Good Morning Friends,
Some may think that the whole idea of hell is just plain mean. Part of the problem is that when we hear the word hell, we do not immediately think of Jesus and what he said about hell. We see paintings, medieval imagery, flames, demons, tortured bodies, and perhaps the great imaginative world of Dante. But those pictures can become so vivid that we mistake them for Scripture. Jesus gives us something both more mysterious and more disturbing. He speaks of Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, a place associated in Israel’s history with idolatry, judgment, and the horrific sacrifice of children. Later Jewish and Christian imagination connected the valley even more strongly with fiery judgment. It was a trash heap. And Jesus uses this terrible landscape as an image of what it means for human life finally to reject God’s kingdom. Yet Jesus also describes judgment as“outer darkness.” That should make us pause. Fire gives light. Darkness is the absence of light. If we insist that every detail must describe the physical geography and temperature of hell, the images begin colliding with one another. Perhaps that is precisely the point. Jesus is not giving us a travel brochure for the afterlife. He is warning us about the terrible spiritual reality of separation from God who is the source of life, light, love, goodness, and finally our humanity itself. He uses metaphors. So, What If Hell Is the Final Consequence of “My Will Be Done Instead of God’s Will”?
Scripture Summaries:
Luke 16:19–31: Lazarus and the Rich Man
Jesus tells of a rich man who lives comfortably while poor Lazarus lies suffering at his gate. After death their situations are dramatically reversed.
The story is often treated as if Jesus were drawing a literal map of heaven and hell. But Jesus is telling a story with a moral warning. It is a parable. And notice something unsettling. Lazarus has a name and an identity. The rich man has no name and only an identity based on his status. Even in judgment, the rich man still seems to regard Lazarus as someone who should serve him. He wants Lazarus sent to bring him water, and then sent again to warn his brothers. He doesn’t even ask to get out of there. He has chosen to be there. But now his circumstances have changed.But has his heart? Perhaps that is one of the most frightening possibilities Jesus places before us: a heart can become so curved inward upon itself that even when confronted with truth, it still clings to itself.
Mark 9:43–48: Gehenna
Jesus warns his disciples about Gehenna. The Valley of Hinnom carried memories of Israel’s rebellion and child sacrifice and became associated with divine judgment. So when Jesus speaks of Gehenna, his hearers were not necessarily picturing Dante’s inferno. They were hearing: Sin destroys. Evil has consequences. God takes evil seriously. That matters. A God who looked upon cruelty, exploitation, murder, oppression, abuse, and human suffering and simply said, “It doesn’t matter,” would not be loving. Justice means that evil matters because people matter.
Message: C. S. Lewis did not treat hell primarily as God gleefully throwing unwilling people into a cosmic torture chamber. He pictured something far more tragic: the progressive dissolution of the person who will not surrender the self to God. Lewis wrote that entering heaven means becoming more truly human, while hell represents being progressively “banished from humanity.” That is an extraordinary thought. Sin does not merely break God’s rules. Sin breaks us. Pride shrinks us. Hatred shrinks us. Greed shrinks us. Bitterness shrinks us. Self-righteousness shrinks us. We were created to receive life from God. Cut ourselves off from that source long enough, and something begins to disintegrate within us. This helps explain Lewis’s famous picture that the doors of hell are “locked on the inside.” Eventually the great divide becomes: “Thy will be done.”or “My will be done.” And perhaps judgment is God finally taking our choice with dreadful seriousness. And that is not just plain mean. It is God honoring human beings as morally significant creatures. Love cannot ultimately be forced. God does not say, “Love me or I’ll hurt you.” The gospel says something much more astonishing: “You are already lost, and I have come looking for you.” That changes how Christians should talk about hell. Hell is not our weapon. We do not know its temperature. We do not know heaven’s attendance figures. And we certainly do not know the final condition of another person’s heart. God does. That means we can trust God’s justice without pretending to possess God’s knowledge. We see fragments of people’s lives. God sees the entire person. We see actions. God knows wounds, motives, opportunities, resistance, ignorance, pride, repentance, and every hidden movement of the heart. So our assignment was never to determine who is in and who is out. Our assignment is to tell the story of Jesus. And here Jesus becomes particularly uncomfortable for people like us who spend our lives around church. Some of his strongest warnings were directed not toward notorious sinners but toward intensely religious people.Why? Because religion itself can become another method of saying, “My will be done.” We can sing hymns, quote Scripture, defend doctrine, sit in worship, and still construct a life in which we do not actually need grace. The Pharisee can be farther from God than the sinner who cries,“God, be merciful to me.”That should tell us something important about hell. The great danger may not simply be that bad people refuse to become good. It may be that all of us can become convinced that we don’t need Jesus.This is why Christianity’s message is not fundamentally, “Here is how you avoid hell.” It is: “Here is Jesus. Experience Grace” The One who warned about judgment is the same One who ate with sinners.The One who spoke about Gehenna touched lepers.The One who warned the self-righteous welcomed prodigals. And ultimately, rather than standing at a safe distance from human judgment and suffering, Jesus went to the cross. Christian hope therefore does not rest in our ability to understand exactly how judgment works. It rests in the character of God revealed in Christ. The official C. S. Lewis’s site summarizes Lewis’s understanding of Christ as the One whose death and resurrection open humanity’s way into life with God. We can therefore say two things at once: Judgment is real. And grace is real. The cross tells us never to take sin lightly. But the empty tomb tells us never to underestimate grace.
Reflection: Perhaps the most important question about hell is not: “Who is going there?” Perhaps it is: “What is happening in my own heart?” Where am I saying to God, “My will be done”? Where am I becoming smaller because I will not forgive? Where has pride made me unable to receive grace? Where have I become like the rich man, able to see Lazarus but unable truly to see him? And where is Christ standing before me saying, “Come to Me.” We do not need Dante’s maps. We do not need Michelangelo’s terrifying images. We do not need to speculate about flames, temperatures, populations, or precisely how the imagery works. Fire and darkness may be different biblical pictures pointing beyond themselves to a reality more terrible than either image can fully express: life turned away from the God for whom we were created. And heaven may be something far greater than merely going somewhere when we die.It is life with God.It begins even now. The question therefore reaches into the present: Whose will is shaping my life today?
And So, in the end, I think we should speak about hell with tears rather than triumph. Never as a weapon. Never as though we know another person’s eternal destiny. And never as though Christians stand safely among the righteous pointing toward everyone else. We stand beside everyone else saying: I need grace too. Then we point not toward hell, but toward Jesus Christ. Because the center of the Christian story is not hell. It is not judgment. It is not even heaven. The center is Jesus. And Jesus is the grace that creates life.
Pray Lord Jesus, that You keep us from making light of sin, but also keep us from using judgment as a weapon against others. Pray You teach us to trust the justice and mercy of God where our knowledge ends. Pray You show us the places in our own hearts where we still whisper, “My will be done.” Pray You break down our pride, our bitterness, our self-righteousness, and everything that separates us from You. Pray You make us more fully human by making us more fully Yours. Pray that rather than speculating about who may be lost, You send us out to tell the beautiful story of the Shepherd who came looking for the lost. Pray believing our hope is not that we understand everything about hell or heaven, but that our hope is Jesus. Amen.
Blessings,
John Lawson
