Tough Love Wins (Part Five)

WHAT THE HELL?

“If God is so loving then how can He condemn people to be tormented in burning flames for all eternity simply because they don’t believe in Him?”

At first glance this seems like a fair question. Most civilized societies today have outlawed torture, and even the death penalty is viewed by an increasing number of people as constituting ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ Also, in the Western world we’ve long ago moved on from the idea that anyone should be punished because they hold to a different set of religious beliefs. So, it seems fair to ask, isn’t the whole idea of hell really just like a divine version of the Spanish Inquisition but with far crueler methods of torture?

As Christians we instinctively cringe at the idea of anyone going to hell. No reasonable person can enjoy the thought of anyone, even their greatest enemy, suffering for all eternity. In fact C.S. Lewis once used the doctrine of hell to argue against those who tried to suggest that Christianity was all just wishful thinking invented by people who couldn’t face up to the fact that we all just disappear like a puff of smoke when we die. Lewis argued, very reasonably, that if we were going to invent a set of beliefs then wishful thinking would never come up with a place where human beings, including some of our loved ones, will suffer for all eternity! It’s a good point, but it doesn’t help us answer the question as to why a loving God would send people to suffer eternally in hell just because they don’t believe in Him.

A Man of Straw

Let’s begin by correcting one huge misunderstanding that is contained in that question. Christians do not believe that anyone gets sent to hell simply because they don’t believe in God. That is what we call ‘a strawman.’ This is a rather dishonest debating technique where you set up a gross distortion of your opponent’s position, then you proceed to attack and demolish that distorted position. If you are dishonest enough to be solely interested in winning an argument, rather than actually finding the truth, then a strawman can be a very effective tool in a debate. It has to be a lie that is close enough to your opponent’s position to fool onlookers, but can still be easily demolished in an argument.

First of all, simply believing in God is not the measure of whether someone is saved or not. The Bible tells us that even demons believe in God (James 2:19), but that doesn’t mean they are saved. What is important is putting our faith and trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, not merely a mental assent to the existence of God.

Secondly, leaving aside for the moment just what hell is like, the historic Christian position is that people go to hell because of their sins, not for what they believed or didn’t believe. So anyone in hell will be there because of their greed and selfishness, because they exploited and abused others, because of their cheating, lying and stealing, and because of a load of other sins that we’ve all committed.

It is true, of course, that God has given us all a totally undeserved escape route and offer of a free pardon. And it is true that faith is the key to receiving that free pardon, but that is a very different thing indeed to the dishonest claim that anyone is sent to hell simply for not believing.

I’m reminded here of the old joke about a guy in prison who was asked by another inmate why he had been jailed. He replied, “I’m in prison because of my beliefs!” “Really?” responded his questioner, “How come?” “I broke into a house and I didn’t believe the alarm system was working.”

The reason that joke works is that we all understand that the guy was sent to jail for the crime of breaking into a house, not for his beliefs. Having the correct beliefs about the alarm system might have led him to change his actions and so avoid going to jail, but his beliefs are not the crime for which he was jailed.

In the same way, having the correct beliefs about who Jesus is can lead us to take the necessary actions (accepting Him as Savior and following Him as Lord) to avoid going to hell, but our beliefs are most certainly not the crime for which anyone goes to hell.

However, even when we’ve disposed of that strawman, our basic question doesn’t go away. If we go to hell for the sins we’ve committed, that still leaves us with a massive problem. While we might see why child rapists or serial killers should deserve to go to hell, most of us don’t feel that our particular lists of sins actually warrant being burned for all eternity. It’s not so much the idea of punishment itself that seems unreasonable – it’s that the punishment seems to be out of all proportion to the crime. Isn’t the idea of an eternal hell, when weighed against our rather petty list of crimes, a bit like sentencing someone to death for stealing a loaf of bread?

Giving Hell an Extreme Makeover

If we suspect that the traditional concept of hell seems to be a case of the punishment not fitting the crime, then we’re left with one of two options. We either look at the crime more closely, or we reinterpret the punishment. And, since the whole concept of sin tends to be somewhat unfashionable these days, it’s hardly surprising that many Christian thinkers have tried to give hell an extreme makeover. Maybe hell isn’t quite so ‘hellish’ after all?

One aspect of this makeover is to suggest that hell is not eternal. Maybe, it is suggested, the words that we translate as ‘everlasting’ could simply mean a long time? Perhaps the biblical writers were like a teenage girl who complains that she had to wait “for ever” for a bus? It is often pointed out that Origen, one of the Early Church Fathers, held such a view. He believed that the punishments of God would be restorative, turning the wicked back to God until everyone, even Satan, would eventually worship God and be saved! By the way, if anyone thinks that Origen’s endorsement of such a doctrine clinches the argument then be careful. You really don’t want to follow Origen in everything. Remember, this is the guy who castrated himself because he wanted to be a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:12)!

The problem with this idea of ‘everlasting’ actually being somewhat less than everlasting is that you have to do a fair bit of twisting of the Bible to get there. For example, Jesus said, “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Matthew 25:46) Now, it doesn’t matter whether you translate this word (in Greek it is aionios) as ‘everlasting’ or as ‘eternal’. The point is that the self same word is being used, in the same sentence, to refer to both the life and the punishment that come after the final judgement. It would be totally unreasonable and dishonest to try to pretend that Jesus somehow switches the meaning of a word mid-sentence.

So, if eternal punishment were only to mean a long period of time, then to be consistent we would have to say the same about eternal life. Does any Christian really want to go down that road? Do we really think that the eternal life that Jesus promised us is one where, after a few thousand years, God says, “OK guys. Out you go. Time’s up. We’re closing now!”

There are good biblical reasons why Christians have historically understood that ‘everlasting’ really does last for ever. In the words of John Newton: “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright Shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, Than when we first begun.”

The other aspect of hell’s extreme makeover is obvious. If the Bible does not allow us enough wiggle-room to diminish the duration of hell, then the only other option is to modify the intensity of hell’s sufferings. Perhaps hell is not really as bad as that flaming pit of fire that we’ve all imagined? Could hell be nothing more and nothing less than separation from God’s presence?

Such an idea can claim some measure of Scriptural support. Are we not told that the King will say to those who have demonstrated that they don’t belong to Him “Depart from Me, you who are cursed” (Matthew 12:41)? Is it not possible that the language of fire and flames is just symbolic, and that hell is really just a state of being where we are eternally separated from God? Not so much hell, perhaps, as just an absence of heaven?

Such a notion sounds attractive to many people, particularly unbelievers. Many of them seem quite happy now living without the presence of God, so spending an eternity separated from Him doesn’t sound too bad at all to them.

I’m not so sure that a simple separation from God would be such a benign experience. Imagine a planet populated by everyone that has ever chosen to reject God, but where nobody ever dies. Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot will have an eternity in which to compete for dominance. Death will never intervene to halt their maniacal schemes, nor will their victims be able to cherish the hope that death might bering them a release from their sufferings. Such an existence sounds pretty hellish to me.

But my major quarrel with this notion of hell as nothing more than separation from God is that it stems from a desire to soft peddle the spiritual realities that Jesus taught. Let’s remember that some of the most graphic language about hell in the Bible is not culled from the pages of Daniel or Revelation, but rather it comes directly from the lips of Jesus in the Four Gospels. (Significantly, much of Christ’s warning about hell is directed to the disciples, not to unbelievers or to the Pharisees. Jesus saw the doctrine of hell as a motivation for His followers to love the lost rather than as a stick to frighten unbelievers into getting saved.)

Today many Christians have become diplomats rather than ambassadors of Christ. Our fear of seeming intolerant or of giving offence causes us to use watered-down language. So, for example, if we are asked if something should be considered as a sin we say, “Well, it’s not God’s best for you.” That conveys the impression that committing acts which the Bible describes as sinful are in fact like flying Economy Class instead of First Class – they’ll still get you to where you’re going, but you could be doing even better. Of course nobody wants to be rude or offensive for the sake of it, but in the end the Gospel is a stumbling block (1 Corinthians 1:23) rather than an escalator! We have to be honest enough to call a spade a spade and to call a sin a sin!

Being eternally separated from God is undoubtedly a huge part of what hell is all about. But to pretend that is the whole story fails to do justice to what Jesus taught. Earlier we quoted His words, “Depart from Me, you who are cursed.” But we neglected to complete the entire sentence: “Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

Yes, the Bible does indeed use symbolic language, and Jesus Himself frequently used metaphors, parables and figures of speech to teach spiritual truth. But we need to ask ourselves why Jesus would use such a metaphor. Was He in the habit of using metaphors to exaggerate things? To make them seem bigger and more scary than they really were? Would Jesus use the metaphor of fire and then say, “Actually chaps, it’s nothing like as bad as fire, but I thought I’d just get your attention by scaring you out of your wits”? Or is it more likely that Jesus would use a metaphor to express something that was so great as to defy ordinary human language? Is it possible that He was saying, “The reality of dying in your sin is so horrible that your limited human vocabulary is insufficient for Me to describe it, so I’m going to do the next best thing and use the imagery of fire to impress upon you how awful it would be to die without having your sins forgiven”?

This is not a case of searching for isolated proof texts to prove a point. If I take the teaching of Jesus as a whole, and the way He used symbolic language, then I am persuaded that if His talk of hell as fire is symbolic, then He is saying that hell is something worse than eternal flames – not something milder. Yes, hell is indeed separation from God, but it is a separation that is even worse than the traditional concept of a pit of fire.

So our makeover of hell has not answered our troubling question about how a loving God could send a sinner to hell. If anything it has made the question more urgent. So how can we answer the accusation that the idea of an eternal hell, when weighed against our rather petty list of crimes, is a bit like sentencing someone to death for stealing a loaf of bread? The answer is not to try to give hell a makeover. The answer is to realize that, according to Jesus, our sin problems go much deeper than stealing a loaf of bread.

Godwin’s Law of Sin and Death

Part of our problem is that we persistently underestimate the awfulness of sin. We might sometimes wax indignant at the sins of others, but we have a wonderful capacity for minimizing our own wrongdoing. We even employ a host of euphemisms to avoid calling sin what it is. Instead we have our faults, our weaknesses, our little slips and our failings.

Yet every now and again something happens that brings us face to face with sin in such a naked form that we can’t dress it up as if it were something else. Then, just for a moment, we start to see sin as God Himself sees it.

Several years ago I had the privilege of visiting Jerusalem as part of a team of pastors organized by a Christian TV station. It was certainly not a sight seeing trip. For most of the time we were ensconced in a hotel room that overlooked the Old City and we prayed continually. But one morning we took the time to visit Yad Vashem, the primary Holocaust museum and memorial in Israel. It was sobering to see the history and the evidence of that terrible genocide that was perpetrated by the Nazi regime.

One of the final exhibits in the museum was a hall of mirrors. Countless little mirrors lined the walls and ceiling. And in the center burned a single candle, so that its reflection was multiplied over and over thousands of times by the myriad of mirrors. A plaque on the wall informed us that each reflected candle we could see in that hall represented a Jewish child who died in the Holocaust. As I gazed at those thousands of reflected lights I felt overwhelmed by sadness and anger.

In 1994 my wife and I had the grief of seeing our young daughter die at just four years of age. Our little girl, Grace, was born severely underweight and suffering from an extremely rare genetic condition. Throughout her short life an army of doctors, nurses and social workers labored to keep her alive and to make her life more comfortable and enjoyable. We were living in the UK, where medical care was free, and occasionally I tried to calculate how much was spent in medicines, equipment, medical staff and so on in keeping Grace alive. I estimated that the State had invested more into my daughter’s life over those four years than I will ever earn in my entire lifetime. But no-one ever questioned whether all the effort was worthwhile. We all operated on the assumption that a child’s life is priceless.

Yet those reflected candles in Yad Vashem tell me that seventy years ago a child’s life was not priceless. For the perpetrators of the Holocaust a child’s life wasn’t even worth the price of a candle. We boarded our bus to return to our hotel, and everyone was silent. When you are confronted with sin in all its awfulness then what is there left to say? The first person to break the silence was a Pentecostal pastor from Birmingham who was seated beside me. He turned to me, and uttered words that I never expected to hear from any Christian, least of all a pastor. He said, “By God, I’m glad that there’s a hell!”

And you know what? I know exactly what he meant. If there is no hell then God will owe an apology to every child that is represented in the Hall of Mirrors at Yad Vashem.

We recognize that the Holocaust represents sin in all of its unvarnished horror. But we like to kid ourselves that what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was a one-off event, a never to be repeated orgy of demonic cruelty. But to think that way is the pinnacle of self-deception. What about the genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenians in 1915? What about the slaughter in Rwanda in 1990? What about the crimes against humanity committed in the Balkans by Serbs and Croats in the early 1990s? And then, when we begin to read history, we see that such cruelties are not isolated events. The history of the human race, including Church History, is a long record of sin that cries out for judgement.

There is a principle on internet discussion boards known as Godwin’s Law. This basically states that the longer a discussion continues, the more likely it is that someone will invoke a reference to the Nazis or to the Holocaust. Actually, when you think about it, Godwin’s Law is rather pointless and banal. After all, the longer a discussion continues then the more likely it becomes that any subject will be mentioned! But Godwin’s Law has become famous because people misunderstand it and misuse it as if they think it forbids any mention of the Nazis whatsoever. So if, in an internet discussion, anyone draws a comparison with Nazi Germany some poor simpleton is likely to chip in with, “Ha! Godwin’s Law! You lose!”

This abuse of Godwin’s Law is based on a terrible misunderstanding, namely that somehow the Holocaust that occurred under the Nazis was so unique, so special, that it can never be compared to anything else. But the truth is much more disturbing. The Holocaust is only one of a series of historical events where sin was stripped of its mask and revealed to us in all its horrible depravity. And the Scriptural teaching is even more shocking. It is only our tendency to ignore and justify sin that blinds us to the fact that all sin is grossly offensive to God and cries out for judgement.

Let’s forget about all the fingerpointing at others. Let’s stop pretending that every one of the ordinary German people who joined the Nazi Party were evil in a special way that none of us ever could be. What if all of our lives are characterized by deeds, words and thoughts that cry out for judgement – either judged in the Person of Christ upon the Cross or in some other way? What if there are things in your history and my history that are so wrong that God would owe the universe an apology if He were to leave us unjudged?

Therese Raquin and the Power of Guilt

When we talk about hell from our modern worldviews we often fail to understand that there are plenty of things that are worse than physical suffering. Soldiers, for example, will endure all kinds of physical injuries rather than have their comrades think them to be cowards. A parent that has known the tragedy of being bereaved of a child knows that any physical pain would be preferable to the overwhelming grief that such a loss brings. Can any physical torture really compare with the horrors felt by a betrayed spouse or a scorned lover?

Émile Zola was one of the more profound and thoughtful authors of the 19^th Century. His novels, at times both poetic and gruesome, often use beautifully written language to describe the ugliness of poverty, crime and human misery. Zola was reviewing a novel which described the murder of a man by his wife and her lover, and their subsequent arrest and trial. He commented to friends that the story could have been much more powerful if it had concentrated on divine, rather than human, justice. What would such justice look like, he mused, if the murderers had escaped human detection but then been tormented by their consciences?

Zola’s answer to this question formed the basis for his novel “Therese Raquin.” Therese is a shopkeeper trapped in an arranged marriage to her sickly cousin Camille Raquin, whom she secretly despises. She embarks on an affair with Camille’s friend Laurent, and the lovers plan to murder Camille so they can be together permanently. One day the three all go boating together, and Laurent, urged on by Therese, seizes Camille and drowns him in the river. As Laurent seizes Camille, however, his intended victim struggles violently and manages to bite a chunk of flesh out of Laurent’s neck.

I have read enough novels and watched enough movies to know that such a detail always has consequences. So, when I first read this, I was already wondering how this bite on Laurent’s neck is going to play out in the story. Will they find the lump of flesh from Laurent’s body still in the mouth of Camille’s corpse? Will a perceptive detective match the teeth marks on Laurent’s neck with Camille’s dental records? (As you can tell, I’ve probably watched too many episodes of CSI!)

But a masterful story-teller like Zola is better than that. Therese and Laurent get away with their crime. In fact Laurent is celebrated as a hero who tried to save his friend’s life. His subsequent care and attention towards Camille’s elderly mother leads her, after a decent period of mourning, to suggest that Laurent should take her son’s widow as his wife! So Therese and Laurent’s plan works to perfection. They have committed the perfect murder and have got exactly what they wanted.

But that is where divine justice kicks in. Both Therese and Laurent are tormented by guilt at what they have done. They imagine that they see Camille’s face at every turn. They become jumpy and afraid of the dark. When they sleep they run a gauntlet of dreams about the murdered man. Laurent tries to distract himself by working as an artist, but every figure he draws bears an uncanny resemblance to Camille. Every time Laurent dresses in the morning he sees the scar on his neck where Camille bit him. The more he dwells on things, the redder and more angry the scar becomes. He imagines that it is hot and burning him. Sometimes, as he is shaving, he is tempted to use his razor to cut the flesh out of his neck and to erase the mark of his victim’s teeth.

When Laurent and Therese do get married they feel no love for one another. In fact their motive for marriage is no longer lust, but rather because each has found their guilt too intolerable to bear alone. They cannot even sleep together, feeling that Camille’s ghostly presence is somehow wedged between them. Just to touch each other causes all kinds of imagined burnings and pain. They spend their wedding night seated in armchairs opposite each other, staring at one another in horror and longing for morning to come. They argue incessantly, blaming each other for the murder. They seek distraction in partying, in work, in extramarital affairs, in sobs of repentance – but nothing eases their guilt. Eventually Therese provokes Laurent into beating her, finding that the pain of the blows and kicks proves a welcome distraction from her self-condemnation.

Gradually Therese and Laurent grow to hate each other, but they cannot separate because of the fear that the other might confess everything to the authorities. So they follow one another, and threaten one another, trapped together in mutual guilt and loathing. Each comes to see murdering their spouse as the only option left to them – not to remove their guilt altogether, but at least to make it more bearable. They separately hatch plans to kill each other, but this time with no thought of evading detection. Each would be prepared to risk arrest and execution if they could reduce their torment even temporarily. Finally, each realizing what the other is planning, they unite in a suicide pact, finding death itself preferable to their lives of constant guilt and fear.

Zola, with his keen perception of human nature, understood something that is largely overlooked in our discussions about eternal punishment and hell. Our innermost feelings and emotions have a much greater power to pain us than any physical fire. What if hell is simply a state of being where, like Therese and Laurent, we are continually confronted with the shamefulness and sinfulness of our actions? Imagine an eternity of reflecting on our actions, but where we have reached a maturity of thought and understanding by which all our excuses are stripped away, where we see our sin as God sees it. Might we, like Therese Raquin, long for kicks, for blows, for any kind of physical sensation (including fire) that would distract us from the horror of being confronted by the enormity of our actions.

Suffering and Shame

The Hebrew writers of the Old Testament, and indeed the communities in which the New Testament was born, were typically Middle Eastern in the ways that they valued honor and saw shame and disgrace as the ultimate evil to avoid. Indeed, in such societies people are willing to endure all kinds of physical suffering rather than to ‘lose face.’ The worst imaginable punishment, in their eyes, is not physical, but is to be disgraced. The more public and permanent the disgrace, the closer they approach to the idea of hell. Curiously, our modern Western minds get fixated by every reference that suggests pain yet we gloss over their obvious horror of shame and disgrace.

For example, the prophet Daniel describes the resurrection of the dead and their subsequent judgement: “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2). This sounds strange to our way of thinking, conditioned as we are to thinking of pain as the ultimate evil, but it made perfect sense to the Hebrew reader. The opposite of everlasting life was not everlasting punishment. It was not even everlasting death. The opposite of everlasting life was shame and everlasting contempt!

This idea runs throughout the Scripture. Those who look to the Lord for help are promised that “their faces are never covered with shame” (Psalm 34:5) while we are admonished to avoid pride because it is followed by disgrace (Proverbs 11:2). The Book of Hebrews, in referring to the Cross of Jesus Christ, stresses its shame more than the physical pains of crucifixion.

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)

“And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through His own blood. Let us, then, go to Him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace He bore.” (Hebrews 13:12,13)

When the apostles were flogged for preaching in the name of Jesus, the Word tells us that they left “rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41). If we read today about some similar act of persecution against believers then our thoughts immediately fly to the physical pain that they suffer, but the apostles’ emphasis was on the issue of disgrace.

Think also of Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.” The first time I watched it I remember thinking that it did a great job of emphasizing the physical suffering of Christ on the Cross, but failed to even begin to convey the immensity of Christ’s spiritual suffering. Yet what happened spiritually on the Cross was much more important to our salvation than the mere physical pain that Jesus endured.

The old Gospel song, ‘The Old Rugged Cross,’ describes the Cross as “the emblem of suffering and shame.” Without wishing to over-simplify things, it would be accurate to say that modern western Christians dwell on the suffering of the Cross, whereas the Early Church was more concerned about the shame of the Cross. Perhaps our concept of hell is twisted because our emphasis on avoiding pain has made us a people without shame!

A Moment of Clarity

When I was eight years old, growing up on the outskirts of East Belfast, I squabbled in the school playground with a boy named Robert. He taunted me about the death of my mother, so I warned him that if he ever said anything like that again I would knock his teeth out. Robert replied, “You can’t do that, because my Auntie is the Playground Supervisor.” At that we both looked over at the Supervisor – a big round woman with white hair like the Fairy Godmother in Disney’s Cinderella. Playground Supervisors were volunteers who kept an eye on the kids during lunch breaks. They had no authority to discipline the children, but they reported what went on to the staff, and their version of events would determine who got punished and who didn’t. If I was to start punching a Playground Supervisor’s nephew then things were going to go badly for me.

I suspected Robert was lying to get out of a beating, so what followed was one of those typical childish arguments. “Oh no she isn’t!” “Oh yes she is!” “Oh no she isn’t!” And so on. Finally Robert ran up to the Playground Supervisor. “Aren’t you my Auntie?” “Why, of course I am, Robert.” she replied. “Yah! I told you so!” shouted Robert, and at that he burst into tears.

That was when things got weird. Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother took one look at me and turned into the Wicked Witch of the West! She snarled, “What have you been doing to this poor boy?” and, grabbing my arm, dragged me straight to the Principal’s office. By the time we got to the office I was the one who was crying, trying to understand what was going on. The Wicked Witch of the West (formerly the Fairy Godmother) spun a tale to the Principal that I had been bullying her poor nephew who had been afflicted with polio. Heck, I didn’t even know what polio was. I actually had to look it up in the dictionary when I got home that night. I hadn’t even noticed that Robert walked with a bit of a limp – as far as I was concerned he was just the kid who had taunted me about my dead mother! But somehow I never got the chance to give my side of the story. I was severely disciplined for bullying a crippled boy. All afternoon in class, as I sniffed back my tears and felt the heat in my backside where I had been caned, I could see Robert gloating at me out of the corner of my eye. I was too humiliated and upset to look back at him directly, but inside I burned with a thirst for revenge.

A few days later the opportunity for revenge came my way. We lived about two miles from the school, and I was walking home with a couple of friends. Suddenly I spotted Robert walking alone ahead of me, and this time there was no Auntie Playground Supervisor to protect him. At first my plan was simple. I would run and catch him up and give him six punches in the teeth, one for every stroke of the cane I had received from the Principal.

But, as I walked faster and gained ground on Robert, I noticed something. He did have a limp! In fact, when he looked over his shoulder and quickened his pace at the sight of me behind him, his limp looked quite comical. And then something inside me rejoiced as I hatched a diabolical plot. My eight-year-old mind, tainted by generations of human sin, realized that I could exact a revenge on Robert that would be far sweeter than a few punches in the mouth.

I stayed about twenty feet behind Robert and began to mimic his limp. At first my two friends started laughing, but soon they got in on the act as well. They started to limp too. Now there were three of us limping along behind Robert. Other kids, including a group of girls, saw what we were doing and thought it looked great fun, so they started limping along with us as well. The more of us gathered, the faster Robert tried to get home. But the faster he moved, the more comical his limp looked, and the more children joined in. It was only a mile from the school to Robert’s house, but by the time we reached his front door the crowd of limping children had swelled to over a hundred. I was gratified at how well my revenge was working out, but I was also scared. I had unleashed something bigger than myself and had created forces beyond my control. I was leading a mob!

When Robert reached his house he tried to get inside, but no-one was at home and the front door was locked. Such things happened all the time. We all knew that you could play in the street, or if it was raining you could go to a neighbour’s house until one of your parents got home. But none of us had ever been in the position of being trapped in front of your own locked door by a mob of kids who were all mimicking you. Robert stood facing us on the little patch of grass in front of his house, and we stood on the other side of a low brick wall. Everyone fell silent and wondered what was supposed to happen next. We all stared at Robert, and he stared back at us. Some of the kids were nudging me in the back as if I was supposed to say or do something, but I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t planned for all this to happen. My idea had gone no further than one person mimicking another for a few minutes to get revenge. I had no plan to form a lynch mob!

Then something happened that will live with me for the rest of my life. Robert’s face crumpled into tears and he fell to his knees. In impotent fear, rage, and frustration he began to punch the grass. His little fists were beating the ground faster than the eye could follow them, and all the while he was making a whimpering noise like a wounded animal. All around me the other kids were hooting and jeering at him, but I could only stare in stunned silence. I was watching a human being disintegrating in front of my very eyes and I had caused it.

Eventually a neighbour came to Robert’s help and gathered him up into her arms. She shook her fist at the crowd of kids and started cursing at us for being the cruel little brats that we were. Most of the children ran off at that point, but those who knew about my caning a few days earlier gathered round to congratulate me at what a great trick I’d played on Robert. I couldn’t accept their congratulations. I couldn’t smile. I wanted to cry but tears would not come. I was only eight years old, but I knew that I had just crossed a line that human beings weren’t meant to cross. I wished with all my heart that I could travel back in time and undo what had just happened. I had no belief in God, and no ability to think in religious terms, but I knew that I was a sinner and that what had just occurred had been a window into my inmost being. I had glimpsed for an instant who I really was, what I was capable of, and I hated what I had just seen.

Over the next ten years I was to commit many acts which in most people’s eyes (and certainly in the eyes of the law) would be considered much worse than one young boy mimicking how another boy walked. I engaged in acts of violence, wallowed in immorality, committed armed robberies, and on one occasion stood watching as fellow gang-members kicked a man to death. Yet, in the dead of the night when I was all alone, I would find myself pressing my fists against my eyes to try to erase the image of a young boy with polio being mercilessly teased and taunted by the crowd I had created. I would wonder why that one incident persisted so stubbornly, and the pain it caused me could never be numbed by alcohol or other substances. Did everyone else have things that troubled them in this way? Was it just me? Sometimes I wondered if I was losing my mind.

When I was eighteen years old I had a Damascus Road-type experience of Christ. I knew what it was to have the assurance of sins forgiven, and I rejoiced in my salvation. But perhaps the most liberating feeling of all was to know that God had forgiven me for what I had done to Robert ten years earlier. I fully appreciate that God has removed my transgressions from me as far as the East is from the West (Psalm 103:12). Yet, forty years later, I still sometimes wake up in the night and I see Robert surrounded by jeering children and beating the ground, and I remember the evil that I am capable of.

Why has that one incident affected me so deeply? I believe that for one moment in my life God, as an act of grace, enabled me to see sin as He sees it. All my self justifications (the unfairness of being caned for something I hadn’t done) and my excuses (I was only eight years old) were swept away. That one single moment of clarity and understanding prepared the way in later life for the Holy Spirit to convict me of sin and to lead me to repentance. That is why I view that moment of self-awareness, as I stood stunned in front of Robert’s house, as an act of grace rather than as an act of punishment. Indeed, if I were a wiser man than I am, proper reflection on that moment would undoubtedly have spurred me on to be a much better person than I have been over the last forty years.

An Eternity of Clarity

But what if God were to enable me to see all of my life as He sees it? What if I were to have a similar revelation and understanding of every sinful deed, word or thought that I have ever committed? Such a constant self-awareness would not be a blessing, for it would render life intolerable. The continual pain and shame of such an existence would, like Therese Raquin, make me long to feel physical pain just to distract me from the reality of truly knowing myself and my sin.

Now, imagine an eternal existence where there is nothing but a similarly perfect clear understanding and memory of your sins. No flames of fire. No demons with pitchforks. Just memories that fill you with shame and hold up a never-failing mirror that reflects your own selfishness, greed and hatred. And you know that there is no prospect of redemption, no possibility of forgetfulness, and no excuse that can ever mitigate your guilt. In this eternal existence God is not punishing you, for God is nowhere to be found. You have received exactly what you asked for – to be left alone. You have received exactly what the first human beings were promised when they were first tempted to sin – your eyes have truly been opened to know good and evil (Genesis 3:5). Perfect knowledge and an eternity without God sounds like the atheist’s idea of paradise. But when that perfect knowledge includes knowing our sinful selves, then the hoped-for paradise can be seen as the deepest pit of hell, compared to which flames and fire would be a welcome relief.

Such an understanding of hell, I might add, does not deny or conflict with even the highest views of Scriptural inspiration and inerrancy. This is not some vague shadowy concept that tries to make hell seem nicer. I am suggesting that hell might, in fact, be very much worse than the traditional idea of non-stop physical flames. By this understanding the language that speaks of eternal fire is not an exaggeration. It is the best the biblical writers could do to describe something much more horrible! If you were a Jew, living thousands of years ago, then how would you describe a concept such as I have outlined in this Chapter? Given that your cultural understanding of shame was that of a condemnation that burned within your heart. Given that the greatest disgrace was to be cast out from the people of God to skulk outside the camp where the garbage was burned and human excrement was dumped. What language would you use to convey these ideas of perpetual shame and separation? You would talk about flames, about pain, and about ‘outer darkness’ where you were utterly and completely alone with no-one or nothing to distract you from yourself.

Of course such an understanding of hell is speculative. We can never be fully sure of such things this side of eternity – and no sane person will want to know and experience them on the other side of eternity! But I offer it as one suggestion of how hell can be viewed as a biblical reality, yet one that is totally just and compatible with our understanding of the love and mercy of our God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In fact, the question could be not whether a just and loving God would allow such a hell to exist, but whether God can be truly loving and just without allowing people to go to such a hell! Think about it for a moment. If people truly choose to reject God, and if they really insist that they want to gain knowledge, then what could be fairer than allowing them to exist separate from God and with a full and perfect knowledge of themselves? It would be a violation of their moral freedom for God to drag them screaming and kicking into His presence when they have made it abundantly clear that they want nothing to do with God. And it would be equally wrong for God to allow them to live in some delusional state where they hide themselves from recognizing their own true natures. If we truly believe that humans are morally responsible beings with eternal souls, then it would seem perfectly fair that a loving God would allow those who reject him to exist for all eternity with a perfect knowledge of themselves.

Perhaps the only reason we see such an interpretation of hell as somehow nicer than literal fire and brimstone is because we are foolish and prideful creatures that insist on thinking of ourselves as if we were infinitely better than we really are. And that, when all is said and done, is the essence of our sinfulness which got us into this whole mess in the first place!

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