Michael Horton is the J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), host of the White Horse Inn, national radio broadcast, and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation magazine. He is the author of many books, including The Gospel-Driven Life, Christless Christianity, Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, The Christian Faith, and Core Christianity: Finding Yourself in God’s Story.

Article: Hell Is Not Separation From God (original source here)

Unquestionably, irresponsible speculation about hell on both sides of the debate have made the discussion considerably more difficult. Whether it is vivid descriptions of Dante’s Inferno or revivalist “hellfire and brimstone” sermons, the impression is too often given that we must go beyond biblical description to alert people to avoid such a dreadful place.

The problem here is that hell, rather than God, becomes the object of fear. Think of Jesus’ sober warning: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). Hell is not horrible because of alleged implements of torture or its temperature. (After all, it is described variously in Scripture as “outer darkness” and a “lake of fire.”)

Whatever the exact nature of this everlasting judgment, it is horrible ultimately for one reason only: God is present. This sounds strange to those of us familiar with the definition of hell as “separation from God” and heaven as a place for those who have a “personal relationship with God.” But Scripture nowhere speaks in these terms. Quite the contrary, if we read the Bible carefully we conclude that everyone, as a creature made in God’s image, has a personal relationship with God. Therefore, God is, after the fall, either in the relationship of a judge or a father to his creatures.
And God, who is present everywhere at all times, will be present forever in hell as the judge. “Hell reigns wherever there is no peace with God,” John Calvin wrote, refusing to speculate on its salacious horrors. When our conscience condemns us, “We carry always a hell within us” (Gen. Epp. 167).

Just as heaven is not purely future, but is breaking in on the present through the kingdom of God, hell, too, is breaking in on the present: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.” But they are left without excuse (Rom. 1:18-19). Their tortured consciences drive them to expel the thought of God entirely from their horizon, but they cannot evade the revelation of God’s wrath.

Hell is not ultimately about fire, but about God. Whatever the exact nature of the physical punishments, the real terror awaiting the unrepentant is God himself and his inescapable presence forever with his face turned against them.

A measure of our own ongoing sinfulness is that we just don’t understand the beauty of God’s holiness, righteousness, and justice and the equal ultimacy of these attributes with his love. But one day we will not have a problem with eternal punishment. It will make perfect sense. We are not entitled, much less required, in our present condition to defend the doctrine of eternal punishment in any way that either exceeds Scripture or reflects a perverse delight in damnation.

Since God does not delight in the death of the wicked, neither can we. Hell is both the vindication of God’s justice and the prerequisite for his creation’s restoration. But it is also a tragedy and will forever memorialize the tragedy of human rebellion.

God justifies the wicked: this is the astonishing and counter-intuitive claim that distinguishes Christianity from every other religion. In any defense of the traditional doctrine, we must let our interlocutor know that, unlike the terrorist’s “Allah,” God “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” for the salvation of every believer. Islam has no concept of the fall, original sin, or the impossibility of attaining righteousness by good works, and consequently, knows nothing of justification, sanctification, and redemptive mediation.

For Islam, it’s simple: good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell; it is self-salvation from beginning to end. In sub-Christian versions, the “good news” is that sinners can be partly saved and partly condemned; they can atone for at least some of their sins by their own suffering. But the genuine “good news” of revelation is that God justifies the wicked who place their trust in Christ and find God a reconciled friend now and forever, world without end. Amen.

Ephesians 2:8-10

It is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who tells us most about hell and its endless torments, speaking more about hell than He did of heaven. Exactly how we are rescued from this place is spelled out with great clarity in this passage.

John Piper you argued that the deepest answer to the question, ‘Why doesn’t God save everyone?’ is that he is seeking to put the full panorama of his glory on display for the vessels of mercy. But — and here’s the kicker — how would you respond to the claim that the cross is already the fullest and most ultimate expression of God’s love, grace, justice, and wrath? In light of the cross, isn’t reprobation unnecessary for the full display of God’s glory?”

Excellent question. That is so good. So let me read the text that Clayton is referring to, so we all have it in our heads and then give a possible answer.

Romans 9:22–23, “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory?”

And my argument was that the ultimate reason God shows his wrath and his power is to make known the fullness of his glory — his gracious — including the justice of wrath and righteousness on unrighteous and impenitent rebels and sinners.

Now Clayton’s question is, “Does the death of Christ, who bears the wrath of God for all who believe and displays the grace of God supremely, doesn’t that event display God’s wrathful justice on Jesus in our place so supremely that hell would not be necessary as a display of God’s justice and wrath in order for God to be known for what he truly is?”

Now two observations: One is method and then the other is an exegetical/theological answer to the question.

Methodologically, I work from what texts mean toward understanding what reality is, not from what reality is back to what texts mean. At least I try to; that is my goal. And as far as I can see, Romans 9:22–23 and other texts teach that wrath is coming on the world of unbelievers, and it will be eternal wrath for those who don’t repent and fly to Jesus.

Therefore I don’t think I should start with the assumption that the cross makes hell redundant and then come back and say, “Well, these texts can’t mean what they say.’ So, that is my method.

Now, this is more important. It may be that Clayton has posed the question differently than the apostle Paul would or did.

Clayton asks: If the cross is the supreme demonstration of God’s grace and righteous wrath against sin, why do we need hell to demonstrate God’s righteousness and wrath against sin?

Paul seems to ask: How can we see the cross and the supreme demonstration of God’s grace and righteous wrath against sin unless we see that he is thereby saving people from real, coming, eternal wrath?

In other words, the wrath that is coming is indispensable for understanding the very nature of what happened on the cross. For Paul it is precisely the reality of the coming eternal wrath of God that makes the meaning of Jesus’s substitution supremely glorious in absorbing that wrath for all who believe. If there were no eternal wrath for us to see and to be frightened by, the glory of the death of Jesus in the removal of that wrath would be scarcely visible. I think Paul would say that.

If there were no future eternal wrath, we could say Jesus is amazing in absorbing wrath, but in Paul’s mind — and I think in God’s reckoning — this would not carry the day in amazing God’s people forever. There would never have been any future threat of eternal wrath that we could see, that we could taste, that anybody was ever enduring. It would be a nonexistent possibility that never came to be.

But is that idea biblical? Well, I think so, because of Romans 5:9–10: “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”

For Paul, the glory of the death of Christ is seen precisely in the fact that wrath is coming and we, because of the cross, will escape it. That is how we are made to feel the wonder of what he achieved in saving us. We see it coming, and he is going to shield us from that and protect us. First Thessalonians 1:10 says that We “wait for [God’s] son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.”

So Paul’s answer, I think, for Clayton, would be, “Future, righteous, divine, everlasting wrath on unrepentant sinners doesn’t make the glory of the cross more wonderful, and it doesn’t make it less wonderful. It makes it more visible. The existence of hell is, and always will be, a vivid reminder of the hell that Jesus bore for all who believe.’”

In an e-mail teaching letter sent out from the desiring-god website, Dr. John Piper writes:

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.” (For all the relevant quotes, see Martindale and Root, The Quotable Lewis, 288-295.)

This inclines him to say, “All that are in hell choose it.” And this leads some who follow Lewis in this emphasis to say things like, “All God does in the end with people is give them what they most want.”

I come from the words of Jesus to this way of talking and find myself in a different world of discourse and sentiment. I think it is misleading to say that hell is giving people what they most want. I’m not saying you can’t find a meaning for that statement that’s true, perhaps in Romans 1:24-28. I’m saying that it’s not a meaning that most people would give to it in light of what hell really is. I’m saying that the way Lewis deals with hell and the way Jesus deals with it are very different. And we would do well to follow Jesus.

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.

When there are only two choices, and you choose against one, it does not mean that you want the other, if you are ignorant of the outcome of both. Unbelieving people know neither God nor hell. This ignorance is not innocent. Apart from regenerating grace, all people “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom 1:18).

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.

But whatever he believes or does not believe, when he chooses against God, he is wrong about God and about hell. He is not, at that point, preferring the real hell over the real God. He is blind to both. He does not perceive the true glories of God, and he does not perceive the true horrors of hell.

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.”

What sinners want is not hell but sin. That hell is the inevitable consequence of unforgiven sin does not make the consequence desirable. It is not what people want—certainly not what they “most want.” Wanting sin is no more equal to wanting hell than wanting chocolate is equal to wanting obesity. Or wanting cigarettes is equal to wanting cancer.

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.

When someone says that no one is in hell who doesn’t want to be there, they give the false impression that hell is within the limits of what humans can tolerate. It inevitably gives the impression that hell is less horrible than Jesus says it is.

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).

These words are chosen to portray hell as an eternal, conscious experience that no one would or could ever “want” if they knew what they were choosing. Therefore, if someone is going to emphasize that people freely “choose” hell, or that no one is there who doesn’t “want” to be there, surely he should make every effort to clarify that, when they get there, they will not want this.

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. Surely everyone who desires to save people from hell will not mainly stress that it is “wantable” or “chooseable,” 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.

Trembling before such realities, and trusting Jesus,

Pastor John Piper