Did God create hell?

This is good, and pleases God our Saviour, who wants all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. 1 Timothy 2:4

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:9

For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy upon them all. Romans 9:32

“Did God create hell?”

The question came at me right out of the blue, and it sounded a little aggressive, even angry.

I thought I could guess what lay behind it: “Surely, if your God is a God of mercy and compassion, there’s no way he would bring into existence such a terrible place? The very thought is impossible!” Whether we like it or not, very likely most of us have found ourselves thinking such thoughts at various times in our lives.

At one level the answer is obvious: Of course God created hell! Who else could have! The very first verses of the Bible tell us that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, which we generally take, and surely rightly, to mean that God made everything that exists. So what’s the problem?

Well, that’s logical enough – and yet many of us find that there is a problem, a mental niggle that refuses to go away… There is, after all, not a word in that Genesis account, or indeed in the Bible as a whole, to tell us that God created this destiny called hell, and to suggest he did seems almost blasphemous.

It seems a trickier question than at first appears.

Something may depend on what we mean by “hell”. If we see it as a place of never-ending torment – a kind of cosmic torture-chamber – it’s certainly hard to envisage the God revealed to us in the Lord Jesus Christ as bringing such a place into being.

And even if we treat these pictures – “fire”, “outer darkness”, “weeping and gnashing of teeth” – as symbolic language for loss, destruction, exclusion, never-ending death (as surely we must) it’s still hard to grapple with.

We instinctively cry out, Why! If a person refuses to repent and be reconciled to God, wouldn’t total destruction, straight annihilation, be enough? What need is there for more? Yes, God is holy and perfect beyond our imagining – but what need does even such a perfect God have to inflict eternal punishment on even the worst of sinners? Why would he find it necessary to keep anyone in some kind of existence for no other reason (as it might seem to us) than to cause them pain?

Such thinking is very natural. But annihilation really is not an option, if we want to be true to the Bible. After all, some of the direst warnings about hell come directly from the lips of Jesus himself - for example, Mark 9:42-49 and Matthew 25:46, not to mention the sombre story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31. The idea of hell is by no means confined to the vivid picture language of Revelation at the end of the Bible.

The Old Testament shows little interest in what we call “the afterlife” - the people of Israel focussed very much on practical life in the here and now. (Isaiah 26:19-21, with its  triumphant cry, stands out as very unusual.) “Sheol”, in particular, sometimes translated “hell” or just “the grave”, seems like a kind of grey spectral underworld where the dead are more like ghosts than people as we know them, and where there is (as far as I know – I am certainly no expert) no suggestion of pain or torment. 

But more relevant for us as Christians are the New Testament texts like the ones at the top of this blog. In Romans 9 Paul makes it clear that what God wants is to “have mercy upon all” people; in 1 Timothy 2 that he “wants all people to be saved”; and in 2 Peter 3, Peter explains God’s seeming slowness to act in judgment as a sign of his mercy and compassion, not indifference, that he doesn’t want anyone to “perish”.

These verses should be taken at full face value; true, they seem to suggest that the ultimate will of Almighty God will in fact be thwarted, and we instinctively respond “But that’s impossible!” But that is a conundrum we must learn to live with: God is not willing that anyone should perish – yet there are those who will perish.

It's as if, when God created the human race, he took a risk; he gave us the freedom to obey or disobey him. And the Adam and Eve story, with which the Bible begins, describes the decision we made – to disobey him. And the result? “The Lord God banished mankind from the Garden of Eden” (Genesis 3:23). And isn’t that “banishment” exactly what hell is? – a separation without end from God, the source of all life and joy. To be cast into hell is, in effect, to suffer the judgment of Eden, only writ large and final. But the key point is that it self-chosen: God, regretfully, gives us what we ourselves have desired.

What about the question I started with: did God create hell? Have I answered it? If what I have said is right the answer could be something like this: No, he didn’t; but what he did create was a race of people to whom he gave the freedom, by disobedience, to create their own hell. Which is exactly what happened. It is possible to be lost. Where exactly hell is located, and what exactly it consists of, perhaps we do well not to probe too deeply, but leave it to the perfect justice and perfect love of a perfectly holy God.

Father, I struggle with this idea of eternal lostness, and I thank you for these Bible verses which tell us that it is not something you desire. Help me to rest this great matter in your hands, trusting in your perfect love, holiness and justice, and to do all I can to let people know that because of Jesus and his cross it need not be. Amen.