Hell: What can separate us from the love of God?
Our culture has a love-hate relationship with religion. Many of the portrayals of religious people in movies, books, and television are derisive—we Christians are petty, judgmental, delusional, or hypocritical. Unless the media is specifically “Christian” in nature—like the Veggie Tales, or Left Behind, or Passion of the Christ—Christian believers are often characterized as the target of criticism or the butt of the joke.
As a kid, I was taught how much the secular world culture wanted to take people away from Christ, instead focusing their desires on some mythical Heaven-on-Earth existence here and now—chasing cars and wealth and sex and satisfaction. It was a holy war between us and them.
We were IN the world but not OF this world.
Don’t bring me down
Once, in youth group, the youth pastor demonstrated this us-and-them dynamic. Down in the church basement where we met a few times a week, the youth pastor placed a folding chair in the middle of the room. Then he recruited two of the teens, one a large boy who played football at the local high school, and a girl from the “mathletics” team, who was a head shorter than him and probably 50 pounds lighter, to come help with this experiment.
The boy was asked to stand on the seat of the chair, while the girl remained standing on the floor. The two were told to hold one another’s hands. Then, the boy up on the chair was supposed to try to pull the other person up onto the chair while the girl who stood on the floor was supposed to pull the boy down off the chair.
Although the boy was probably much stronger than the girl, the experiment ended just about how we all expected. The football player never even got the girl so much as an inch off the floor. However, the math genius was able to easily pull the boy down to the floor.
The youth pastor thanked the teens for participating, then delivered the lesson: In this world, it is so much easier for someone to pull us down, than it is for us to pull others up.
This was the relationship I had with the world as I approached adolescence, trying my best not to let them pull me down.
The world asks why
Yet, during my teen years, the constant criticism of religion started to wear on me. I asked myself if there were questions I should be considering, even if they threatened my faith. During that time there were a few media portrayals of religion that gave me a moment of pause and made me think about some aspects of my faith a little bit differently. Two of them resonate in my mind still.
One of these moments was while I watched episode of a science fiction series from the 1980s. It was one of those anthology series that followed the model of the Twilight Zone, with different writers, actors and locales for every episode. In this particular episode, the main character was an out of work truck driver, who was given a mysterious new job.
As it turned out, his new role was not to drive regular cargo to a port or to a warehouse. It was to carry human cargo. A bunch of groaning, complaining people were loaded up into the back of a truck outfitted for carrying livestock and the driver was charged with driving them from Earth to Hell.
Once the truck got to the drop off point, the driver got out to get a look at the people, stuffed into the back of the truck like sheep—although in this case, goats would probably make for a better metaphor. Curious about who would set up such a transaction as this, the young driver sneaked past the loading dock doors to see where he was and what was going on in there.
As the driver struck up conversation with the people, he discovered that many of the people he was supposed to deliver to the lake of fire that is never quenched knew why they were going there—they were drug addicts or murderers or adulterers, or otherwise notorious sinners.
However, among the cacophony of voices, one man asked a question of the driver that has haunted me ever since. The man said:
“Why am I here? I just don’t understand. I had a family, a wife, 2 sons. I love them. I did everything I could for them. Now maybe I didn’t go to church every Sunday and maybe I didn’t even believe there was a God. But what kind of God sends you to Hell just for not believing in it?”
I had known other kids who didn’t believe in God, but I had never until that moment fully taken their fate into consideration. I believed that God would reject them because they had first rejected him, but I never put myself in their shoes. What if these people genuinely couldn’t bring themselves to believe in God. Is that a crime worthy of eternal punishment?
For some people, it really is hard to believe in God. The Apostle Paul seemed to think people should be able to innately know about God just from our life experience, as he wrote in Romans 1:21:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
However, for someone who needs tangible evidence, or who has gone through such trauma that they can’t believe a god who is both all-good and all-powerful would allow them to suffer so much, just looking out on creation might not be enough. Framed in this way, it made God seem awfully petty—especially because Hell was such a extreme response to such a passive “sin” as disbelief.
An appeal to justice
Another little metaphorical stab wound to my heart happened while I was watching a high school play about troubled teens who were at risk of suicide. I’ve looked for the play script online, to see if I remember the quote correctly, but I can’t find it. It may have been written by the students themselves. What makes it even more heartrending is the fact that some of these kids may have been writing true stories.
One character in the play had abusive parents, and was frequently beaten by his father. This child, along with several others, stood along the edge of the dimly lit stage, and each gave a monologue about their story. When the subject of his plan to commit suicide came up, he looked straight out into the audience and said:
I know they say if I kill myself, I’ll go to Hell. But isn’t that where I am already am?
And it dawned on me, maybe for the first time, that someone could be in so much pain that they would prefer to risk the eternal torment of Hell over real life, because they already suffered every single day. It made God seem very unsympathetic, if not cruel, to heap additional punishments on this kid’s head, when he had already experienced so much torment.
I know there are explanations for the ways in which God seems cruel in these situations, explanations that talk about how God loves us but is also infinitely just, and his judgment demands a price that needs to be paid.
But once someone puts it into specific terms—that kid you know with the abusive religious parents who can’t believe in a God who would let him be born into this, or the young parents who lost their child and can’t see God from within their heartache, the intellectual who needs empirical proof—once we put real faces onto the stories, it’s hard for someone with a sense of compassion to just brush it off as divine justice.
It's easy to accept the punishment of a cruel dictator or a serial killer or a predatory lender—in fact, our innate sense of justice seems to ask for it. It brings us comfort to know that the wicked will be dealt with by God, as those same people look like they are escaping any consequences in this world.
However, in the case of these people whose stories explain so clearly why they don’t or can’t believe in God—people who, if I were in their shoes, I might agree with—eternal, unescapable punishment does not look like any kind of love or justice that I’ve ever seen.
If eternal punishment for believing the wrong way is love and justice, then those two words no longer have any real meaning.
