SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, whether good or evil.  Ecclesiastes 12.13-14 ESV

            Tdarkedinburgh darklight-350here is a quote from Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (my favorite novel) with which I strongly disagree. Kasper Gutman and Joel Cairo have Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy at gunpoint. Spade points out that it would be bad business for them to kill him before they get the black bird. “Sir, there are other means of persuasion than killing, and threatening to kill” Gutman warns. Spade replies, “Sure, but they’re not much good without the threat of death behind them.” Gutman is threatening torture, and Spade says torture is only effective if the threat of death is behind it. To me it is the one false note in the book. Sam Spade is wrong.  I can think of a lot of things worse than death, and I’ve known many people over the years who suffered so severely and long that they welcomed death as a blessing.

            This is what makes the thought of hell so horrible. The firing squad, the guillotine, the noose, the electric chair, and intra-venous poison are awful for a moment, and then are over – but hell is torture that lasts. Hell is a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 24.51), where the fire is not quenched and the worm doesn’t die (Isaiah 66.24).  It is torture that never ends.

            Some of us cannot bear the thought of this and try to find an alternative. “Perhaps all will be saved in the end,” some think. “Perhaps hell isn’t eternal, but consumes the lost and they cease to be,” others posit. How can a loving God plan to torture people eternally? Even the worst human tyrants haven’t done that. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot together didn’t attempt to inflict that much misery. There must be another understanding.

            I admit, I wish there was - but reading the Bible I do not find one. There is a phrase often used by another hardboiled detective, Phillip Marlowe, which I think applies. When given a rosy explanation of events Marlow says, “It would be pretty to think so.” When I read the arguments against an eternal hell, that is exactly my reaction, “It would be pretty to think so.” But the Bible tells us the opposite. Our resurrection bodies are going to be indestructible (I Corinthians 15.42). Our torment is experienced consciously (Luke 16.24). In the same way that Heaven lasts, so also will Hell (Isaiah 66.22-24). 

            If God is love (I John 4.8) how could He do this? We must consider the words of Jesus in the great Judgment scene of Matthew 25. In that passage, as the saved are welcomed in, they enter a “kingdom prepared for you before the foundation of the world” (v.34). Before God said “Let there be light” he intended we should be with Him in heaven. Conversely, the lost are told to depart “into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (v.41).

God didn’t make hell for us at all – he never intended we should go there. Jesus died that we might all be saved, His call is universal (John 3:16). Thus, if we are lost, Hell is not something God inflicts upon us – it is something we inflict upon ourselves.

God made a perfect universe, engineered a planet fine-tuned to support human life, and placed us on that planet. He gave, and continues to give us choice – because we reciprocate his love freely or not at all. It has to be this way. The nature of love demands it. Too often, we use that choice to rebel, not to reciprocate love. If the planet is ruined, if our species has been damaged, if human society is self-destructive – if the world is thus, thus have we made the world.

God provides us salvation from this world we have made.  Will all eventually be saved? This is what God wants (II Peter 3.9). It would be pretty to think so. But this conclusion is not what reality suggests, and not what the Bible teaches.

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