I don’t particularly like thinking about hell.
I don’t think many people do. Honestly, I would rather not believe anyone ends up there. It is so foreign to the way we think about life that the whole idea can be difficult to get our heads around.
And sooner or later the question comes up: If God is good, why hell? How can a loving God allow someone to face eternal judgment?
I’ve thought about that question quite a bit. I don’t pretend to understand everything about eternity, and I don’t think Scripture gives us every answer we might want. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered whether we sometimes begin at the wrong end of the question.
Maybe the first question isn’t why God judges.
Maybe it’s why a holy God went so far to save us in the first place.
God Did Not Leave Us Without a Choice
One of the best-known verses in the Bible is also one of the clearest.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
— John 3:16 (NIV)
We’ve probably all seen that verse hundreds of times—on signs, bumper stickers, at football games, just about everywhere. Sometimes something becomes so familiar that we stop thinking about what it actually says.
God loved. God gave. And whoever believes receives eternal life.
There is an offer being made.
But Jesus didn’t stop talking at verse 16. A few verses later he said something that isn’t nearly as comfortable.
“Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”
— John 3:19 (NIV)
That’s harder to hear.
God offers the light, but he doesn’t pretend darkness doesn’t exist. And Scripture doesn’t describe us as having no responsibility for how we respond to him.
There is a choice involved.
If God Is Good, Why Hell Exists
I’ve often heard the question phrased this way: “How can a good God send someone to hell?”
I understand why people ask it. I’ve wrestled with it myself.
My first thought has often been that God doesn’t simply put someone in hell against their will. People have free will. Accepting Christ is a choice, and rejecting him is a choice too.
That’s how I’ve always looked at it. But the more I’ve thought about it, I don’t want to make it quite that simple either.
The Bible does say that God judges. So I don’t think it’s completely accurate to reduce this to “people send themselves to hell” and leave God out of judgment altogether.
What Scripture shows us is more complete than that.
“I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.”
— Ezekiel 33:11 (NIV)
That’s not a God looking for an excuse to condemn someone.
It’s a God who takes sin seriously, who judges justly, but who would rather see someone turn to him and live.
God doesn’t force us to love him. He doesn’t force us to receive Christ. But our choices are real, and according to Scripture, they have consequences beyond this life.
I don’t necessarily like thinking about that.
But whether I like something has never been a very good test of whether it’s true.
A Great Chasm
The story Jesus told about the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 has always made me think.
After death, their circumstances were dramatically different. Lazarus was comforted, while the rich man was in torment. Between them was what Jesus described as a “great chasm” that could not be crossed.
But there’s another part of that story that gets my attention.
The rich man doesn’t argue that there shouldn’t be consequences. He doesn’t say, “I don’t belong here.” Instead, he starts thinking about his five brothers who are still alive.
“Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.”
— Luke 16:28 (NIV)
Think about that for a minute.
His concern wasn’t getting someone to explain why judgment was unfair. He wanted his family warned while there was still time.
I don’t think Jesus gave us that account so we could figure out every detail of what happens after death. But he certainly didn’t speak about judgment as though it were imaginary.
There was a reality beyond this life.
And choices made here mattered there.
That’s uncomfortable. At least it is for me. It’s not something I particularly want to think about, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
What Would Separation From God Really Mean?
This is where I sometimes try to bring the question down to something I can understand.
I’ve spent much of my adult life as a firefighter and paramedic, an electrician, and later a building inspector. In those kinds of jobs, rules, boundaries, and consequences aren’t theoretical. You see what can happen when something goes wrong, when someone ignores the guardrails, or when there aren’t any guardrails to begin with.
And after enough years of seeing people and life up close, you realize pretty quickly that consequences aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Some actions have consequences because right and wrong really do matter.
We put laws in place because people don’t always do what is right. We have consequences because some actions hurt other people. None of our systems are perfect, but almost everybody understands the basic principle.
Some things really are wrong.
Now imagine removing every restraint on what human beings are capable of doing.
We don’t have to use much imagination. History has given us glimpses of it. There are people living in parts of the world right now who see things most of us would have trouble comprehending.
That leads me to another question I’ve wondered about for years.
Why do we know?
Why do we recognize cruelty as cruelty? Why does injustice bother us? Why do people from completely different backgrounds still have this persistent sense that there really is such a thing as right and wrong?
Paul wrote about God’s law being “written on their hearts,” with their consciences also bearing witness.
“They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness…”
— Romans 2:15 (NIV)
Maybe our awareness that evil deserves consequences isn’t an argument against God.
Maybe it’s one of the things that points toward him.
The Holiness We Have Trouble Understanding
I think another problem is that we naturally measure God using ourselves as the standard.
I know I do.
We think of a “good person,” and then perhaps imagine God as infinitely better. But Scripture describes something much greater than that.
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God placed him in a cleft in the rock and covered him with his hand as he passed by.
“When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by.”
— Exodus 33:22 (NIV)
Moses couldn’t simply stand there and look upon the fullness of God’s glory.
That account in Exodus 33 has always fascinated me.
We sometimes talk pretty casually about someday standing before God. But when I read passages like that, I realize I probably don’t begin to comprehend what the holiness of God actually means.
God isn’t just a better version of us.
And that changes the question for me.
Instead of only asking how a loving God can judge sinful people, I also have to ask how sinful people like us could ever stand before a perfectly holy God.
That’s where Christ changes everything.
That contrast has always struck me. The holy God we could never reach on our own chose to come to us in Christ. I reflected on that from another angle in The King Who Came Without Earthly Status.
The Man Who Had Nothing Left to Offer
The criminal hanging beside Jesus may be one of the clearest pictures of salvation in the entire Bible.
Think about where this man was.
His life was essentially over. He couldn’t straighten himself out and come back twenty years later with a better record. He couldn’t give money away. He couldn’t join a church. He couldn’t undo whatever he had done. There wasn’t time left to prove anything to anybody.
And he didn’t pretend he was innocent.
Speaking about himself and the other criminal, he said:
“We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
— Luke 23:41 (NIV)
He recognized his own guilt. He recognized something different in Jesus.
Then he asked him one remarkably simple thing:
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
— Luke 23:42 (NIV)
That’s it.
He had nothing to offer Christ except himself.
And Jesus answered:
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
— Luke 23:43 (NIV)
I don’t know how you can read that exchange and come away believing you’ve gone too far for Christ.
If there were ever a man who had run out of time to fix himself, it was the man hanging on that cross.
And he didn’t save himself.
That’s the part that matters.
Christianity isn’t about accumulating enough good behavior to finally outweigh the bad. I’ve lived long enough to know that if that’s the system, every one of us has a problem. How would we ever know when we’d done enough?
Grace Isn’t a Free Pass
Of course, that doesn’t mean accepting Christ gives us permission to do whatever we want.
I still screw up. I still say things I shouldn’t say, think things I shouldn’t think, and make decisions I wish I had made differently. Every Christian I know still fails in one way or another.
Following Christ hasn’t made me incapable of sin.
What it has changed is how I see it.
Repentance isn’t pretending I never failed. It’s recognizing that I did, calling it what it is, and turning back toward God instead of making excuses for it.
I think there is a big difference between struggling with sin and deciding that sin doesn’t matter.
Grace doesn’t mean what we do suddenly becomes meaningless.
It means our failures don’t have to have the final word.
Christ does.
The Door Is Still Open
There is another picture from Scripture that has stayed with me for a long time.
Jesus describes himself standing at a door and knocking in Revelation 3:20. He was speaking to the church in Laodicea, but the picture has always struck me.
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in…”
— Revelation 3:20 (NIV)
A door.
A knock.
And someone on the other side deciding whether to open it.
Throughout Scripture, I see God calling people, warning people, showing mercy, forgiving sin, and offering reconciliation. I also see people rejecting him.
Maybe that’s part of what makes this whole subject difficult for me.
I don’t want hell to be real. I don’t want to go there, and I don’t want anyone else to go there either. It’s much easier to picture a God who simply overlooks everything in the end.
But then I have to ask myself whether that would actually be a good God.
Would a good God simply look the other way at cruelty, evil, and injustice and say none of it really matters?
I don’t think so.
And yet judgment isn’t where the Bible leaves us.
God knew exactly what sin had done to us. He knew we couldn’t fix it ourselves.
And he came after us anyway.
He gave his Son.
The longer I think about it, the question that stays with me isn’t only why a holy God judges sin.
It’s why that same holy God, knowing exactly who I am and everything I’ve done, would still love me enough to make a way home.
More Straight Talk on Faith
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