Is hell the absence of God? Or is God ever-present in hell pouring out his wrath on a sinful people?

I have a problem with the saying, “God doesn’t send people to Hell, people choose to go there.” Throughout the scriptures I find while yes, “God does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked.” (Ezekiel 18:23) God is the one who sends people to hell. The argument I will make is that those who hold to this humanistic view of hell also remove the offensive nature of sin towards God.

By taking God out of the act of throwing sinners into hell and punishing them one makes sin no longer an offense against a Holy God. Sin becomes but merely a harmful element to which God “kindly” warns man against. You will find that those who purport this view will also often state that, “God hates sin not because it offends Him but because it is harmful to man.”  If people choose to go to Hell as opposed to God sending them there: Sin will no longer be sin; God will no longer be Just and the gospel will be transformed into a man centered gospel rather than a Cross Centered Gospel.

Argument for God sending people to Hell: (The bible says he does)

• In Matthew 7:21-23 it says that many WANTING to enter the kingdom of heaven will be told by Jesus, “Depart from me you workers of of lawlessness I never knew you!” Firstly this doesn’t sound like a person who chose to go to Hell.
• In Matthew 13:41-42 it says that there will be WEEPING and gnashing of teeth. Secondly, this doesn’t sound like a people who want to go to hell.
• Matthew 25:41-46 tells us again Jesus separates one from another and the wicked are cast into hell.
• Revelation 20:11-13 says the wicked are judged by their works and cast into the lake of fire. Note: The wicked are JUDGED by their WORKS!
• Rev 11:18 God is thanked for his wrath on the workers of lawlessness. Clearly God is the one pouring out wrath and they suffer it not out of choice but because they deserve it!
• The false teaching that man chooses to go to hell assumes that the default is Heaven. The bible teaches that the un-regenerate man already stands condemned. (John 3:17-18). He deserves it!
• Matthew 10:28; we are told to fear Him who is able to throw both soul and body in hell!

So then why must people say, “God doesn’t send anyone to hell… People choose to go there”? If not because they do not comprehend the righteous judgment of God? Nor the total depravity of man.

Usually these statements are followed up with the fact that Hell was not created for man but for the devil and His angels. But we find this statement in but ONE verse (Matt 25:41) and in that verse we find God sending MEN to hell. That verse doesn’t say that MEN don’t deserve to go there… it just says that it was originally prepared for the devil and his angels. Though it was once prepared for Angels it is where God pours out his wrath on both men and angels.

Is Hell the absence of God? David did say where can I go from your presence, if I make my bed in Hell… you are there (ps 139:8). Could it be that God is also ever-present in Hell pouring out His wrath?

Why does it matter? Because the gospel message is completely altered by the stance you take!

The Gospel is that the unregenerate are already rightfully condemned to Hell to suffer the wrath of God. The gospel commands us to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. If I am so wicked as to be deserving of Hell as the bible teaches… If I am due the just WRATH of a Holy Righteous God… and not only that, but with all of eternity could not pay my debt… Then the fact that I am saved from going there becomes ever so much more the amazing grace of God. The atonement becomes ever so much more intense and great and effective. God owes me the cup of His wrath; but Jesus drank it for me: WOW! and then in the ages to come He shows the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus… Mind blowing!

On the contrary IF God doesn’t send people to Hell… If Man chooses it himself… Then God’s wrath is nothing to be feared. The good news, is minimized. Sin is no longer serious. The difference between the hell bound man and the heavenly bound man IS NO LONGER THE DILEMMA OF SIN, RIGHTEOUSNESS and the JUDGMENT to come as Paul so beautiful articulated to Felix (acts 24:25) and Jesus emphasized was the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit (Jn 16:8). The problem is no longer that man has offended God and awaits His pending judgment. The issue becomes: man hasn’t made a choice yet! You haven’t made the decision to go to heaven yet.

Now instead of preaching a gospel centered around the dilemma of sin and the work of the Cross… I must appeal to the carnal desires of man to muster in him a decision for a “christ” who saved man from an empty sad voided life rather than a Christ who saved man from the eternal WRATH of God and this wicked generation… Sin, while mentioned, is no longer sin anymore. The Heresy our church fathers condemned comes to life!

No wonder the church has such a low view of God’s grace, love and holiness. No wonder the church can’t see why we are to be living sacrifices or why we owe Christ our lives (2 Cor 5:15; Romans 12:1-2). We told them Hell was a mistake and the work of salvation was your choice! We downplayed salvation.

Hey Christian,

Admittedly Obama is not the biblical choice for president…  But lets stop lying, gossiping and rumoring about him.  Whether the person is Barack Obama, John McCain or my Mom; lying, gossiping and spreading rumors are sin! You blindly send these e-mail forwards and chain letters and you don’t check your facts.  I get e-mails about what books they are reading, what quotes they are saying and what songs they are singing and 99 out of 100 times YOU ARE WRONG!

So what it’s a picture from CNN! So what there are some quotes from so and so!  So what it promotes the very cause we stand for.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, IT’S NOT TRUE or the implications it makes are NOT TRUE.

We pride ourselves in disassociating with the world and their pseudo intellectual pursuit of false wisdom… But at the same time we reject biblical wisdom: we gossip, we lie and we spread rumors.

We pride ourselves in being bereans.  Searching the scriptures to assure ourselves that the doctrines we believe are biblical and accurate.  Yet when it comes to secular facts and rumors we blindly pass them on.  Check your facts, include references, be biblical.

I want the world to consider me a fool on the basis of the cross.  Not for my anti-academic antics, misconceptions, conspiracy theories and course jesting.

Send me truth!

 Prov 18:7-8; Prov 21:23; Prov 11:12; 1 Tim 5:13;Romans 1:29b

1 Tim 4:10 “For to this end we toil and strive,because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.”

This is a cool verse and it’s no challenge to the doctrines of grace. Think about it.. How can Jesus be the savior of all people when all people aren’t “SAVED”? If there was only one kind of salvation then this verse would mean nobody goes to Hell.

The answer is simple.

WHAT IF Jesus was never on the agenda to die on the cross or save anyone? Would God allow the earth to continue on if there was no hope for anyone to be saved? Would there be life after the fall?

How could there? There would be no patience (2 Peter 3:9) because there would be no promise! If there was no promise; it would mean instant WRATH and the end of the human race.

If Jesus was never on the agenda to die; nobody would experience the grace of life. Whether believer or non-believer the fact that you are alive and can enjoy life can be attributed to what Christ did on the cross.

Jesus is the savior of all men in the sense that if Jesus didn’t die on the cross; nobody would ever live. Those who do not believe benefit in this life from the cross whether they recognize it or not.

Jesus IS the Savior of all people, ESPECIALLY of those who believe.

I have recently embraced the ESV translation of the bible.  I think it is a GREAT literal translation and have begun to read, memorize, study and teach out of it.  I also found this quote by C.S Lewis in a book I have called “Letters to Young Churches” by J.B Phillips.  He answers many of the criticisms for using new translations:

Introduction to Letters to Young Churches
It is possible that the reader who opens this volume on the counter of a bookshop may ask himself why we need a new translation of any part of the Bible, and, if of any, why of the Epistles. ‘Do we not already possess’, it may be said, ‘in the Authorised Version the most beautiful rendering which any language can boast?’ Some people whom I have met go further and feel that a modern translation is not only unnecessary but even offensive. They cannot bear to see the time-honoured words altered; it seems to them irreverent.

There are several answers to such people. In the first place the kind of objection which they feel to a new translation is very like the objection which was once felt to any English translation at all. Dozens of sincerely pious people in the sixteenth century shuddered at the idea of turning the time-honoured Latin of the Vulgate into our common and (as they thought) ‘barbarous’ English. A sacred truth seemed to them to have lost its sanctity when it was stripped of the polysyllabic Latin, long heard at Mass and at Hours, and put into ‘language such as men do use’ — language steeped in all the commonplace associations of the nursery, the inn, the stable, and the street. The answer then was the same as the answer now.

The only kind of sanctity which Scripture can lose (or, at least, New Testament scripture) by being modernized is an accidental kind which it never had for its writers or its earliest readers. The New Testament in the original Greek is not a work of literary art: it is not written in a solemn, ecclesiastical language, it is written in the sort of Greek which was spoken over the Eastern Mediterranean after Greek had become an international language and therefore lost its real beauty and subtlety. In it we see Greek used by people who have no real feeling for Greek words because Greek words are not the words they spoke when they were children. It is sort of ‘basic’ Greek; a language without roots in the soil, a utilitarian, commercial and administrative language.

Does this shock us? It ought not to, except as the Incarnation itself ought to shock us. The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant-woman’s breast, and later an arrested field preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense, an incurably irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King. The real sanctity, the real beauty and sublimity of the New Testament (as of Christ’s life) are of a different sort: miles deeper or further in.

In the second place, the Authorised Version has ceased to be a good (that is, a clear) translation. It is no longer modern English: the meanings of words have changed. The same antique glamour which has made it (in the superficial sense) so ‘beautiful’, so ’sacred’, so ‘comforting’, and so ‘inspiring’, has also made it in many place unintelligible. Thus where St Paul says ‘I know nothing against myself,’ it translates ‘I know nothing by myself.’ That was a good translation (though even then rather old-fashioned) in the sixteenth century: to the modern reader it means either nothing, or something quite different from what St Paul said. The truth is that if we are to have translation at all we must have periodical re-translation. There is no such thing as translating a book into another language once for all, for a language is a changing thing. If your son is to have clothes it is no good buying him a suit once for all: he will grow out of it and have to be re-clothed.

And finally, though it may seem a sour paradox — we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty so lulls. Early associations endear but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations. Does the word ’scourged’ really come home to us like ‘flogged’? Does ‘mocked him’ sting like ‘jeered at him’?
We ought therefore to welcome all new translations (when they are made by sound scholars) and most certainly those who are approaching the Bible for the first time will be wise not to begin with the Authorised Version — except perhaps for the historical books of the Old Testament where its anachronisms suit the saga-like material well enough. … It would have saved me a great deal of labour if this book had come into my hands when I first seriously began to try to discover what Christianity was.

Speaking of checking our beliefs and traditions against scripture… What’s God’s method for us of knowing His specific will for our lives? Has the church drafted un-biblical methods of doing so?

Would He have us close our eyes and pick a verse in scripture? Would He have us seek confirmation in license plate numbers as we drive to work? Count the number of times we hear a certain word and consider it confirmation? Silence our mind, pray and wait for a word to pop up? Close our eyes, think of something and try to feel a sense of peace?

Are any of these the methods taught in scripture for knowing Gods will? Or do they sound more like the pagan rituals of divination?

This looks like a good book that might challenge the way we ‘Hear from the Lord’:

“Finding the Will of God: a Pagan Notion” by Bruce K. Waltke

CBD is kind enough to provide the first ten or so pages for your reading pleasure.

The word ‘Reformation’ has a negative connotation in many Christian circles. To some it brings to mind thoughts of hyper-calvanism, elitism, dry intellect-only study of scripture, the denial of certain spiritual gifts, etc…

And while I am not claiming to subscribe entirely to Reformed Theology or vice-versa I think there are some lessons and practices of it that every Christian should consider. Ponder its definition:

“Reformed: ri-farmed’, a, to be corrected; Restored to a good or proper state; having turned from unlawful ways to obey the law; as a reformed criminal; to restore from a bad state, to a previous good state; a rearrangement which brings about a better order of things; (cap) restoring biblical precepts…”

The heart of the Reformation movement began in the 1500’s when several men began to question the man-made traditions of the prevailing Catholic church.  The church persecuted men who sought the  translation of the bible into the common language fearing contradictions in church doctrine would be found as a result. It was the beginning of the process of departing from false belief and traditions and conforming doctrine, practice and understanding of God to the Biblical teachings and principles of scripture.

If this was and is the reformation… Did it end? Should it have ended? Do we still practice un-biblical traditions in the modern church today?

Should we maintain the heart of the reformation and continually check ourselves and our beliefs and practices against what scripture says? What does 2 Tim 3:16-17 say about it? Why would Paul say that if he didn’t expect (from the scriptures) re-proof, correction and profit for doctrine?

I do a lot of consulting work and recently had the opportunity to work with the United Nations. It was interesting to be there and talk with Ambassadors and other insiders about their views on “world peace” and the future. I was speaking with a religious Israeli Jew, told him I was a Christian, and questioned him about when peace would come to Israel. He said not until Moshiach comes! What a setup for anti-christ, huh?

The UN does have desire to see the world move towards a “new age” of peace. That was a continuing thread amongst conversation, but it would be presumptuous to point any prophetic fingers. They are just one of many organizations falling in line with the prophetic view of a “one world system”. Though, interestingly, while eating dinner with a key figure I was told a “secret” desire of UN leaders: for there to be an “international law” governing peace. Yikes!

Here I am sitting at Israel’s desk at the UN: