Rethinking How I Talk About Hell and Judgement

I feel pretty uneasy with how often teachings about deserved death and banishment to hell are presented in church settings and Christian books, usually without anywhere near enough context.

I would not say it’s because I doubt that God is a righteous judge, or because I reject the idea that our actions have consequences. I believe that God has 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 that it seems to me that what’s actually going on in our culture tends to prevent this kind of message from ever reaching the hearts of the people who hear it

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 seem to face few consequences (where are the Epstein files?), where justice feels distant (how many stories of police brutality do we see regularly?), and where goodness often goes unrewarded. In this environment, being told that a habit of greed or self-indulgence merits hell and divine eternal punishment can feel overwhelming and entirely disproportionate to reality. That’s how I’ve heard it described by people trying to make sense of what they’ve been taught.

From the vantage point of an unchurched culturally experienced American, they can see clearly that 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 too many have seen rules for faithful living applied unevenly, sometimes aligned with Scripture, sometimes shaped more by preferences or cultural differences. Harmless activities and ordinary human enjoyments have often been labeled sinful, leaving many unsure who they are supposed 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 would describe as an internal alarm system inside the minds of the people we want to reach

For many, I fear that these messages register not as truth and but as an inauthentic persuasion tactic from someone they don’t yet trust. Given without careful context (which seems to be normal), the language of deserved damnation just feels entirely incoherent within the world people are actually navigating.

The modern secular mind, I think, has developed a particular sensitivity to this. When it encounters claims about eternal punishment, the tension is felt immediately and that tension is simply resolved through dismissal, not through repentance. What may be true is set aside as simply unbelievable.

In my estimation, in earlier generations the message of deserving Hell was often spoken with distinct clarity to people who got the point. 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 imagine these words carried a lot of weight in a time when preacher and listener shared a common understanding of God, sin, and morality. But I’m not convinced they land the same way today. I’m starting to think that 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 distance from God — not “evil desires” that cause me to “deserve hell”.

We are all born experiencing distance from Him that we were not designed to experience. From the beginning of our lives, our hearts were missing the connection with God we were made by Him to need (all things have been created through him and for him — Colossians 1:16). We inherit and learn to adopt patterns of life shaped by centuries of this separation from God; patterns that have become deeply embedded in the culture and environment around us (deeply embedded in our own neural pathways too). We are completely surrounded by influences that subtly (and not so subtly) train our desires away from the life God would have for us — not because the people themselves are “evil” or bad, but because for centuries humans have tried to find ways of satisfying our inner need for God through the things we have. We’re bombarded with messages from our cultures that tell us where the “good life” is found. We all walk our paths of life from one version of the good life to the next, not realizing that our pursuits are all leading us to something less than what we truly need.

I think Jim Carrey sums it up nicely:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”

Whether we recognize it or not, being disconnected from God is actually the primary reason we struggle with life. When we pursue life apart from God, we step further and further away from an awareness of divine goodness, grace and sovereignty — the things our hearts actually need to be truly alive, satisfied and content. We were made for a deeply close and personal relationship with God, but because we are born distant from Him, even our best efforts at experiencing real life, satisfaction and contentment cause us to drift from the life were were meant to share in.

At first, through a normal human lifespan our best efforts often do not look so bad. 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 until the eventual conclusion of distance becomes final.

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 the responsibility we bear for our choices, but it does reshape what our responsibility looks like. Responsibility for us is not found in being the cause of this distance, but in how we respond to it.

This is where my concern with deservedness language ultimately settles: I was never responsible for being born apart from God.

That choice was made on my behalf. You could say it is right to banish me from God’s presence forever because of the choices I have made in my life. And I might agree with you on several counts, but if I continue in the way of life I’ve inherited from the world around me, then the same outcome unfolds naturally because of my estrangement from God. Simply remaining disconnected from Him over time will move me farther and farther away from Him. He is the source of life, He can create life and sustain it after death, but the farther I move from Him, the farther I move from being sustained. I may last 70 or 80 years in my physical body, but eventually my earthly life apart from Him will reach its natural end. The opportunity to squash my distance with Him is available now, but will not always be available.

The Bible shows us that one day, God will bring this current 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 choices and fully consummating the new era of eternal life with Himself. He won’t force you to come with Him into this new era, but if you truly understood what He is offering you, you would desperately desire to participate in it.

This final end of life apart from God is the same one often described as “deserved hell.” I suspect Jonathan 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 though.

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. I think 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.

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