Hell

No teaching in the Bible is harder to hold than this one, and none should be held with more trembling. There are two easy ways to get it wrong, and both are escapes. One is to relish it, to picture cartoon pitchforks and quietly enjoy the thought of certain people getting what they deserve. The other is to delete it, to decide it is simply too harsh for a modern conscience and edit it out of the faith. The honest path is neither. It is to listen carefully to what Jesus actually said, to let it weigh on us as it weighed on Him, and never once to speak of it apart from the cross, where God did everything it cost Him to keep us out of it.

The warnings came mostly from Jesus

It is worth facing a fact that unsettles the people who want to drop the doctrine: the most vivid warnings about hell in the whole Bible come not from a fire-and-brimstone prophet or from Paul, but from Jesus, the gentlest figure in the book, the one who welcomed children and wept at a grave. He spoke of a place "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:48), and He set the two destinies side by side without flinching: "these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal" (Matthew 25:46). He told people to fear the One "which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). The One who loved most also warned most. That alone should keep us from waving the subject away as someone else's harshness.

What the words actually mean

Some of the heat around hell comes from blurring several biblical words into one. Sheol and Hades usually mean the grave or the realm of the dead, not the final state. The word translated "hell" in Jesus' warnings is most often Gehenna, the name of a smouldering valley outside Jerusalem, a vivid picture of final ruin under God's judgment. The book of Revelation gives the last image, "the lake of fire," and calls it "the second death" (Revelation 20:14). Christians have long debated whether the fire, darkness, and worm are literal or are images straining to describe something worse than any of them. But the thing the images point to is not really in dispute: a final, ratified exclusion from God and from every good thing that comes from Him, "punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord" (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

At its heart, separation from God

That last phrase, "from the presence of the Lord," may be the truest definition. The deepest horror of hell is not the imagery of flame but the absence at its center: to be, at last and by settled choice, without God, who is the source of all light, love, joy, and goodness. Every good thing anyone has ever enjoyed, even those who hated Him, came from His hand; hell is what is left when that hand is finally withdrawn from someone who spent a life insisting on it. There is a sober sense, which thoughtful Christians like C.S. Lewis have pressed, in which hell is less God locking people out than God honoring, terribly, a person's lifelong "no" (see C.S. Lewis). The gates, in that picture, are locked from the inside.

Who it was made for, and the face in the clouds

A picture goes round every few months: the fire below, the lost reaching up, and above the clouds a God smiling down at it, with a caption that He made hell in case you did not love Him back. It gets one thing right. Hell is in the book, and Jesus spoke of it more than anyone else in it. It gets two things wrong, and the two wrong things are the whole picture.

First, who it was made for. The one time Jesus says who the fire was prepared for, He does not say sinners. He says, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41). It was not built for people. A person ends there by taking the devil's side of the room when the door on the other side stood open.

Second, the face. The God of Scripture takes no pleasure in that scene, and He says so on oath: "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" (Ezekiel 33:11). When Jesus came in sight of the city that was about to kill Him, "he beheld the city, and wept over it" (Luke 19:41), and His last public word to it was grief, not relish: "how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" (Matthew 23:37). Peter gives the same reason for the long delay of judgment: the Lord is "not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

So the honest form of the claim is this. There is a judgment. God takes no pleasure in it. He has held it off for a very long time to keep people out of it, and He came into the world Himself to take the worst of it so that no one has to go. A person may reject that. But the picture is arguing with a god who enjoys hell, and that god is not in the Bible. The one who is wept over the city.

The honest range among believers

It is only fair to say plainly that sincere, orthodox Christians have not all held this in exactly the same way. The historic mainstream, across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant history, has taught eternal conscious punishment: that the lost continue, consciously, under judgment, resting on texts like the "everlasting punishment" of Matthew 25 and the unceasing torment of Revelation 20. A serious minority of evangelicals have held conditional immortality, or annihilationism: that the finally impenitent are at last destroyed rather than tormented forever, pressing the Bible's own words of "perish," "death," and "destroy" (the careful Anglican John Stott raised it, tentatively, late in life). And a smaller stream has hoped for universal reconciliation, that God will in the end win everyone; some early figures leaned that way, but the church as a whole has judged it unable to take the warnings of Jesus seriously enough. This site does not pretend the debate is closed by a slogan. It holds the sober traditional view while granting that faithful believers, reading the same texts, have landed in more than one place, and that humility is owed on the details of a country none of us has seen.

And the range is ancient, not modern. That is worth showing rather than asserting, because both sides of the argument tend to claim the early church.

Origen, around AD 230, states the hope in his own words: the end "comes to rest at last in the so-called restoration of all things, since no enemy is left them to fight against." He is not a fringe figure inventing a comfort; he is the greatest scholar of the pre-Nicene church, and the church later condemned the developed form of the view without erasing that he had held something like it.

And Augustine, commenting on "everlasting punishment" (Matthew 25:46), does something that settles the question of whether a debate existed. He argues against people who were reading it another way: "Some deceive themselves, saying, that the fire indeed is called everlasting, but not the punishment. This the Lord foreseeing, sums up His sentence in these words."

Read what that sentence assumes. There were Christians in Augustine's day distinguishing an eternal fire from an eternal punishment, and there were enough of them to answer. You do not refute a position nobody holds. So the mainstream reading is early and it is strong, and it was already having this argument, and both of those are true at once.

Where this lands

Hold this doctrine the way you would hold something heavy and sharp: carefully, never carelessly, and never with pleasure at another's danger. Let it do in you what it did in Jesus, who wept over a city He warned. It should drive a believer to two things and not to a third. It should drive us to Christ, in gratitude that He went to the cross precisely so that we "should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). And it should drive us to compassion, an urgency to see no one lost. It should never drive us to speculation, to spiritual smugness, or to a single ounce of glee. The same Jesus who warned of hell more than anyone is the one who walked toward His own death to keep you out of it (see the cross).

Words That Carry the Freight gathers this letter's word, Sheol, Hades and Gehenna, with seven others. Related: Heaven, The Judgment, The Cross, The Character of God, Last Things, and C.S. Lewis. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Held soberly, and offered for understanding rather than as the last word on a country none of us has seen.