Archive: Whatever Happened to HELL?

by G. Roger Schoenhals
adapted from an article ©1977 Light and Life Press

I remember hearing a sermon on hell. I was a child, and it so frightened me I wanted to be a Christian just to escape going to that awful place. That was 30 years ago.

Things have changed today. A sermon on hell is about as rare as a wild buffalo whistling “Dixie.” We hear about God’s love, discipleship, spiritual gifts, social ministries, moral development. But the wrath of God? Zilch.

One reason is the pendulum. In our reaction to the excesses and distortions of the past, we have swung over to the other side where we feel comfortable only with positive themes like love and spiritual fulfillment. The “good life” brand of Christianity has little room for God’s holiness, the wretchedness of sin, everlasting judgment, sorrow, repentance, and righteous living.

Another reason may be our desire to make converts—dangle the goodies in front of them and tell them the stuff about hell later.

And then there’s the contemporary emphasis on determinism—you really can’t help being the way you are. Its great exponent, B.F. Skinner, has done much to relieve us of our guilt. He has taught us that we are only social animals acting in conditioned ways. So there’s no such thing as personal sin, accountability, judgment, or hell.

One of the strongest influences leading us away from a serious view of hell is the philosophy of humanism. Man is good. At his best, he would never let a fellow human being suffer. And since God is better than man, He would certainly not allow any of His creatures to suffer eternally in hell!

This line of reasoning presented itself in a TV news special on being “born again.” Bill Moyers zeroed in on the question of hell with a Christian teenager: “I know people who are moral and good and who do not claim to be born again. How could a good God allow them to go to hell?”

The young man shrugged his shoulders and answered, “That’s what the Bible says.”

Ah, now we come to the basic issue. The Bible. Do we believe it? Is it the Word of God?

The pendulum, easy believism, determinism, humanism—these are all peripheral. At the core is a breakdown of Biblical authority. The less authority people ascribe to the Scripture, the less seriously people take the teachings on hell.

We can play our games with the Bible, sidestepping and distorting passages that conflict with contemporary thought. We can try to tunnel under, go over, or steer around references that offend our human sensitivities. We can ignore, pretend, and even cast aside. But does that change anything? The Word of God remains true. Forever.

The church’s calling is not to judge and distort the Word; it is to believe it and to declare it to a crooked and perverse generation. The entire Word. Even the parts about hell.

Jesus believed in hell. Get a Bible and look up the references. (Matthew 5:22; 8:12; 13:42; 24:51; 25:41,46; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 12:5; 16:23-24; John 5:29.) He didn’t mince words. Some say He talked more about hell than about heaven.

Hell was prepared for the devil and his angels. It was never intended for man. We sentence ourselves to hell by going against God’s plan for our salvation. He is “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (II Peter 3:9 RSV)

Hell is horrible. The way we throw that word around today only dilutes our understanding of the actual conditions. Even the analogies in Scripture (lake of fire, bottomless pit, gnashing teeth) do injustice to the reality of being totally cut off from all that is good and true.

Hell is eternal. The teaching of a temporary punishment is a perversion of the truth. Jesus clearly declared that hell is final and forever.

I’m not calling for a return to the old days when preachers, like Jonathan Edwards, dangled their listeners over the fiery lake of hell. And I’m not urging for a reduction of our teaching and preaching on God’s love. I’m pleading for balance. For the whole picture: love which includes the necessary dimension of His holy wrath.

What happens when the church takes seriously the Biblical teaching of hell? A soberness fills our thinking and praying. A sense of urgency grips us. We proclaim salvation earnestly.

Recognizing the holy and just nature of God we show greater concern for righteous living. We flee from evil and from all that is impure. We desire to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And, most important, we gain a clearer understanding of the love of God. It’s only as we see the awfulness of sin and how much God hates it that we fall more deeply in love with the pure Son of God who took upon Himself the sins of the whole world that we might be saved from guilt and delivered from the wrath of a holy God. God’s love is hollow without hell.