Jesus warns us about hell precisely so we do not have to experience it! He became accountable for us as he engaged a life of sinless righteousness and love. At the end of his ministry, of course, his disciples did fail him. They betrayed, denied, and deserted their Lord. But Jesus took on the responsibility for their (and indeed our) failures. Jesus entered the fiery judgment for his people. On the cross, he endured the hell of God-forsakenness. 

I don’t want to go to hell. In some part of me, I don’t want there to be a hell. I became a Christian, at least in part, to escape the prospect of hell. And at times, I’ve intensely studied Christian theology, at least in part, to find a scriptural case for nobody staying in hell.

On the personal level, I’ve found assurance that, united to Jesus, my future is secure with him. But I cannot, with theological integrity, scrub out hell from the Bible. Nor can I ignore the witness of the church through the centuries that everlasting separation from the triune God remains a fearful possibility. My heart may at times want to be a universalist, but the word will not let me.

It’s vital that we do not avoid considering the reality of damnation. So, I’d like to make three observations about hell from Scripture that lead to one astounding hope.

Beyond the Dead

Hell is a place yet to be. As I read Scripture, prior to the resurrection of Jesus, when someone died, his spirit separated from the body and entered a shadowy nonphysical realm. Sheol (in Hebrew) and Hades (in Greek) express this state, or place, of the dead. It was a lonely, twilight kind of existence. It was devoid of experiencing the personal presence of the Lord in prayer or worship (Psalm 6:5). Both the evil and the faithful went there, though (it seems) to different parts. In the unfolding revelation of Scripture, however, we come to see Sheol/Hades as but an intermediate state for the human spirit.

With the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, we learn that Sheol/Hades is not a permanent state, either for believers or unbelievers. For those united to Christ, our spirits get to go directly into God’s presence (Philippians 1:23). For those not united to Christ, some traditions, following Hebrews 9:27, believe that these persons enter judgment immediately. To my reading, Scripture doesn’t give us enough information to say definitively what happens to the spirits of those who die without Christ. Sheol/Hades as an intermediate state may still be a possibility. What is abundantly clear, however, is that for every human spirit there is more to come.

With the return of Jesus at judgment day, all the dead will be raised (1 Thessalonians 4:16). As Paul writes, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. . . . The dead will be raised imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:51–52). Human beings don’t go out of existence. Our spirits live after death. Then, “at the last trumpet” (1 Corinthians 15:52), we will be raised into spiritual bodies.

This rising, however, is not as hopeful as it first sounds. We all will give an account. Paul writes, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10). Jesus chillingly clarifies, “An hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28–29).

What follows for those judged and found wanting is Gehenna, properly translated as “hell.” Gehenna is the same word in both Hebrew and Greek, designating the fiery place of everlasting punishment. Gehenna is a variation on the Valley of Hinnom, a place outside Jerusalem where children had been sacrificed in idolatrous rites (Jeremiah 7:31; 32:35). It later became a garbage dump, and its fires smoldered continually. By Jesus’s time, the name of this notorious valley had become equated with punishment in the afterlife, a condition to occur after the intermediate state of Sheol and after the day of judgment. Gehenna is what we usually think of as hell.

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