How Willingly Do People Go to Hell?

My intention for the subject matter of today's post was originally going in a much different direction. However, Tim's sobering message this past Sunday, and several recent blog posts this week, has inclined me to add some further thoughts on the Biblical teaching concerning Hell. The subject of the horrific destiny that awaits all who die in their sin is one we dare not neglect nor misunderstand. It was Jesus Himself who spoke more about Hell than everyone else in the Bible put together, and He had more to say about Hell than He did about Heaven.

So, when I read a blog post the other day by John Piper on the Desiring God site on the subject of Hell, its significance moved me to share it with you here, at least in part. I do not offer this in any way as something to be approached casually or tritely. The magnitude of the issue of final judgment is almost beyond words to describe. I offer this simply that we might think more Biblically, be affected more deeply, be moved to pray for the lost more earnestly, be more zealous for evangelism, and be focused more completely upon the glory of God.

Here is a portion of what John Piper had to say:

C.S. Lewis is one of the top 5 dead people who have shaped the way I see and respond to the world. But he is not a reliable guide on a number of important theological matters. Hell is one of them. His stress is relentlessly that people are not “sent” to hell but become their own hell. His emphasis is that we should think of “a bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is.”

...I think it is misleading to say that hell is giving people what they most want... The misery of hell will be so great that no one will want to be there. They will be weeping and gnashing their teeth (Matthew 8:12). Between their sobs, they will not speak the words, “I want this.” They will not be able to say amid the flames of the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14), “I want this.” “The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night” (Revelation 14:11). No one wants this.

...The person who rejects God does not know the real horrors of hell. This may be because he does not believe hell exists, or it may be because he convinces himself that it would be tolerably preferable to heaven.

...So when a person chooses against God and, therefore, de facto chooses hell--or when he jokes about preferring hell with his friends over heaven with boring religious people--he does not know what he is doing. What he rejects is not the real heaven (nobody will be boring in heaven), and what he “wants” is not the real hell, but the tolerable hell of his imagination.

When he dies, he will be shocked beyond words. The miseries are so great he would do anything in his power to escape. That it is not in his power to repent does not mean he wants to be there. Esau wept bitterly that he could not repent (Hebrew 12:17). The hell he was entering into he found to be totally miserable, and he wanted out. The meaning of hell is the scream: “I hate this, and I want out.”

...Beneath this misleading emphasis on hell being what people “most want” is the notion that God does not “send” people to hell. But this is simply unbiblical. God certainly does send people to hell. He does pass sentence, and he executes it. Indeed, worse than that. God does not just “send,” he “throws.” “If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown (Greek eblethe) into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15; cf. Mark 9:47; Matthew 13:42; 25:30).

The reason the Bible speaks of people being “thrown” into hell is that no one will willingly go there, once they see what it really is. No one standing on the shore of the lake of fire jumps in. They do not choose it, and they will not want it. They have chosen sin. They have wanted sin. They do not want the punishment. When they come to the shore of this fiery lake, they must be thrown in.

...We should ask: How did Jesus expect his audience to think and feel about the way he spoke of hell? The words he chose were not chosen to soften the horror by being accommodating to cultural sensibilities. He spoke of a “fiery furnace” (Matthew 13:42), and “weeping and gnashing teeth” (Luke 13:28), and “outer darkness” (Matthew 25:30), and “their worm [that] does not die” (Mark 9:48), and “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), and “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43), and being “cut in pieces” (Matthew 24:51).

...Surely the pattern of Jesus--who used blazing words to blast the hell-bent blindness out of everyone--should be followed. Surely, we will grope for words that show no one, no one, no one will want to be in hell when they experience what it really is... but that it is horrible beyond description--weeping, gnashing teeth, darkness, worm-eaten, fiery, furnace-like, dismembering, eternal, punishment, “an abhorrence to all flesh” (Isaiah 66:24).

I thank God, as a hell-deserving sinner, for Jesus Christ my Savior, who became a curse for me and suffered hellish pain that he might deliver me from the wrath to come. While there is time, he will do that for anyone who turns from sin and treasures him and his work above all.