My church secretary got me going on hell. I was pastoring the International Church in Osaka, Japan, and she was troubled about believing what I preached. I didn’t blame her.
Her grandparents had certainly heard about Christianity but had never adequately heard the gospel message. She wasn’t sure she wanted to follow a God who would summarily condemn them to eternal hell. And with so few Christians in Japan, a hundred and twenty million more people were like her grandparents.
As I thought about it, I went one step further: On one hand, Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), and Peter says of Jesus that “there is no other name under Heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). So Jesus is the only way to Heaven, and without him I go to the hot and fiery place. On the other hand, the First Letter of John says twice in chapter four, “God is love.” He doesn’t just love believers; he is love.
Isn’t there a contradiction here—like the one repeated ad infinitum of “how could a loving God send people to hell?” In responding to the question, I risk being vilified as a narrow-minded, judgmental Christian. And I risk being vilified as a doctrine-denying liberal.
When I hear people leaning Universalist and letting everyone into Heaven because “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13), I gasp and say, “What about all the times Jesus warned us about hell?” He wasn’t just having a bunch of bad days.
When I hear people proclaim that anyone who does not confess Christ goes straight to eternal damnation, I sigh and say, “What about all the places where the Bible talks about God’s mercy?”
To say it’s a mystery is partly right, because there’s much we don’t know. Deuteronomy 29:29 sets the standard: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” Some things we’re meant to know; some we’re not. But a lot of us ignore what’s actually been revealed to us.
The Problem with Hell
I wish we could take the word hell out of our English vocabulary—not because it’s unpleasant, but because it creates so much confusion.
Hell is originally an English word derived from Old English, referring to the place of the dead. It is not a biblical word. Whenever we take a single word outside of the Bible and impose it on several different biblical words, we can expect confusion. And that’s exactly what we have.
The mindset of applying hell to all the bad people who don’t make it to a nice place in the afterlife is universal and deeply rooted, even in the minds of Bible translators. After the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, two of the earliest and most important English versions of the Bible were published—the Catholic Douay Reims Version and the Protestant King James Version. In these Bibles, both Sheol and Hades, together with Gehenna, appear as the English word “hell.” And it’s theorized that these translations were both influenced by Saint Augustine’s theology.
As a result, most English Bible translations uses “hell” for the words Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus. For a long time the only version that did not was Young’s Literal Translation, published in 1862. As with everything else in his translation, Young keeps intact all the Greek words referring to the afterlife. But with all the modern versions dumping several different terms into one hell basket, it’s no surprise that we have hundreds of millions of English speakers who view hell simplistically and unbiblically. Thankfully, more modern translations are now properly distinguishing Hades from hell, or at least adding notations. Gehenna is almost always rendered “hell.”
The word and concept of hell are used with countless religions, taking on all kinds of images and metaphors. Ancient mythologies and contemporary folk religions on every continent, as well as the major religions of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism all have concepts of hell. And they’re all different. Images of other religions’ hells, as well as comic-bookish depictions of demons in red suits with pitchforks, get confused with biblical distinctives.
If we have to keep the term hell, and I can’t imagine it going away, we should at least be careful which biblical word we apply it to. That one word—and only that one—is Gehenna.
What the Gehenna?
Every city needs a garbage dump. And before recycling, places like Jerusalem burned their garbage—day and night for millennia. In this same place, Kings Ahaz and Manasseh sacrificed their own sons (2 Chronicles 28:3 and 33:6). The dump was the valley on the south side of Jerusalem, the Valley of Ben Hinnom (son of Hinnom), or the Valley of Hinnom, in Hebrew Ge Hinnom. Jesus takes this imagery of refuse, perpetual fire, and human sacrifice, along with the name, to describe for us the eternal destiny of the damned, rendered in Greek as “Gehenna.”
With the exception of one reference in James 3:6 (by Jesus’ brother), Jesus is the only one in the Bible to use the term Gehenna. We should take to heart that the One who loves us the most is the one who gives the scariest warnings.
When Jesus recommends ridding ourselves of our hands and eyes rather than sinning, he uses the imagery of “eternal fire” and “the fire of Gehenna” (Matthew 18:8–9) to describe the judgment. Mark 9:43’s version reads, “Gehenna, where the fire never goes out.” Mark adds that the “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (9:48). Matthew 25:41 says Jesus will tell the people on his left to go to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Revelation 20:10 identifies this as “the lake of burning sulfur,” and says people will be thrown in it, three times calling it the “lake of fire” (20:14–15).
Jesus is also the only one to use the phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth” for end time judgment—and only in Matthew. He uses the phrase in six different occurrences, every time in a parable. The phrase is joined with images of “the fiery furnace” (13:42, 50) and “darkness” (8:12; 22:13; 25:30). And it makes sense: Though fire produces light, a furnace is always considered a dark place. This is also the place of “hypocrites” (24:51). Is Jesus talking about Gehenna? Consider this: In direct expository teaching he always uses the place name Gehenna. But in parables he speaks consistently in the genre of narrative, and instead of saying Gehenna, he uses the imagery of fire, darkness, and “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The term “judgment,” referring to God’s end-time judgment, is all over the Bible. It is the phrase Paul uses instead of describing hell directly when he says to those who are stubborn and unrepentant, “You are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5). The Book of Hebrews brings the two together, saying that if we deliberately keep on sinning, we have “only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire” (10:27).
Gehenna, then, is what most people really mean when they say hell: judgment, punishment, fire, eternal misery. But we do not see anything about the devil or demons poking people with pitchforks or anything close to that. According to Scripture, these fallen angels will suffer in Gehenna too—but only at the end of time (Revelation 20:7–15). Now they’re in Tartarus (more on that in another article).
Today the Hinnom Valley is a city park. No surprise that not much was built there, and it’s the city’s main venue for outdoor rock concerts. You can imagine all the jokes that go on. But the Gehenna we can’t see is no joke.
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Photo credit: www.stock.exchng.com
great job Dr. love the clarity you bring to the subject , even though the reality of judgment doesn’t change one iota .
Brother Lundell,
You say, “Jesus says, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6), and Peter says of Jesus that ‘there is no other name under Heaven given to men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12).”
These two statements are not synonymous.
1) To get to the Father, we must go through our High Priest, Jesus (Heb. 3).
2) There IS only one name UNDER heaven by which we must be saved. But there is a name of One IN heaven who can save us. Compare Acts 2:17-21 with Joel 2:28-32 and you’ll see that Peter was quoting Joel. And since “the LORD” in the “Old” Testament replaces “Yahweh,” we can see that the Father is the ultimate Savior.
You mention that the YLT uses Gehenna, hades and Tartarus. The NASB does use “hell” for “gehenna” and “Tartarus,” but uses “hades” directly.
As for Tartarus, the one time it’s used in 2 Peter 2:4 (for God’s messengers [angels] who sinned) can well be compared to Jesus’s words about a special place for them in Matt. 25:41, so that “the devil and his angels” may be presumed to be the only being assigned to “eternal torment.”
Isn’t the KJV interesting? They took a word (sheol) that the NASB transliterates and whose dictionary defines as “grave” or “pit,” and KJV can divide its translations half of the time into a word that supposedly means “a place of eternal torment” and the other half of the time into grave or pit. Here, if we could read Old English, we would know that prior to the 15th century, the word “hell” meant “the underworld” (i.e., underground, the grave). Parallel, the Old Norse word for “cave, cavern” was “hellir.” I.e., another hole in the ground.
A word about the “eternal fires of Gehenna”: The Hebrew word “olam,” often translated as eternal or forever, sometimes just means a very long time or an indeterminate length of time. That’s how we can visit Gehenna today without the risk of being consumed.
Riddle me this. Why would 1st-century Jews, in all 11 instances in which Jesus used Gehenna He was speaking to the Jews, why in the world would they understand Gehenna as an other-worldly place of eternal suffering and damnation?
Jeremiah prophecies three times about Gehenna, it pertains to the destruction of Jerusalem, during the Roman-Jewish war of A.D 66-70, the prophecy came true. The 1st-century Jews of the time would have only known Gehenna as a real-world, this-world place that was prophesied about, they would have no grounds what soever to ever think of it as a metaphor for a place of eternal suffering and damnation. They already knew about Hades and Sheol, and we can study those and learn about suffering.
Jesus was trying to warn these Sadducee’s and Pharisees of the coming doom, in which over 1 million Jews were slaughtered, and guess what? Thrown into the burning fires of Gehenna.
So when you say that it is a metaphor for hell, it makes no literal sense. And it’s hard to find textual basis for this leap.
1. Jesus never gave clue to it being a metaphor for a place of eternal damnation.
2. The 1st-century Jews never would have an inclination that Jesus was talking about an other-worldly place of eternal suffering and damnation.
3. Any time Jesus used Gehenna as a warning, it was to the Jews, never Gentiles.
4. Hell in old English used to mean to conceal, or cover and protect. They used to “hel potatoes”, in England they would “hel a house” or put a roof on it, they were called “helliers”.
So to go from, Gehenna being used in the Greek as a proper pronoun, to suddenly it being a metaphor, I think is quite a stretch.
Thank you for your thoughts. I respect your viewpoint and the time and thought you put into your comment.
Consider that in Luke 12:5, Jesus indicates that Gehenna is after physical death. A strong argument can be made that other verses imply it.
Rabbinic literature identifies it as the final destination of the wicked, which Jewish people of the day would have been familiar. It is the proper name for what in English we call hell.
The Gehenna verses and the end-time-judgment fire verses are strongly parallel in meaning and application.
Also, regardless of one’s particular interpretation, Jesus was often cryptic in what he said.
Rabbinic literature? Citation please. The fact is everything Jesus said about Gehenna was true of that burning worm infested trash dump and furthermore where do you think the Romans disposed of all those 1 million slaughtered Jews after 70 A.D.? Did they all get one million proper graves? Hardly. They were thrown into Gehenna and thus Jesus words were totally fulfilled.
Keep in mind we have been suffering from the deliberate biased renderings of the KJV translators still yet in many of our current translations. Its easy to create a new doctrine when you can choose to bend the Greek any way you want to. And Remember the scriptures are only infallible in the original manuscript…which is nonexistant. Furthermore the earliest manuscripts of the most pertinent hell passages stop at around 500 A.D.
400 years is a lot of time to monkey around with key words.
“Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power (wrong translation, should be grasp or comprehend), together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of His love, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.…”
Know (Gonisko- intimate, understanding, experiential, sexual) the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (gnosis- book learning, education, intellect)
Just as Spurgeon knew that Edwards knowledge of infant damnation was wrong, there are more and more people realizing by the spirits witness that eternal conscious torment is not the God who is love. Join us.
Actually you are wrong. The term is used several times in the old testament. The Hebrew Rabbinical use of the term spelled in hebrew Gehinnon as a place of purgatory where a person suffers for 12 months and is then released. It seems that Jesus would know this and use it since it is already part of his religion. This also remove the validity of its existence since a burning garbage dump grew into a Hebrew mythological place of cleansing or purification. So if Jesus did say this I don’t think he was referring to anything real but using it as a tool of fear to keep people in line. Fear is a great political and religious tool. If he stretched the truth a bit to get his message across no big deal that’s how politics and western religion works.
I believe when Christ said that no one comes to the Father but only Through Him, He really meant to imply that He and the Father are but one.
“… If you have seen me, you have also seen the Father”
When God said in Genesis, “let us make man in our image” He was being truthful of course. For He is truth.
Man’s image is
Body, Spirit & Soul.
Thus, God’s image is
Body (Christ), Spirit (Holy Spirit) & Soul (Father).
As well as what John said about Christ being the only name that can save man.
Your article was a good read. I wrote a document that consists of what I have concluded after 100s of hours and months worth of research on the topic of hell. I’m still occasionally adding to it as I learn more but feel free to give it a look if you would like. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JrQDLV7zksL4an3XdIzsy-1x1hbaNU2onOIFxLgsHY8/edit?usp=sharing