I’ve heard much debate on the nature of hell over the years. Our notion of the devil with horns and a pitchfork, dancing in the flames, tormenting his wards, is most likely one of medieval invention and most certainly inaccurate. We can, of course, turn to Jesus’s own description of the place – “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.” He was quoting the prophet Isaiah here, who was himself speaking of the day of God’s judgement, saying that those who come to worship the Lord in the new heavens and the new earth “shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”
So from the view of Jesus himself, hell is quite possibly worse than a cartoon with a pitchfork. Enough so that people who believe God is all love and no justice have a hard time seeing this, and would prefer to write it out of their Bibles altogether.
I myself have taken a bit of a different stance on my understanding of hell in the past. While I see the biblical descriptions as metaphors for something horrible which we cannot truly understand in human language, I believe the truth is worse: that hell is an eternity without God himself, filled with hatred and resentment toward Him – and even more than that, a place without any hope whatsoever that “things will get better.” We should know from experience a taste of what even a few moments of hatred, resentment, and hopelessness brings to our senses. Can we imagine what might be an eternity of such feelings?
But wait. There’s more than just that, bad as it sounds. In a recent podcast episode ofThe White Horse Inn, Tim Keller said something that got me thinking: that hell would be “a place without peace and joy.” This brought to mind the passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians telling us about the fruit of the Spirit – “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…”
The thought that hell is a place completely devoid of that fruit might serve even better to drive home the despair of it. We can identify with even a small piece of what this might be like. Perhaps we’ve felt unloved at times in our lives. Can we imagine a place with no love at all? We’ve had our joyless moments – times of anxiety and worry. So how would our lives be in this place that is completely without joy and peace? People around us have been rude and rough at times, but here is a place that totally lacks even a hint of kindness, goodness, or gentleness. A place where we’ll never have a faithful and patient friend with whom we can share our burdens. On the contrary, we will only be surrounded by those who have no restraint on their impulses to tear us down or tear us to shreds. And we will be the same.
The old jokes we tell each other just cannot be true. Hell is not just a place without God to boss us around. Those in hell won’t all be gathered around a keg, hoisting a pint and singing beer songs with old friends; maybe sneaking off for a little fun every so often without having to worry about God the party-pooper looking over our shoulders. If we think about the fruit of the Spirit, even these things require the overflow of that which God gives to the world through the common grace that allows all of humanity to live and breathe and enjoy some part (but never all) of our lives.
No. Without God, we have none of it at all. And the result does not seem one in which I’d have even the slightest interest in seeing for myself.
