This is exactly how it is supposed to be.

Hell is an aberration, an abomination, a place that was never meant to be. Hell was not a part of the original creation. In fact, hell is not even meant for humankind. Hell is made as the banishment awaiting Satan and his angels. The tragic tale of humanity is that there will be some of us who will choose to join him there. But the fact that the idea of hell seems so out-of-place and “wrong” speaks to this truth that it is not where we are meant to go. Hell is supposed to shock the mind and the senses. However, don’t let that unease keep you from considering the claims of Jesus. If we preached a God that made complete and perfect sense to us, we’d be preaching a man-made god, not the Infinite Creator of the Universe who so vastly exceeds our intellect and imagination that we can’t even think or imagine the extent of how much He does.

But back to the question: how can a God who claims to be perfect and infinite Love send people to a place of infinite punishment and torment??? There’s no way I could possibly hope to cover all the relevant aspects of hell in one short blog post. If you didn’t make it to church this Sunday, I highly recommend watching Steve’s message. In addition, I’ll post some resources at the end for further study. So instead of a full discussion of hell, I want to focus in on only this aspect of it, the question asked in the title.

First off, a giant misunderstanding about hell is that it’s a place God angrily throws people who didn’t do things the way He wanted them to, or simply believed the wrong things about Him.

Hell is not a place where people are consigned because they were pretty good blokes, but they just didn’t believe the right stuff. They’re consigned there, first and foremost, because they defy their maker and want to be at the center of the universe. Hell is not filled with people who have already repented, only God isn’t gentle enough or good enough to let them out. It’s filled with people who, for all eternity, still want to be the center of the universe and who persist in their God-defying rebellion. –D.A. Carson

Hell is the place for people who don’t want to be with God, who don’t want to bow to anyone but themselves, who don’t want to serve others but want to be served and to oppress others for their own gain. When Jesus returns to end our present mode of history, God will finally shout ENOUGH! to the world. When he comes back, He will be saying “From now on there will be no more rape, no more murder, no more child abuse, no more hatred, no more oppression, no more condemnation. That is finished with, now and forever.” Justice and peace will finally reign and all wrongs will finally be righted.

Unfortunately, that won’t be good news for everybody. That type of world will not be desired by all.

You may (perfectly reasonably) object, “But perhaps God could just change them so that they see the light and realize how wrong they are.” The problem is that these hell-bound people already have seen the light, and they consciously rejected it, knowing full well what they were rejecting. Consider this: to be “cured” against your will by God of pride, selfishness, and total independence would be a sort of divine cosmic rape of your very soul. As Chesterton said, “Hell is God’s great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.” We are not programmed robots but powerful beings with self-determination and free will. True free will demands the possibility of rejection of God’s love and way of life.

What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? He has already done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They [do not want to be] forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does. – C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

It is theorized that the gates of hell are not locked from the outside by God, but rather from the inside by its own inhabitants. It may be possible for a being in hell to leave it any time they wish and join God in heaven, but because of its very nature, the type of souls that go to hell will never want to enter God’s presence. It would be like a vampire walking into the bright noonday sun. For someone whose whole existence is wrapped up in self-worship, self-centeredness, and “getting what’s mine”, the sacrificial, servant-love of God that will characterize heaven would be like bright, powerful rays of burning painful light. Heaven would be hell for those types of people.

“Milton was right…’The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery…” – C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

The only kind of people in hell will be the kind of people who agree with that statement…even if all it means is to reign over the flies of the garbage dump (see Steve’s message for that neat insight). But imagine a whole nation populated with only those types of people. That’s why hell will be misery and torment–not from any external punishment by God, but because their own wretched, selfish desires will constantly be frustrated by all the other people there who will also be trying to become “lord of the flies”. Or imagine it like a drug addict who is so totally addicted that no amount of drugs bring them even the smallest high anymore, yet they’re still addicted. That is the misery of hell.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that God doesn’t send people to hell. People send themselves there, and they want to be there. Nobody will be in hell who doesn’t want to be, and nobody will be weeping behind hell’s gates because they realized just a bit too late how wrong their life was lived. There won’t be a single person in hell lamenting that they’re not in heaven because they ‘missed it by that much‘. “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.”

I truly believe that if you are the kind of person who wants to be kinder, gentler, more loving, more compassionate, more self-controlled, more giving, and truly wants to be with God and live in a place where agape reigns supreme and is the normal mode of existing, then you will be in heaven. The caveat is this: you can’t do it on your own. Anyone who’s seriously tried to will themselves to being a better person solely by their own power knows keenly well how impossible this is. I’ll let God sort out the details, but if you are not yet a follower of Jesus, then read His love letter to all of humanity, written in the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice. The Spirit of God is the only power in this universe that can transform you into that type of person and guarantee your inclusion in that community with a seal of ownership.

In closing, the best quote that I have ever read on this, one which so completely captures the essence of the doctrine of hell in one solitary sentence comes, again, from C.S. Lewis:

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.” – The Great Divorce

-Jeremy

For further study and reflection on the reality of hell, I recommend the following: (and please forgive me for pimping my own works

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis
Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli
Who’s Got God?, by Yours Truly [pages 69-74]
The Skeptical Believer, my blog’s review of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins

I don’t feel remotely qualified to dive into the pastoral aspects of answering a question like this, but I will recommend several books to the interested reader:

Reason For God, by Timothy Keller. This book is fantastic, and is available in the lobby for $10

The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis is one of the classics.

Disappointment With God, by Philip Yancey

The Shack, by William Young.

I do want to focus on one aspect of suffering that sometimes gets Christians into trouble with the rest of the world: the reason for suffering.

We all know that there is suffering that is self-caused and that there is suffering that is other-caused. But what about suffering such as natural disasters, or suffering that seems to have no cause? I’m thinking of the massive tsunamis of the last several years, earthquakes, children being born with terminal illnesses, things like that.

Human beings are rational creatures, and Christians believe that the universe is purposeful and is moving towards a climax. This leads us quite naturally to look for specific reasons why things should happen to us or those around us. Unlike a strict atheist, we do not believe that the universe is random, purposeless and without intrinsic meaning. So it perfectly reasonable to watch a tidal wave obliterate 100,000 lives and ask “why”.

The problem that we run into is when we start believing that we actually know the answer to this question. Even worse is when we start ascribing moral reasons to disasters. I can guarantee you that if you ask a non-Christian what they think of first after hearing the words “9/11″ and “Christian” one of the very first things they’ll tell you is that they think of Jerry Falwell’s words:

The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but…throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.

Ask them about the Haiti earthquake and they’ll probably mention remembering Pat Robertson blaming it on a pact with the devil that the Haitians agreed to centuries ago.

This is dangerous, dangerous ground to tread on. Mainly because when you start ascribing moral reasons to disasters, you are in direct contradiction with Jesus himself. Consider these two stories:

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. (Lk 13:1-5)

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been born blind. His followers asked him, “Teacher, whose sin caused this man to be born blind—his own sin or his parents’ sin?”

Jesus answered, “It is not this man’s sin or his parents’ sin that made him blind. This man was born blind so that God’s power could be shown in him. (Jn 9:1-5)

These two passages here should forever silence any Christian from ever claiming to know why bad things happen in the world that don’t have clear causes. The first example was a sort-of terrorist attack: Pontius Pilate had murdered some Jewish people and combined their blood with the pigs’ blood of their sacrifices…just about as heinous a desecration that you could come up with. The second story references a building falling down, perhaps due to an earthquake, and crushing 18 people to death. The final story involves a man who was born blind. Apparently there were people who, much like today, wondered whether all these people suffered because “they deserved it”. And in each one of these three cases, Jesus’ answer was clear:

Absolutely not.

Jesus refocuses the entire question itself and throws it back on the asker. “Don’t worry about why someone else died tragically,” He tells us, “Look to your own heart instead and make sure that’s taken care of or your own death will be just as tragic.”

If Jesus Himself refused to answer these types of questions, then why would we want to attempt to? What we do know is that God doesn’t cause suffering, but he can use it. Like Will talked about this morning, suffering and pain and evil is not good, but God is able to bring good out of them. He is like a Master Weaver, and suffering is like black thread. He can take these black threads and weave them into the pattern of your life to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. If you let Him.

–

What about you? We’d love to hear your own stories of God bringing good out of suffering or your stories of doubt in this regard.

This is a very American (and modern) objection to Christianity. After all, the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is in the Declaration of Independence. It’s in the very DNA of our country (I’m not going to get off track here and delve into politics and all that, but it’s my belief that this phrase is widely misinterpreted today and has become a selfish and superficial attitude rather than the ground-breaking statement of political freedom it was meant to be).

So when a person becomes a Christian, do they have to give up their freedom? Don’t you become a slave to one group’s view of morality? Do you have to give up your voice and become just another sheep in the crowd?

Many people think becoming a Christian means just that.

I’d like to address this by looking at it in a couple different ways. First, what does the word “freedom” really entail? Is true freedom being free from all constraints and letting me do what I want? I think not. I think that exercising this kind of freedom is an illusion and actually leads to less freedom. For example, you’re perfectly free to eat anything and everything you want to without restraint, but acting on this kind of freedom inevitably leads to slavery. Soon you’ll weigh 300 pounds, have high cholesterol and diabetes, and very possibly die. This freedom will eventually take everything from you.

The movie Pinocchio has some great wisdom in this regard. On Pleasure Island, kids have complete freedom to do anything they want to do. Eat nothing but candy, play all day and stay up all night. Smoke, drink, and gamble. For awhile, it’s heaven on earth but as we all know, it’s really a trap. The boys eventually turn into donkeys (or jackasses, wink wink) and are sent off to be slaves, working in the mines or sent off to the circus.

We’re all slaves to something. Even the free-est of thinkers give their allegiance to something. The important thing is not to escape being a slave, but choosing what (or who) will be our master.

Being a Christian means giving our allegiance to the God who made us and designed us. This is the only kind of slavery that makes sense, since God knows how we work best. Choosing God as our Master and living the way He says is best actually leads us to more freedom, because we align ourselves with the way the Universe actually works, and the way human relationships were meant to function.

Think of a train. If you dump a train in the middle of a field, it gets stuck and can’t move anywhere. But put that same train on the tracks it was designed to run on, and see how far it can go. The train finds its freedom on the tracks, not off of them. Human beings are just like this.

Another way in which people object to Christianity is to say that the Christian community is too constraining. They have certain ideas about morality, and to be a part of the group you must follow them or risk being ostracized. This is true, I won’t deny it. But why people think that this only applies to Christianity or other organized religions has always kind of baffled me. The fact is that every community has standards. That’s part of what defines any community–a shared set of values. As Keller says in The Reason For God:

Any community that did not hold its members accountable for specific beliefs and practices would have no corporate identity and would not really be a community at all. We cannot consider a group exclusive simply because it has standards for its members. (p. 40)

Perhaps a better yardstick to judge a community by is not how stringent its moral standards are, but the results of living in that community. If a community leads its members to be more loving, more charitable, more neighborly, then I think we can agree it’s a positive community. It doesn’t really matter how strict its standards are if it leads its people to become better, kinder people. Conversely, a community which leads its members to condemn outsiders and attack those who disagree with them is not a good community to be in. They may have the loosest rules in the world, but if the spirit of it is arrogant and divisive, then that’s a negative community and makes the world a little (or a lot) darker.

You can find both types of community in the world today, and you’ll find them among all belief systems. Any Christian community that is ungracious and accusatory rightly deserves criticism for their attitude, as does any other community. And we know that this is clearly not the way Jesus intended His followers to live. His community was to be marked by love and compassion. Any Christian community who denies this (and they are out there) is simply wrong. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist of  degree in Biblical Studies to understand what Jesus means when He says “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (Jn 13:34-35)

True freedom, then, is not the freedom from all rules and standards. True freedom is freedom for. For aligning yourself with the way the Creator designed you. For fulfilling your destiny. For loving others the way God has loved you.

All of us are a slave to something. Our freedom comes in choosing what we will allow to be our master. You must choose: choose whether to be a slave to sin, or to be a slave to the One who takes away all sin.

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Cor 3:17)

-Jeremy

“I believe all paths lead up the same mountain.”

“Isn’t it pretty arrogant to think that you alone out of every culture in the whole world has the only Truth? You know that Muslims feel the same way about their religion too, right? Everybody thinks their way is the only way!”

This is an extremely common objection–probably the one I hear the most often. And I do think it is a very legitimate question which, most times, comes from a place of compassion and a praiseworthy motive.

The biggest problem with the underlying objection here is that it’s self-defeating. Truth by its very nature is exclusive. Meaning that if something is True, then its opposite cannot be true–no matter how many Zen Buddhists try to convince you otherwise. Now there are indeed a lot of things in life that seem on the surface to be contradictory but when you look deeper are indeed both truth, but at the most fundamental level truth is exclusive. Even a Zen Buddhist looks both ways before he crosses the street, if you know what I mean.

As for the claim of arrogance, it’s not arrogant to believe that something is True, or exclusively true. Arrogance comes from the attitude of the belief, not the belief itself. Yes, there are a very many arrogant Christians out there (and to them I would ask them to heed one of the sharpest warnings Jesus ever gave. It’s crucial to note that in this passage, Jesus was talking to the people of his own faith, people who knew and loved the Bible far more than you and me put together. The people Jesus were talking to here knew the truth–it was their attitude towards it that put them in danger of hell.), but there are just as many arrogant atheists and agnostics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone condemning the arrogance of Christians in the most arrogant manner you can imagine.

In the end, what really matters is this: Is what you believe TRUE? Everyone on earth places their faith in something. Many people’s ultimate faith is in themselves. The important thing is whether what you’re placing your faith in is worthy of that faith. Forget whether it’s “exclusive” or “narrow” or anything like that. Is it true?

So don’t let anyone tell you that they don’t like “organized religion” because it’s too exclusive. Everybody’s exclusive. Even the belief that all beliefs are equally true is exclusive–it excludes the belief that all beliefs are not equally true.

The Christian’s answer to this objection is not that Christianity is true. Our response is that JESUS is true. When Jesus told us what the only Way to Truth was, it wasn’t a religion. It was Himself. We do ourselves and our world a disservice when we say that Christianity is the only true religion. For we don’t follow a religion, we follow a Person. Jesus said He was the way and the truth. His way of living, and his truth about the love of the Father. That is what makes Christianity, properly understood, different from every other faith that has ever existed in the history of man. He showed us that having the right doctrine doesn’t really matter. What matters is knowing God and following His heart. Jesus came to teach us how to do both.

As Christians (and especially Protestants) we rely on the Bible as the primary source of our information about God. Indeed, we believe that the Bible is the ONLY fully complete and accurate revelation from God to His people.

It would behoove us then to understand why we believe that, don’t you think?

After all, in an age where machines can read your mind and men can travel to the moon, what sane, rational person could possibly believe in a 2000 year old book filled with fairytales? One of the most common objections you’ll hear from a skeptic is the ‘game of telephone’ argument. You know how it goes:

Isn’t the Bible really just like the children’s game of telephone? One person whispers a message to the person next to them, who then repeats it to then next person, and on and on in a circle. By the time the message gets back to the original person, it’s changed so much that it’s completely unrecognizable! And the Bible has been copied and copied for thousands of years, and translated into so many different languages, there’s just no way that the Bible we have today is the same one that was originally written.

That’s actually a completely reasonable assumption to make…as long as you don’t know the facts behind how the Bible we have today came to be. In reality, the Bible is the most reliable ancient text in all of history in any culture. No other ancient book even comes close to matching the Bible’s reliability. Consider the following: in determining the authenticity of ancient writings, two of the main pieces of evidence that scholars look at are how many copies of that manuscript still exist, and how long these copies were written after the original. For example, here are the numbers for some of the most famous and influential writers of antiquity:

It’s important to note that each of these works is regarded as firmly reliable by historians. By contrast, the wealth of manuscript evidence supporting the Bible is almost embarrassing. For the New Testament, we have 24,970 manuscripts available, with the earliest fragments within 50 years of the original writing.

For the Old Testament, there are fewer manuscripts in existence, but this actually serves to increase its reliability in this case. The reason is because each copy of the Old Testament was regarded as absolutely sacred by the Jewish scribes; after all, they believed they were copying the very words of God. If a scribe made one single error while making a copy of the Torah (Old Testament), if they made one letter wrong, they burned the entire copy and started over from the beginning. This was in the days when you had to do it all by hand!

Let’s go back to the game of telephone, but add one simple rule to it. Instead of listening to the message once and then passing it on, let’s say you can now repeat the message back to the person whispering it to you and ask them if you got it right. And you can do this as often as you want until you get every single word right. Wouldn’t you think this would vastly improve the accuracy of the message?

In fact that’s exactly what we see with the Bible. Do me a favor and read Isaiah 53 really quick. Does that sound like anybody you know? Yeah, I thought so. In fact, this passage so closely mirrors the life of Jesus in the New Testament that for a very long time, skeptical scholars said that it was obvious the early Christians had rewritten that passage to force it match up with their beliefs. And for a very long time, there wasn’t much a Christian scholar could do to directly disprove this claim, because the earliest manuscripts we had of the Old Testament were dated at 900 A.D.

But then a funny thing happened. In 1947, a young shepherd boy threw a rock into a small cave. Instead of banging off the wall, he heard the rock shatter some pottery. Inside these clay jars was an astounding treasure: what we know today as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls were dated at 125 B.C. In one fell swoop we gained a thousand years of proximity to the original Old Testament, and more importantly, found copies that predated the birth of Jesus.

Upon comparing Isaiah 53 from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the next earliest copy, about a thousand years later, only seventeen letters were different. And not a single one of those differences changed the meaning of the passage. In fact, most of those differences were simply a matter of spelling the same word differently, kind of like ‘theater’ and ‘theatre’.

By the way, does anybody else think it’s incredibly awesome at the poetic ways in which God continues to reveal Himself to us? Think about it: a young shepherd boy who’s proficient at slinging rocks? Treasures in (literal) jars of clay? Our God is gracious, elegant, and likes to give us a playful, knowing wink every now and then. How could you not love that?

So the next time someone says you can’t trust what you read in the Bible, tell ‘em about Homer and Caesar, telephones, and shepherd boys throwing rocks.

-Jeremy

Whether or not you are a member of Journey or have ever even been to our church, I don’t care. All are welcome to post here. I hope to hear from fervent believers, equally fervent skeptics, and those who aren’t sure what they believe anymore . Don’t feel like you need to give “the Christian answer”. If you have serious doubts or faith-threatening questions, be intellectually honest with yourself and discuss them here. If you’re not comfortable with people knowing who you are, post under a pseudonym!

A bit about me. I have been studying apologetics (i.e., the intellectual reasoning for believing the Christian faith) for nearly 20 years. Earlier this year I published my first book, Who’s Got God?, a real-life conversation between believers of different faiths about the very issues that this series will be dealing with. In addition, I manage my blog The Skeptical Believer, which covers many apologetic issues in blog format.

In closing, I’m completely serious when I say this should be an open conversation. Ask anything. Faith that cannot stand up to doubts and questions is a weak and flabby faith. I want you, believer and nonbeliever alike, to exercise your “doubting muscle” and fearlessly search your own heart and mind to take that “leap of doubt”.

Don’t worry about offending me if you think all Christians are small-minded sheep. Unless you’ve got something worse to call me than a “zombie-eyed nutcase” then I guarantee you I’ve heard it all thrown my way. But I do insist on respect for fellow commenters. Comments containing profanity, ad-hominem attacks, and personal insults will be moderated into oblivion; this is a place of respect for differing views, not revile.

Now go forth and comment!

Jeremy Seely, AKA The Skeptical Believer

Keller urges Christ-follower and skeptic alike to take “A Leap of Doubt”, identifying and exploring the hard questions in their own minds, as well as those in the minds of “the other side”. In so doing, we are humbled by the realization that we all have faith, and we all have doubts.  This kind of humility brings civility to the discussion, as well as authenticity to our ownership of what we really believe.

So for the six weeks beginning October 2 THE JOURNEY will be focused upon the most common doubts that skeptics, and even devoted Christ-followers, have about religion: “Isn’t The Bible A Myth?”, “How Can There Be Just One Way to God?”; “What Gives You the Right To Tell Me How To Live My Life?”  “How Could A Good God Allow Suffering?” , “Why is the Church Responsible For So Much Injustice?”, and “How Can God Send Good People To Hell?”

As an added feature, this blog will serve as a forum to   discuss the question raised each week.  Please join me in welcoming our guest moderator, Jeremy Seely.  Jeremy is a Journey member who loves exploring questions of faith with other people when he’s not immersed in World of Warcraft (Seriously–he works for Blizzard).  He has had A LOT of doubts himself, so you are in good company.  All are welcome to the conversation–let’s learn from each other.

–Steve Phillips

See, I had it all wrong.  I thought that once I was saved from my sins the goal was to please God with my good behavior.  Only one problem—I’m still me.  Even with Christ inside, I continue to screw it up.  Then the downward spiral:

good intentions

lead to failure

leads to guilt

leads to shame

leads to hiding from God

leads to try harder

leads to good intentions….

and here we go again.

To be rescued from something sets us on the path toward something, and that something is not another unreachable standard of moral conduct.  NO.  I realized that Jesus put me on the path of Trusting Him.  Trusting Him is the adventure.  It’s about a JOURNEY.  Here are some of the benefits:

1.  Destination unknown, I learn to trust Jesus for the journey.  He TRANSFORMS me along the way.

2.  Ambushed by regret, loneliness, or shame–I dare believe I am NOT ABANDONED.  Grace.  He reveals Himself in the journey.

3.  Insecure, inadequate, at the end of my resources—I have nothing left but God.  Then I discover He is ENOUGH for the journey.

4.  Jesus calls, and as I walk in His dust I realize my DESTINY.  I was made for this journey.

And so are you.  We were made to walk it together.  Here at Journey, we are all about the adventure with Jesus, not so much about having arrived.  We haven’t arrived, but He has.  What more do we need to rock our world?  He is enough.