and it has to do with what C.S. Lewis said about the doors of hell being locked on the inside. Revelation 16 talks about God’s anger being poured out onto the world in the last days. They’re called the seven bowls of God’s wrath. Painful sores and the sea turning to blood and the sun scorching people and darkness and on and on, but never do the people who are left here repent.

Then in Revelation 22, the angel is showing John a picture of the river of life and the throne of God. He says that those in heaven will see God’s face, and night will be no more because God will be their light, and they will rein forever and ever. And then the angel says this in Revelation 22:11: “Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy.”

That angel is saying something very important. Those in heaven can’t help but be righteous and holy, because they’ll be face to face with God. There’s no sin, because God is there. But the very definition of hell is that it’s a place where God is not, and if God is not there, there can be only evil. Which means that a sinner in hell will never stop sinning. A sinner in hell will never repent.

Just look at the rich man here, asking Abraham for everything but forgiveness, asking for everything except to be let out. You see? People in hell aren’t just punished for the sins they committed on earth. They’re also punished for the sins they keep on committing in hell, and it’s all sin because they’re away from God. There is no goodness, and certainly no love. So if those in hell go on committing an eternal number of sins, the only result can be eternal punishment.

But this issue of hell is about more than just answering objections. It makes us uncomfortable, and we don’t like to think about it, but the truth is that hell serves an important purpose. There are reasons for it, and I’m going to give you three. Here are three reasons why human beings actually need hell.

First, hell is important in helping us answer the problem of evil. We’re going to be talking about the problem of evil in a few weeks, but here’s a quick picture of it. Here’s the argument that a lot of atheists use: If an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing God exists, then evil shouldn’t exist. But evil does exist. Therefore, an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing God doesn’t exist.

And we go, “Uh-oh, that’s actually a really good argument.” It isn’t, though, and we’ll talk about that later, but for today we can say that hell goes a long way in answering that argument. Because yes, there is evil, but hell means that one day evil will be judged and destroyed. It might take longer than we’d like, and sometimes it might look like evil is winning, but that’s because God is merciful and gives us every opportunity to turn from wickedness and be forgiven. Evil will not win. That’s God’s promise, and God always keeps his promises. Again, it will come to pass.

The second reason we need hell goes right along with our first. Hell doesn’t just help answer the promise of evil, it also helps satisfy our longing for justice.

There are a lot of people in our country who have no problem at all with a God who forgives. Their problem is with a God who punishes, and I think that speaks a lot to how easy we’ve had things for a long, long while. Most of the rest of the world has lived out a much different story.

There’s a theologian at Yale named Miroslav Volf. He’s a brilliant man. He was born and raised in Yugoslavia, if you remember in the early 1990s that country fell into a civil war between the Serbians and the Croatians. Miroslav Volf was a witness to that war and saw thousands upon thousands of his people killed. He described part of what he saw and how he looked forward to God’s judgment. Listen to what he writes:

“ … cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit … if God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence, God would not be worthy of worship.”

Those are some pretty harsh words. Those are words that can only be spoken by someone who’s witnessed firsthand the evil that human beings are capable of.

You can say what you want about this world. You can call it beautiful and wonderful, and those things are true, but you can never call this world fair. You can never call this life fair, because it isn’t. The powerful step all over the weak, the tyrant murders the peaceful, and hate does its best to stomp out love.

Hitler committed suicide. He never received the justice under the law that he deserved for the murder of six million Jews and at least five million prisoners of war.

Stalin died of a heart attack. He never received the justice under the law that he deserved for killing 20 million of his own people.

Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, killed 2 million Cambodians in four years during the 1970s. He died of a heart attack under house arrest and never receive the justice under the law that he deserved.

I could go on and on, and every time we would cry out, “It’s not right,” and it isn’t, which is why it’s so easy to give in to bitterness at having to watch injustice every day. The only way to find a sense of peace in this life is to know that there’s a God who will someday put everything right. There is no tyrant, no oppressor, no evil deed, that will go unanswered and unpunished. There is nowhere for darkness to hide. God will judge, and his justice is both holy and absolute.

Here’s our last reason about why we need hell: hell actually helps us understand God’s love. Now that’s a strange thing to say, isn’t it? How can that possibly be the case?

Here’s how: What the rich man is asking for in verse 27 is really a miracle, isn’t it? He wants Abraham to send Lazarus back into this world so he can warn the rich man’s brothers. The fact that the rich man wants Lazarus to do this instead of going himself means two things — the rich man can’t get out of hell, and even if he could, he doesn’t want to.

But Abraham tells him, “No, that won’t work.” He says in verse 29, “They have the words of Moses and the prophets, and that’s enough. If Lazarus would be sent back to warn your brothers about hell, what do you think they’d say? Would they say, ‘Look at our brother and where he is. We better live good lives so we don’t end up there?’ No.”

Here’s what Jesus is saying: The reality of hell will never change the human heart. It won’t solve what’s really wrong with us.

The root of every sin is saying, “Me, me, me,” instead of “God, God, God.” That’s why you can’t scare people into heaven. You can’t tell people that they have to do the right things and put their faith in the right place, or you’ll pay for it forever. Because if they believe that, then none of what they do is for God, it’s all to save themselves. It’s still selfishness.

Only love will change our hearts. The sort of love that shocks us into a new way of living our lives. It’s the love of God that helps us understand that we deserve judgment every bit as much as Hitler and Stalin, because our hearts are just as filthy as theirs were. But God offers grace. He said, “You can’t save yourselves, but my son will save you, and he’s the true home for that desire to worship that you have. Put your worship and your trust there, because that’s what’s going to save you.”

That’s the wonderful thing about the grace of Christ. That one decision to accept in faith that Christ died for you is what washes you clean in front of a holy God.

You see? Without the reality of hell, we can’t really understand our own heart. Because if we spend our whole lives choosing to follow everything but God, if we make the choice every day to put something else above him in our lives, then aren’t we also choosing to be apart from him forever? More than anything else, God is a perfect gentleman. He won’t go where he’s not wanted. So if you go through this life wanting nothing to do with him even though he spends every moment chasing you down, he’s going to oblige you in the next life. People don’t go to hell for their many earthly sins, they go to hell for the single sin of going their entire lives telling God, “No, I reject you.”

The reason it’s so hard for us to accept the idea of hell is because God’s put a portion of his own love into our hearts. We don’t want anyone to suffer forever. We certainly don’t want to see anyone cut off from the love and presence of Christ forever. But if you think a loving God wouldn’t allow a place like hell to exist, you’re assuming that you’re wiser and more compassionate than Jesus himself, you’re forgetting that hell is a choice, and you’re not understanding that the doctrine of hell is what makes God’s love and grace so amazing.

If you ask, “I can’t believe in a God who sends people to hell,” you have to also ask what you expect God to do.

Do you expect him to wipe out people’s sins and give them a fresh start? Well that’s exactly what he did on Calvary.

Do you expect him to just forgive them? Well he can’t, because by definition a perfect God has to be perfectly loving but also perfectly holy. That means that by his very nature, he can’t ignore sin.

So what’s left? Do you expect God to just leave the ones who reject him alone? That’s exactly what he does, and that’s why hell is real.

The right question to ask isn’t why an all-loving God would send people to hell. The right question is why an all-holy God would send anyone to heaven. And the answer to that is Jesus. At the cross, God’s love and God’s holiness met. His judgment was poured out on all of our sins. Christ took on our punishment so we wouldn’t have to.

Our choices have a power that we often don’t understand, and we’ll be talking about that in the next weeks too. The biggest choice we have in life is deciding who we truly are. Is your identity based on something God has given you, or on what God has done for you through Christ? Is your name based on something you can do or become, or is it based on being a child of God? So choose wisely.

Your life’s purpose is to get you ready to stand before God, because every single one of us will have to. So choose wisely. Choose Christ. And if you’re ready to make that choice today, I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father we’re so thankful for the guidance you offer, and how trustworthy you are and will always remain. Though we struggle at times with your word, we know that word is the wisdom and knowledge that we need for both this life and the next. We pray that you continue to lead us in the paths of your righteousness, that you continue to fill us with love and understanding, and that you give us hearts that ache and reach out for the lost of this world. Bless this day, bless the meal we are about to share together, and bless the hands that prepared it. For it’s in Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.