The difficulties of believing in hell

I think part of the difficulty some people have about hell is that they imagine it in the Bugs Bunny or Dante's Inferno sense--a literal fiery pit in which you are burned alive but never die. You're just tortured for eternity.

I don't believe that's true. In 1 Peter, he is trying to comfort Christians who are suffering persecution, and he refers to their persecution as a "fiery ordeal," (1 Peter 4:12) but he isn't talking about them literally being in flames. Fire is just a metaphor for suffering.

Likewise, Jesus uses the word, "Gehenna," which was a literal place on the outskirts of Jerusalem where people burned their trash. So he was clearly just creating a word picture.

Fire also shows up in the book of Revelation as the "lake of fire," but Revelation is apocalyptic literature which uses a lot of imagery and symbols, not literal descriptions of things.

So I think all "hell" means is God's judgment.

Judgment is justified because of sin. When you do wrong, you deserve to be punished. There's no injustice in this. Parents punish their children when they do wrong. The government punishes criminals when they break the law. So God has the right to punish people who sin.

Part of the problem seems to be the mistaken notion that God is only punishming people for their failure to believe something they had no reason to believe in the first place. But that isn't the case. Belief in Jesus is what saves us from God's judgment. So if you don't believe, then you are judged for your sins, not for your lack of belief. Jesus put it like this, "Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins" (John 8:24).

The final problem with hell is just that it's permanent. It doesn't seem like there's anything we could possibly do in a short lifespan that would justify eternal punishment. I admit that this is a difficulty for me. I am not totally comfortable with it. It bothers me.

There are a few things that ameliorate my discomfort, though. One of them is the fact that the duration of our sin has nothing to do with the duration of the punishment we deserve. Burglarizing a house may take ten minutes, but murdering somebody could happen in a couple of seconds. But that doesn't mean burglars should get longer sentences than murderers.

Second, we may not fully grasp the holiness of God in this mortal life. Because of that, we may not fully grasp the severity of our sins. We object to hell because of our lack of perspective in God's holiness and our sinfulness. It may be that when we see "face to face" as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 13:12, we will gain a perspective that allows eternal punishment to make more sense to us.

Third, although the length of the punishment may be the same for everybody, the severity of the punishment is not the same for everybody. And this is evident in a number of passages in the New Testament (e.g. Luke 12:47-48, Matthew 11:22). The punishment will fit the crime.

Fourth, it's possible that those who are exiled in eternal punishment will never stop sinning, so they will always accumulate a longer sentence.

One last thing I want to say. A lot of people believe in annihilationism, which is the idea that at some point, those who do not receive eternal life will cease to exist. I think this is possible, but I don't actually think it's true. I wish it were true because it would be preferable to eternal punishment, but I just haven't been persuaded. But it's at least a possibility.