The Doctrine of Hell and Evidence of God's Remarkable Love

I ran across a statistic the other day that I found shocking. A 2003 research group referenced by this article found that nearly 65% of Americans believe that they will go to heaven when they die, however, a whopping one-half of one percent think they might go to hell. Along the same line of thinking, I found the following quote from one of our presidential candidates, Barack Obama, extremely interesting, especially since he has been so outspoken about his Christian faith throughout his campaign. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004, Obama, speaking about Christianity, said,

"The difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some
level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize. There's the belief,
certainly in some quarters, that if people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as
their personal savior, they're going to hell."

The 'spin' in today's politically correct society, clearly, is to abandon the clear words of Jesus Christ on the concept of hell and eternal punishment and fashion our own thoughts about a universal religion of pure love and tolerance into a false gospel. Its my belief that this trend, the removal of this crucial doctrine, robs Christianity of its beauty and power, The Bible's integrity, and ultimately its evidence for Jesus' love. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer church in New York City, argues the essential nature of the doctrine of hell in his article, "The Importance of Hell". He points out that no Biblical author spoke about Hell more than Jesus (Matthew 5:22, 10:28, 18:8-9, 25:41, to name just a few). Also, he argues that the commonly used "fire and torture" depiction of hell is a difficult image for today's society to grasp, and that it points to a symbolic, far more dire, situation of eternal seperation from the Source of Life, God. Here's an excerpt from the article:

So what is a 'totaled' human soul? It does not cease to exist, but rather becomes completely incapable of all the things a human soul is for--reasoning, feeling, choosing, giving or receiving love or joy. Why? Because the human soul was built for worshipping and enjoying the true God, and all truly human life flows from that...What is hell, then? It is God actively giving us up to what we have freely chosen-to go our own way, be our own "the master of our fate, the captain of our soul," to get away from him and his control. It is God banishing us to regions we have desperately tried to get into all our lives. J.I.Packer writes: "Scripture sees hell as self-chosen . . . [H]ell appears as God's gesture of respect for human choice. All receive what they actually chose, either to be with God forever, worshipping him, or without God forever, worshipping themselves." (J.I.Packer, Concise Theology p.262-263.) If the thing you most want is to worship God in the beauty of his holiness, then that is what you will get (Ps 96:9-13.) If the thing you most want is to be your own master, then the holiness of God will become an agony, and the presence of God a terror you will flee forever (Rev 6:16; cf. Is 6:1-6.).

For me, this article placed an interesting twist on the topic and caused me to think about it differently. What is unjust about God giving people the "god" they most desire in life, for an eternity (whether that be an eternity with God (big 'G'), or the 'god of self')? Why is that so hard for us to believe in? To me, an eternity of loneliness and separation with myself as god, when my soul is hand-crafted for a relationship with the God of the universe, is a fearsome thing indeed. The fact is, left to ourselves, we would all choose ourselves and 'declare independence' from God (Rom. 6:23), and be left to an eternity of spiritual decomposition and misery apart from God.

The incredible love of God is seen in his grace in sending us His Son, who rescues us from that fate and (remarkably) takes on that misery and separation for Himself in our place. Imagine the agony that Jesus Christ took on himself by being held accountable for our sin as he was seperated from his source of Life, his ultimate love. Keller brings up a valid analogy - imagine being rejected by a spouse or best friend, and them saying to you, "I never knew you." This, on a much greater scale, was what Jesus experienced with his Father on the cross as he took on our sin. And Jesus, God in the flesh, did this for us, willingly. Now that is what I call "a loving God"!

I leave you with a last excerpt from Keller's article. I hope this post has been a resource for you as we humbly strive for truth in all things!

So the question becomes: what did it cost your kind of god to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this god agonize, cry out, and where were his nails and thorns? The only answer is: "I don't think that was necessary." But then ironically, in our effort to make God more loving, we have made him less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all. The worship of a god like this will be at most impersonal, cognitive, and ethical. There will be no joyful self-abandonment, no humble boldness, no constant sense of wonder. We could not sing to him "love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all." Only through the cross could our separation from God be removed, and we will spend all eternity loving and praising God for what he has done (Rev 5:9-14.)