Fully Devoted: New CreationSample

Why Hell Is More Loving Than You Think, Part 1

In the book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says this about hell:

“There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”

A growing number of people point to the existence of hell as the primary reason they can’t believe in God. Because the way they’ve understood hell makes God out to be less like a good Father and more like a cruel monster. 

But hell, just like every other part of Scripture, when understood wisely, becomes one more piece of the puzzle that displays the goodness and mercy of God. To get there, we have to pull back the layers and let go of some assumptions that have distorted our understanding of hell. 

But first, please remember this: God is not happy about hell. God’s desire is that everyone would accept His offer of eternal life. His heart breaks every time someone chooses life apart from Him. 

Jesus wept outside of Jerusalem knowing that many of the Jewish people would reject Him. Paul said he would choose life apart from God if it meant his people would choose life with God. 

If you are unsettled by the idea of hell, you should be. As we’ll discover, hell is not what God wants, but it is something He allows. 

A Better Story

If you were to ask most people what the gospel is all about they might tell you some version of this: “We’re all sinners in need of a savior. God sent Jesus to die on a cross to save us from our sins so that anyone who believes in Him will go to heaven and not hell when they die.” 

Here’s the problem with that story: It’s woefully incomplete. While it includes part of the story, it isn’t the whole story. This story puts the spotlight on us, and our eternal destination. In this story, God is a side character, earth is ignored, and the effects of the gospel are reserved for the afterlife. 

Hopefully, at this point on this journey, hearing that version of the gospel story causes red flags to shoot up. 

If we want to understand hell wisely and grasp the part it plays in the biblical story, we have to put it back into the right story. What is that story? It’s the story we’ve been walking through this entire time. The first words of the Bible tell us: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  

According to the Bible, the main character of this story is God, and the setting isn’t heaven and hell, but heaven and earth. Hell doesn’t show up until much later (don’t worry, we’ll get to that). For now, it’s important to notice the Bible begins with God creating heaven and earth and it ends with God making heaven and earth new.

Here’s a better summary of the story the Bible is actually telling: 

The Bible tells the story of heaven and earth being created by God, ripped apart by sin, and brought back together by Jesus. 

A Truer Picture

If you were to ask most people what hell is like, you would hear them describe something that sounds like a torture chamber God installed in the basement. Hell is somewhere in the bowels of the earth, it’s designed to torture sinners for eternity, and God is the one who made it. 

But if you were to ask Jesus what hell is like, you would hear something very different. When Jesus talked about hell, He referred to a place called Gehenna.  

What was Gehenna? Gehenna was the Aramaic name for the Valley of Hinnom, located just outside the walls of Jerusalem. In this valley, the Jewish people sacrificed their kids to false gods. Because of the horrors and atrocities committed there, God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah declaring that there would come a day when the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna) would become known as “the Valley of Slaughter, for they will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room.”  Jeremiah 7:32 NIV

Over time, Gehenna became the picture in the Jewish imagination for how God would eventually deal with sin and evil. 

So when Jesus is talking about hell in the Gospels, He’s talking about Gehenna, this place of injustice and idolatry, where sin and evil ravaged God’s creation. 

Joshua Ryan Butler compares Gehenna to “the cheap hotel outside the city where Israel cheated on God with other lovers.” And “the woodshed out back where Israel beat God’s children.” 

Now for the last piece of the picture. Where did hell come from? According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the earth, and what He created was good. It wasn’t until the rebellion of Adam that sin and death entered the story. And it was through the sinful practices of people that hell was unleashed in this valley outside of Jerusalem. The origin of hell wasn’t an act of God, but the sin of humanity. 

But God, doing what He does best, has decided to take what we created for evil, and repurpose it for good. When Jesus comes back, He’s going to throw the trash of sin, death, and evil out of God’s Kingdom and into the hell we created. 

What is hell? Hell is not a torture chamber God installed in the basement. Hell is a graveyard we created outside the city. 

Journaling Questions  

• What verse or verses stood out to you the most in today’s reading? Write them in your journal.  
• If you were honest, what would you say your understanding of hell has been based on in the past? 
• How is God comforting your heart or challenging your assumptions today? Write about it. 

Memory Verse

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Colossians 1:19-20 NIV