The Fshbwl

The Reading of the Week: Matthew 13:24-43. Click here for a review of Matthew 13's context.

"Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned."

"Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace."

There it is. It's ugly, I don't like it, and I don't want it to be there, but there it is, Jesus talking about eternal punishment. It's black and white, so the only two options we have are to claim that they were added in later and aren't the voice of Jesus, a move which then casts skepticism over all of the Bible, or to accept them as original and seek to understand what Jesus meant.

So, assuming we take the second route, what was Jesus getting at? It seems to me there are three major questions to ask. First, "Is hell a literal and physical place?" The second is, "What's it like?" And the third is, "Who goes there?" Matthew is helpful with all of these questions.

On the physicality, the central issue has to be the idea of the resurrection, after all, if death is the separation of body and soul, then there is nothing physical about a person following death and thus no need for a physical hell ... unless of course there is a resurrection which reunites body and soul.

In Matthew 22:23-33, Jesus engages in a brief dialogue with a group of religious leaders in his day known as the Saducees, a Jewish sect known for their denial of a resurrection at the end of the age. While the focus of their conversation wasn't the resurrection itself, Jesus closes out their dialogue by affirming an End Times resurrection of the dead. Therefore, given the physical nature of the age to come, it seems appropriate that we think of hell as a literal and physical place.

So what happens there? If we look just at Matthew 13 (both verses 42 and 50), we would say that there's never-ending fire. However, this isn't the only image used to describe hell, rather, in Matthew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30, hell is described as "outer darkness", an image that seems to clash with light emitting fire. Then, you also have Matthew 24:51 where a guy is cut into pieces and sent to the place hypocrites dwell.

Taking this collection of images, the best way to understand hell is not to think of it as a place that's literally dark or on fire, but it's a place where there is extreme and perpetual suffering and struggle because God is not there to sustain the creation. You could say that hell is the world without the presence of God.

Given all of that, who is it that spends eternity in hell? The answer to this question is simple. In each of the six places in Matthew where it talks about somebody experiencing the weeping and gnashing of teeth, it's a result of them rejecting God's good gifts. In other words, it's God letting people experience what they've desired all along, life without God.

Question: The idea of hell is obviously abrasive. What can we do to talk about hell in a way that eases defensiveness, but doesn't water down what the Bible teaches?