Sermon outline:
“What the Hell?”
1 October 2023
David Huang
Good morning! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is David and I’m honored to be speaking to you today on a rather weighty and unhappy topic – HELL.
As always, we’ll be using menti to allow all of you to participate in the sermon, so please use your phone to log in at fcc.li/menti or scan the QR code on the screen. When you share your answers on menti, I truly believe not only you’ll get more out of the sermon, but your answer might also be help someone else. So I invite each and every one of you watching online, or on site, to join in.
Please pray with me:
Dear Lord, as we examine this difficult subject this morning may our hearts be held tight in your loving embrace, because we know perfect love casts out all fear. May everything we learn lead us to know you more deeply, and to love you and others better. Amen.
Today is the last sermon in our sermon series “Faithfully.” We have been relooking at doctrines which we may have previously accepted without question, and taking the time to examine them afresh. So let’s get started with today’s topic – HELL. Hell is something I am sure we have all heard of, whether we grew up in church, or whether you only know it as a curse word. And it is not an easy topic to talk about. So let’s start with a question:
MENTI: What do you believe about hell? (word cloud)
As we can see, there are variety of ways we all understand Hell. The real question is, how does our view of Hell affect how we see God, see ourselves, and see others? We’ll come back to this question!
So today I want to share with you 3 things:
Firstly, what does the Bible say about Hell
Secondly, four theological views on Hell.
And lastly, how then shall we live?
Part 1: What does the Bible say about Hell?
Do you know what scripture says about hell? There are 4 words which are translated as Hell in the Bible. We’ll take a look at each word – because through this, we can trace the evolution of the idea of hell.
The first word is Sheol Shee-owe-l (Ancient Hebrew): Used 66 times. Anytime you read the word “Hell” in the Old testament, the word is “Sheol”. It’s an ancient Jewish concept for the place where all people went after death, both the “good” and “bad”. People believed it physically existed below the surface of the earth, and it was a dark joyless place where you ceased to be a real person, and existed as a “shade”. The key point to note here is that the Israelite people of the OT had no concept for eternal punishment after death. Let me say that again for emphasis. Our modern idea of hell did not exist at all in the writings of the Old Testament.
Hades (Greek): Appears 11 times. Hades is from Greek mythology, but in the Bible it is pretty much the same as the Old Testament Sheol. Sometimes it refers to the grave, or the place where the dead reside. It also refers to the place where the wicked suffer after death, but it is never used of final destination of anyone, righteous or unrighteous. In Revelation, Hades will someday end when it is thrown into the lake of fire.
Tartarus (Greek): This only appears 1 time, in 2 Pet 2:4. Tartarus is from Greek mythology, and Peter uses the word to describe a place where certain sinful angels are presently kept bound. It’s an interesting example of the influence of Greek mythology on Christian thought.
Gehenna (Greek): Gehenna is used 12 times in the New Testament, and is the main word Jesus uses for “hell”, so we really need to pay attention to it. It’s the Greek version of a Hebrew word “Ge’henom” or Valley of Hinnom, which was a real place outside the city of Jerusalem.
Here it is, and it’s a beautiful park today, but it was not a nice place in Jesus time. In the Old Testament times, it was a place where ancient Israelites practiced child sacrifice to the god Molech. Some also think that in Jesus time it was used as a rubbish dump for burning the city trash and dead bodies, associating it with worms and constantly burning fires. The place was considered cursed, and it became a figurative name for the place of spiritual purification for the wicked dead in Judaism.
The word Gehenna was not invented by Jesus. It developed during the Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE), which was around 500 years before Jesus. In response to the great suffering their nation had been through, Hebrew scholars had developed the idea of final resurrection and judgement, with Sheol divided into multiple compartments – Gehenna for the wicked and Paradise for the righteous.
According to most sources, the period of punishment or purification is limited to 12 months, after which the soul ascends to Olam Ha-Ba (the world to come) or is destroyed (if it is utterly wicked).
Jesus was a Jew, and would have used the word in this way, plus his listeners would have been very familiar with it. The point I am making here is the hell Jesus spoke of, Gehenna, is not really the same thing as the eternal damnation we know today.
We do need to mention Revelation, since this book was very influential in the development of the idea of Hell. Revelation contains the imagery of the “lake of fire” and being tormented day and night for ever and ever.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation
The key thing to note about Revelation is that it is packed with metaphors, and political coded language. It is strange that we can agree most of it as metaphor until we come to this part – then suddenly it’s literal!
For the next 15 centuries years Christian writers developed and embellished even more on hell into the idea we have of it today. The Apocalypse of Peter from the 2nd century is a good representation of the ideas that were going around, where heaven is described as super white and covered in flowers, where all the people spent their time singing choral prayers together, while hell is super-dark, and featured a variety of creative punishments for the damned (think Haw Par Villa style tortures, individually tailored to each person’s particular wrongdoing). Many of these ideas came from pagan sources – Homer, Plato, Virgil, and other traditions.
In the 13th Century, Thomas Aquinus theorized that hell had four levels – Limbo, for the Old testament saints to wait till judgement, Limbo of the children, for unbaptized babies who had committed no sin, Purgatory, and Gehenna.
In the 14th Century we have Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”, and “Inferno” now with 9 levels of hell, and in the 17th century, John Milton’s paradise lost. All these works introduced even more imaginative ideas – purgatories, circles of hell, and more awful punishments.
But why keep adding to this story?
I will suggest two reasons – fear is a great motivator to get people to behave morally, and to follow the church and its teachings. We find this same practice across cultures and civilisations. The Vikings has an idea of hell called Helheim, a freezing cold place guarded by an impassable river and a monstrous dog, reserved for everyone who didn’t die a glorious death in battle. The Zoroastrians had the Chinvat bridge, where evildoers would fall off the bridge into The House of Lies, where one would suffer torment and loneliness, though not forever. So the idea of an eternal place of punishment after death is not unique to Christianity, and predates it by centuries.
Secondly, there’s a deep part of us that wants others to go to hell! There is evil in the world, and we want to take it seriously, to acknowledge harm and pain and and respond to that. We don’t like the idea that people can inflict evil without consequence, and get away with it forever. We feel a need to balance the scales. But then again, this is a fate we wish on others, not ourselves, and we tend to minimize the harm we ourselves have done.
The very idea that justice must require punishment is in fact a very human idea – it is almost never for the good of the person being punished – rather it is for the good of society to create deterrence and reduce crime. There is a better way – that is called Restorative Justice.
Retributive justice focuses on assigning consequences to those individuals who have committed a crime. Restorative justice focuses on repairing the harm done by the perpetrator and rebuilding that person’s relationship with the victim and society.
To sum up, we have seen how the ideas of the afterlife in Jewish thought changed over the centuries from Sheol, to Gehenna, to what we now think of as hell – with eternal suffering and torture, and how Hell became a hodgepodge of traditions and horror stories from various cultures and times.
The point here is that the Gehenna Jesus spoke of may not at all be the hell we imagine, but has been embellished over the years, quite possibly to keep the masses obedient and maintain religious control, and to satisfy our human desire for retribution.
Perhaps, the idea of eternal punishment really stems not from God’s justice but from humanity’s pain. Let me say that again. The idea of eternal punishment really stems not from God’s justice but from humanity’s pain.
Part 2: Who Goes to Hell?
So we’ve seen how the idea of hell evolved through the ages to today where we understand hell as eternal conscious torment. And if you believe that, then one of the key questions is how to avoid going there!
There are various theological views of Hell, and we’ll discuss four of the main ones. To make it easier to understand, I’m going to present it as stages of my own life, since my own view of Hell has gone through many shifts over the years.
Childhood
So this is me in primary school. I started going to church at the age of 6, invited by my best friend in Primary 1. I enjoyed going to church because it was fun and they gave me free stickers. They also taught me many things in Sunday school, including hell.
At the time, the idea seemed scary. I had a mental picture of eternal fire, devils, physical pain and screaming, like the kind of scenes you see at Haw Par Villa. For those not from Singapore this is a local theme park where they have grisly statues of Chinese “hell” – with statues of people being tortured and killed in all manner of ways. I’m not going to show any pictures of this – it’s pretty awful. I don’t actually remember this exactly, but my mum told me the reason I first became a Christian was out of fear of going to hell.
I recall a conversation I had with my son when he was 5. At that time, we went to a traditional evangelical church and he attended the Sunday school there. His favorite possession in all the world was his bear, and one day we nearly left it at church, because he hid it and forgot where. So we looked everywhere and finally found it. I said to him “If we left bear at church that would have been the worst thing in the world.” He replied “No, the worst thing in the world for me is if I went to hell.”
Yes, there’s nothing like hell to scare a new generation of kids into the church!
Teenagehood
This is me as a teenager. I had started going to a mega church in Singapore, and was active in Youth for Christ. We would go out on the street on weekends and try to talk to random people, using the little booklet “The Four Spiritual Laws”. We would explain to everyone that all of us have sinned, sin separates us from God, and Jesus is the bridge to reconcile us to God.
Behind this “good news” was also the idea that those who reject the offer will end up in hell, and this prompted quite a bit of urgency to go out and tell as many people as possible. The way it was explained to me is that God is so holy God cannot abide the presence of sin. At the time I didn’t question. But looking back, I now feel this idea is illogical – since we still sin and yet God’s spirit dwells inside us.
The other idea behind this diagram is known as Arminianism – this idea says that we have the ability to choose or to reject God. It sort of makes sense, because we do feel we have free will to choose or reject God, in small ways and big ways. We’ve all been there.
Young adulthood
This is me as a young adult. After graduating from university, I worked in America and attended a Presbyterian church. There I learned the idea of “Election” and “Predestination.” It’s known as Calvinism because it the ideas were developed by the Protestant reformer John Calvin in the 16th century. This view was based on the sovereignty of God, and says that on our own we are incapable of responding to God, but God chooses some, and God’s selection is irresistible, plus you can never lose your salvation. This idea made sense to me in that it seems logical that if God is in control of all things, then God can also influence our choices.
Ephesians 2:8–9
“By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
So if faith is not of ourselves, but is a gift from God, then even though we may think our free will led us to choose God, actually God decides who will be saved.
On one hand this view made sense – the process of how we came to know God usually involves circumstances beyond our control – where we were born, our upbringing, maybe our school, perhaps a person, friend, family member who approached you, or being in the right place at the right time. It seems easy to believe God engineered the whole thing. But I couldn’t get over the feeling something was very badly wrong about this. Because why me and not someone else? What about all the people who God did not choose? How is that fair?
When I asked such questions, no answers were forthcoming. People would try to rationalize it but ultimately it just doesn’t seem like any kind of justice as we know it or understand it. It feels very wrong. So then people just say ultimately God’s ways are higher than our ways and it is a mystery but in the end we have to take it on faith that God is just. Basically a big “we just don’t know”.
Parenthood
More recently, my view of God has been changed by my experiences as a parent. As I watched my kids growing up, I found new depths of love for them that I’d never felt before, and this has forever shaped how I understand God feels about me, and about every person ever made – as we are all God’s children whether we know it or not.
A good parent may at times, allow their children to experience the consequences of poor behaviour, and let them experience pain. But this is always for the child’s good, so that they learn and grow. But a good parent would never, ever, condemn their children to eternal torment, no matter what they had done. How much more so God?
Susie Ambrose writes: …imagine you’re watching a movie where a father and child are in an argument. The child is hurt and confused, and he runs away from the father. The child is about to run off a cliff but doesn’t realize it. Or perhaps the child does realize there could be a cliff edge coming but continues running anyway. Would the father let his child fall if he could stop it?
Especially when there are great danger and suffering involved, love protects at all costs.
You would do everything in your power to keep your loved one safe and happy always, even if they rejected you and you respected their wish not to be with you. This is real, sacrificial love.
So if fallible human parents would not condemn their children, how could God do so? God’s primary characteristic is love. So maybe Hell is NOT like we’ve been taught.
This leads to 2 other ideas:
Annihilation:
(also known as extinctionism or destructionism) – the belief that after the Last Judgment, all damned humans and fallen angels including Satan will be totally destroyed, cremated, and their consciousness extinguished rather than suffering forever in Hell.
People who take this position might point to verses such as:
Matthew 10:28 ”And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
Universalism:
The idea that because of God’s mercy, every person will be reconciled to God in the end, and that if there is punishment, it does not last forever. In this view, there is a hell, but it is empty.
People who take this position might point to verses such as:
1 Corinthians 15:22, “As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”
1 Timothy 4:10 “We have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.”
There are many places in scripture which say God wills that all shall be saved. Universalism supports the idea that God’s will triumphs over humankind’s stubbornness, even in the afterlife.
Metaphorical:
The previous four views assume hell is real, however another possible way to look at it, is that Hell is a metaphor, and the dramatic imagery is meant to convey the serious nature of the need to align one’s life appropriately. Those who hold this view might see hell as a place of our own creating, symbolizing the emotional pain of being separated from God. This would mean no one literally goes to hell, but there are times all of us live through hell on earth when we become distant from God’s love.
So to do a quick recap – we’ve looked at 5 views on Hell.
Two views where hell is real, and majority of people go there:
Two other views where Hell is real, but empty:
One view where Hell is not real, but is more a psychological state.
FCC is home to people from a wide variety of spiritual backgrounds. To some of you, hell will remain an important part of your worldview. Maybe for others, like me, it’s something that always felt illogical and unsettling, and doesn’t fit with the character of God revealed elsewhere in scripture. It’s ok whatever view you hold – the main thing is whether it leads you into greater love for God, for yourself, and for others, and not to judge those who believe differently.
Menti Question: Which of these resonates with you?
So where does that leave us today? Maybe some or all of this is new to you, and maybe you are starting to think the hell you’ve been taught as a kid isn’t real, or isn’t like that, then what?
If there is no hell…
I think Pastor Miak, Pastor Pauline, and Alvin have answered this in their previous few sermons. Jesus came:
The “life” Jesus spoke about isn’t something we have to wait for after death, but is something we can experience right now – coming alive to God and experiencing God’s presence. The flip side is also true – when we hurt others, act in self destructive ways, or abuse our earth, we do experience a sort of “death” of our relationships, health and so forth.
Even without hell, we can still tell people about God, to give people hope, purpose, and healing through a relationship with God our loving parent. Scaring people with hell is not the way – it paints a picture of God that is very hard to undo later, and is quite a distortion of God the divine and loving parent.
The point here is, if you are only following God to avoid punishment, or avoid hell, then that is not a very good reason.
To further answer this question, I want to share a framework by Lawrence Kohlberg on the stages of moral development in children.
When we are children, we often behave well or avoid bad behaviors to avoid punishment, or to gain a reward. We don’t have our own personal sense of right and wrong yet, but we think that something is good if we get rewarded for it and bad if we get punished for it.
As we get older, we learn social rules and what others expect of us – like being a good son or daughter. We’re generally driven by earning the approval of others. We may also understand society’s laws need to be upheld to maintain social order, and we believe being law abiding is the right thing to do.
Hopefully at some point, we reach the highest level which is Postconventional morality. This is when we develop our own ethical principles and values, and don’t just do what society tells us to do. At this level, we think about what is just, not just for ourselves but also for others, and we follow these principles to determine what is right in any given situation.
A good example of this is when Jesus healed on the Sabbath – he broke religious laws to demonstrate the wellbeing of the crippled man was a more fundamental value than keeping the Sabbath law.
I think it’s pretty obvious that the doctrine of Hell belongs to the lowest level of moral development. At some point in your spiritual journey, it may no longer serve any helpful purpose, because you are following Jesus not due to fear of punishment, or seeking for a reward, but because it is simply the right thing to do, guided by Christlikeness. Guided by an inner compass and motivation. Guided by the law of love.
Let’s not be motivated by fear.
John 1:14
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
And so we come to the end of this sermon series. I hope this sermon and the others in this series have given you some food for thought. Please continue to explore any questions you might have with us, with our pastors, and other believers in your life.
Most importantly, may our faith draw us into a deeper understanding of God’s love, and a deeper love for others. Amen.
Sources:
https://www.learnreligions.com/what-is-gehenna-2076760
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gehenna
https://www.britannica.com/topic/sheol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehenna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_universalism
https://www.firststepcounselor.com/post/paul-did-speak-about-hell-1
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/does-god-really-desire-all-to-be-saved
https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/why-does-god-choose-some-and-not-others
https://lifehopeandtruth.com/life/life-after-death/what-is-hell
