In case you missed it, last week I stood here and made an impassioned plea for us to “go where angels fear to tread.”

I emphasized how important it is to talk about the stuff we don’t usually talk about, how it’s our responsibility to help each other grow mature in the faith and not be deceived by the world.

I painted the picture for a series where we would look at hard things in the bible, and wrestle with them, always trying to get closer to Jesus at the center, preparing each other for the works of service God prepared for us to do.

So we get to today…”Are we really going to talk about….hell?”

NO! No, we’re not! I’ve been there all week, reading and reading about hell, and I’ve changed my mind entirely! Bad idea!

I stole that line from Josh; it’s good for a laugh, but we really are going to go through with this. It has been very challenging to prepare for this, but it’s been good.

You know what would be great?

It would be great if we could all approach the topic of hell with a completely clean slate. It would be great if the word hell meant absolutely nothing to us, like if when we heard the word “hell” it was just like hearing the word… “sopchop.” It just didn’t mean a thing.

If we had no background, no pre-conceptions, no understanding whatsoever about hell, we could calmly look at the bible together, see what it says, and the discussion could move forward.

But NONE of us are at that place. We all come in with all kinds of background, and in many cases baggage, surrounding the word hell. Take some of these extreme examples:

Here’s someone responding in an Amazon.com forum to a book on hell: “there is not one scrap of evidence for the existence of a heaven or hell. This book represents a scare tactic catholics and christians have been using for hundreds of years to coax otherwise reasonable people into accepting christianity's sad mythology. Everything you credit as "evidence" for the existence of God, Satan, Heaven, and Hell is much more parsimoniously, comprehensively, and (in my view) satisfyingly explained in scientific (often biological and psychological) terms. Please educate yourselves, for your own sake and that of your neighbors.”

William Shedd, 1885: “The rejection of the doctrine of Endless Punishment cuts the ground from under the gospel. Salvation supposes a prior damnation.”

Jonathan Edwards, in his sermon “Sinners in the hands of an Angry God”, 7/8/1741: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”

It’s difficult for me to even read that.

We all come with “connections” like those to the word hell. Plus a whole lot more.

The word hell causes some to see a devil in a red suit with a pitchfork. Some can’t serve a God who would condemn people to hell. Some assume, because of preachers like Jonathan Edwards, that because there is hell, God abhors us and burns with wrath toward us.

And if that weren’t enough, it goes deeper. Because of the various divisions in the church over the last 200 years, we think in extremes. If you believe in hell, well, that MUST mean you are self-righteous and believe God enjoys torturing the vast majority of his creations for all of eternity. If you don’t believe in an eternity of punishment in hell, if you believe a doctrine known as annihilation where hell and its suffering ends in the second death in the lake of fire described in Revelation 20, well, then you must be a universalist who thinks everyone will go to heaven, you must not believe the bible, and you must have a “soft” view of God.

Not only, then, do we already have pre-conceived notions about what hell is or isn’t, what we believe about hell seems to imply a whole lot of other things about our view of the bible and of God.

We are not on an objective playing field.

We all have beliefs that affect how we read the bible, and affect what is important to us in this discussion.

So before I try to take apart this topic and look at some places hell is discussed in the bible, I think it would be good for me to name my starting point, my beliefs, where I stand after a lot of reading, praying, and thinking.

As I said last week, one of my ground rules is a commitment to let the bible be authoritative in my life, and to view it as a faithful record of Holy Spirit-inspired and Church-recognized texts that God uses to revel himself to us. (He speaks in other ways, too, but the 66 books of the bible are universally recognized by the church of Jesus as an objective record of God’s revelation.)

Because I take the bible seriously, because Jesus himself talked about hell, I believe there will come a time of final decision and separation, where some people receive God’s gift of eternal life in God’s presence, and where others are forever shut out of the presence of God. As difficult as it is to reconcile a loving God with the existence of hell, it is just as difficult to conceive of no justice ever for the true evil that exists in our world.

I believe that every good thing we experience in life here and now comes because of the presence of God. The living, eternal, life-defining presence of the God of the universe is the central issue, the most important difference between heaven and hell.

Separation forever from the presence of God is the most awful thing imaginable. In life on earth now, as we know it, every person experiences some measure of the presence of God– whether they know it or not, whether they accept it or not.

To have every shred of the presence of God removed…to be separated from the creating, redeeming, sustaining presence of God…that is the awfulness of hell.

When I take the bible seriously…

…I can’t find a way to escape the fact that some people, by their own choice, will be forever separate from the presence of God, in a way that no one now on earth currently is. That is a difficult, sobering, horrible thought. Yet it also has a hint of news that could be called good.

In Jesus’ time, the difficult philosophical question was, “Why are people who do great evil able to keep hurting others?” Jesus promised that God would do something about evil, that justice would occur. He told a story in Matthew 13 about a field of wheat where an enemy planted weeds. The servants wanted to go rip the weeds out right away, but the owner didn’t let them, because it would hurt the wheat. But there will come the harvest, when decisive action will be taken.

Actual evil does exist in our world. There are spiritual and human realities that are not just misguided or unhealthy, but are evil. Hell is a recognition that God is not impotent in the face of evil. Justice is a very real question for which hell is part of the answer.

There are, of course, a whole lot of other issues about hell raised by the bible and by preachers and by books like “Dante’s Inferno.”

How could God be a loving God and let hell exist? Are there literal flames and physical torment? Does it last forever? How does one avoid ending up in hell?

It’s impossible to definitely answer all the questions today. Or in a lifetime, for that matter. Faithful followers of Jesus have been disagreeing about it for millennia. And there’s another issue altogether: once we decide what it is we believe about hell, there is the separate issue of how we use what we believe.

But let’s dive into some of what the bible says. Let’s dig first into what Jesus says.

In most cases, when Jesus talks about hell, he’s simply assuming it exists. He asks us to avoid it, taking drastic measures of cutting off our limbs or gouging out our eye if we need to. He warns those who deceive children that they are in danger of hell. But we don’t have any record of Jesus doing what I’m trying to do today, giving an outline or theological overview of hell.

Probably the closest is in Matthew 25. In Matthew, this is the last teaching that Jesus gives before the last supper and the crucifixion. It’s put in an important place, in other words, and it’s about when Jesus, the Son of Man, will return. [READ]

““When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” Matthew 25:31-34, NIV.

Here is the judgment or the separation, which is taught in many places in the bible.

Some are blessed, and will be rewarded with an inheritance, a place in the kingdom of God. Some have a different destiny. [READ]

““Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Matthew 25:41, NIV.

““Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”” Matthew 25:46, NIV.

Jesus is drawing on Jewish thought from what’s known as the inter-testamental period, the time between when the final books of the Old Testament were written and Jesus himself. He actually doesn’t even use the word “hell”; he uses “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment.”

This is one of the difficulties for us. There are three distinct words translated “hell”, and there are also several images like “eternal fire” and “lake of fire” and “the pit” that have all been lumped together in our minds.

Jesus’ main meaning is quite clear, no matter what words or images are used: there will come a time where he will make a final separation, an irrevocable decision. And if I am to take Jesus’ words seriously, some will forever be separated from God.

Notice that in both cases, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are relational.

To the “blessed” ones, he says “Come.” It’s an invitation to be in his presence forever.

To the others, he says “Depart from me.” It’s a pronouncement of a relational separation that, from what he says later, can never be restored.

2 Thessalonians is another difficult passage, yet it also centers on separation from the presence of God. [READ]

“They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people...” 2 Thessalonians 1:9, 10, NIV.

It is a consistent teaching of scripture that our choices matter.

How we respond to Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, has an ultimate, final consequence.

It is also a consistent teaching of the bible, found even in these difficult passages, that God does not want anyone to be separated from him; God wants us to have eternal life. God has done and is doing everything possible for every person on the face of the earth to live with him forever! And when it comes to the presence of God, forever starts now!

Immediately after Jesus taught about the final judgment, he went and sacrificed his life to a cruel and unjust death so that we could experience forgiveness and redemption and a right relationship with God.

The presence of God is constantly reaching out to all humanity. God always has done this…from the first moments in the garden of Eden, through the burning bush, and the cloud by day and fire by night that led Israel, through the Spirit-voiced prophets calling Israel to leave her evil ways and return to God, all the way to the ultimate expression, a baby born in the flesh to live and die and live again.

Every time Jesus talks about hell, it’s because he wants us to avoid it.

When we read about hell in Revelation and in Paul’s letters, it is most often a reminder that there will be justice for God’s children, that the suffering they are experiencing now is not the final word. God doesn’t rejoice in punishing evil; God’s acts to judge and bring justice to evildoers are spoken as hope to his persecuted people.

I stand in opposition to Jonathan Edwards’ angry God, dangling each of us over an eternal fire. I will not deny that our response to Jesus has eternal consequences, but I ALSO will not deny the loving, faithful, patient, wooing nature of God who has done everything possible for us to stand unashamed in his presence forever!

And as I do so, I stand with a long line of Quakers, including George Fox.

The early Quakers preferred to speak of the loving presence of God, the light or seed in each person, ready to take root and grow in each one. They did not often speak of hell, because they wanted to speak of the ever-present Christ.

But that doesn’t mean they rejected belief in hell. George Fox wrote a letter to the governor of Barbados in 1671, and said this:

“We believe that He [Jesus] alone is our Redeemer and Saviour, the Captain of our salvation who saves us from sin, as well as from hell and the wrath to come, and destroys the devil and his works.”

In Robert Barclay’s Apology, he writes:

“When we hear them talk foolishly about heaven and hell and the last judgment, we urge them to depart from the hellish condition they are in. We ask them to come to the judgment of Christ in their hearts, to believe in the Light, and follow it, in order to be able to sit in the heavenly places that are in Christ Jesus. From this, they maliciously say that we deny any heaven or hell except that which is within us, and that we deny any general judgment.” (p. 439 in Dean Freiday’s edition, published 1967)

Choosing to speak first about the love of God is not the same thing as denying that hell exists.

As I read and prayed and thought and prayed and read and thought, I kept coming back to this question: what’s most important to talk about in regard to hell?

I think it’s the reality that some will be forever with God, and some will have to forever depart from God, and that God has done everything possible so that we will NOT suffer the horrible reality of his absence. That, in my opinion is the most important thing to believe about hell.

There is more to the discussion of what we believe, obviously.

The questions are complicated by the different words used for hell, which need to be carefully kept in mind as we study deeper. The Hebrew word sheol, and the Greek word hades, for instance, are sometimes translated hell, but they clearly are a place where everyone goes after death, a sort of waiting ground before the final decision time.

The New Testament word gehenna is a word for hell that is the name of an actual valley outside Jerusalem, where centuries before Christ human sacrifices had been offered, and which had become a fiery dump and the most horrible place imaginable. It’s tempting, but not always correct, to link that together with other descriptions like the lake of fire and the pit.

Even the word eternal presents challenges, because it carries the idea of being final, as well as the idea of everlasting. Does that mean hell is everlasting and never ending, or that it is a final, irrevocable punishment?

Our branch of Friends, Evangelical Friends International, believes in an everlasting and never-ending hell as part of its statement of belief. I have to say that I personally am not willing to say the bible makes that statement unequivocally.

To those who stand strongly for a hell that must be never-ending punishment, I must say this.

If you must have a really awful hell in order to follow Jesus, you are missing something really important about the message of the gospel.

The presence of God is a much greater good than avoiding the worst punishment possible!

And I suppose this is finally getting us into how we use what we believe about hell. As much as there is disagreement about what hell is, the different petals of the flower that is Christ’s church also have very different perspectives on how we talk about hell, and who we talk about it with.

A lot of it may come down to basic differences in the way we’re wired.

Some of us are people motivated by the carrot, and some of us are motivated by the stick.

Some parents punish their children for bad behavior, others create a sticker chart to reward good behavior. I can imagine some, when trying to stick to a diet, posting a picture of themselves on the fridge when they were skinny, to remind them of the goal. Others might post a picture of themselves at their heaviest, to remind them where not to go.

Some people want to use a belief in hell as a tool to help people decide to follow Jesus. And others would rather talk about the eternal, wooing love of God to help others decide to follow Jesus.

It’s pretty obvious I’m in the latter camp.

I think it’s fair to say that Friends have historically been on that petal too, against those like Jonathan Edwards and many others who emphasized the wrath of God and the fires of hell in order to coerce people into following Jesus.

I think it’s also fair to say that Jesus seems to do the same. He told a lot of stories like seeking the lost sheep and the prodigal son that show us the forgiving, loving, pursuing nature of God. When the prodigal son returned to the embrace of his father, it made the older brother quite angry.

Jesus saved his stories about eternal fire and wrath for the religious people of his day, for the ones who already thought they were chosen and destined for heaven. When Jesus talks about eternity, he most often talks about surprise: we will be surprised by who is with God forever, and who is not.

With all my heart, I want every person in this room, in Newberg, in the world, to be with God forever.

With all my heart, I don’t wish for a single person to be in hell. And when we look at everything Jesus says about the final judgment, when we look at everything in Paul’s letters and John’s letters and the rest of the New Testament, a clear picture emerges.

Eternity in the presence of God is dependent upon what we do with Jesus. The promise, the gift, the reward, the hope of life forever with God, with evil destroyed forever, is something that God wishes for every person. So much so that God became a human being in the person of Jesus, died for the forgiveness of sins, and rose again to new life to show us the power of God to defeat death forever.

Believing in Jesus and living in the power of God’s Spirit, molding our lives after the one we follow, is our guarantee that we will not have to face separation from God forever.

Instead, God offers us a life in the power of his presence now AND forever. Believe it. Accept it. Walk in it. Live in it. Not just with a decision today, but with a way of life forever.