Hell might not be a palatable subject for our culture, but culture has never been the arbiter of truth. We have all heard the objections to the biblical concept of an eternal hell, and most often they are made in reference to the perceived character of God. If God is a good and loving God, why would he torment people forever? If God is loving and merciful, surely that love must win, and everyone eventually gets to heaven. The problem with these perceptions of God is that they are blindly selective of God’s attributes and greatly ignorant of the seriousness of human sin. The Bible clearly speaks of our God as eternal, immutable, righteous, jealous, wrathful, holy, and just. Put these attributes together and we understand that God is eternally unchanging in his judgment against evil perpetrated against his infinite holiness. If God’s mercy, love, and grace are eternal, then God’s righteous judgment and wrath are also eternal, and our relationship with God is based on one or the other depending on whether or not we are in Christ.
The objections to God’s eternal and righteous judgment are not just found in those who find the gospel reprehensible, but also many who claim to profess Christ. Some professing Christians have suggested many alternatives to an eternal hell in an attempt to make the love of God more palatable for themselves and others. The problem with this is that if you deny the eternality of hell, you end up having the same problem with heaven.
In Matthew 19:16, Jesus is asked a very important question: “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” When Jesus told him to sell all his possessions and give to the poor, the man went away sorrowful. If the temporal is more important to us than putting our faith in Jesus, what have we left but sorrow? In Christ, however, there is eternal reward. “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.” (Matthew 19:29).
One chapter before, Jesus was talking to his disciples about the seriousness of sin. He said, “And 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 crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet 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 with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire”(Matthew 18:8-9). Notice that Jesus uses the word “eternal” in reference to hell. This is the same word used in Matthew 19 in reference to eternal life. It is the same word used in reference to the eternal God (Romans 16:26) and the eternal power and nature of God (Romans 1:20). It’s also the same word used in the verse every Christian loves to quote as we give witness to the gospel – John 3:16, a verse we quote because we want everyone who hears to know that through faith in Christ we have eternal life.
When God warns us to be serious about sin, he does so to emphasize the seriousness of sin’s punishment. It’s not simply hell (as horrific a thought as even one single day in hell would be). It is eternal hell. It is as everlasting as eternal life. We can’t have one without the other. If hell is not eternal, then Matthew 18 is an empty threat. It would be as if God is saying, “Sin is serious, so don’t forsake Jesus to follow your sin because sin leads to an eternal hell – but – not really.” What we can know from Matthew 18 is that if hell is not eternal, then neither is heaven, and sin is not really that serious, and the gospel loses its relief. It’s no longer good news. It’s just news.
The reality is that whether you want to believe in eternal hell or not, the Scriptures give us no alternative. The good news of Jesus is not salvation from an empty threat, but salvation from the eternal judgment of the all-holy God of the universe. Our only hope is indeed to repent of sin and put our faith in Jesus Christ who paid the eternal price for our salvation when he died for our sins on the cross. He is our only hope, but he is also our eternal hope. God never makes empty threats, and therefore, God also never makes empty promises.
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