Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We Made Up

by Francis Chan

Don’t believe something just because you want to, and don’t embrace an idea just because you’ve always believed it. Believe what is biblical. Test all your assumptions against the precious words God gave us in the Bible.

Let’s be eager to leave what is familiar for what is true. Nothing outside of God and His truth should be sacred to us.

God is compassionate and just, loving and holy, wrathful and forgiving. We can’t sideline His more difficult attributes to make room for the palatable ones.

Hell is for real. Am I?

So often these hell passages become fodder for debate, and people miss the point of the warning. Jesus didn’t speak of hell so that we could study, debate, and write books about it. He gave us these passages so that we would live holy lives. Stop slandering one another, and live in peace and brotherly unity. Jesus evidently hates it when we tear into our brothers or sisters with demeaning words, words that fail to honor the people around us as the beautiful image-bearing creatures that they are.

One day, Christ will come back and there will be an amazing worship celebration—with African bongos, Indian sitars, and an ensemble of Mariachi trumpets—where every tribe, tongue, nation, and color will bow the knee to their King and celebrate! If this sounds irritating, then go back and read Matthew 8. It’s written for you.

There’s a literal hell, and helping the poor is essential. Not only did Jesus teach both of these truths, He saw them as necessary and interrelated.

I often hear people say, “I could never love a God who would …” Who would what? Who would disagree with you? And do things that you would never do? Who would allow bad things to happen to people? Who would be more concerned with His own glory than your feelings? Who would—send people to hell? But this makes about as much sense as the clay looking up at the Potter and saying, “I really think you messed up here, let me show you a better way to mold me.” Picture the absurdity! Yet we do it all the time.

Our God is not a person who is slightly more intelligent: His thoughts are infinitely higher than ours. Knowing that the gap is so large, shouldn’t we put our energy toward submitting rather than overanalyzing? It is natural—no, it is expected—that there will be times, many times, when you won’t figure Him out.

The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don’t fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don’t need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways.

It’s not about figuring out all of the mysteries of God, but embracing Him and cherishing Him—even when He doesn’t make perfect sense to us.

As I have said all along, I don’t feel like believing in hell. And yet I do. Maybe someday I will stand in complete agreement with Him, but for now I attribute the discrepancy to an underdeveloped sense of justice on my part. God is perfect. And I joyfully submit to a God whose ways are much, much higher than mine.