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The Bible’s teaching on hell is a lot to take in, if one takes it seriously. Many don’t. God’s unending judgment of unbelievers is a step too far even for people who like other parts of the Bible.
But we can’t pick and choose doctrines. We must believe what God says about hell. Despite its offensiveness, hell is not a fringe topic of Scripture. It is found in both Testaments and is at the center of the warnings of Jesus and the Apostles. Rightly understood, the doctrine even “has the support of reason,” as C.S. Lewis put it. And like all other revelation, the truth about hell is “profitable for teaching, . . . that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). If you don’t believe in hell, you will be incomplete and ill-equipped for faithful living in God’s world.
hell is real
Studying what the Bible says about hell can try one’s faith. One popular evangelical recently questioned the reality of eternal conscious punishment, partly over how atheists caricature hell as an “eternal barbecue for sinners.” But such phrases are prejudicial and mishandle the biblical testimony. Louis Berkhof notes that “a great deal of the language concerning heaven and hell must be understood figuratively” and therefore spoken about cautiously. When Scripture says that heaven’s street is “pure gold” (Rev. 21:21), it is delighting our imagination over the gracious reward that “God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). Likewise, the prospect of entering a “bottomless pit” and “lake of fire” (Rev. 9:2; 20:14) should make us shudder at losing God’s good presence. These kinds of images are suggestive, not descriptive. The Reformers, their confessions, and their heirs offer few details about the particulars of hell. They summarize the consistent but often nonspecific data of Scripture but go no further.
Though Scripture uses nonliteral symbols to describe hell, it demands that we affirm hell as a real place of unending negative judgment against the unsaved. Hell is one of just two locations that people will enter after this life. Whereas the godly are welcomed into heaven (Matt. 25:34), the wicked are cast into hell (5:29–30; Luke 12:5). Hell is like an unbearably broken country from which one cannot escape (Luke 16:26). In this dreadful place, the Lord exercises righteous punishment. God the Judge is active even in hell (Ps. 139:8), though without any blessed manifestation of His love, mercy, and grace. This makes hell a place of gloomy darkness in which one’s soul and body perpetually experience a sort of death (Matt. 10:28; 2 Peter 2:4). Hell’s torments are sharply contrasted with heaven’s comforts (Luke 16:25).
Some Christians have suggested that hell is a symbol for the total annihilation of unbelievers at or after the final judgment. They claim that only the redeemed have unending life. Against this view, Scripture uses the same words to describe the duration of the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the righteous (Hebrew olam, Dan. 12:2; Greek aiōnios, Matt. 25:46). Four times in a brief speech, Jesus repeats this grim reality: Hell’s fires will never be quenched (Mark 9:43–48). God’s prophets, and none more so than Jesus, warn against hell because it is a place of never-ending loss, not because it is a state of nonbeing.
Hell is a real place populated by real people that should be avoided, literally, at all costs (Matt. 16:26). Still, the idea of hell so offends our sensibilities that it may seem incongruous with God’s justice.
hell is just
Hell cannot be unjust because God is “completely . . . just” (Belgic Confession, art. 1). “All his ways are justice” (Deut. 32:4). “The Judge of all the earth” will “do what is just” (Gen. 18:25). A few considerations can help us understand the justice of hell.
Hell is chosen. Unbelievers choose to distance themselves from God’s light in nature (Rom. 1:19–21) and His light that shines in Jesus (John 3:19), who also gives light to the eternal city (Rev. 21:23). God therefore commits no injustice in permitting the wicked to spiral further away from Him and His good gifts (Rom. 1:24–32). Hell’s chosenness also makes it tragic: God made man so that he would seek and find Him (Acts 17:26–27). Instead, sinners despise His offer of grace and try to run from Him—hell is the farthest place to which they can go.
Hell is proportionate. Scripture teaches that because God is just, the penalty that the wicked receive is perfectly balanced with their offenses. The metrical version of Psalm 94 makes this point: “Almighty Lord God, who judges the earth, arise, give the proud just what they deserve” (vv. 1–2, emphasis added). Judgment will be carefully measured according to the amount of light that unbelievers received and rejected (Luke 12:42–48; John 9:39–41; Rom. 2:12; James 4:17). Similarly, Scripture counters the notion that everyone in hell will face identical eternities (Matt. 10:15). Herman Bavinck put it like this: “The penalty of damnation . . . is the same, but the penalty of sensation . . . differs.” No one in hell will receive more or less than his sin has earned.
Hell is dehumanizing. Numerous theologians who affirm the biblical teaching on hell (e.g., Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, William Hendriksen, J.I. Packer) observe that alienation from God’s kindness degrades human consciousness and the experience of divine image bearing. Scripture says of idolaters, “They followed vanity and became vain” (2 Kings 17:15, NASB). Will hell cancel this consequence? Will it not rather escalate it? This is not to diminish the horrors of hell. But the fact that sin makes us stupid, blind, deaf, careless, calloused, and dull can help us better understand the justice of eternal conscious punishment. If the damned “will not possess the qualities of the glorified body like the elect” (The Hungarian Confessio Catholica, 1562), we should not expect an equality of sensory or psychological experience between those in heaven and those in hell.
Hell can be defended not only by the biblical testimony but also according to principles of justice. Moreover, Scripture presents hell not for the purpose of lurid and sadistic speculation nor to frighten those who have accepted Jesus’ invitation to find rest in Him (Matt. 11:28–30), but to stir us to action.
hell is instructive
While hell itself is entirely negative, we must use the doctrine positively.
Know your God. Hell evokes what J.I. Packer calls “traumatic awe” as it reveals God’s holiness and righteousness. God is far less tolerant of evil than we are. It is due to His uprightness that He creates an eternity in which beauty and peace are inside, and dark arts, sexual perversion, murder, self-worship, and falsehood are kept out (Rev. 22:15). True to His hatred of everything that detracts from human and cosmic flourishing, God will one day make “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). Meanwhile, God refrains from judgment, showcasing His “kindness and forbearance and patience” so that sinners would repent and be saved from the coming wrath (Rom. 2:4).
Love Christ. Christians confess with the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus “descended into hell.” Even though Christians understand this phrase differently, every believer can say that “Christ my Lord, by suffering unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul, on the cross but also earlier, has delivered me from hellish anguish and torment” (Heidelberg Catechism 44; see Isa. 53:10; Matt. 27:46). Christ knows hell because He endured its horrors in the place of those He came to save. Revulsion toward hell can teach us to sing with Philip Bliss:
Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
in my place condemned he stood,
sealed my pardon with his blood:
Hallelujah! what a Savior!
Fight sin. Sin always brings misery. Even in this life, when nurtured and cultivated, sin grows into a sort of hell, life with all the best parts sucked out. Hell is the earned wage for everyone—even very religious people (Matt. 7:21–23; 23:15)—who lives in the flesh and loves sin. So we should hate “even the garment stained by the flesh” (Jude 23). Jonathan Edwards called heaven a world of love. If hell is a world of hate, we should renounce the works of the flesh that make hell—and life in this day—so ugly (Gal. 5:19–21).
Proclaim the gospel. Those who know “the fear of the Lord” will persuade sinners to be reconciled to Christ and escape the judgment to come (2 Cor. 5:11). Preaching on hell, C.H. Spurgeon said:
If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies; and . . . perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay, and not madly to destroy themselves. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.
If you believe in hell, you will want to snatch the lost out of the fire (Jude 23; see Zech. 3:2).
As Scripture teaches the reality of heaven (John 14:3), so it teaches the reality of hell. And to a healthy mind, the doctrine is deliberately troubling; that’s the point. You don’t have to like it. But rejecting hell won’t change the facts. Indifferent to our opinions, hell is a monument to the reality of sin, death, and judgment (Heb. 9:27). In concert with Jesus’ message of hope, it warns us against “saving” our life now only to lose it forever (Matt. 16:25).