I haven't yet asked, but I may have given the longest sermon I ever have today - three times. This was the sermon on hell that was part of the "Hot Theology" series we have been going through. The series was based out of questions from those in our church that we tallied up and compiled the most commonly asked questions and one was about "hell"- what is hell and "Would a loving God send people to hell?" It just isn't easy speaking about hell and trying to wrap it up in 35 minutes or so. *Update: I found out that the sermons were 55 minutes long. Didn't break my personal record of longest sermon, but close.
I started the sermon giving some examples from pop culture of how we generally portray or think about hell today - from Far Side cartoons with a red devil and pitchfork, to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" song and then showed a clip from an episode of Seinfeld which is the one where Puddy (Elaine's boyfriend) becomes a "Christian" and listens to Christian music on the radio but then he emotionlessly makes comments to Elaine how she is going to hell and he isn't. He then asks her to steal his neighbors newspaper and he says something like "you're the one going to hell not me, so you might as well steal it". And then she explodes and starts whacking him with the newspaper and says:
"If I am going to hell, you should care that I'm going to hell."
I addressed that when we talk about "hell" it should not be done out of Christian trivia interest or curiosity - but as Elaine stated - if we believe in "hell" then we should be caring about people as why we study this. I specifically stated that only God knows people's eternal destinies and that we cannot say who is or isn't going to hell. It is not a subject to treat lightly or something to ignore. The subject of hell and judgment is written in many places in the New Testament, so I really don't see how we can be skipping it or ignoring the exploration of what these Scriptures and teachings mean. I am not sure how pastors or churches can't address the topic of hell and judgment because of its frequency of being mentioned in the New Testament. I feel odd blogging about hell. But if we do believe in hell, and we believe that people are created in God's image who would then be experiencing judgment and hell - it should make us grieve, and hurt, be in great concern, care, praying, and doing whatever possible we can to be on the mission of Jesus living out and communicating the gospel to people.
We then shifted from making sure we aren't shaping our view of hell from current pop culture or medieval art based out of Dante's Inferno - but basing it from Scripture. So we read outloud every single New Testament passage that the English word "hell" is used in the New International Version translation of the Bible. It took several minutes, and I Intentionally didn't explain each one at first. But I wanted to have every single New Testament verse with the word "hell" in it read and heard. Then as we spoke about the previous week wanted to walk through basic hermeneutics and wanted to lay out historical context, cultural context etc. - and wanted to try and have a definition of hell that was laid out before we tried to answer the question about whether a loving God would send people to hell.
Something fascinating is looking at the concepts of the afterlife that different cultures and religions had throughout time - as to show it isn't just Christians who have a "hell". So I walked through how there was a universal sense of an after-life among world religions throughout time and even what seems to be an instinctual sense of some sort of "hell". If you go back to the Sumerian's and Mesopotamia and Egypt and other ancient people groups, they had a hell of some sort.
I then talked about words and names used for hell in the New Testament and showed how it was around 700 BC with Greek writers when the terms "Hades" and "Tartarus" (2 Peter 2:4) were first used in Homer's Odyssey. I briefly talked about Platonic views of the afterlife which then were framing the culture that Jesus lived in. We then looked at what specific Greek words are used in the New Testament for "hell" - which are 1) hades 2) tartarus 3) gehenna Looking at these words and how God chose to use two familiar pre-existing Greek mythological terms which were about a underworld of the dead (hades and tartarus) which pre-dated the New Testament by 700 years describing the underworld of Greek mythology. But God chose to use words originally from the underworld of Greek mythology ('hades' and 'tartarus' in 2 Peter 2:4) to communicate about hell as the New Testament was revealing hell to actually be. We also looked at how Jesus used the word gehenna ( which is translated as "hell" in English such as in Mark 9 etc.) which was the Valley of Gehenna - the garbage dump outside the city walls of Jerusalem where dead bodies were thrown, where worms ate flesh and where fires were constantly burning. So the imagery of fire, worms etc. which was a term Jesus used (gehenna) which is translated in English as "hell" makes sense when looked at through this lens of the Valley of Gehenna, the Greek word gehenna, that Jesus actually used which was translated as "hell" in English. We also need to be differentiating the times when the original Greek word used is hades such as in Luke 16 and what the specific context and meaning there and the difference of when the Greek word gehenna is used and the specific context and meaning for that. And at the same time, whether metaphors are used and whether it is sheol, tartarus, hades or gehenna we are talking about and their individual meanings - we cannot forget the many other passages which may not use the word hades or gehenna, but do specifically, strongly and soberly talk about judgment after death.
Something interesting is that the English word "hell" that has been translated in our Bibles from the Greek words gehenna, hades and tartarus is derived from Hel, the name of the mythological Nordic goddess of the underworld. So as we even say the word "hell" in English (the word translators chose to pick as our English word translating for the Greek words hades, tartarus, gehenna) we now adopted and use the name of a mythological goddess Hel . Kind of similar to the word Easter which is derived from the fertility goddess Eastre - but Easter is not a word used in the Bible, where the English word "hell" is.
I found this background information important to walk through, as this is not just limited to scholars and this is becoming more commonly known and taught in universities - so I felt it important to at least briefly raise these things in pro-active awareness of the origin of these words and how this does frame the words, definitions, metaphors from the world Jesus was speaking from.
But then - after going through the actual words Jesus used and then some of the descriptions which likely are metaphors of fire, the worm that never dies etc. - even if metaphors are used, the reality and truth is still there. When Jesus used the metaphor of "vine" or "bread" to describe Himself - even though He wasn't meaning those words literally, there was still truth to the metaphors used. So we then walked through that the Scriptures do state that it is appointed for people people to die and then everyone face judgment - Hebrews 9:27 (we walked through the difference of judgment between a Christian and another who is not a Christian). I shared how much of what hell specifically will be like is a mystery, we can know that is eternal, it is a place of regret etc.
I read what to me is one of the more horrifying passages of the Bible in 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 about being "shut out of God's presence". Talked about Jesus and the cross and what happened there, His payment for sin and what it means to have your name in the book of life (Revelation 20:15).
Jesus didn't seem to focus on hell as a means of evangelism. I am fully aware of how Jesus focused on the Kingdom of Heaven on earth for His teachings, not only the after-life. I think we have often taken hell and subtly infused hell as the primary focus and motivation for salvation and the gospel - which I think has altered what the 1 Cor. 15 gospel holistically is. But then I fear that some can remove hell and judgment from the gospel and we are left with the same path some of the more extreme "liberal" (so to speak, I don't like using terms but can't think of others right now) churches currently and in the past have taken to where hell, judgment, eternal shutting out from the presence of God (2 Thess. 1:7-9) is not mentioned or seen only as a metaphor for this life and not the afterlife. It has to be holistic and I believe in eternal judgment and there is separation.
Far too much to write about here - but I stressed how we don't want to focus on hell and punishment as something we dwell on, but at the same time we must not ever forget it. It seems easy for churches and Christians to forget or because it is uncomfortable not talk about it or teach on it. We can so easily just get busy in our Christian-world, we don't really take serioulsy praying for those who are outside the church and Christian world. But it is easy to forget, beacuse we don't hear hell talked about too much. It is actually odd it isn't talked about as it is in the teachings of Jesus and in the New Testament just as much, or if not more, than other things we seem to regularly teach about. But then on the other extreme, those who do talk about it, seem to be consumed with it in an unhealthy way - preaching on it all the time, using it as a weapon, the signs about hell you see on street corners sort of a thing - and I don't want to go the other extreme where in some circles hell is something talked about so much - the beauty of the holistic gospel is lost in the extreme focus on hell and punishment.
But, as I shared in my long sermon and now in this long blog post, the thought of eternal "shutting out" from the presence of God is so strong and horrible that it causes me to I used a Spurgeon quote in closing:
"If sinners be dammed, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for."
- Charles Spurgeon
That was the day of preaching 3 times on hell. Not an easy thing to tackle or understand or figure out how to balance a belief in eternal hell but balancing it with the beauty of the gospel for this life and the life to come. But if we believe in hell - then as Elaine said - "if you think I am going to hell, you should care that I'm going to hell".
