Between the Trees

Note: This is part 3 of an ongoing series discussing the question of hell. Here are posts one and two.

Last time, I tried to offer a take on the big story of Christianity, putting the questions of hell and divine judgment in their proper contexts. I’d like to sum up four major points from this story:

1. God does not stand between us and heaven. He is not trying to keep us from going there by beating us back into hell. Instead, we are standing between God and the restoration of what He has created. If we are not mercifully spared, we must be dealt with some other way. And, if God’s work of saving the cosmos is to succeed, part of sparing us must be restoring us into our right roles in relation both to God and to creation. The sense many people have that God could somehow save people while they continue on in their merry little ways, rebelling and worshipping idols and abusing the world and one another, is to completely miss the point. You cannot be saved without becoming a worshiper of Yahweh, because until you do you are still standing in the path of the freight train of restoration coming to this world, shaking your fist.

2. Human sin really is bad. It’s destructive. When God punishes sin, it is not some petty dictator killing a political prisoner. It is a doctor pouring antiseptic on the wound. The only ones who see it as anything but good are the bacteria. Too often, we have articulated the doctrine of sin in such a way as to keep hell from making sense. It is true that human sin is ultimately grave because it offends the holiness and glory of God. However, we miss the point when we separate this fact from sin’s other consequences. God in His holiness and glory wants the world to work together in joy, beauty and shalom. To pretend as if we are offending God without also breaking the world we live in misses the whole point.

3. Because of this, the idea of judgment (of which hell is a part) is actually a good thing. Granted, it’s not a happy thing for those being judged. But when we see that the thing keeping the world from working in the way we all know it should is our own shalom-breaking, it helps us recognize that God’s wrath poured out on sin is the wrath of a Father coming to defend His beloved. And this, assuming you love what the Father loves, is a very good thing.

4. In addition, salvation really is gracious on God’s part. If the story I told last time is the biblical one, then there would be no reason that God couldn’t have fixed things without saving any of us. He could have simply come like a warrior and wiped us all out. But He didn’t. He instead included us in the restoration.

Next Time: Now that we’ve laid the groundwork (some might say belabored the point), I’d like to begin to examine the biblical and exegetical concerns that lead us to a doctrine of hell.