Is Hell Compatible with a Loving God?

Raise your hand if as a kid you ever ran a lemonade stand. What were the rest of you doing? I love lemonade stands and the kids who run them. It shows grit. Determination. Ownership. And lemonade is great, although I will say, not even lemonade stands can escape inflation! I remember it being $0.25 for a glass, and then I see one the other say where they are charging $1.50! That is a 500% increase! My mind goes to, “What kind of overhead expenses do they have to need those kinds of margins?” Shoot, next thing you know, lemonade stands are going to be subscription based. Sign here to pay for 11 months, and get your 12 month of lemonade free. These business kids.

But lemonade stands haven’t been great for everyone, and that includes the 5-year-old daughter of Andre Spicer in East London who in 2017 was slapped with nearly a $200 fine for operating her lemonade “business” without a permit. $200! Now, the fine ended up being reviewed and ultimately canceled, but notice your reaction to that story. That is appalling! Even if it was true that you needed to get a permit for a lemonade stand, giving a 5-year-old girl a $200 fine is insane. That punishment seems so outrageous and unfair compared to the actions that caused it.

That right there is at the heart of the faith question we are wrestling with today: Is Hell Compatible with a Loving God? This is one of the most difficult and unsettling doctrines of the Christian faith. The idea that if someone doesn’t subscribe to the beliefs of a certain religion, God would cast them into a place of eternal suffering—it feels extreme, even offensive. It feels like the officer giving a $200 fine to a child running a lemonade stand. The punishment doesn’t just seem harsh—it seems completely outrageous. Our minds can’t even grasp the weight of an eternal punishment like hell, and so what do we do? We avoid it. We don’t think about it. We don’t talk about it. Someone brings it up, and we change the subject because down deep even we struggle with the idea of hell. “Let’s just focus on Jesus and the loving things He had to say.” Well, it turns out Jesus isn’t against talking about hell either. In fact, 13% of Jesus’ recorded words in the gospels involved judgement and hell. Half of his parables reference judgement, separation, or the consequence of rejecting God. Jesus not only didn’t avoid the topic, but He saw a proper understanding of hell as something that was necessary to fully grasp the gospel. And that is what we are going to wrestle with today. You cannot fully grasp the justice, mercy, and ultimately, love of God apart from the doctrine of hell. It is essential.

Now to understand hell you have to understand two things: the nature of God and the reality of our sin. The first is the nature of God. Something that becomes super clear when looking at Scripture is that God is both a God of love and a God of justice. 1 John 4:8 says, “But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” And Deuteronomy 32:4 describes God and says, “He is the Rock; his deeds are perfect. Everything he does is just and fair. He is a faithful God who does no wrong; how just and upright he is!” He is a perfectly loving God and He is a perfectly just God. And this is where people have a problem…because the doctrine of hell seems to completely contradict that! “How can a God of love also be filled with wrath and anger? Why does He need to get angry and punish people? Why can’t He just accept everyone?” However, this assumes that wrath and anger are the opposite of love rather than flowing out of it. Becky Pippert, in her book Hope Has Its Reasons, talks about this when she says, “Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it…. Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference…. God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer…which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.” The wrath of God towards sin is not the denial of His love. It is the very proof of it.

And here’s the crazy part. I think our culture today understands this more than we realize! Something that has become abundantly clear over the last 10 years or so is that justice is one of the highest regarded virtues in our society. We demand justice when we see oppression, corruption, or wrongdoing. We cry out when the guilty go free, and we instinctively know that evil cannot simply be ignored or excused. If a judge were to let a murderer walk free without consequence, we wouldn’t call that love—we would call it a miscarriage of justice. And yet, we don’t do the same with God? If God truly loves the world, then He must also punish that which destroys it.

The truth is, our struggle with hell isn’t so much about God’s justice—it’s about our own self-perception of our condition. We don’t reject the idea of punishment; we reject the idea that we could possibly deserve it. This is where we are so blind to how bad things really are. We tend to think that, in general, we are good people. Maybe we mess up sometimes, but overall, we are pretty good. And with that mindset, hell is going to always seems appalling, outrageous, and unjust. But what if sin is not just “breaking the rules” or making the wrong choices within a finite lifetime, but instead, sin is the willful rejection of God. Sin, as Saint Augustine of Hippo writes, is, “The essence of sin is the desire to be our own god.” Sin is the willful running towards the self and away from the presence of God. We see this in John 3:18–20 where it says, “There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed.”

Notice, it doesn’t say, “God’s light came into the world, saw everyone living in darkness, and cast them into hell.” No—the light came, but people loved the darkness more than the light. They chose the darkness within themselves over the illuminating presence of Christ. In doing so, they didn’t just passively reject God; they actively fled from Him, the very source of life and light, retreating further and further into themselves. God does not “throw people into hell” against their will. People choose hell—because hell is the eternal consequence of choosing self over God. As the late pastor Timothy Keller describes, “Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.”

This is the critical realization you must make today: Hell isn’t just some distant place out there. Hell is in here. Hell is in each one of us. Psalm 51 tells us we were born into sin, which means that from the very beginning, a flame of hell has been burning inside us—the flame of self-centeredness, selfishness, bitterness, and envy. The flame that whispers, “I don’t want God. I know best. I will live for myself.” C.S. Lewis captures this reality in The Great Divorce when he writes, , “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.” Every single one of us is on a path of self-destruction, trapped in a prison of our own making, destined to perish. So the real question isn’t, “Why do some go to hell?” but rather, “Why does God save anyone at all?” If Romans 3:10–11 is true, “No one is righteous— not even one. No one is truly wise; no one is seeking God,” then why is anyone saved? In our sin, we are not righteous. We are not seeking God, and even worse than that, there is nothing within us that wants to. Our sinful nature doesn’t fear hell. No, it craves it. Everything in our sinful nature wants to flee the presence of God so that we can be our own god, and hell is God giving us over to that very desire.

But this is where the doctrine of hell sets up the full beauty and glory of the gospel. Rather than leaving us to perish in our self-inflicted destruction - as He should have! That would have been justice! - John 3:16–17 says, “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.” What is God’s response to a world that seeks evil and rejects Him? Love. Rather than allowing the separation we think we want, He pursues. Jesus comes down, not to judge the world - not to throw people into hell, but to save the world - to save you and me from the the very hell we are trapped in. And how we He do that? Well, it’s those last two words: “Through him.”

This is where we see the full justice and love of God come together at the cross. The justice of God means that there must be a punishment for sin. The punishment of the wrath of hell must be poured out. And yet, for some reason, Jesus loved you so much that He was willing to take the punishment of hell upon Himself at the cross. We often focus on the physical suffering Jesus endured at the cross, which was horrific, but it pales in comparison to what He took on spiritually. Isaiah 53:6 says that at the cross, “Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.” He became sin, and in doing so, received the full punishment of hell - complete and total separation from the Father - at the cross. Theologian R.C. Sproul says about this, “The most violent expression of God’s wrath and justice is seen in the cross. If ever a person had room to complain of injustice, it was Jesus. He was the only innocent man ever to be punished by God. If we stagger at the wrath of God, let us stagger at the Cross.”

Let’s close with this. The doctrine of hell is a hard truth—one we should never be comfortable with, but one we also cannot ignore. My prayer is that it stirs three things in you: First, urgency in your witness. If you were on a sinking ship, you wouldn’t sit idly by, pretending everything was fine. You’d act. You’d warn others. You’d do everything in your power to help them reach safety. The same is true here. Every person in your life is heading toward eternal destruction apart from Christ. So pray for them. Love them deeply. Live each day with an urgency to shine the hope of Jesus to them. Second, humility in your witness. We don’t look down on those apart from Christ because, if not for the sheer grace of God, that would be us too. You didn’t save yourself. Christ saved you when you wanted nothing to do with Him. That truth should strip away pride and fill you with compassion as you share the Gospel. And third, awe in your view of God’s love. The reality is this: the Gospel is only as beautiful as the depth to which you understand your need for it. If you find yourself feeling apathetic or indifferent about your faith today, could it be that you’ve failed to fully grasp the depth of your brokenness—and because of that, you’ve missed the sheer magnitude of Jesus’ love for you found at the cross? The more you let the reality of hell AND the reality of the gospel penetrate your heart, faith will no longer remain intellectual, but it will begin to transform your life. Let us pray.