I often hear people make statements, or ask questions that go something like this: “I can’t believe in a God who sends people to hell just because they didn’t believe the right thing, or they did some bad things,” or “How can God be good if He tortures people forever in hell?” Some people believe, and at least one religion that I know of (Jehovah’s Witnesses) teach that there is no such thing as hell. They believe that there is such a place as heaven, or paradise on earth, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses teach. Many people, and religions throughout time have some belief in the afterlife, where the good people enjoy some paradise. But they believe that there is no such thing as hell. The “bad people” simply cease to exist. In other words, they are annihilated.
The fact of the matter is, the Bible doesn’t give us a whole lot of information about heaven or hell. In fact, hell, in the sense that we understand it, is not even mentioned in the Old Testament. Hades, the word that is translated as hell in some translations, is always mentioned as a place of torment in the New Testament. The afterlife is alluded to in a few places, but, as with hell, the Old Testament also does not mention heaven in the sense that we understand it. She’ol, in the Hebrew Bible, is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and separated from God. A term that is used periodically is “gathered to his people” or “gathered to his fathers.” The New Testament uses phrases referring to being received into Abraham’s bosom, or sitting down with Abraham, Issac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of God.
So, both the Old and New Testaments affirm some after death existence or state of blessedness or torment.
It is my contention that people that ask questions or make statements like the ones that I have started this article with have not studied the scriptures, or if they have, they do not rightly understand them. Scriptural knowledge builds upon itself. It is not possible to rightly understand many Scriptural matters by taking isolated ideas or concepts out of the context of a solid, systematic, and prayerful study of the Scriptures as a whole. Often the questions we ask about one section of Scripture will be answered in another place. That is why most Bibles have cross-references.
In order to rightly understand anything, you must start at the beginning. There are some basic principles in Genesis that cannot be skipped over or ignored for any of the rest of the Bible to make sense. For you to understand the next part of what I am going to say, you must read the first three chapters of the book of Genesis. You must read it with the intention of understanding it, not with the intention of proving it wrong, as is the case with many so-called scientists evolutionists and athiests. You must start with no agenda other than the desire for understanding.
A brief synopsis of the beginning themes:
1. God existed before anything we know of existed. Genesis does not specifically state that God is an eternal being, but that is stated in other places throughout the Scripture. God is the first cause, not some vague concept of an eternally existing “nature”. God is the Creator of what we call “nature”. The idea of an eternally existing natural order apart from One who created it is absurd if you take the idea to its logical conclusions. We know that nature, as we call it, is ordered, not chaotic. What we call “natural laws” govern how things in nature work. We cannot change natural laws. You can write 10,000 books explaining why you do not believe in the law of gravity, and every time you drop one of those books, it will fall to the ground. It will not float, suspended in mid-air. Our ideas and beliefs about reality do not change reality. Reality exists regardless of what we do, or do not believe about it. To say that we “create our own reality” is nonsense. On the other hand, we can control, to a degree, how reality affects us. We do have a degree of control in whether our interaction with reality will be positive or negative, so maybe that is what people who say “we can create our own reality” actually mean. It is a poor choice of words. We do not create reality, we accept reality, and we work with it in either a positive or negative way. So, it can be rightly said that God is the Creator of reality.
2. God is the Creator. As the Creator, He owns what He creates. He has the power, and the right, to do whatever He chooses with that which He has created. He can destroy it, if He so chooses. We, as finite human beings, have no say so in any of this. Until you get that fact firmly established in your heart and mind, you cannot rightly understand reality. You can conjure up a lot of ideas in your own mind that can affect your thinking and perception, but none of that changes reality, it only puts you on a path to insanity if you continue.
3. God is holy, pure, and good. His purposes are good. What He creates is good. He created a perfect place for man to exist. Everything about the place God created for man to live was perfectly suited to meet man’s every need. It was also suited to bring man pleasure and enjoyment. God made man the caretaker, (manager) of that place. We, as human beings, do not rightly own anything. We may say we “own” a piece of property, and if we have the deed to the property, in the legal sense, that is true. But in the ultimate sense, we do not own it, God does, and we are ultimately accountable to Him, because He made it, He owns it.
4. God made man to be like Himself. Some religions teach that we can become gods. We were not made to “become gods”. We were made to reflect the glory of the one true God. We were created to live in innocence, but we were given the choice not to. That is what is meant to eat from the knowledge of good and evil. We were given the option of living in innocence, and we chose not to. That is mankind’s downfall. The first man and woman, Adam and Eve, were created in God’s image. They were placed in the perfect place. They had access to God intimately. God had never shown Himself anything but good and loving to them. They had no reason to doubt His goodness.
5. Adam and Eve were given a test. They had access to every good thing God had created, but He put one tree off limits to them. You know what happened. Some may ask, “Why did God even place the tree there in the first place?” Well, I am not God, so I can’t answer that question for Him, but I would like to suggest a possible answer. The scripture tells us that “God is love”. God gives love, and God desires love. Like us, who are created in His image, God is a relational being, and as such, He desires relationship. We understand God as a relational being, because, as the Triune God, (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) God exists in relationship within Himself. That is a hard concept for us to grasp, since we are not that way (triune in being). Nevertheless, that is how God is revealed to us in the Scriptures, so we accept that it is true, even if we cannot fully understand it in our finitude. In order for true love to exist, the option to not love must also exist. Love must be a choice. There is no such thing as coerced love. Love is not a feeling or emotion (although it can be the cause of feelings and emotions.) Love is a choice. We would not be able to love God if the option to not love Him did not exist. That is the reason for the test. We could not obey God if the option to not obey Him did not exist. As with love, obedience is also a choice. Adam and Eve made a deliberate choice to go their own way. In their willful disobedience of God, they proved that they did not fully love Him. In doing so, their orientation (the trajectory of their lives) was turned away from God, and they began their march towards total alienation from God, and as the result, hell.
God does not “send” people to hell. People willingly walk into hell by rejecting the One who created them to live in innocence. Regardless of whether or not you believe in a literally burning hell, as it is often depicted, think with me about something for a moment. God is good. God is the source of all that is good. God is life. He is the source of all life. God is light. He is the source of all light. To reject Him puts the soul on a trajectory away from all good, life, and light. That can only end in hell, whatever terminology you choose to define it. It has to be horrible, beyond anything that we have the power to express in words.
Suppose you were in a mall shopping with your family, and someone entered the store where you were shopping with a gun, with the intention of robbing the store. Someone in the store notifies the police and they show up and arrest the man and take him to jail. While it might be said that the police sent the man to jail, it might more rightly be said that the man sent himself to jail. He willingly entered the store knowing he was breaking the law. He knew that in so doing, he might be arrested and put in jail. He was following a path that he knew would get him in trouble, and he did it anyway. The same principle can be applied with God. God does not sent people to hell. They go to hell of their own volition once they have been made aware of the truth. How are we made aware of the truth? First and most importantly by our conscience. That little voice inside of our head that tells us that what we are doing is wrong.
A word that is not popular in our vernacular, but one that is profoundly important is repentance. To “repent” means to turn from the direction you are going and go back in the opposite direction. That is the original meaning. It means you are walking away from God, and you turn around and start the journey back to him. You turn the trajectory of your life around. When I Googled the word “repent” two of the definitions that were listed are as follows:
“feel or express sincere regret or remorse about one’s wrongdoing or sin;;;”
“view or think of (an action or omission) with deep regret or remorse.”
The meanings of words have a way of changing over time because language is fluid. A word that meant one thing 100 years ago might mean the exact opposite in our vernacular. A good example of this is the word “liberal” as it is used in the political sense. If we think of the word “repent” in the sense of the above definitions, it does not mean what it originally meant at all. We might regret or feel remorse over many of our actions, but if we do not change our actions, we have not repented at all, in the Biblical sense. If I am a bank robber who feels guilty after each bank robbery, but I continue to rob banks, I have not repented. To repent means that I stop doing it.
I was talking to a man years ago who considered himself an alcoholic, and I would not argue with his assessment. He was, indeed, an alcoholic. He had been through alcohol rehabilitation numerous times and had relapsed into alcohol use time and time again. He said to me, “I do not understand how it keeps happening. I get sober, and in my right frame of mind, and then I do it again. I don’t understand why.” That statement irritated me a little bit, and I said to him, “It is not complicated at all. You stated that when you got sober, you were in your right frame of mind. There was nothing controlling your actions other than your own choice. At some point you chose to go to a store and buy alcohol. You were in your right frame of mind when you chose to make the drive, or the walk to the store to purchase alcohol. You knew full well what it had done to you before. Nothing changed. Alcohol had not miraculously become un-toxic. The affects of alcohol on your mind and body had not changed. You were in your right frame of mind, with no external force controlling you, when you chose to open the container and pour the alcohol into your mouth and swallow it. You made a conscious and deliberate choice. Alcoholism is not a disease over which you have no choice. Exposure to the flu, and subsequently catching the flu and suffering its effects might be a disease over which you have little control. Alcohol consumption is not. It is a deliberate choice, so you make with no one, or no thing to blame other than yourself. I get a little tired of hearing people call deliberate self-willed choices diseases.
In the Gospel of Luke we read the following:
Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
Bad things can and do happen to everyone. That is the nature of our reality. Jesus’ words to the people who brought these things to His attention are just as relevant to us today. While it might rightly be said that some of the bad things that happen to us are a result of our sin, such as a man who robs banks getting put in jail, or an alcoholic getting cirrhosis of the liver, it is also true that some of the bad things that happen to us have nothing to do with anything but circumstances and chance. Mind your own heart and do not compare yourself with others. The people that Pilate had murdered in the temple were not “worse sinners”. It might even be said that they were better people, after all, they were in the temple offering their sacrifices. But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Jesus knows the nature of man. He knows something is wrong with us. That something is what is referred to in Christian theology as “original sin”, that bend in the nature of every man that puts on a path away from God from the moment we are born. Again, you have to understand the first three chapters of Genesis to get this. Adam and Eve, the parents of the entire human race, sinned by turning away from God in disobedience, and as a result of that, their entire nature was changed, and they passed that change onto everyone.
Danny's Stump 