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- God and Hell (Part 3)
This post will hopefully wrap up our conversation about Hell. It’s been a long one, and I haven’t said everything I want to say, but it’s gotta end somewhere. There’s a lot more to it than what I have to say, and that’s why I started adding some “recommended reading” for ya’ll at the bottom of the posts.
For obvious reasons, I want to end this series with a slightly more encouraging post. It’s easy to get bummed out when we hear about this kind of stuff, so I wanted to say something about the way God orchestrates things towards a perfect, redeemed, justified universe. We’ll call it “God’s great plan.” Any believer who takes themselves seriously needs to acknowledge that Hell, evidently, is a part of God’s great plan. This is going to poke at our concept of free will again, so hold on tight.
The Good King
Let’s dig in. We’ll start with establishing some facts. This is just classic theology:
1) God is good.
2) God is sovereign.
3) God does not want anyone to “go to hell.” In fact, our guy (the apostle) Peter specifically tells us that God wants the exact opposite. He is patient for all to come to repentance.
I basically describe hell as a process where your sin eats you alive. When God “hands sinners over to their own desires,” that’s what is happening. He’s letting them do what they want, and what they want just drives them into further separation from God (Life Himself), and nearer to an eternal death of sorts (that’s a really rough summary of my other two posts, I suppose). So, in that sense, Hell is what you make it.
On the metaphysical level, maybe this means it only exists in your mind. But that doesn’t make it any less real. Consider this:
Whether this means (horror of horror) being left to a purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one’s own envy, prurience, resentment, loneliness & self conceit, or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you cd. call a world or a reality, I wd. never pretend to know. But I wouldn’t put the question in the form ‘do I believe in an actual Hell’. One’s own mind is actual enough. If it doesn’t seem fully actual now that is because you can always escape from it a bit into the physical world — look out of the window, smoke a cigarette, go to sleep. But when there is nothing for you but your own mind (no body to go to sleep, no books or landscape, nor sounds, no drugs) it will be as actual as — as — well, as a coffin is actual to a man buried alive.”
When you put it that way, Hell sounds like it sucks. We call it hell for a reason, folks. It’s meant to be judgment. Still, we’re left to wonder what kind of “good plan” of God’s would leave anyone in an eternal mental coffin.
Nevertheless, God’s plan is good. He is the Author of the Universe, thank you. If he makes, orchestrates, or destroys something, you can bet that there’s a good reason for it. He makes fruit, and his creatures are both satisfied at its taste and sustained by its nutrients. He makes life, and relationships are formed and songs are sung and the King is worshiped. He influences wisdom and innovation that we might cure diseases and explore the cosmos. He orchestrates war, and evil is vanquished. At the center of History, we have the victory of the Cross that redeems and claims dominion over every square inch of it.
So… why Hell?
So… what “good” purpose could Hell possibly have in His universe?
Why eternal judgment?
Apart from being a sort of punishment that sinners create for themselves, we can confidently say this:
It is God’s tool to set the universe right.
His intention, as it was from the beginning, is to make everything as it ought to be after history has run his course and every man has made every decision he’s ever been given. There’s plenty of goodness scattered throughout the narrative until then, but that end is where Goodness itself is fully realized.
When we reach the end of it all, whether we’re talking about the end of our individual lives or the end of the known world, goodness “fully realized” requires that justice be served. This isn’t some wild-west, good-old-boy theology. This isn’t Toby Kieth, rounding up the bad guys and marching them up the gallows and celebrating at the bar with all your cowboy friends and a shot of whisky. No, God’s final judgment will be dealt out with a whole lot more in mind than guns and whisky. He intends to resurrect the universe. Doing so, he will effectively vanquish any part of it that insists on staying dead to Him.
Again, this is true whether we’re talking about the end of one life or the end of history. Nothing will be left of you or the world that isn’t found in Christ. God intends to set everything, and everyone, right.
The world has chaos and evil in it. People rightly demand justice. God will bring it, but He is the Author of the universe. He’s not a mere man. He doesn’t operate on our plane, with our legal boundaries or mental limits. He knows what is right and wrong far better than we do. When He shows up with justice, I think we’ll be caught off guard by the way it looks, regardless what we think about Hell.
I want to include this quote from Scott Lencke, in case we question who God thinks he is for dealing justice the way He does:
Judgment is necessary – unless we were to conclude, absurdly, that nothing much is wrong, or blasphemously, that God doesn’t mind very much… evil must be identified, named and dealt with before there can be reconciliation… God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end. This doctrine, like that of resurrection itself, is held firmly in place by the belief in God as creator on the one side and the belief in his goodness on the other. And that setting-right must necessarily involve the elimination of all that distorts God’s good and lovely creation, and in particular of all that defaces his image-bearing human creatures…
So that’s where Hell comes in. It’s God’s tool to eliminate everything that seeks to steal, kill and destroy His creation and the Image Bearers that dwell in it. If God was indifferent or unjust toward us, there would be no Hell.
The Story God Tells
It’s easy to wonder: “If God is sovereign, he must know who ends up where. In fact, he basically puts us there. Are some of us predestined for Hell?”
Listen.
God has written the greatest story ever told. He is good and perfect, so the story is good and perfect. While man is sinful and cruel and forever changing, the Lord remains the same.
Not only that, He is strong. He can be sovereign and predestine the universe a certain way and also allow the creatures within it the total freedom to do as they please. If it sounds contradicting, it’s only because it sounds contradicting. Just because we can’t grasp something in a perceptibly logical way doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
We already talked about God’s idea of justice being different than ours. The reason He sees the world differently is because He exists outside of it. Reality derives from Him. The universe hinges on Him. We, on the other hand, exist far from His station. We are human. We exist with limits and boundaries, wrapped up in a world constricted by time and space and matter (this actually makes the Incarnation that much more significant).
God is beyond it all.
He is the Good Author.
He is sovereign over everything, and yes, we still have free will.
He creates heaven and hell, knowing who they’re ultimately for, and yet we choose how it ends for us.
Douglas Beyer lays it out like this:
Certainly our concept of justice virtually demands an active punishment for the wicked, but our concept of an infinitely loving God demands love even for those who would reject it. God has designed the universe so that people have freewill. Yet, he somehow manages to place all those free actions in times and places which carry out his perfect plan (see Acts 2:23). Through the free treason of Judas, the free self-interest of the Sanhedrin, and the free cowardice of Pilate, God carried out a plan that demonstrated his love from the very beginning… The elect are spared by God’s action, but all who are in Hell have chosen their sentence. These are not contradictions, but the one truth that shows the omnipotence of God. He is so powerful that he can predestine the history of the universe by leaving all of us totally free. Or, as Lewis put it so much more succinctly: ”Ophelia is drowned because a branch breaks, or because Shakespeare willed it to happen. These are not contradictory once you have grasped that Shakespeare is writing the whole play.”
Hell is a necessary function of God’s goodness for a world in need of justice. Because we do not see the world through God’s eyes, it is difficult for us to recognize God’s justice. Hell seems too harsh and Heaven seems too floaty.
We want whatever it takes to right all the wrongs we see. God uses Hell to make that happen, and is Himself completely justified in doing so. Part of what makes it fair is that we really do choose our own destiny.
No one who ends up with God will have lived a life desiring anything else. He has Life Himself.
No one in Hell will have lived a life wanting anything else. They have their own selves, “away from the presence of the Lord,” just as they hoped.
I Still Don’t Get It
I don’t get it either. I’m not God. His ways are higher. I don’t understand Him.
Honestly, if I could understand God and somehow fit Him into my head, He wouldn’t be God.
I would like to close with the following passage from the end of Ecclesiastes, which reminds me that 1) it’s not that complicated and 2) God is good:
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
Recommended Reading:
I basically robbed some of these articles to write my thoughts on this subject. I cannot recommend these enough. Also, I’ll try to ease up on my CS Lewis fanboying.
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