"What a Loving God Would Not Do"
INTRODUCTION
Confession: I am an annihilationist. I believe that the wicked will be resurrected on the last day, judged and condemned by God Almighty, and cast into hell to suffer and die.
Some of my fellow annihilationists may have just experienced a bit of theological whiplash. You were offering a hearty “Amen” to my belief statement until I threw in the word “suffer.” If that describes you, put on your big boy/big girl pants, because I’ve got something to say that you might not like.
The Bible describes hell as a place of suffering.
THE BASIS OF BELIEF
Before we can hash out the Biblical descriptions of hell, we need to start with a more basic question. Why do we believe that the wicked are ultimately annihilated (cease to exist). Simply put, it’s because the Bible says so.
Growing up in various Advent Christian churches, I heard a lot of different arguments for our annihilationist convictions. Unfortunately, the most common by far was, “A loving God would not torment someone forever.” I’ll tell you in a moment why that is unfortunate.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I read Edward Fudge’s “The Fire that Consumes” and became intimately acquainted with the strongest arguments in favor of our position. And from whence do the strongest arguments come? The Bible, obviously. If we are truly “no creed but the Bible” people (a controversial subject for a different article) then at the bottom of every belief we hold should be one simple foundation: because God said so.
GOD IN OUR IMAGE
Unfortunately, I have heard and continue to hear many Advent Christians making a very different sort of argument for their annihilationism, and it is the one I mentioned earlier. They say that they cannot imagine a loving God tormenting people forever. But in some cases, they go even further than that. Some go so far as to say that they cannot imagine a loving God tormenting people at all. For them, hell is a sort of eternal euthanasia. Perhaps they imagine a terminally ill dog at the vet. The animal receives the lethal injection and slowly goes to sleep for the last time as the owner tenderly pets and coos and soothes and cries. Or perhaps they imagine a car accident at 400 miles an hour. Lots of fire and smoke, but no feeling on the part of the driver. The last thing the person in the Mach-speed car remembers is turning left.
Whatever they imagine, here is one thing they definitely don’t imagine: “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Later in the article, we will deal with the Biblical use of that phrase, as well as a few other descriptions of hell. But first let’s cut to the heart of the argument described above. It is emotionally driven. Some might contend it is philosophical at its bottom, but I submit to you that it is far more psychological. Before I make my claim, however, I ought to give full expression to the argument, as I have heard it presented.
Premise 1- God is loving. Premise 2- It is not loving to torment someone (forever). Conclusion- therefore, God would not torment someone. Note the “forever” in parentheses, which I included because I have heard this argument both with and without that word. For now, let’s stick with those who leave the word out, the ones who essentially claim that hell is Divinely administered euthanasia. If that’s you, you may want to sit down for what I say next.
You are playing with blasphemy.
I very carefully chose the phrase “playing with blasphemy” because I don’t think most of you are being openly or intentionally blasphemous. Your error is more subtle. You think that God wouldn’t do something because you wouldn’t. Put another way, you’re trying to make God in your image. “If I were a loving God, I wouldn’t torment people.”
MARCION’S GHASTLY SPECTER
If I had to choose one heresy at the heart of most evangelical errors today, it would not be a difficult choice. Marcion was a 4th century theologian who chopped his Bible in half and threw away the Old Testament because he didn’t like the God he found in its pages. You see, hell isn’t the only place where we see God seemingly engaged in brutality.
On a personal level, this squeamish reality came to a head for me as a teenager, when I read Joshua 6 for the first time. God instructed Israel to slaughter every man, woman and child in the city of Jericho. And they did. I remember the horror I felt when I first read and understood that story. “What kind of God would do something like this?”
But God’s ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. They are much higher (Isaiah 55:9) even when they may appear to be lower. We don’t get to judge God’s actions. We can certainly experience deep emotional reactions to His actions. But we do not have the right to make value judgments of God. He knows only goodness.
THE PSALMS & JOB
One thing you’ll notice the first time you read through the book of psalms is that there is an awful lot of grief directed toward God by the psalmists. Keep in mind, these are the songs given by God for his people to sing. God is not afraid or ashamed of our feelings. To be horrified by hell is not a sin.
When, then, can it become a sin? When you decide you know better than God. The book of Job teaches us this beautifully. Twice in the first two chapters, the author of Job makes it plain to us that Job, who has expressed deep agony and grief for God’s choices, has not sinned. But by the time we reach Chapter 38, God starts rebuking Job, which means that at some point between chapters 2 & 38, Job sinned. And if you read all of God’s rebuke, it should become clear to you how Job went wrong. He claimed to be more righteous than God.
HELL, TORMENT, & DEATH
Since Edward Fudge has already written such an excellent treatise on the subject, there is no reason for me to exhaustively analyze the litany of Biblical descriptions of hell in this brief article. Allow me instead to highlight one key phrase: “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It appears several times in the New Testament, always as a description of the final judgment.
Find me one single Biblical description of the experience of God’s wrath as painless. I’ll wait . . . Now find me one single Biblical description of the weakness of God’s resolve to punish sinners . . . Still waiting.
The only thing even close that we can find in the Bible is the statement from Ezekiel 18 & 33, “God does not rejoice in the death of the wicked.” God is not a sadist. He does not gleefully or cheerfully cast his own creatures into the fire of everlasting destruction.
Consider, for a moment, the crucifixion. In no other act of God can we find a clearer expression of both His gracious compassion and His righteous anger. God loved sinners so much that he sent His own eternal Son to redeem them. He hated sin so much that “it was the Lord’s will crush [Jesus]” (Isaiah 53). Jesus received the penalty of sin for us. And what was that penalty? Euthanasia? Was Jesus beheaded, like John the Baptist? No, he was nailed to a cross, he endured prolonged agony, and then He died. So shall it be with the wicked in the end. How long will they suffer? What will be the exact nature of that suffering? God only knows. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us” (Deuteronomy 29:29).
HORROR & HUMILITY
As we near the end of this article, it seems helpful to propose a reason for the errors I have identified and rebuked. Why are we tempted to sanitize hell? Why might we desire to tame the wrath of God? I think the answer is both simple and obvious. We all know people who will end up in hell. In some cases, they are people we know/knew well and love very much. The thought of their suffering seems unbearable to us. The idea of a God who would inflict such a punishment horrifies us. “What kind of God would do that?”
I’ll tell you what kind of God would do that. A loving God. A righteous God. A holy, holy, holy God. We know he is that kind of God, not because we have observed his actions and assessed them based on our finite and flawed understanding of good and evil, wrath and grace, worthiness and unworthiness. No! We know what kind of God He is because He told us, and God cannot lie (Titus 1:2).
Three days after I became a pastor, I was called to the hospital. Without getting into all the grimy details, the short version of this story is that a baby died in the womb. It was awful. A few weeks later the mother came to me to ask the inevitable question: “Will I ever see my baby again?” I know some pastors would have immediately said, “Yes!” Some of them have good reasons for doing so. They have studied Biblical passages like 2 Samuel 12:23 and have concluded that God, in his abundance of mercy, somehow redeems those human beings who never had the opportunity to choose faith and repentance. But I think some of them would have told that grieving mother, “Yes,” not because of Biblically defensible convictions, but rather because of their own weak stomach. The thought of an unborn child subjected to the unrestrained wrath of God nauseates them, so they eliminate it as a possibility.
There have been plenty of moments in my 4 years as a pastor that I have cowardly refrained from the truth. But this was not one of those moments. “Will I ever see my baby again?” I looked that mother in the eyes and said, “I don’t know. I don’t think the Bible clearly says.” After giving my disappointing answer a moment to settle, I continued. “But this much I do know. The judge of all the earth will do right (Genesis 18). And whatever God ultimately does with your baby, we can trust that it will be righteous.”
WHY ANNIHILATIONIST?
If you are an annihilationist, ask yourself why. Is it because God has spoken in His word, and we believe whatever he says? Or is it because the idea of eternal conscious torment makes your stomach turn?
I have spent most of this article criticizing those who claim to know that hell will be void of any suffering. But before I close, I want to speak more directly to those of my persuasion, the annihilationists who will acknowledge the Biblical descriptions of suffering in the final judgment. We are not immune to feelings-driven theology. I have heard some such annihilationists say, “Hell will be a place of torment, but that torment will end because God is merciful.” It sounds so Christian, doesn’t it? Yet even this statement stretches beyond the revelation of Scripture. There is no Biblical reason to conclude that the wicked are annihilated out of pity. If anything, the Bible teaches the opposite. The wicked are ultimately annihilated because that is exactly what they deserve. There will be no mercy in hell. God’s gloves will be off. The time for restraint will be over.
One more important point- what I have just said does not, in any way, make God less loving. That is the sort of argument that atheists like Christopher Hitches and Richard Dawkins have made. They have the audacity to stand over God in judgment, to decide whether or not He is a “worthy” God. What damnable heresy! News flash: God is more loving than you can understand. He is more righteous than you can understand. He is more holy than you can understand. We know because He told us so. We trust Him, not because we can understand His ways, but because we can understand His word.
In my childhood, I knew an Advent Christian family with three adult sons. Those boys grew up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Later in his life, one of them apostatized. What his mother told him will shake you to your core. “Son, I love you, and for the rest of your life I will pray that God grants you repentance and faith. But if He doesn’t, then on the day that He casts you forever into the outer darkness, I will cry, ‘Worthy is the God who administers justice!’” Wow, now that’s what I call faith!
CONCLUSION
Stop trying to make God in your image. Stop claiming that God wouldn’t do something just because you wouldn’t do it. Acknowledge Him as the only righteous judge. He alone has the right to determine and execute ultimate justice for and upon His enemies.
We don’t.