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To truly understand Hell I have endeavored to extract it from 2000 years of church and religious history. The problems arising from our modern understanding of Hell, whether it is complete disbelief or the distortions produced by religion, Greek mythology, fictional writers, movies or Ghost Hunters TV, is that it appeals to the Bible inconsistently, and inaccurately. It is not that the Bible teaches some unbelievable doctrines on Hell, but that those who teach the Bible, teach doctrines of Hell which are not given the proper scholarship and care. This has left the world with a binary and over simplistic view of Hell…and that has allowed religion to create the hell of its choosing and most suitable to its purposes.

This series attempts to offer a correction. However, to do so with fidelity to the corpus of the biblical teaching means that I cannot cherry pick verses which solely use the term Hell or Hades and then eisegete (read into) the Hell of history. To avoid this biblical error, I must go beyond these terms, and weave together a cohesive framework which includes many other terms such as, outer darkness, gloomy darkness, eternal punishment, eternal life, judgment, the lake of Fire, the second death, and these must include not only the eschatological texts such as Revelation, but it must also include the metaphors and parables of Jesus, and the Pauline understanding including the Hebrew Scriptures. Anything short of these inclusions to our understanding of Hell doesn’t seem like a biblical exposition. This also means that I have much to share and it will take something more from you to consider this.

This is why I began this series where I did. I needed your mind to become free of Gehenna as solely the afterlife. Hades is the Greek mythological term for the dark underworld which is used in the Bible and is our most common grasp of Hell. Essentially, modern Hell is a version of Greek mythology, and as such, both Gehenna and hades are not big enough Hell’s, for they are not eternal.

Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.” (Revelation 20:14)

What the Bible does say is eternal…is the everlasting Fire of God. The idiom of a “lake” is to capture the all encompassing, fully orbed immersion, the totality of ones existence somehow remaining within the fire of God without being consumed BUT where parts or portions (meros) are being utterly consumed by this fire. The burning trash that doesn’t go out in Jerusalem’s dump is a metaphor, but it is not the ultimate Hell. It does reveals a place where everything is utterly consumed and also where people exist just-outside of its consummation. The biblical purpose of fire is to utterly destroy or to utterly purify.

God’s Fire is the catalyst of transformation.

  “Everything that can stand the fire, you shall pass through the fire, and it shall be clean.” (Numbers 31:23)

Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire because they will be consumed; “and death shall be no more.” (Revelation 21:4). Biblically, there are beings (primarily fallen angels and demons) for whom this fire is not intended to purify, but to punish forever (Jude 1:7)

Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

“For them (fallen angels) the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved.” (2 Peter 2:17)

And this is one of the only texts that I can find that explicitly says those who do not (úpakauo–answer the call/obey) the Gospel.

“…when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9)

When placed within a more biblically aware understanding, even this verse reveals that the relief is (meta-together with) the vengeance seem to point us not to two different people groups, but different aspects of the people, those aspects that find (hanesis–relief/freedom) in God and those aspects that face (holethros–a ruined state)

I realize most of us haven’t been exposed to this nuance in the Bible. When the Spirit revealed it to me over a decade ago, I thought I had to be mistaken. But I’ve spent hundreds of hours, and many years mining the depths of the biblical revelation, and now I’m convinced that this hold more fidelity to the Bible than the stories which emerged from dark ages of Church history. I hope you’ll consider it and begin your own study.

Switching gears…

Imagine someone that you greatly dislike. Now imagine them in your “personal space bubble”, staring at you, with their face right in yours, eye to eye, so close you can smell and feel their breath. How does this image make you feel? How long could you put up with the proximity? What emerges in you if you were to discover you can’t create distance from this person? Does hatred arise? Unless our disposition toward this person changes, their proximity is utter torment. This exposure is what the Bible calls the “torment reserved for the devil and his angles.” (Matthew 25:41, Revelations 20:10). For them, the torment is forever because their disposition cannot change. They were created by God for this purpose. (Genesis 3:1)

But it may not be forever for us…(Didn’t see that one coming, did you?)

The Lake of Fire is a way of describing the indescribable future for the self (Our Self) existing, completely engulfed within the blazing fire and light of God’s unswerving stare. The light of truth utterly consumes the darkness of all falsehood and pretense, just as one lit match extinguishes pure darkness in a room. There are many biblical verses which depict the altar of God as an all consuming fire. The voice of truth consuming those who oppose God in pride is a vast theme of scripture. Even the people of God, who believe, do not want to be that close to God.

“For this great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die.” (Deuteronomy 5:25)

In the Hebrew Scriptures, (Deuteronomy 4:24, 9:3, Isaiah 33:14, Lamantations 2:3) God is known as the Consuming Fire. Our greatest enemy is darkness and deception. The Fire of God burns directly into that part of our pretenses/ false self (Greek- “Pseudo”) that is unwilling to yield to the Fire’s purification and truth. The Fire before the seat of God purifies some and destroys others.

God is an all consuming fire. We are either transformed by this fire or tortured by it. No one is sent to Hell, that framework seems unbiblical in light of this revelation. Instead, all of us are always, continually perpetually, before God, some parts or portions of us celebrate this discovery and seek to join in God, other parts or portions of our humanity resent it, and seek the illusion of our own autonomy.

“In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, “There is no God.”” (Psalm 10:4)

“…they say, “The Lord does not see; the God of Jacob does not perceive.” (Psalm 94:7)

“…did God actually say?…” (Genesis 3:1)

Even a dog knows when it has done wrong, will turn its head away from its master in shame. The effect of fire is that it totally consumes some things but utterly transforms other things. Fire burns out the slag and makes gold more pure and it reduces wood to fine carbon dust. The suffering of eternal fire is our falsehood in its proximity to God and this is this same proximity which makes Heaven the joy of Divine union with our true self found in God. When our ontological state, (inner I am) or center of being clutches to the temporal, or is disoriented toward our appetites, or seeks to maintain it’s illusion of independent agency, then the fire burns hotter, the stare of truth is the Gospel’s call or invitation to give up the charade and surrender our outcome. This humble act in the face of the blaze, will transform us into our true self and we will forever love the all consuming fire as we are lost in it. Pride is the prison of clutching and insisting that what we want to believe about ourselves is somehow true, and it’s that desire to turn our face like a dog from God’s truth that makes suffering so bad, and since God is eternal, this suffering is eternal.

As Merton says, “The false self is the only thing God knows nothing about.” “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21)

Our insistence is our resistance…and the more we resist, the more truth is torture for us, the more we surrender and give up our charade…the more the transformation. Paul likens this to a life of building something lasting or something that will be burned, yet he comes to this same conclusion:

“…If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” (1 Corinthians 3:15)

Remember, darkness doesn’t actually exist as a positive entity, but only as a derivative of the lack of light. The same is true for cold in that there is no way to measure cold, but only to measure the presence or absence of heat. These everyday, observable realities reveal how we see them as opposing binaries but in truth, in ultimate reality, they are aspects of the same singular thing. The same is true of Heaven and Hell. Again, Thomas Merton captures this really well in his book “New Seeds of Contemplation”:

“Our God is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men then will His fire (by our own choice rather than His) become our everlasting enemy, and Love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and our destruction.”

I hope this brief study reveals something new to both the novice and the scholar about Hell, what it is and what it’s not. I believe I’ve shown the biblical justification for the purpose of an all encompassing lake of fire. If you hold this biblical framework against that of Church history, then the idea of being sent to a good place or a bad place based upon ones moral merit or performance, or based upon religious affiliation, all start to unravel. My advice is to let it. Don’t clutch to container, seek the Contents.

The Bible reveals a Gospel (Good News) which truly does free us from Hell, especially the one religion has constructed for us. We must stop telling people that we are either sent to Heaven or sent to Hell, rather all people come from God, are before God now, and will return to God. Our disposition (both now and in our afterlife) toward God’s presence is constantly and immediately tested. Do we want God to consume us or at least that false part of us? Do we want the slag to be burned out of us in the crucible of God’s fire?

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” (Mark 8:35)

Or do we want to insist on our pseudonym, our temporal existence as a pretender (úpokrites–under mask, hypocrite)? The biblical answer is that fire is not a choice.

“For everyone will be salted with fire.” (Mark 9:49)

“…put him with the hypocrites. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 24:51)

Imagine our surprise to discover that not only does religion not save us, but that none of us are wholly disposed toward God. Every sin we ever commit is a disposition of unbelief or a preference for something other than God to satisfy us.

“For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” (Romans 14:23)

This means that on our very best day everyone of us is a partial believer…

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7)

“The Lord…is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

So what are we to do with that part of us that wills not be transformed by the fire?

The Bible has a clear answer for this but it is not what we have been given by religion. There is a big discovery that I can’t wait to share with you about judgement day, about what happens after we die… when we all perceive ourselves as before God. This all reveals the greatest news of all, which I’ll share with you next week.