Sunday June 18, 2023 | Greg Boyd
If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the hell of fire.
In this sermon, Greg addresses the problem of hell and how many have walked away from the faith because they cannot reconcile a God of love with a place of endless torture. Greg gives a biblical understanding of hell by demonstrating its metaphorical language, how we bring hell upon ourselves, and how it actually is related to God’s love.
One of the reasons why people struggle with and walk away from the faith is the traditional teaching of hell. Greg approaches this by first reading a passage from the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards. This sermon depicts the dominant view of hell throughout church history. Hell is conceived as the worst nightmare imaginable: unending, hopeless, relentless and merciless torment. Many have raised the question that if God is all-loving, then how can there be such a thing as a hell? They reject a God who will torture people endlessly.
The question that we must ask is, what does the Bible actually teach on hell? Greg uses three points to flesh this out.
First, the language about hell is metaphorical. The word in the New Testament for hell was “Gehenna” which was a literal place in the valley of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem. It was a place where pagans had burned children to false gods and had served as a garbage dump. For Jesus and others, this location became a metaphor for the ultimate fate of all who reject God and make themselves unfit for the kingdom. No one believed the wicked would literally be thrown into this specific valley. Rather, following God’s ways leads to life in the city among the living. Breaking from God’s ways leads to death, thrown out into the valley of wickedness and destruction. Gehenna is terrible. To reject God is to reject the source of life, goodness, love, joy, peace and harmony. The opposite is death, evil, hate, despair, turmoil and conflict. Rejecting the ways of God brings about truly terrible consequences in this life and in the next
Secondly, we bring hell on ourselves. There are two kinds of judgment in the Bible. The first is judicial, a judgment that is extrinsic to the evil act, as there is not direct relationship between the action and the punishment. The second is organic, where the consequences of the act are built naturally into the act itself because the punishment follows naturally from the crime. The latter is how Scripture most frequently speaks about God’s judgments.
When we find depictions of God pronouncing sentences on people, if we read closely, we can see that God is simply allowing people to experience the destructive consequences of their own rebellion. This is illustrated in Psalm 7:12-16:
If one does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and strung his bow;
he has prepared his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
See how they conceive evil
and are pregnant with mischief
and bring forth lies.
They make a pit, digging it out,
and fall into the hole that they have made.
Their mischief returns upon their own heads,
and on their own heads their violence descends.
It appears that God is directly doing something against those who reject him. But if we read closely, we see that the judgment is actually a natural result of their actions. Our sin is inherently self-destructive as judgment is woven through the action itself. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”
The third point is that hell expresses the love of God. There are three main views that have been taught about hell. Greg offers an overview of these three views and asks if these views are compatible with the love of God expressed on the cross. The first view is that hell is eternal conscious suffering, and it has been the dominant view held in the church, as illustrated by Edwards’ sermon. Greg questions how eternal, conscious suffering can align with the love that God has demonstrated on the cross.
The second view is called annihilationism, where the ultimate fate of the wicked is non-existence. The natural consequence of sin is death, the ending of one’s existence and forfeiture of the right to eternal life. In this view, if someone is hopelessly set against God, to go on existing would be hell, for they are incompatible with God and his kingdom. This is compatible with the love of God revealed on Calvary in some ways because the God of love gives rebels what they want. However, it also means that we must accept that love doesn’t always win.
The third view is called universalism. There is biblical support of this view (Rom. 5:18-19, 1 Cor. 15:22, Eph. 1:9-10). The great thing about this view is that it fully embraces that God seeks all and works for all to be included in his love. But there is also a concern in that it can result in cheap universalism. We don’t have to worry about how we live because it all ends well. If this is the case then why are there so many warnings about hell? Some have argued that God, in his relentless love, will let you sin to whatever nightmarish level you need to sink to in order to have you eventually wake up to the folly of your way and accept God’s gracious offer of love and life. They warn against Gehenna as strongly as any hell fire and brimstone preacher, saying that hell will last as long as you want it to, but God’s love will win in the end.
Whatever view you hold, it has to be rooted in the love of God. Living in God’s love has intrinsic results of life and peace. Living outside of God’s love is Gehenna. This natural consequence of rejecting love is actually a loving process of letting consequences of decisions slay the old person in order for God to restore them in Christ. It’s better to enter the process of burning away all that stands against God’s love now and purge ourselves of sin now than it is to have it purged later. Today, we have the opportunity to let go of hell and move into God’s life and love.