Does God really send people who don’t believe in Jesus into an eternal torture chamber when they die? Put that way, the idea of Hell seems preposterous, even wicked. Unending agony for ignorance of Jesus, or culturally-biased refusal of Jesus seems more like cruelty than justice. But this is not what the Bible means by Hell.
To understand the doctrine, we first need to ask if we believe in retributive justice. In other words, do we, as people who claim to be loving, believe that people guilty of horrifying, sickening acts of evil need to face punishment for what they have done? Or should Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot simply have been sent to reformatories to improve their behaviour? We all know what the canned, scripted answer of the enlightened Left will be: “no one deserves to be punished”. But actually, when we face the horror of evil, that is not what we say. We cry out for an appropriate answer to the evil. In fact, it is our love of people that hates the evil. We sense that justice need not be malicious and vengeful to be retributive. Retribution simply means “to pay back”. What evil has broken, damaged and defiled, it now receives back in a fitting retribution. If we agree that evil deserves retribution, and that justice demands it, we can at least agree that it is possible that Hell could be a just retribution for evil.
The next thing we need to ask is if any offence could merit something like the description of Hell. When confronted with the most horrific crimes (rape, torture, child abuse, murder, genocide) most people have a kind of “death-penalty-reflex”. Though they will often later moderate their comments to fall in line with their established political views (no death penalty), initially they often cry out for the perpetrator to die, to suffer, and even to “rot in Hell”. I’ve read people on the extreme left whose comments upon the death of a conservative are to the tune of “the world is now a better place”. In other words, their death is, on balance, a good thing, a kind of justice. Almost universally, people recognise that some crimes merit death. Now if it is possible to merit death for crimes against other people, it is even more likely to merit death for crimes against God, seeing that God’s standards are perfect.
That leads us to another question. Since capital punishment results in the cessation of bodily life on earth, what would the spiritual death penalty be? What is everlasting capital punishment? The Bible’s answer is to give us multiple analogies and descriptions. One is the image of retributive punishment (Luke 16:19-31). A second image is of humiliating banishment (Matt. 22:13). A third image is of destruction (Matt. 10:28). Though it is difficult to fully reconcile these images, we dare not dispense with any of them. The reality of eternal death is somehow all of them. Arguments about the literalness of the fires of Hell miss the point. Surely the point is that the reality of Hell is worse than one metaphor can fully capture. That should be enough to flee the wrath to come.
Finally, if we have agreed to this point, we must ask what kind of sin could possibly merit eternal capital punishment. The answer is: God-murder. Jesus told us that whoever hates his brother has committed murder in his heart. Therefore, whoever hates God is guilty of the equivalent of (attempted) God-murder.
But who hates God? Answer: Whoever receives food, rain and sunshine and never thanks God treats Him with spite. Whoever receives gifts from God and discards them treats God with spite; that is, whoever sees the beauty of creation and suppresses the truth that it is all a gift from God. Whoever hears the pleading of God and slams the door in His face treats God with hate; that is, whoever ignores his own conscience and does what he knows is wrong defies the Lawgiver. Whoever receives personal invitations from God and tears them up treats God with spite; whoever despises the Bible, and its message, and its messengers treats God’s own words with contempt.
Certainly, most people don’t feel that they hate God. But that’s exactly what hardness of heart is: when our moral and spiritual sensitivity has become calloused and indifferent, and we no longer feel the injustice and injury of what we are doing. The fact that many Nazi executioners felt little guilt over their crimes or personal animosity towards their victims hardly exonerates them; if anything, it condemns them further.
And in the end, this is the other side of Hell: the hardness of the human heart to God. As a human being turns in on itself, it descends into its own torture, banishment and death. God-rejection means that a form of Hell begins while on earth. Rejecting the Source of life, the human lives a living death. Hell continues and extends that state, but with addition of the banging of the gavel of Divine Justice.
Can a loving God send people to Hell? A loving God must send people to Hell, if His love is just. Not for ignorance. Not for mistakes. Not for unavoidable cultural differences. For wilful, spiteful, and continual indifference and murderous malice towards the Fountain of Life and Goodness.