Is Hell Really "Hell"?

Students of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost cannot soon forget his Biblical description of hell. Writing out of his own blindness, Milton paints hell as a place of "darkness visible." Not only is hell a place of palpable darkness, it is an abyss of sulfurous flames in which the newly cast Lucifer, now Satan, rolls in thunderous pain as the embodiment of Leviathan. But it is Satan himself who defines hell also as a state of mind, a state which, in his rebellion, he deceives himself into thinking he can turn into a "heaven" if he wills. "For the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." But the dramatic irony Milton conveys is that Satan brings his hell with him wherever he goes because rebellion itself is hell. Thus Milton, himself a devout Puritan, speaks through the mind of his epic anti-hero to express a dual truth: hell is both a physical place of unending torment and a spiritual state of doom. Despite his boast, Satan cannot turn his depraved mind into a paradise; he must endure hell as hell forever.

Scripture affords such a picture of mental and physical torment in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Who could doubt the insanity of the men of Sodom who know nothing better than to violate even angelic strangers if they could? To be lost in a state of obsession that has turned destructive is certainly no pleasure, and it is true to say that Sodom and Gomorrah's fate was inevitable: they experienced the physical doom that already plagued them mentally and spiritually. Those who see in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah a picture of ultimate annihilation fail to remember that our Lord Himself referred to the fate of these twin cities in His teachings about final judgment. Not only does He reveal the unthinkable fact that it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah and for Tyre and Sidon on Judgment Day than for the cities that have heard and rejected the Gospel--Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum--He confirms that the fate of these condemned cities is not over (Matthew 10:15; 11:23-24; Luke 10:12). The fire that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah historically will just as surely punish them eternally. Why else would Jesus describe their fate as "more tolerable" if it has already ended?

It is true that, despite Scripture's vivid teachings about hell as an actual place of eternal torment, our minds are incapable of comprehending hell's reality. But, unless we even attempt to grasp our otherwise inevitable fate, can we even begin to worship our Redeemer who bore our suffering on Calvary? The agonies of crucifixion are themselves a picture of unending and immeasurable pain. Even God Himself looked away when His Son bore our hell on Calvary. If eye has not seen nor ear heard the things that God has prepared for those who love Him (I Corinthians 2:9), we can be sure that our human imagination is likewise incapable of comprehending hell, whether in its duration or in its intensity. This inability to grasp the awfulness of hell surfaces daily in casual speech. Do people really know what they are saying in their bold and ubiquitous use of this word? If we really believed our Lord's words about hell, we would regard this profane word as truly the worst anyone can say--worse even than the most explicit obscenity--for this word sums up sin and rebellion in its entirety.

With what flippancy and ignorance did the otherwise brilliant humorist Mark Twain quip this advice: "Go to Heaven for the climate and Hell for the company." Twain failed to grasp what Milton accurately told--that hell is fundamentally a place of all-encompassing lostness and isolation where all human comforts have been removed, companionship and camaraderie most of all. Along this line, my father used to tell of a man who had a dream where people in heaven and hell alike were seated at a large banquet table loaded with food. There was only one problem: they all had four-foot utensils attached to their arms which prevented them from feeding themselves any of the food. The banqueteers in hell fussed and fumed over their fate in despair, while the guests in heaven were happily feeding each other across the table, problem solved. Hell is indeed selfishness and narcissism forever without love, peace, light, and, most of all, without God.

But our Lord describes hell in all of these ways and more: He speaks so much about hell, in fact, that we might arguably contend that one's doctrine of hell sets the boundary from which all other truth must flow. How otherwise do we explain that the Lord Himself introduced the concept of death as punishment into His perfect Paradise? "For in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17). It is Satan, not God, who equivocates the meaning of "death," negating God's Word, "You shall not surely die: for God knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:4-5). Clearly, what he said was half true, as equivocation always is: the immediate death that Adam and Eve experienced was not physical but spiritual; death brought not a loss of consciousness but an altered consciousness in which they lost their sense of God's Presence while deluding themselves that they were God.

Certainly, had the Lord not atoned for their sin, Adam and Eve would have died physically as surely as they died spiritually, but even physical death would not have terminated their spiritual punishment. Of this truth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow correctly writes in his lyric poem, "A Psalm of Life," saying, "Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal; / Dust thou art, to dust returnest, / Was not spoken of the soul." If death brought loss of consciousness, precluding, therefore, one's fate in hell, then the only punishment for sin would be that which is administered in this life. But we all know that justice outlives the grave and that many sins, as Paul says, are hidden in this life, to be revealed only in the judgment (I Timothy 5:24). But then, what does the Lord mean when he says to Adam, "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19)?

Clearly, the context is speaking of Adam's body, for the description of him as being made of dust does not include the entirety of his creation, which began in the mind of God as a soul made in the image of God (Genesis 3:26-27). The idea of Adam existed before Adam, and when God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground, He then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). Not only does this "soul" ("nephesh" in Hebrew) possess the breath of life as all living creatures do, it possesses consciousness of that life with a unique and irreplaceable identity that sets its consciousness apart from every other soul in the universe. This fact alone disproves the Transcendental concept of the Oversoul in which all souls merge into a collective consciousness as parts of the whole. This teaching is an obvious distortion of what Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 12:7, when he says, "the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it."

The presence of a soul in man not only necessitates that being's self-consciousness but also requires its individual identity, moral accountability, and eternal destiny. Certainly, it is man's possession of a soul that even makes sin possible, for surely no lion or bear will be punished for tearing its prey limb from limb. It is this possession of a soul that makes atonement necessary. Neither sin nor punishment for sin would be logically possible or necessary if the soul was not conscious of moral choice for which it must give account. To argue, as many do, that the soul can cease to exist once the body is destroyed is to see soul and body as inseparable and identical when they are certainly not. There is no necessary codependency between body and soul. We have a body, but we are a soul. To say that the soul can cease to exist, making its eternal punishment impossible, is to say that the breath of God in man--the breath God gave to man--is but a breath that can be snuffed out by God Himself.

Certainly, to some, this is an attractive view. But even Scripture's poetic descriptions of such a fate invariably require a sense of moral accountability that endures forever. Time would prevent a deep study of this idea in the Psalms or in the wisdom literature, but if the soul is not eternal, the epicureans are right: we do indeed eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But God's Word says, "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9:27). Paul reminds Christians that we, too, will be judged. "Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men" (II Corinthians 5:9-11). It would certainly appear that the nature of eternal punishment would require the eternal nature of the soul. Or, to turn the point around, it would seem by logic alone that the eternal nature of the soul would require eternal accountability. And this logic is, in fact, made vividly plain by Scripture's many descriptions of eternal conscious torment. If sin is to be punished, it must be punished in proportion to the One wronged--our eternal Creator God.

Certainly, there are those who question Scripture's clarity regarding whether the soul is indeed immortal. Those who argue that the soul is not immortal are not mere materialists or Marxists who believe human beings crumble to dust when they die. They argue, and rather cleverly, that since the Fall, man's natural fate is to die and that immortality was lost and can only be restored through faith in Christ as a gift from God. They believe that death and, with it, cessation of consciousness, is the natural fate of the unbeliever. For them, death includes ceasing to exist. But this doesn't solve the problem. If death were the same as nonexistence, as we have already examined, then any sort of after-death punishment would be impossible. And to argue that after-death punishment would be inflicted only for a specific period of time would be to require said unredeemed soul to have bestowed upon it the very "immortality" supposedly reserved for only the redeemed. This argument is illogical on its face.

To argue that final punishment would last only for a period of time assumes that time still exists beyond the grave. But the very concepts of time and eternity are by nature mutually exclusive. It is a contradiction in terms to say that eternity is accountable to any sense of time. This means, then, that understanding eternity is beyond our capability, just as is understanding what life was like in Eden before the Fall. We cannot draw the lines between life and death with the five bold colors in the toddler's crayon box. We must compare Scripture with Scripture without omitting the colors we think are too dark. Inasmuch as there could be no punishment beyond the grave if the unredeemed are stripped of immortality, then they are of necessity punished only in this life or not punished at all. And, for all we might say about a loving God not sending anyone to hell, how could a loving God not punish sin? Clearly, Scripture's use of the word "death" is not restricted to the body, for our Lord teaches that the unredeemed are dead already in this life because in their unbelief they have never been born again from above. The spiritually dead in this life remain dead in the next but in an entirely new dimension felt beyond the grave.

Some stumble at Scripture's frequent use of the word "perish," believing it to be synonymous with being extinguished. But if this were so, it would be impossible to "rescue the perishing," as the great gospel song commands. To assign to the word "perish" a merely physical meaning is to strip it of any meaning at all. Certainly, we do not speak of a beloved pet as "perishing." To perish is not the same as to "die." The spiritual nature of "perishing," then, which is not only required for the word's central meaning but intended in its frequent use in Scripture, includes by its very nature a state and fate which is ultimately spiritual. To "perish" is certainly not to reach some state of blissful oblivion paralleling Nirvana. On the contrary, specific references to hell teach quite the opposite: that the spiritually dead cannot die but must endure a living death.

This paradox is vividly portrayed in the Book of Revelation when the tormented who face the locusts from the abyss long for death but cannot find it (Revelation 9:6). There is no mercy to be found even in death, for evil pursues the wicked beyond the grave, where those who took the mark of the beast can find no rest day or night but live in constant torment (Revelation 14:9-11). This paradox of a living death is also portrayed by Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus, which, contrary to popular belief, is not a parable but an actual account, given the fact that proper names are used, unlike in any of Jesus' parables. The rich man is not only conscious in death, he is physically aware of pain. Those who argue that a body cannot burn forever are completely disregarding the fact that physical pain can be felt in the soul. This is why abuse of any kind is evil. And surely the physical torment of spiritual pain is what our Lord endured on the Cross in ways we are utterly incapable of comprehending.

We know full well that people have demonstrated the ability to feel physical pain when none was physically inflicted, such as when a twin experienced an accident and the other twin felt phantom pain. This is also the case with amputees. Likewise, those who should have felt pain sometimes feel none when a far greater purpose overrules. The idea that pain is subjective to each person is its own phenomenon, as is the inexplicable fact that some people have a high pain tolerance and some have a low tolerance or none at all. Pain is not only subjective, it is inherently mental in order to be physical at all. Therefore, if we argue that the wicked cease to exist because their bodies must logically be burned up after a period of time, we are not accounting for the mind or the soul. Jesus Himself asked what it should profit a man if he gained the whole world but lost his own soul, or what he should give in exchange for his soul. The soul is a world of its own, and if we do not believe this, we jeopardize much more than our view of hell.

We jeopardize our own call to evangelism or our passion to reach the lost if we believe, ultimately, that their suffering is measurable because they are human beings. God's Word does not teach that life is merely temporal even when it is brief. The fact that the Psalmists describe our life as a vapor does not preclude the realization that "at Thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore" (Psalm 16:11). The point being made is the brevity of this life in contrast to the permanence of the next. We might say, in keeping with Psalm 1, that there is no statute of limitations for the judgment of the ungodly. If in the strictest literalness, they merely perished as the "chaff" that the wind drives away (Psalm 1:4), then the very idea of their facing divine judgment is logically impossible. But face it, they will: "Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish" (Psalm 1:5-6). The "way" of the ungodly shall perish, contrary to the scornful counsel of their swagger. If we are consistent with other core Scriptures that describe the fate of the wicked, we will not read into the word "perish" a merely physical death or cessation.

Even the primitive understanding of the resurrection in Job's time testifies to a consciousness beyond the grave. And the fact that this consciousness extends to Sheol whether or not the deceased were godly or ungodly further proves that the dead are not annihilated. Even if they were, at what point would this happen--after millennia of being bound in the grave? For God's Word says that all of the unredeemed will appear before the Great White Throne Judgment of God. They will not only appear in spirit, their bodies will be resurrected for this purpose as they face their fate. Whatever punishment they endure after death now will be compounded by the verdict at the Great White Throne. We are not capable of understanding what this new level of punishment entails, but to assume that it involves annihilation is absurd when the soul might as well have been annihilated in the first place rather than to be resurrected to face its God.

Scripture is clear that this life is not all there is but that there is a reckoning day for what we have done in this life. This reckoning day is the ultimate boundary toward which time itself is moving. This day, as vividly portrayed in stark simplicity in the medieval play Everyman, gives meaning to all morality. How could it even be murder to take a life if that life ended when it was taken, as a dog's or an antelope's? Murder is murder because to kill the body is to decide the premature fate of the soul. If this were not so, blood would not be the required payment for blood. The life is in the blood because the blood itself is life. This is true on a spiritual level and a physical level, but it is true in a way we cannot fathom. The idea that blood can be shed yet cry out on its own from the ground points back to Abel's murder in the dawn of civilization. It also proves why this world must one day be destroyed as the scene of worldwide bloodshed for centuries. The shedding of blood is Satanic, and any ceremonial celebration of blood outside of the Atonement is occult. Why? Because the blood of the innocents still cries out from the earth after centuries, awaiting that final day when sin will be punished eternally.

But those who contend that the soul is not immortal ignore not only the fact that the Lord God breathed into Adam's nostrils His own breath of life, but also the fact that we inherited this nature from Adam as surely as we inherited his sin nature. As we have already seen, to argue that we do not possess an immortal soul unless or until we receive eternal life causes its own unsolvable dilemmas. How or why would we even need eternal life if not to escape the inevitable counterpart, eternal death? When Jesus teaches in John 3:16 that this eternal life begins at the moment we are born again, He contrasts this life with our inevitable fate: that we might not perish. As we have already seen, the word "perish" does not require cessation of consciousness, for the unjust are perishing now, and this word is indeed used in connection with the living.

Certainly, human beings are not immortal in their bodies as angels are, and they are obviously not eternal as God is, but the nature of the human soul surpasses even that of the angels, which question David ponders in Psalm 8, such that the human soul can and must be redeemed, whereas an angel's spirit cannot. Some would see in this difference between the human soul and the angel's spirit the very point they would seek to make: that the soul is not immortal until it is granted the spirit from above. It is not that the unredeemed receive a spirit when they come to faith; the spirit they already have which is dead is quickened and made alive in Christ (Ephesians 2:1, 5; Romans 8:11). Although the state of the soul after death is complex in the Old Testament, the New Testament provides numerous explicit teachings that the second death is the negative and evil parallel to eternal life and righteousness forever.

To dismiss our Lord's explicit teachings on the weeping and gnashing of teeth that the ungodly will endure in hell (Matthew 8:12; 13:42; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28), where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched (Isaiah 66:24; Mark 9:48), does violence not only to the meaning of language but to one's handling of Scripture. If we pick and choose what we take literally and what we take metaphorically, especially when those literal images are presented with the strongest and most vivid descriptions possible, we have ignored the most loving thing our Lord could do for us outside of dying for us on the Cross: to warn us of the perils of rejecting His substitutionary death. Even the words "peril" and "perish" bear a common root of trying or risking danger. The soul who ignores his own peril is already floundering in it.

Then we have what would appear to be the clinching argument for those who teach that hell is not forever, even if it exists: the nature of a loving God who would not send us there. But why the burden of blame should be upon God and not the creatures He sent His Son to save remains unclear, as errors always do. Better that we should ask how we could ignore so great a salvation or why we should expect to escape eternal punishment when we disregarded the punishment of our Savior on our behalf (Hebrews 2:3). For this purpose, the Apostle Paul jeopardized his life daily, to warn us of the wrath to come, specifying it as clearly "everlasting destruction" (II Thessalonians 1:8-9). That this destruction is spiritual and not merely physical in nature is also clear, for the wicked will be shut out of the Presence of God forever, which fact becomes meaningless if they are not aware of this punishment which is so designed.

David voices the paradox of the soul's separation from God in Psalm 139. "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee" (Psalm 139:7-12). Frances Thompson in his lyrical masterpiece, The Hound of Heaven, portrays this truth from the viewpoint of its most merciful application: the Lord will do everything a loving Lord can do to prevent me from going to hell--everything except fail to punish sin as a loving and holy God must--and everything except usurp my free will, apart from which moral accountability is impossible.

But those who doubt the perpetual nature of hell for the unbeliever also argue that a loving parent would not punish a child forever for a single offense; therefore, how much less would God punish someone forever for a finite sin? But there are several problems with this view, none of which are solved by negating the belief in everlasting torment. To assume that God is accountable to His creatures is an insult to His justice, for our Lord Jesus has already borne our punishment. Furthermore, to assume that we could ever be more righteous or loving or forgiving than God assumes that we also possess the omniscience and the omnipresence to grasp the full scope of even one sin, the impact of which is proved by Adam and Eve's sin alone on all of creation for all time.

Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol and Philip Van Doren Stern in his short story, "The Greatest Gift," upon which Frank Capra based the Christmas film classic, It's a Wonderful Life, capture the truth of the butterfly effect: even one deed bears an almost untraceable chain of consequences. In fact, even the omission of one good deed bears untold evil and pain. Who are we, then, to assume that we know what God Almighty should and should not punish or how and when? The self-righteous presumption required even to voice this protest ignores the reality not only of Christ's punishment for our sins on the Cross but the fact that our Lord would have borne this punishment for even one sin--the seemingly "tame" sin of Adam and Eve.

Not only is a faulty view of sin required to make this claim against the nature of a loving God, so is a faulty view of God Himself as the ultimate target of every sin. "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest," David prays in Psalm 51:4. Not only must every sin be punished or atoned, every sin has eternal ramifications because of having been committed against a holy, eternal God. If this were not so, the Cross was unnecessary, even a farce. If our fate as sinners would soon come to an end, why did Jesus die in our place? Wouldn't it have been a whole lot easier to have allowed us simply to cease to exist? We cannot define God by our own terms; to do so is the heart of idolatry. On the contrary, God's holiness cannot even be grasped, let alone quantified. Therefore, if even one sin requires blood atonement, then how are we to assume that the cumulative effect of all sins across the ages has not done untold damage to the world our God created, bringing untold grief also to His heart?

Most importantly, this argument fails to account for the fact that the ultimate sin which requires punishment is the sin of unbelief. This sin cannot be quantified as a "single sin" but must be understood as a perpetual state of sustained rebellion against God and against all that is holy, righteous, and good forever. Nowhere is this rebellion more plain than in the soul's final rejection of Christ's death on the Cross. For those who have never heard, Scripture does teach degrees of punishment--punishment referred to as "stripes" (Isaiah 53:5; Luke 12:48; I Peter 2:24). God is never unjust, therefore, even in His sentencing for all eternity.

Ultimately, if we do not believe that hell is forever or that it is a place of physical torment as Jesus said it was, we are left with few alternatives other than to assume that Jesus was being hyperbolic or merely poetic when He warned so vividly of hellfire. Clearly, warnings against hell and final judgment were a centerpiece of Jesus' teaching and present the core reason for His death on our behalf. God receives no pleasure whatsoever in the death of the wicked but desires for the wicked to turn from his ways and live (Ezekiel 33:11). We can be sure, therefore, that whatever God decides to punish indeed required punishment and to that exact degree. But if hell in any measure is not meant to last forever, then the words of Scripture describing exactly that are lies of the cruelest sort. If our Lord was in any way exaggerating, then the Cross was also exaggerated. And the redeemed simply enjoy a nice bonus for being allowed eternal life. But somehow in our gut we know better. We know there is a hell because there is a Satan, and we know that Satan's followers will be cast into the lake of fire along with him.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of questions regarding the true nature of hell. Those who have turned their questions into pronouncements in their sophistication of disbelief have propagated the idea that the Bible does not teach eternal conscious torment but annihilationism or conditionalism. But this has never been the official position of the historic Church. On the contrary, the position of the Church throughout the ages as based on God's Word is that one cannot by any means decide for himself what hell is, any more than Milton's Satan can determine to make a heaven of hell. The justice of God and the wrath of God are not the footnote to our theology but in a very real sense our starting point beginning in Paradise itself. We will not understand salvation until we understand just what we have been saved from: the presence of sin in this life and the punishment for sin in the next. May we earnestly search God's Word for the truth and teach men so. If they will be offended at hell, they will be just as offended at sin. And if they are offended at being called sinners, they can never be found by our wonderful Lord but are lost to darkness and pain forever.