Rethinking How I Talk About Hell and Judgement

I’ve been feeling uneasy with how often teachings about deserved death and banishment to hell are presented in church settings and Christian books, often without enough context.

I wouldn’t say I’m bothered because I doubt that God is a righteous judge, or because I reject the idea that our actions have consequences. I believe that the One who created all things has both the wisdom and the authority to name what is good, and to speak truthfully about the cost of turning away from it.

What bothers me is this sense that what’s going on in the culture prevents the weight of this message from ever reaching the hearts of the people who hear it.

It seems to me that we’re trying to share a message about eternal punishment at a time when there is very little shared moral imagination in the culture to begin with. Many people already experience a world where the powerful face few consequences, where justice feels distant, and where goodness often goes unrewarded. In this setting, being told that a quiet habit of greed or self-indulgence merits hell can feel overwhelming and disproportionate. That’s how I’ve heard it described by sincere people trying to make sense of what they’ve been taught.

We also live amid a long and steady stream of scandals involving church leaders. It seems with a quick Google search you can find story after story of financial excess, spiritual abuse, and moral compromise. I believe that many too have seen rules for faithful living applied unevenly, sometimes aligned with Scripture, sometimes shaped more by preference, power, or culture wars. Harmless activities and ordinary human enjoyments have often been labeled sinful, leaving many unsure which voices to trust.

With all of this as the backdrop, a message centered primarily on deserving damnation for sins known and unknown often triggers what I can only describe as an internal alarm.

When claims about eternal punishment are heard within a culture already marked by hypocrisy, injustice, and fractured authority, the message does not simply sound severe, but it can sound disconnected from reality. For many, it registers less as truth and more as an inauthentic persuasion tactic from someone they don’t yet trust. Given without careful context, the language of deserved damnation can feel incoherent within the world people are actually navigating.

The modern secular mind, I think, has developed a particular sensitivity to this moral inconsistency. When it encounters claims about eternal punishment, the tension is felt immediately. And without patient guidance or the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, that tension is often resolved not through repentance, but through dismissal. What may be true is set aside as simply unbelievable.

In earlier generations, the language of deservedness was often spoken with unflinching clarity. Jonathan Edwards famously preached:

“He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.”

— Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)

I suspect these words carried real force in a time when preacher and listener shared a common understanding of God, sin, and moral order. But I’m less convinced they land the same way today. What I’ve been wrestling with is whether the truth these words aimed to communicate might be carried more faithfully and more fruitfully today by using different language.

What follows is my best attempt on this point to hold these truths together.

I believe one of the deepest consequences of original sin is alienation from God, a separation that shapes how we live and love. We are all born into this condition. From the beginning of our lives, our hearts are disordered. We inherit patterns of life shaped by this separation from God, patterns that have become deeply embedded in the culture and environment around us. We are completely surrounded by influences that subtly (and not so subtly) train our desires away from Him. Whether we recognize it or not, unbelief in God’s goodness, grace, and purposes reshapes what we love and pursue. And when we love and pursue life apart from God, we step further from belief in His goodness, grace and sovereignty. We were made for communion with God, but without Him even our best efforts cause us to drift from the life were were meant to share in.

At first, this may not look so destructive. Our actions may genuinely benefit others. We may act generously, build meaningful things, and live outwardly admirable lives. But over the long arc of a life, and especially over the horizon of eternity, a life disconnected from God increases in distance from the source of life itself.

Over time, through our own choices and developed preferences, we seek for ourselves the very distance we did not originally choose. Unless that trajectory is interrupted by grace, there is no hope of breaking the cycle on our own. That does not remove our responsibility, but it does reshape what responsibility means. Responsibility for us is not found in being the cause of our condition, but in how we respond to it.

This is where my concern with deservedness language ultimately settles: We were never responsible for being born into sin.

That choice was made on our behalf. You could say it is just to banish a sinner to hell as a consequence of his actions. But those consequences also unfold as the natural outcome of estrangement from God. Simply remaining disconnected from Him moves us steadily farther from His purposes and love, until life apart from Him reaches its natural end.

One day, God will bring this age to its close. When He does, the final trajectory of each life will be permanently set, not because God is losing His temper with evildoers, but because He is honoring human orientation and fully consummating eternal life with Himself. If we truly understood what He is offering, we would all desperately desire to participate in it.

This final end is the same one often described as “deserved hell.” I suspect Edwards himself would agree that God’s certainty about what we are “worthy of” rests on His clear sight of our true nature and the paths our actions inevitably take.

None of this removes human responsibility or accountability.

I believe that those who emphasize deservedness rightly want people to recognize their responsibility before God for the choices they make. They care about the offense sin brings to God’s holiness, the grief it brings to His heart, and the integrity of divine justice. I share those concerns. Where I differ is not in what I believe is true, but in what I believe is most effective today.

Emotional urgency has often been seen as a necessary catalyst for change, especially during the revivalist movement. Charles Finney, one of the most influential voices of that movement, wrote:

“The evangelist must produce excitements sufficient to induce sinners to repentance.”

I believe fear can awaken awareness, but I don’t believe it can sustain faith. I believe what God wants to see is more than single-time repentance inspired by emotional excitement, but ongoing fruitful discipleship. This ongoing fruitfulness is only made possible by grace, through the power, nudging, and guidance of the Holy Spirit. If we lead with punishment divorced from God’s revealed character in Christ, people will hear distortion, not truth, making their discernment of His voice less clear from the outset.

If it were up to me, Christian leadership would place more emphasis on helping people understand the condition of the world, the corruption we inherit, and the invitation God extends within it: to repentance of sin and unbelief, reconciliation to Himself and life with Him. We could strive to use richer language in explaining this. People can handle this depth.

In closing: People do not need to be made afraid in order to repent. They need to understand who God is and what He is offering.

Fear of judgment has been misused for a long time. We can do better. We do not need people to be afraid of judgment to turn toward God; we need people to believe in Him and to respond to His invitation to life with Him. The life God is offering, both now and in the age to come, is a life that we would all desperately desire if we would comprehend it.

Practical Takeaways

1. We are all born into sin.

This was not our choice, and it shapes how our hearts and desires naturally form apart from God.

2. We need God’s grace.

On our own, there is no hope of escaping the cycle of sin; grace is what interrupts it.

3. Separation from God has real consequences.

Without responding to His grace, life apart from Him leads inevitably to eternal estrangement.

4. God offers life, not just rescue from Hell.

Through Him, we are invited into the life we were made for, a life of true communion, purpose, and fulfillment that we would all long for if we fully understood it.

These truths don’t depend on fear or punishment, they depend on recognizing who God is and what He offers

A deeper reflection on God’s wrath and how it reveals His love for justice and goodness will be added at another time.