How can a loving God send people to hell?

How should we respond to this question? What does Scripture teach about final judgement and salvation and the nature of "personal eschatology"?

Week in and week out, I have people asking me questions about the Bible and following Jesus. Many of these questions are posed by people who are beginning to explore what Christianity is about, doing what my friend Mark describes as “sampling the buffet table.” We actually spent two months here in our local church digging into those questions in a recent sermon series, Reasonable Faith, tackling questions like:

• How can a loving God allow human suffering and evil?

• Is Jesus really the only way?

• What about people who never hear about Jesus?

I did my best to trace a cohesive biblical theology that took these questions seriously and provided some of the best answers, in my opinion, to those questions. But our last question was definitely one of the most challenging questions: How can a loving God send people to hell?

This question is one that is asked by both non-Christians who are exploring Christianity as well as Christians who are doing their best to reconcile their faith in a loving God and the final judgement.

So how should we answer this question? Here is a brief summary of where we landed in our sermon.

What happens when we die?

First, we traced out how Scripture teaches that when people die, they go into an “intermediate state,” as mentioned by Jesus in Luke 16:19-31, where we get the term “Abraham’s bosom.” For followers of Jesus, those who pass away go immediately into the presence of Jesus (John 14:2–3; Luke 23:43; Phil 1:23). Those who have rejected Christ go to hadēs and away the final judgement (Acts 2:27; Rev. 20:14).

Once Jesus returns and the kingdom is consummated, followers of Jesus will spend eternity with God on the “new earth” as part of the “new creation” (Rev. 21:1-4). But what about those who have rejected Christ? What happens to them?

This is where there is some debate. There are essentially three positions that have found advocates throughout church history. First, a minority view is universalism, the believe that ultimately everyone is redeemed and that Christ’s reconciliation spans all of creation. Proponents for the early church were Origen and Clement of Alexandria and more recently, Jürgen Moltmann and David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved. Space doesn’t permit me to go into the numerous reasons why I am not persuaded by this position, but in order to be fair, it has had a voice throughout church history and I certainly would love for it to be true… but I’m am not convinced by the Scriptures.

Second, there are advocates for the annihilationism position, also known as conditional immortality. This perspective takes seriously statements about the final judgement leading to “everlasting destruction” (2 Thess. 1:7b–9; 2 Pet. 3:7) and “the second death” (Rev. 20:14) seriously. Advocates from the Patristics include Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. More recently, John Stott and Clark Pinnock. This position has been one I’ve been most convinced by for the past five or six years.

Recently, when returning to a thorough study of the subject, I became convinced by the third and traditional perspective: eternal conscious punishment. For me, this perspective does the most justice to the Scriptures (Isaiah 66:15-16; Jeremiah 7:30-34; 19:6; Dan. 12:2; Joel 3:1-2; Matt. 13:42-50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:10-46; 2 Thess. 1:9; Heb. 6:2; Jude 7; Rev. 14:10-14).

But the question still remains… how can a loving God send people to hell in order to suffer eternal punishment for rejecting Christ?

How can a loving God send people to hell?

This is a tough and sobering question. But if we take the time to think about it, I think we need to reject the premise it is built upon. We need to acknowledge that the question assumes a lot about God (who I think humans often misunderstand and lie about). I would suggest that God does not arbitrarily send people to hell (or annihilation, which suffers the same philosophical question). C.S. Lewis addressed this when he states,

“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

I’m super indebted to Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s Hope and Community for what I consider to be one of the best responses to this “dilemma of hell” (and many thanks to Andrew Ray Williams for recommending it).

Kärkkäinen, in dialogue with the eastern Fathers, Orthodoxy, and N.T. Wright provides three important responses to this “dilemma”:

1. God desires for people to freely love him and to turn to him for salvation. He will not force anyone to choose him (this is what C.S. Lewis was hinting at).

Isaac the Syrian, a 7^th century pastor, suggested that God did not create hell; it was created by humans for themselves. Final judgement is the will of those humans who are unable and unwilling to partake of God’s love, to feel God’s love as a source of joy. Thus, a key answer to this question is that “God does everything he can in order to save all persons, short of destroying their freedom. There’s a tension between God’s love and human freedom. While God is generous, inexhaustible, and infinitely patient, his love will not overrule the freedom of choice by human beings that he has created and given a certain amount of independence.”

2. There is a universal acknowledgement that justice matters and God is both loving and just, merciful and committed to vindicating victims; hell is not about torture, but about justice (which is why every major religion has some sort of final judgement).

So God does not send people to hell. People receive punishment for rejecting God and rebellion against his teachings. As Robert Gundry writes:

"...the NT puts forward eternal punishment as right, even obviously right. It wouldn’t be right of God not to punish the wicked, so that the doctrine supports rather than subverts his justice and love. It shows that he keeps faith with the righteous, that he loves them enough to vindicate them, that he rules according to moral and religious standards that really count, that moral and religious behavior has consequences... eternal punishment defends God’s justice and love and supplies an answer to the problem of moral and religious evil..."

3. While people were created in the image of God and Christians are called to conform themselves to the image of Jesus, those who reject Christ appear to eventually cease to be human.

The Bible makes it very clear that we become like what we worship (Ps. 115:8; 135:15-18; cf. Beale’s We Become What We Worship). Those who worship power, money, greed, lust... they eventually become like those things and cease to reflect the image of God. Building on N.T. Wright, Michael Bird notes:

"Hell is the place for creatures who have rejected God’s revelation of himself in both nature and in the gospel, who refuse to bow the knee to the one true Lord, and who would rather live in darkness than in the light that exposes them... such persons have entered a posthuman state; they became what they worshiped—greed, lust, power—and they ceased to reflect the divine image in any meaningful sense... Hell, then, is the eternal and punitive quarantining of a humanity that has ceased to be human." (Evangelical Theology)

So in my mind, it’s not that God wants to send people to hell; rather, people reject Jesus and are held accountable for their freedom of choice and, though God wants to save all people, they eventually reap what they sowed.  

No one needs to go to hell. The offer of the gospel is for everyone and God so loved the world that he send his Son Jesus, who willingly came to earth, to die on the Cross so that people could experience salvation and eternal life.

About the Author

Luke Geraty is a pastor-theologian in northern California. With a few theology degrees and nearly twenty years of pastoral leadership, Luke loves the Bible, theology, fly fishing, coffee, and books. All opinions are his own and not the views of any other organizations he’s affiliated with. You can follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe to his YouTube.