Is Hell Real, and Is It Fair?

The short answer: Yes, hell is real. Jesus spoke about it more than anyone else in the Bible, and He spoke as someone who wanted no one to go there. It is fair because God is perfectly just, and it is not the last word about God, because He went to the cross so that no one has to go.

It’s the doctrine most people would like to quietly delete. Even many Christians would rather not think about it. If you find it disturbing, that’s not a sign of weak faith. It should disturb us. But it isn’t something the church made up to frighten people. It comes from Jesus Himself.

What Jesus said

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Speaking of the final judgement, He said that some “will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). The same Jesus who welcomed children and ate with outcasts gave the most serious warnings in the Bible. He warned people because He loved them.

What hell is

Forget the cartoons with horns and pitchforks. The Bible uses pictures such as fire, darkness and an outer place, and the pictures point to something real and terrible. At its heart, hell is being “separated from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His might” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Every good thing, whether love, light, beauty, friendship or joy, comes from God. Hell is what is left when all of that is gone.

Is it fair?

Justice matters. Think of the worst things you’ve seen in the news: genocide, abuse, people who destroyed others and never faced consequences. We don’t want a God who shrugs at that. A judge who let every crime go wouldn’t be kind. He would be corrupt. God’s judgement is part of His goodness.

God is exact. Hell isn’t one-size-fits-all. “God ‘will repay each one according to his deeds’” (Romans 2:6). Nobody will receive a gram more than is just.

People are not dragged there against their will. C. S. Lewis said the doors of hell are locked from the inside. To the very end, God offers Himself, and those who finally refuse Him receive what they chose: life without Him. Jesus wept over a city that rejected Him: “how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling!” (Matthew 23:37).

God doesn’t want it. “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked should turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). The Bible says that God “did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him” (John 3:17).

That last point is the heart of it. On the cross, Jesus took the judgement that our sin deserved. That’s why the Bible can say, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The God who warns about hell is the same God who went through darkness Himself to rescue us from it.

A difference among Christians

The view held by most of the church through history, and by most evangelical churches today, is that hell is conscious and never ends. Some evangelicals believe instead that the lost will finally be destroyed and cease to exist, and they point to phrases like “eternal destruction” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Both views take hell seriously as real, final and terrible, and both say the only rescue is Christ. The traditional view is the one this book holds, as the church’s long-standing teaching.

Two cautions

Hell isn’t something to threaten people with or to joke about, and it isn’t for us to decide who is going there. That belongs to God. If you’re worried about someone you love who has died, remember that God knew them completely, and He is more just and more merciful than any of us.

And if fear of hell keeps you awake at night, talk to a Christian adult you trust. Jesus didn’t speak about hell to make His people anxious. He spoke so that we would run to Him, and He promises that “the one who comes to Me I will never drive away” (John 6:37).

Think about it: Why do you think the most loving person who ever lived spoke so seriously about hell?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of C. S. Lewis — explains Lewis’s conviction, from The Great Divorce, that hell is real, terrible and permanent, and is the final state of those who refuse God to the end, while heaven is not thinner than this world but more real. Start with chapter 17, “Heaven, Hell and the Great Choice”.