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

by Francis Chan

Even some evangelicals, such as Thomas Talbott and Gregory MacDonald, have argued that God will end up saving everyone in the end.

God’s moral will and His decreed will.

Some things may be part of God’s desire for the world, and yet these desires can be resisted. God doesn’t desire that people sin, but He allows it to happen because humans are moral agents who often make evil choices.

His moral will—is resisted.

And then there’s God’s decreed will. This refers to those things that God makes happen regardless of what humans decide. He sometimes uses our bad choices—our rebellion against His moral will—to carry out His decreed will. There’s a difference, in other words, between God’s values that please Him (moral will) and those events that He causes to happen (decreed will).15

God was “seeking an opportunity against the Philistines,” and so He used Samson’s lust to oppose the Philistines. Samson’s love for pagan women went against God’s moral will, but became part of God’s decreed will. Samson was free to go against God’s moral will, yet God intervened to carry out His decreed will in using this situation to fight against the Philistines.

Paul’s point is not that Timothy is to pray for every single person who ever lived, and neither is it that God has decreed that He will save everyone. The point of 1 Timothy 2 and other passages like it (e.g., 2 Peter 3:9) is that God is not a bigot; He’s not a racist; He loves to reverse social-class distinctions because His love knows no boundaries. The gospel has broken down all ethnic and socioeconomic barriers through the cross of Jesus Christ, as Paul says elsewhere (Eph. 2:11–22).16 God even wants pedophile maniacs like Caesar Nero (i.e., “kings and all who are in high positions” in 1 Tim. 2:2) to repent and come to Jesus! Paul nearly got to Nero with the gospel and had his head chopped off in the process. But that’s another story.

No passage in the Bible says that there will be a second chance after death to turn to Jesus.

Deep down in the heart of every person is a hidden desire to reinterpret Jesus in light of our own culture, political bent, or favorite theological belief.

For Origen, hell was a place where the souls of the wicked were purified so they could find their way back to God.

C. S. Lewis’s portrayal of hell was significantly less creepy. For Lewis, it was kind of like a dark, gloomy city, or a place where “being fades away into nonentity.”

Most recently, Rob Bell said that hell is not “about someday, somewhere else,”3 but about the various “hells on earth” that people experience in this life—genocide, rape, and unjust socioeconomic structures.4

The typical afterlife scenario among Jews in Jesus’ day was that after the wicked die, they go to a place called hades, sometimes called sheol. This is not the same thing as “hell.” Hades is not usually depicted as a place of punishment, though the wicked may suffer there. It is a place where the wicked wait until judgment day. After they are judged, the wicked are then thrown into hell as punishment for their sins.

The same writer described gehenna, or hell, as a place of “fire and torments,” where the wicked “wander about in torments, ever grieving and sad.”

We are bound by the words of the Creator, the One who will do what is right. The One who invented justice and knows perfectly what the unbeliever deserves. God has never asked us to figure out His justice or to see if His way of doing things is morally right. He has only asked us to embrace His Word and bow the knee, to tremble at His word, as Isaiah says (66:2). Don’t get so lost in deciphering that you forget to tremble.

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.

Refusing to teach a passage of Scripture is just as wrong as abusing it.

really believe it’s time for some of us to stop apologizing for God and start apologizing to Him for being embarrassed by the ways He has chosen to reveal Himself.

Matthew 8—9 depicts Jesus reversing all of the cultural and social assumptions of the Jews of that day. One assumption is that the Jews, as the “people of God,” are much more fit for the kingdom than all those other nasty sinners—those Gentiles, those Greeks, those Romans. But in Matthew 8, Jesus is absolutely floored by the faith of a Roman Gentile military leader. This leader of high standing had the faith and humility to submit to the authority of Jesus. And Jesus accepted him as he is, as a Gentile. From

Jesus spins out a short message about many people of all nations and colors and ethnicities that will flood into the kingdom. And it is here that Jesus says that the “sons of the kingdom” who think that God values one ethnicity over another (in this case, the Jewish people) are damned to hell:

Yet there are three places where racial division still persists: bars, prisons, and the American evangelical church.

We have become dangerously comfortable—believers ooze with wealth and let their addictions to comfort and security numb the radical urgency of the gospel.

Racism, greed, misplaced assurance, false teaching, misuse of wealth, and degrading words to a fellow human being—these are the things that damn people to hell? According to Scripture, the answer is yes.

God, help me overcome my selfishness. I want to love the way You asked me to. I don’t want to say another insulting word to or about another person, not even jokingly. I want to shock my enemies with Christian love. I want to joyfully sacrifice for the poor, and to see You when I see them. I don’t want to fit in anymore. Holy Spirit, save me. Set me apart. Make me worthy.

Notice that Paul does not explicitly say that God destroys sinners for the purpose of showing the world just how powerful He is. Rather, Paul simply raises it as a legitimate possibility.

We need to surrender our perceived right to determine what is just and humbly recognize that God alone gets to decide how He is going to deal with people.

In fact, I do it all the time. It has taken me forty-three years to finally confess that I have been embarrassed by some of God’s actions. In my arrogance, I believed I could make Him more attractive or palatable if I covered up some of His actions. So I neglected speaking on certain passages, or I would rush through certain statements God made in order to get to the ones I was comfortable with. The ones I knew others would like.

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (vv. 8–9)

We serve a God whose ways are incomprehensible, whose thoughts are not like our thoughts. Ultimately, thoughts of God should lead to joy, because those same thoughts designed the cross—the place where righteousness and wrath kiss.

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.

Please forgive me, Lord, for wanting to erase all the things in Scripture that don’t sit well with me. Forgive me for trying to hide some of Your actions to make You more palatable to the world. Forgive me for trying to make You fit my standards of justice and goodness and love. You are God; You are good; I don’t always understand You, but I love You. Thank You for who You are.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lam. 3:21–23)

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.

We should not just try to cope with hell, but be compelled—as with all doctrine—to live differently in light of it.

And what does he conclude? That we should throw our hands up in despair because there’s nothing we can do about it anyway? No. He asks a pointed question: “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness?” (2 Peter 3:11). In

Hell is the backdrop that reveals the profound and unbelievable grace of the cross. It brings to light the enormity of our sin and therefore portrays the undeserved favor of God in full color. Christ freely chose to bear the wrath that I deserve so that I can experience life in the presence of God.

Even in our daily living we can look more like the prophets of Baal as we live our lives, running about in a frenzy, trying to fix our problems, not stopping long enough to call on the power of God Almighty. Yet as children of God, we are not called to trust in our idols or ourselves.

look at the story of Gideon in Judges 7. Gideon started with an army thirty-two thousand men strong. In several stages, God purposely dwindled it to three hundred men. I think God did this so that no one could say, “Look what we did!” Instead, everyone knew that it was God’s power that defeated the enemy.