Hell

About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"--which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46)

What is hell? For many people hell is a place of fire, where demons with red skin and horns and pitchforks dance around in glee, poking and terrifying people who had done great evil in life. But what does the Bible actually say about hell? Fire is used to describe it—Revelation 21:8 speaks of a fiery lake of burning sulfur. But the Bible shares a few other terrible images as well. Isaiah 66:24 describes it as the place where their worm will not die—in other words, the people being punished there will be like the living dead, in a perpetual state of decay. And Jesus described hell as a place of darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, a place filled with despair because everything is frustratingly, continually wrong (Matthew 25:30).

But the best definition of hell is simply this—"hell is where God is not." Perhaps you don’t think that such a hell sounds all that terrible? Well, consider these statements of Scripture—God is love (1 John 4:8). Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights (James 1:17). In the place where God is not, there is no love; in the place where God is not, there is nothing that qualifies as perfect or good. Without love and perfection and goodness, what is left? Without love or perfection or goodness, how can there be any happiness or contentment or satisfaction? To be in a place where God is not is to be in a place of no comfort, no pleasure, no hope—all that remains is grief and terror and despair. That, my friends, is hell.

Hell is what awaits those who reject God and His perfect ways, because God is love, and every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights. To reject God is to choose instead to live in the horrible place where God is not. To spare us that terrible outcome, Jesus suffered hell for us—suffered our hell on the cross. Jesus is the Son of God; He has been with the Father since the very beginning. Yet, in order to suffer our hell for us, Jesus had to go to the place where God is not; that is why the Father abandoned Him to the agony of hell at Calvary. The proof? Listen to Jesus’ words, as He suffered in that place where God is not: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Had Jesus not cried those words on Good Friday on our behalf, we would be doomed to scream them for eternity.