There are usually three extreme approaches to the subject of hell.
The first is deliberate ignorance or utter defiance.
This is where people with an aversion to the doctrine of hell deliberately steer clear of the subject. Whether that is steering clear of verses, chapters or an entire book of the Bible that touch on the subject or any preaching on the subject.
This group usually has a hard time reconciling a loving God with the idea of Him sending people to hell so they tend to read their Bibles with a pair of scissors, cutting out the bits of it they don't like and keeping what they like.
Many others in defiance and a bid to defend God, outrightly claim the loving God of the Bible would never send anyone to hell.
The result of this is the birth of false doctrines such as universalism, which basically states that we are all saved or we will all be saved but ultimately, we all end up in heaven.
Annihilationism is another, which is the belief that unbelievers/sinners will simply seize to exist after death or be completely annihialated after the day of judgement, skipping their date with hell.
The second is trying to reinterpret the word hell in an existential way.
We see this the world over.
Hell is no longer interpreted as a specific dreadful place for unredeemed people and damned spirits, the way God intended and the Bible describes it, but it's a fluid word these days, meaning it can stand for anything from an expression to a terrible experience etc.
I'm sure you've said or heard people say stuff like, "As hot as hell" or"All hell broke lose" or"for the hell of it" or "It was a hell of a day".
The danger of this however is apart from watering down the word, it tends to earth hell, meaning it's reduced to something we just experience on this side of heaven and not something to be dreaded after death.
The third is trying to make light of it or even denying its existence.
The word hell is used so frequently today whether as an expletive, meme or a joke, it has basically lost its weight to draw men to repentance.
It's been watered down to a subject of blasphemy, humor and comedy, and people laugh it off, even look forward to going there.
Others on the other hand argue hell out of existence and say it's a figment of our imagination.
The danger with this however is in an attempt to take the edge out of it or totally ignore its existence, people no longer acknowledge or fear hell and see the need to escape it through salvation, which puts them right where the devil wants them.
All these extremities withstanding, the reality and severity of hell is biblical and God sending people there is as sure as taxes.
As a matter of fact, the Bible doesn't teach God sends people to hell as if by their own choice or volition or like a jolly parent sending off a child to some holiday camp for the summer, the Bible teaches He forcefully throws (casts) them there, involuntarily, as you would do with something you no longer have any use for. (see Mark 9:47, Matthew 13:41-42;13:50, Revelation 20:15).
Hell is basically a place where God throws away that which He no longer has any use for, just like you do with garbage.
Jesus, who spoke about hell more than anyone else in the Bible, compared the place to the valley of Hinnom (Gehenna) in Israel which was basically a huge public garbage dumb where things (even people) were discarded. It was a place that burned continually with smoldering fires.
So how can a loving God do such a "horrible" thing?
Well, we need to consider two key things.
1)The Sin of Adam
Hell was never made for man.
Jesus makes it clear that it was prepared for Satan and his angels. (see Matthew 25:41)
Adam's sin however opened up hell's occupancy to all of us.
Where previously hell was reserved for Satan and his minions, it now has a third occupant in waiting, man.
You see, when Adam fell in the garden, since he carried the entire human race in him, the entire humanity also fell with him.
The Bible in Romans 5:12 says, "When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned."
Paul says in Galatians 3:22 that according to Scripture, we are all confined under sin.
In a nutshell, we are all hell bound on Adam's account.
Hell is everyone's default setting.
One man’s (Adam) disobedience brought death on the human race the Bible says. (see Romans 5:19)
So every one of us is born with a date with hell and we have Adam to thank for that.
2) The Character of God.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make (especially believers) when it comes to God is we tend to take one attribute of His character and make it the whole of God or major on it to the detriment of all His other attributes.
This one-sided view of God's character however is where the bulk of our problems lie and has done more harm than good.
Alot of false doctrines like,"God cannot/does not send people to hell" and"God cannot/does not kill" for example, are birthed out of this partial and biased view of God's character.
People in an attempt to defend or stand up for God based on their narrow-minded view of Him, actually end up misrepresenting Him.
Such people have a hard time reconciling that particular character of God they've made their bread and butter, with His strange acts therefore arguing that nothing bad, like say, sickness or suffering or death or hell can coexist with that particular character they've subcribed to, totally overlooking all His other attributes.
But the truth is God is a multicharactered Being just like His Son Jesus, which explains why we have 4 gospels, each looking at Jesus from a different angle or examing a different attribute of Jesus.
Many of us focus on the side of God we like and ignore the side we don't like as much.
But as much as Paul speaks of the love of the Lord, he also speaks of the terror of the Lord. (see 2 Corinthians 5:11)
In Romans 11:22, he says behold the goodness and severity of God.
They go hand in hand and we need to take who God is a whole not just pick and choose the bits we like about Him.
The glory of God is the sum total of all His attributes and it's very dangerous to define Him by or try to argue from just one of His attributes or make it the sum of all your thinking/theology.
Infact i would submit to you that if you've subscribed to a God that only has good attributes (those you like) and not the severe ones (those you don't like), you are worshipping an idol — a made up god and not the God of the Bible.
R. C. Sproul puts it like this:
"A god who is all love, all grace, all mercy, no sovereignty, no justice, no holiness and no wrath is an idol."
We need a balanced and holistic view of God if we are going to address this and any other difficult life and/or doctrinal questions we wrestle with.
So let's look at 3 in particular, shall we?
The righteousness of God
God's righteousness is one of the least emphasized attribute of God yet it's the most spoken about in Scripture.
God is described as righteous more than He is described as anything else.
Now this simply means two things:
1) He does everything right and He does nothing wrong.
2) He determines what is right and wrong.
It's the latter we are more concerned with for now.
The truth is, God is the ultimate law giver and every one of His creation has to adhere to His set of rules to a tee (whether they like it or not) or face the consequences of their disobedience (sin).
Sin has clear and definite consequences and hell is the ultimate consequence.
As much as God loves man, He loves righteousnes more.
If He was to pick between the two, He'd pick the latter everytime as evident by the flood in Noah's day.
For the sake of His righteousness, God wiped out the then known world, save for 8 people.
That's how serious and adamant God is that the people He created live up to His moral standard of living.
God however understands as much as He demands this moral perfection from us, we cannot meet His high moral standard on our own therefore, in His love and mercy, He has granted us His moral state of perfection (rigteousness) as a gift when we accept Christ as Lord and Saviour which then empowers us to walk righteously before a righteous God.
The Justice of God
Another attribute of God that is often overlooked is His justice.
God is just.
This simply means that He never overlooks any wrongdoing whether in thought, speech or action (sin).
In other words, no one gets away with sin and physical death should not be seen as an escape.
With God, no one gets away with anything.
One day, the God of justice will hold each of us accountable for every sin we have ever done without exception and if that is the case, then we are in deep trouble unless ofcourse Someone else took the punishment on our behalf and I am glad to inform you that Someone did.
Jesus took the punishment that was meant for each and everyone of us for our sins on the cross and those who believe in Him are now justified (declared not guilty) before God.
The Love of God
This is the most popular and most focused on attribute of God today.
Infact, it is the one that is notoriously taken as the whole of God.
Interestingly though, it is one of the least understood.
You see one of the major reasons, I believe, makes it hard for many of us to reconcile a loving God with the idea of Him sending people to hell or wonder how God can love someone and still send them to hell, apart from the fact that we think of Him as soley a God of love, is the unscriptural view of God's love we have subscribed to.
Sad to say, we have subscribed to an overly sentimental view of God’s love birthed out of our own flawed worldly definition/view of love instead of a scriptural one.
Many of us have coined our own image of God's love in our heads rather than sticking to the image of God's love painted in Scripture.
When many of us think of a loving God, we picture this nice, loving and cuddly old Man who would never harm a fly.
That since God is so loving, He cannot cause us any pain or suffering, rather, He shields us from any pain or suffering.
That in a sense, He is there to make us happy. To take pain from us and to give us pleasure.
This is the God preached the world over.
A God who when we sin pats us on the head and says,“boys will be boys”.
However, throughout Scripture, this is not how the love of God is portrayed.
From beginning to end, there is a clear sense of a loving God firmly dealing with sin and we need to recover that non sentimental but scriptural view of God’s love.
Infact, God actually demonstrates His non sentimental love awesomely in arguably one of the most common yet most misunderstood verses in the Bible, John 3:16, which says:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."
Now most of us when we read this verse instantly think,"God sooooooooo loved the world" or"God loved the world so much."
Infact they are several translations like the Good News Translation and the Contemporary English Version which translate the verse as "God loved the world so much" which is not what this verse is saying.
The reason we are quick to interprete it this way is partly because of the sentimental view of God's love we have.
The truth is however, you cannot understand John 3:16 without verse 14 and 15 which say:
"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life."
This is a reference to an account in Numbers 21 when the people of Israel grumbled against God in the wilderness and He sent deadly snakes which killed alot of them. Moses in turn pleaded with God to take away the snakes but the LORD instead instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent, put it on a pole and anyone who had been bitten only had to look at the bronze serpent to live. If you had been bitten and did not, you died.
So God did not do away with the consequence of their sin i.e. take away the snakes, He provided an antidote for it instead.
In other words, God's love is not one that sweeps our sins under the carpet or does away with the consequences of them, but one that provides an antidote or a way of escape.
Let me paint a simple picture for you...
Imagine you are on a boat and this boat is sinking. Scared and frantically trying to stay alive, you look up and breathe a sigh of relief to see a rescue boat quickly approaching you.
Soon the rescue boat is a few meters from your sinking boat and the lifeguard shouts, “put this jacket on and grab on to the pole!” as a life jacket comes flying into your boat and a reaching pole is extended towards you.
A few moments later, he pulls you in and you’re safely on your way back to shore.
Now the sinking boat is Adam, the lifeguard is God and the reaching pole is Jesus.
In giving Adam strict instructions with consequences should He fail to heed to His instructions, we see the righteousness of God and in not letting Adam's sin slide and doing exactly what He had said He would do if Adam disobedied, we see the justice of God.
But since God is also a God of love, He set into motion His rescue plan code named, “Jesus”.
You see, in Adam's story, just like in the story of Moses and in the story of the sinking boat, God is the law/instruction Giver (Righteous), Executioner/Judge (Just) and Savior (Love), all wrapped into one, again bringing to light the multifaced nature of His character.
Through the bronze serpent (a picture of Jesus), He offers an antidote to those dying from the snake bites He sent to them after their sin of complaining.
Through Christ (the reaching pole), He offers a lifeline in a sinking boat (Adam) that He (God) has proclaimed judgement on after Adam's sin.
Bottom line is we need a balanced view of God's attributes such that we do not give one pre-eminence over the other and end up with a one-sided distorted view of God or to put it even more bluntly, end up with an idol.
Each of His attributes qualifies the other and they blend together such as you can't have one without the other.
So by sacrificing His Son, God has paid a huge price to make hell totally unnecessary for each and every one of us.
He has done everything He can to ensure none of us end up in hell.
Now it's really up to us.
Just like on the sinking boat, you alone get to choose whether you will grab on the reaching pole or not.
If you do, you live and if you don’t you die. It’s that simple.
Where previously hell was the only option, now hell is a choice (see Romans 5:17).
Where previously Adam damned us all, now we damn ourselves.
We get to choose life or death just like Adam did.
Now someone might wonder, “But why do I have to believe in Jesus?”
Well, because that is the only way the Savior (God) has chosen to save you.
Just like on the sinking boat, you don’t get to dictate how the lifeguard saves you, you just do what the lifeguard says.
The lifeguard out of his wisdom and counsel has determined this is the way to save you so you either take it or leave it but beggers can't be choosers.
We see the same in Moses' story. The Israelites could not dictate how God was going to save them from the deadly serpents, all they could do was obey God's saving instrutions given to them through Moses. Those who had been bitten and obeyed and looked up at the bronze serpent lived while those who did not obey, died.
However, just like God did not force the Israelites to look up at the Bronze serpent and live, He cannot force you to believe in Jesus and escape hell.
It has to be your choice.
God only gathers the willing (see Matthew 13:34).
Love that forces itself on the unwilling is not love.
The bride has to choose the groom just like the groom has chosen the bride.
But the truth is this...
In the end, everyone gets what they want.
C.S. Lewis puts it like this:
"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."
God doesn't want anyone to go to hell (see 2 Peter 3:9) and He went to great lengths to make sure of that.
He never delights in people getting what they deserve but He delights in saving us from what we deserve. That's grace (yet another of God's attribute).
Those who reject the love of their heavenly Father repeat the mistake of their earthy father, Adam, and they reap Adam's reward.
Their undoing is their doing, not God's...not Adam's...theirs.
“But James, I don’t deserve to go to hell.”
Well according to the Bible, we all do.
"For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23)
In fact if we got what we deserved we'd all go to hell.
But God has gone out of His way to give us what we don't deserve — Salvation.
"and all are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." (Romans 3:24)
God loves you, He died for you in Christ and He offers you His life, sonship, forgiveness, righteousness, justification, and escape from Hell (which is a bonus) as a free gift.
And all you have to do is say,"yes".
That ladies and gentlemen is the truth and the good news of the gospel.
God bless you.
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