Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an Angry Judge?

SERMON
Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an Angry Judge?
The Christian understanding of hell is crucial for understanding your own heart, for living at peace in the world, and for knowing the love of God.
Tim Keller

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Few things make an audience squirm more than talking about hell. Come to think of it, few things make a preacher squirm more than talking about hell. Because of the challenging nature of preaching this doctrine, we decided to look to a master to see how it can be done in a pastoral, even surprising way. To listen to Keller's message, clicking here.

One of the things that troubles people most about Christianity is the Christian teaching that God is a judge who consigns people to hell. Basically the objection goes like this: "How can you possibly reconcile the concept of judgment and hell with the idea of a loving God? They just don't go together." What do we say to their concern?

When people ask what I believe about hell, one of the things I have said over the years is, "Well, one thing I believe is that the biblical imagery of hell-fire is probably metaphorical." Immediately the person says, "Whew!" But then I add, "I think it's metaphorical for something probably infinitely worse than fire." Then they say, "Huh?"

I believe the Christian understanding of hell is crucial for understanding your own heart, for living at peace in the world, and for knowing the love of God. I know these three things seem very counterintuitive, so let me explain.

First of all, understanding hell is crucial to understanding your own heart. The parable in Luke 16:19-31 has two characters: a rich man and a poor man. One of the things that commentators have pointed out for years is that this is the only parable in which a character—the poor man—has a proper name. If you look at all the rest of Jesus' parables, no one has a proper name assigned to them except this poor man named Lazarus. If one character has a name, you would think the other character—the rich man—would have a name. But he doesn't. In this parable there is a named character and a nameless character, and the contrast is deliberate.

Let's focus on the rich man for a moment. He was probably not an atheist or a pagan. At that time in Israel, most rich people would have believed in the God of the Bible. This man would have prayed to the God of the Bible and obeyed the laws of the God of the Bible. But here he is in hell, without a name. Why?

In verse 25, Abraham says to the rich man, "Remember that in your lifetime you had your good things—the things that you built your life on." For many years philosophers have talked about the summum bonum—the highest good of your life. What is your highest good? What is the thing you really live for? What is your ultimate value? What is that which gives meaning to your life? What is it that gives you a sense of who you are? Whatever your best thing is—the highest thing with the ultimate value—that is what gives you an identity. The rich man in the parable had his good things—he had his good things. Notice the use of the past tense. Status and wealth had been the basis for his identity, and now that the status and wealth are gone, there is no "him" left. He was a rich man, or he was nothing. Without his wealth, he is gone. He is nameless. When you take away his ultimate thing—his wealth and status—he has no identity.

Søren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, wrote a book called Sickness unto Death. In it he wrestles with the definition of sin, which he defines as building your identity on anything but God. The traditional definition of sin is breaking God's law. While Kierkegaard agrees that breaking God's law is wrong, he wonders whether that's a sufficient definition. His reason is the Pharisees. Let me paraphrase what Kierkegaard says: The Pharisees follow the law fastidiously, yet they're lost. Why? The Pharisees serve as their own Savior and Lord to earn their own salvation. They try to put God in the position where, because they are so good, God has to bless them, answer their prayers, give them a good life, and take them to heaven. But when Pharisees try to earn their own salvation by observing the law, they are actually building their identity not on God, but on their moral performance. Their self-worth is based on their morality and their religiosity, and it destroys their character. Why? Because, as Kierkegaard defines it, what they are doing is a sin. They are building their identity on anything besides God. They are turning good things into ultimate things.

I think Kierkegaard was being radically biblical when he came up with his definition for sin. More specifically, I think he was influenced by the thoughts of Romans 6. Kierkegaard points out that if you take a good thing and make it an ultimate thing—if you look at anything in this life and say, "If I have that, then I have importance and value, and if I don't have that, I am nothing"—you are placing your hope in something other than God. If you look at money, your career, your talents, or your looks; if you look at your relationship with your parents or your children; if you look at power, approval, comfort, or control; if you look at any of these things and make them more fundamental to your significance and security than the love and knowledge of God, then though you may believe in the God of the Bible, pray to the God of the Bible, even obey the laws of the God of the Bible, your faith, the justification of your life, the roots of your identity, what you really worship, is something other than God. This misplaced focus is what starts a spiritual fire in your heart. That's what the metaphor for fire is about.

But you ask, "What are you talking about—'starts a fire'?" Think about it for a moment. We know a lot about the internal and external devastation of addiction. Disintegration happens, because as the addiction grows stronger, you need more and more of the addictive substance to get more and more of a kick, a high, a sense of satisfaction. So, you do everything you can to get more of the addictive substance. That's disintegration.

Another part of addiction is isolation. You have to lie and defend yourself. You are always blaming everyone and everything else for your problems. You say, "Nobody understands me, and everybody's against me!"

Another part of addiction is denial—an inability to see what's really happening. You get more and more out of touch with reality.

Since most of you look like you're older than ten years old, you may not have seen the animated film The Iron Giant. But I would suggest you watch it, because it's maybe the best animated movie I've ever seen. There's a part in the film where the Iron Giant says, "Souls don't die. Souls can't die." He's right, of course. That's what the Bible says. After death the soul and your personal consciousness go on forever. Now, if both Kierkegaard and The Iron Giant are right—that is, that every single person, religious or irreligious, moral or immoral, is addicted to grounding his or her identity in something other than God, and that the human soul goes on forever—what does that mean? C. S. Lewis puts the two together and offers an answer. He writes that Christianity's assertion that we are going to go on forever is either true or false. He then goes on to write that if I'm only going to live eighty years or so, there are a good many things not worth bothering about. But that changes if I'm going to go on living forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact, if Christianity is true, hell is precisely the correct term for it. Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others, but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer do so. Then there will be no "you" left to criticize or even to enjoy the mood. It will just be the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. You see, it's not a question of whether God sends us "to hell." In every one of us there is something growing up which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.