“There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

I have heard it said that Hell is the least preached doctrine of our time. If asked what would we say about it? “It’s a bad place and you don’t want to go there.” We as believers look forward to the completion of God’s grace in an eternity of peace and joy, but what has the grace keep us from?

There are multiple words that scripture uses to refer to hell. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word sheol is used which could literally be translated as the place of the dead. The Greek term for this was Hades. The concepts of Sheol and Hades are different then the common understanding of hell because it contained both punishment and paradise, a holding place for those who had passed on. A good description of this is the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-30. There is a place of torment for those who are without grace where they receive what is due their works and there is a place of joy for those who have been given grace. But the concept of Sheol seems to be a temporary one. That it is a holding place until final judgment.

Christ talks about hell in Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount. He uses a world for hell, “Gahanna”, which means “the valley of the sons of Hinnom.”  In this valley, human sacrifices were offered to the Ammonite god, Molech, during the reigns of Ahaz and Manasseh (2 Kings 16:3, 21:6).  It had an evil reputation as a place of filth that continued on to Christ’s own day where it had become a garbage dump. In Christ references to hell there is only the view of judgment. In Matthew 5 Jesus discusses the reality of hell as a result of an unrepentant life.

Christ’s discussion of hell and latter that of the apostles carries with it an eternal sense of punishment. Revelations 20 says that Hell and Hades will be cast into the lake of fire, which is the second death. The intermediate holding place, with its painful torment described by the rich man in Luke 16 is only a preview of what is to come. In our next article we will discuss the nature of the eternal judgment.

Kevin Farmer, Will Uminn, Dana Arledge, Phil Meade