We were created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever in a love-covenant of eternal praise. But, those in hell reject God in hate and fill their mouths with His curses rather than praises. 

Evil is mysterious. Since the Edenic world was perfect, as an out-flowing impulse of the perfect Creator, whence evil? Satan is not the answer. If that answer is given, the next question refutes it—whence Satan? The most ingenious answer to the question of the origin of evil comes from Augustine of Hippo, who argued that evil is simply privatio boni—the absence of good. Evil was not a creation of God or Satan. Rather, evil exists when good doesn’t. For example, it isn’t evil for me to not have wings, but if I go to the beach and rip the wings off of a seagull, that is evil. The seagull should have wings, according to God’s creation, and the removal of that good creation is the substantiation of evil.

This is how I understand hell—it is a place where all goodness is absent. It is not a chamber of lost souls who long for good things only to be repressed under the burden of God’s angry fire or doused in the literal flames of the infernal lake. Rather, it is the receptacle of all those who reject the goodness of God, consigned to an eternal existence apart from it. There will be no laughter, joy, fellowship, embrace, hope, love, peace, kindness, or goodness of any kind. Instead, it will be a place of eternal depression, existence apart from enjoyment. The desire to die without the ability to experience the good that is death (1 Cor 15:54). It will be darkness filled not with the sounds of joy but weeping. Yet, not weeping that hopes for later rejoicing but weeping that gives way to angry gnashing of teeth, such a great anger that one would rather jump into an engulfing ocean of fire than feel the fiery anger arising from within.

If this is hell, and hell is the absence of all goodness, how then can people exist there? Existence is a good thing. How can people exist in hell if hell is the absence of all good things, existence included? On the one hand, people don’t truly exist in hell. True existence is only possible in covenantal communion with God, the Father of lights, from whom all blessings of life flow. Those who exist in hell, when compared to those in heaven, aren’t truly human. They were human. But now they are much closer to demons, and those in heaven are much closer to gods (glorified sons of God, to be exact) when compared to their this-worldly counterparts. This is why the New Testament sometimes sounds like eternal death is to be annihilated. Hell is an ex-human type existence because “John Smith” in hell is so different from John Smith in this life that they are essentially two different creatures. But John Smith still exists in hell. How can he exist in a world devoid of all good if existence is a good thing?

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