The framework below comes from Why Does God Allow Evil?: Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions by Clay Jones, who taught the course on this subject that I sat under at Biola. If this question presses on you, or on someone you love, buy his book. It goes considerably deeper than one post can, and I cannot recommend it more highly.
Two Objections
Two objections come up whenever hell is raised, and both deserve an answer. The first is that hell is not fair. Eternal conscious torment for a finite life of sin looks disproportionate. Does the punishment fit the crime? The second is that hell is not loving. A loving God, people say, would never send anyone there.
Before either objection, notice something about the way we react.
Hell Is Revealing
We hear eternal punishment and we are horrified, and rightly so. But watch the asymmetry. Tell a man he has spent his whole life in defiance of God, every breath in rebellion, every waking moment ignoring his Maker, and he shrugs. Tell that same man he will spend eternity under God’s judgment and he is offended.
Jonathan Edwards saw the inversion three hundred years ago. If we had any true spiritual awareness, he argued, hell’s severity would not amaze us. Our own depravity would. Edwards put the question to the center of it. Does it seem incredible to you that God should be so utterly regardless of the sinner’s welfare, and not at all shocking that you have been so utterly regardless of the honor and glory of the infinite God?
Sit with that. We are scandalized that God might disregard us. We are untroubled that we have spent a lifetime disregarding Him. We do not hate sin, which is precisely why we do not understand God’s judgment of it. R.C. Sproul is said to have observed that there are no hard truths, only hard hearts.
Hell Is Chosen
God is not dragging repentant people into hell. No one has ever come to Him asking to be saved and been refused. Hell is populated by people whose knees will not bend.
That is harder to accept than it sounds, so let the text carry it. In Luke sixteen, Jesus tells of a rich man in torment. Read it and notice what the man never says. He asks for water on his tongue. He argues with Abraham about the sufficiency of the evidence, insisting a resurrection would persuade his brothers. He gives instructions about his father’s house. He wants Lazarus to run his errands. He never once says he was wrong. He never asks God for mercy on a sinner. He is in agony and still the center of his own universe.
That is not the quirk of one parable. It is the pattern wherever Scripture pulls back the curtain. In Revelation, under the direct outpouring of God’s wrath, the refrain lands twice in three verses. People were scorched by the intense heat, “and they did not repent and give him glory” (Revelation 16:9). They gnawed their tongues in pain and blasphemed the God of heaven, “but they did not repent of their works” (Revelation 16:11).
We assume sufficient pressure humbles a man. It does not. Right now we live in an age of grace, and Paul says it is God’s kindness that leads to repentance (Romans 2:4). You would think that when the grace expires and the wrath falls, people would beg for mercy. They curse instead.
Larry Dixon studied the question carefully and concluded that the popular notion of the wicked repenting in hell is simply wrong. Their impenitence continues.
And there is a phrase we routinely misread. Jesus says there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and we hear anguish and regret. Dixon, following Alfred Edersheim, points out that in the biblical world gnashing of teeth is not sorrow. It is rage. Not oh no. How dare You. And it is aimed at God. Hell is not full of people weeping to get out. It is full of people grinding their teeth at the One they still refuse.
Dallas Willard described where that road ends. No one chooses hell in the abstract, he said, but an orientation toward self makes a person into the kind of being for whom away from God is the only place he is suited, a place he would in the end choose for himself. William Lane Craig puts it starkly. The only obstacle to universal salvation is human free will. God desires all to be saved. The Spirit draws. The gospel goes out. Some say no, and keep saying no, forever. Hell is not God overriding a will that wanted Him. It is God honoring a will that never did.
Hell Is Just
This is the harder objection, and it needs two answers.
The weight of sin is not measured by how long it takes to commit. Most sins, even egregious ones, take seconds. A thought. A word. An act. It is done. Sin is measured instead by the One against whom it is committed.
A slap takes a second. Slap a stranger and you may face a fine or a short sentence. Slap the president and you have committed a federal felony carrying years in prison. Same hand, same motion, entirely different weight, because he occupies the highest office in the land. To strike him is to strike the office.
Now raise your eyes. Christ is your Creator, your Redeemer, and your Sustainer. Consider the offices He holds. It is a high and holy thing to sin against God.
This is why David confessed as he did. He had wronged Bathsheba and he had wronged Uriah, and still he prayed, “Against you—you alone—I have sinned and done this evil in your sight. So you are right when you pass sentence; you are blameless when you judge” (Psalm 51:4). He is not denying the horizontal damage. He is naming the root. Had he been doing what God said, none of the rest would have happened. We do not think sin is serious because we do not think God is holy. That is our problem, not His.
Then the second answer. The punishment is eternal because the rebellion is eternal. Hell is not merely a bill for past sins. It is the continuing judgment of hearts that remain in rebellion. Go back to Revelation. Not under discipline but under wrath, they keep cursing. The sinning never stops, and so the sentence never stops.
The Case for Annihilationism
There is a growing tide behind the view that God metes out a just punishment and then ceases to sustain the sinner, so that he passes out of existence. John Stott advocated it, and his reasons are worth hearing even where they do not persuade.
He argued from the semantics of destruction, that words like destroy ordinarily denote a result rather than an unending process. He argued that eternal modifies outcome rather than the duration of an activity, as in eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12) and eternal judgment, neither of which we read as something God is still performing. He noted that immortality is a gift and not a human property, since Paul says God alone is immortal (1 Timothy 6:16). He pointed to prophetic imagery like the smoke of Edom rising forever (Isaiah 34:10) as language for a judgment that is never rebuilt. And he found endless suffering for a finite life emotionally intolerable, while taking care to say it was not logically impossible.
Now notice what Stott conceded. Eternal conscious punishment would make far more sense to him, he wrote, if the impenitence of the lost also continued throughout eternity. He labeled his own view tentative.
That concession is the whole hinge. I am convinced from Scripture that the sinning never stops, and therefore the sentence never stops. Show me a repentant person in hell and I will grant the case. But the record reads weeping and gnashing of teeth, and gnashing is rage.
A Smaller God Is Not a Kinder God
There is an escape hatch here that has to be closed. Rabbi Harold Kushner took it, concluding that God would end suffering if He could but lacks the power. The appeal is obvious. A weaker god is easier to defend.
But a god who cannot judge evil is no comfort. He is a bystander. And a god too weak to have a hell is a god too weak to have a heaven. If He cannot secure justice, He cannot secure a resurrection. If He cannot repay evildoers what they are owed, on what grounds do you expect Him to raise you from the dead? Do not buy your comfort by dismantling the only God strong enough to save you.
Consider what happens when the hatch stays open. Sam Harris asks us to picture a man who abducts a little girl and then goes on to torture and kill her. Where is your good God now?
Here. Paul writes that it is just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict His people, and that when Christ is revealed He will bring eternal destruction on those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel (2 Thessalonians 1:6-9).
We want it both ways. We call God unfair for sending anyone to hell, and we are the first to plead for His vengeance when we are wronged. Which is it? You cannot demand that the torturer of a child answer to his Creator and also demand that there be no hell. Those are the same demand. Hell is that demand granted in full.
A universe with no final reckoning is not a kinder universe. It is a moral nightmare, one where the torturer and the tortured child arrive at the same destination and evil is never named, never answered, never set right. That is not mercy. It is the abolition of morality itself.
The Judge Took the Sentence
Here is what the skeptic never expects a Christian to say, and it is the thing most worth saying. The judge stepped down into the dock.
Consider what hell is at its center. Separation from God. That is not the lighter reading of it. If God is your Creator, your Redeemer, and your Sustainer, and you want nothing to do with Him, then in His absence He becomes your judge and your destroyer. You are cut off from His presence and His strength.
Now go to the cross and hear what the Son of God cried out in the dark, asking the Father why He had been abandoned (Matthew 27:46). John tells us that in the beginning the Word was with God, and that preposition carries the sense of face to face. Jesus had beheld the Father’s glory from eternity past. And in one moment He looked up and asked where He was.
How can Jesus free finite sinners from an infinite hell? Because He is an infinite Person suffering finitely for sinners. God took on flesh, and the Father was pleased to crush Him (Isaiah 53:10).
The rich man in Luke sixteen begged for one drop of water on his tongue and did not get it. Remember that Jesus, on the cross, said He was thirsty (John 19:28). And then He drank the full cup of God’s wrath so that you would never have to.
All judgment has been committed to the Son. None of us will stand before the Father. The Man who will judge the living and the dead has Himself been under the judgment of God. The eternal Son experienced God forsakenness, and that is the essence of hell. The judge was judged. The sentence you earned fell on Him.
Which is why the doctrine of hell, in the mouth of a Christian, is not be afraid. It is that there is a way out, and it cost God His only Son to open it.
Hell is real. Justice is real. And the door is open, not because God went soft on evil but because in Christ He absorbed it.
I still deserve an eternity in hell. My only plea is that Christ experienced it in my place. That is grace.