What exactly IS Hell?

Question

I'm not disputing that Hell exists, what I want to know is WHAT IS HELL?

In my opinion there are only two possible answers, but you might inform me of something else. Many people have argued that evil is the absence of God, hell must be evil, thus hell is the separation of us from God. As poetic as this sounds, I've never found the scripture to back this up. Maybe you have some that I haven't read yet.

The second option in my understanding is that hell is the wrath of God against the disobedient. I have found one piece of scripture that debatable states that God is in Hell, but not what He is doing down there.

Can you set me straight with the scripture that I need to understand the lake of fire?

Answer 1

This is what we know of "Hell".

It's a place of darkness

Jude 1:13 (NIV)

They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

It's a place of torment

Luke 16:28 (NIV)

for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

It's a place of fire

Jesus says in Matthew 13:42 (NIV)

They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

It is eternal

Mark 9:48 (NIV)

where “‘the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched.’

It is separation for God

Matthew 25:41 (NIV)

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

God does not want you to go to Hell

John 3:17 (NIV)

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Those are the highlights. There are many other places that support each one of those facts. I just picked a nice representative of each verse.

Answer 2

The conventional definition of Hell is that it is 'separation from God'. Both Pope John Paul II and Billy Graham have defined Hell in this way, so its is safe to say that this represents the mainstream view of Hell in Christianity.

However this definition does not give any details of what Hell is like. Few Christians would consider the ancient view, of a place with devils and pitchforks, to be anywhere near accurate. While some might agree that there is explicit punishment, for the most part it is considered that eternal separation from God is punishment enough. (An atheist would of course disagree).

Most Christians again agree that the Biblical descriptions of Hell are largely picture-language - that (for example) the fire, brimstone and darkness indicate the quantity and quality of suffering caused by separation from God, rather than actual physical pain; Biblical literalists would be the main dissenters from that view.

There are plenty of online references giving treatises about Hell. My own recommendation for a starter is C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce - though again I would caution that it is intended as allegory and not theology.

Answer 3

The ancients believed in Elysium for the good, the Asphodel Meadows for those neither good nor evil, and Tartarus for the wicked.

Throughout history it's been fairly common for Christian proselytizers to subvert ideas already in place and bend them over to a Christian interpretation, a good example being the winter solstice's rebranding to Christmas.

So the early Church came up with Heaven, Purgatory/Limbo and Hell to make conversion more palatable for the pagans. These became ingrained within our culture, but are really pagan ideas and have no basis in Christianity. Artistic depictions of Hell in the middle ages really strengthened this mistaken view of Hell as a physical, burning place of torment underground.

The New Testament speaks only of the resurrection, and when it refers to Heaven and Hell is in fact talking about inward states of mind. Hell is sometimes connected with fire in the New Testament because fire is used there as a symbol of bodily desire (e.g. greed - the more you feed your greed, the greedier you become, and the more you feed a fire, the stronger it burns).

So Hell is the state of mind where you are a slave to your bodily passions of lust, power, greed, revenge, and hatred, and so are separated from God and from peace.