Justice & Mercy: How Can a Loving God Permit Hell?

The ‘H’ word. Almost nobody, it seems, is willing to talk about it – least of all Christians. It’s hardly surprising I suppose; on the face of things, at least, the doctrine of Hell doesn’t exactly seem to be Christianity’s primary selling point. Who wants to subscribe to a faith who’s God banishes His enemies to a satanic realm of raging fire and brimstone for an eternity of damnation? Doesn’t sound very appealing to me!

For a long time I struggled immensely with the very idea of Hell and I certainly wasn’t in a minority on the issue. For many Christians, Hell is a subject they would rather just avoid; it simply doesn’t sit well alongside the image they have created of an all-loving, all-merciful, benevolent, Father God. Talk of Hell makes Christians sound like crazy fundamentalists or else sanctimonious Pharisees, and in any case, many Christians, in my experience, aren’t at all sure themselves what they think about Hell. In a post-Enlightenment world of scientific reason and liberal values, the ‘roaring furnace’ sounds like a pagan myth straight from the Dark Ages, and a particularly barbaric one at that.

Surely a faith which is rooted in the themes of love, grace and redemption; which tells us to ‘love our enemies’ and ‘turn the other cheek;’ which offers ‘new life’ and ‘salvation’ to all people, irrespective of their past; a faith which promotes forgiveness and reconciliation and speaks of God as our loving Father and Jesus our faithful Friend... surely this faith can do away with such an antiquated and obnoxious idea as Hell?
Well, no is the simple answer. We cannot; indeed we must not. Hell is not only a reality but, for the credibility of the Christian message, it is a necessity and, actually, I am mighty glad of it.
Yes you did read me correctly! I am a devote Christian believer and all that has already been said of the loving, gracious, merciful, redemptive and personal nature of God I fully subscribe to. The love of Jesus Christ is unparalleled, His grace is all-sufficient and His kindness knows no bounds. He never abandons or forsakes me and He is faithful even when I fail Him; I cannot put into words the depth, the breadth, the magnitude, of His love. He has changed my life and He can do the same for you. But ... I am mighty glad of the reality of Hell.

Allow me to explain.

As a teenager I attended the Christian summer festival Soul Survivor, where I heard one talk on this issue that made me pause for thought. The speaker, Mike, recalled a recent experience he had had visiting the impoverished slums and townships of South Africa and his response to what he had witnessed. Prior to his visitation, he explained, he had wrestled long and hard with the notion of Hell; struggling to reconcile it with the God of love he professed belief in. Mike’s experiences in South Africa and what he saw there were to change his perspective on this issue quite profoundly and he returned, he said, now having “no problem with the idea of Hell.”
It wasn’t until several years later that I fully understood what Mike had been driving at. Aged 19 I too found myself headed for South Africa to begin four months of voluntary aid work in the townships and settlements surrounding the city of Durban.
People respond to the suffering and hardship of others in different ways. Some appear to remain emotionally immune to it and able to access the situation objectively; others are overcome with grief, and break down in uncontrollable weeping and sorrow. My response was neither of these. It was rage: fierce, impassioned, righteous, anger, and the longer I was there the more it began to get under my skin.

When you learn that over half of children with whom you are working are HIV positive and most will not have access to sufficient medical provision; when you visit a family who’s ‘home’ would barely be considered suitable for a dog by Western standards; when you meet a family who are so poor that they cannot afford to buy food to feed their sick, elderly mother; when you discover that most grown men are unable to find employment and are driven to drink and crime; when you hear stories of young girls driven into prostitution to earn a living; when you learn that political corruption is so rampant that the powerful will permit, even promote, suffering and poverty for their own ends; when you are confronted with such racial hatred and prejudice that it turns your stomach; when you realise that the inequality gap is so overt that just 100 yards separates the slum village from the millionaires mansion houses with Mercedes sports cars to boot; when you absorb all that each and every day, you cannot help but be angry. It was just so wrong.

Where was God in all this? Where was this God of love; this God of justice?

The realities of injustice, poverty, exploitation - let’s call it what it is: evil – are overt, visible and obvious in a nation like South Africa, but the more I saw, the more I realised that the picture back home in the West was equally stark, if manifested in more covert ways.

Evil is rife. Suffering, injustice and pain, far from being the afflictions of the unfortunate few are the realities of human beings the world over, in one form or another.
My time in South Africa left me with one burning question: how can my loving God permit such evil?
How can He stand idly by as millions suffer the effects of poverty, exploitation and disease? How can God, who calls Himself ‘Just’ allow such injustice; such unfairness and inhumanity, to triumph?

Friends, there is good news. He does not.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, one Jewish prophet by the name of Isaiah recorded a number of prophecies he received from the LORD concerning His people. They make for very interesting reading!
In Chapter 9 of this extraordinary book we get the wonderful and heart-warming foretelling of the birth of the Messiah. If you’ve ever been to a church service over the Christmas period you will be well acquainted with these words which have been read from pulpits, accompanied with candlelight and carols, since time immemorial: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.... For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace...” and so on and so forth. It really is quite beautiful. It’s a message of hope; of redemption; of love and of peace.
What follows this poetic prose, therefore, comes as quite a shock: no less than 14 and-a -half chapters of God’s fierce wrath against the sinful nations of the world, culminating in the ominously entitled chapter ‘The LORD’s Devastation of the Earth.’
What on earth is going on here? What kind of a God is this who calls Himself a Light in the darkness, a Freer of the oppressed, a Prince of Peace, a Wonderful Counsellor, and then proceeds to spell out judgement and damnation on the peoples of the Earth?

Surely this represents a fundamental contradiction in God’s character? Or does it?

If there’s one question that I get asked even more than “how can you believe in a loving God who sends people to Hell?” it’s, “How can you believe in a loving God when there’s so much evil; so much pain and suffering and injustice in the World?” It’s a perfectly valid question. The problem is that, for the Christian who refuses to believe in the doctrine of Hell, he or she can give no satisfactory answer. I am afraid to say that such trite responses as “well God will come and make all things good,” or, as one author has put it, God “weaves a beautiful tapestry by brining something good out of evil” are simply not good enough. Try telling these to the trafficked child-prostitute or the exploited labourer or the mother who has lost her children to AIDS. It just doesn’t wash.

The understanding that this leaves us with is of a God who tolerates evil; who permits sin to go unpunished. This is not a God I want to have anything to do with.

Even we humans, in our fallen and corrupted state, can recognise the basic necessity for justice. We are driven to fury and protestation at the sight of criminality and immorality which is seemingly allowed to continue un-checked. It offends what little sense we have of what is right, and so it should. A society which fails to adequately bring to justice and punish offenders is not a society of love or compassion but one of oppression and gross unfairness. To stand idly by whilst evil triumphs, is not loving; it is abhorrent.

Far from tolerating evil and wickedness in our World, God’s righteous anger rages against it. Strange as it may seem, that fills me with great hope. It seems to me that we have so often constructed a false dichotomy between justice and mercy and we have wrongly asserted that a God of absolute mercy (which Jehovah is) cannot also be a God of absolute righteous judgement. This is a quite peculiar conclusion to come to, given that we don’t appear to hold to these same principles within our own Worldly spheres! Mercy without justice is to simply permit the triumph of evil with no sense of judgement or consequence and I for one would not like to live in a world like that! Rather, the reality of Hell tells us that God is not a passive bystander when it comes to evil, suffering and immorality in our World; He is passionately opposed to it and committed to its absolute annihilation.

Hell, of course, was never intended for human beings. This place of destruction and godlessness, whatever form we imagine it to take, does not exist for us. Hell was always to be the final pit of God’s fiery judgement upon Satan, the so-called ‘Father of Lies,’ and his demonic hosts – themselves the very personification of evil itself. God does not wish to send humanity, whom He created in His own image and for the express purpose of divine and unique union with Him, to its death! Why would He do such a thing? But evil must and will be destroyed. It will be purged from the Universe and there is nothing any man can do about that. It is not a case of if God’s judgement will fall upon evil but rather when. The outcome is not in doubt.

Evil, therefore, is a sinking ship; it is an army in fast retreat before the mighty torrent of God’s burning wrath against it. He will pursue this wickedness, this injustice, this sin, to the very ends of the Universe and there will be nowhere it can run to and nowhere it can hide. It is a fool, then, who allies himself with such evil. It is tantamount to chaining oneself to the deck of the Titanic as it neared that fatal iceberg. And yet this is exactly what we have done.

Some amongst us would have us believe that humankind is basically good and that the term ‘evil’ is reserved for only the most monstrous and heinous minority – the rapists, the murderers, the paedophiles; the Adolf Hitlers and Osama Bin Ladens of this World. Not so.

In such a World as ours, evil can never be something that is isolated within a select few; it is cancerous; it infests and infests all of creation. Indeed, from the very moment you enter this life crying and screaming, you enter a World of evil and pain and darkness. Evil is not something ‘over there’ that only other people are responsible for, it is a regime that we are all complicit in upholding.

To better illustrate this point let us take something as simple as the clothes that you are wearing right now. Where did they come from? In all likelihood the fabric is a combination of natural and synthetic materials both of which have probably been grown or manufactured using intensive industrial methods that have resulted in significant damage being done to the Earths ecological systems – plants and wildlife. Then, that fabric will have been transported to a sweat shop where an overworked and underpaid, probably female, factory worker has stitched them together, earning barely enough to feed her starving children. Circumstances being what they are, she scarcely has time to spend with her family and certainly doesn’t have sufficient income to send her children to school or ensure that they receive proper medical care. Consequently, they have occasionally resorted to petty crime and even prostitution to keep themselves afloat. This garment is then flown the thousands of miles across the globe to the distributing companies in the West, owned by multi-millionaires who pay their workforce the minimum wage and have just laid-off several hundred of them to increase their profit margins. The garment is then wrapped in excesses of unrecyclable packaging and sent to the high street where it is sold to you or I (at an extortionate price), who choose not to look at the label or think about what a journey this item has had. Instead, we sport it proudly until such a time as the media informs us it is not longer in fashion, whereby we dispose of it.

Who is the evil doer in this story? The farmer for destroying the earth? The factory foreman for exploiting his workforce? The mother for neglecting her children? The children for turning to crime? The Western multi-nationals for pursuing profit at the cost of human lives? The high street shop for over-pricing their goods? Or you and me for financing the whole sorry affair with our disposable incomes?

The answer, of course, is we are all in it up to our eye balls!

Such is the nature of evil. We may like to draw distinctions between the ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ perpetrators, but we are quibbling over trivialities in doing so. To return to the Titanic analogy, what does it matter if one has bound oneself to the deck with chains of iron or a cord of rope? Without assistance you are doomed to drown. In the grand scheme of things, it is pretty inconsequential to what degree we feel we are complicit in evil – we are complicit and that is all that matters.

We wrongly conclude that God is some tyrant, banishing those He has created to a blazing furnace, perhaps to satisfy some sadistic power complex. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such is the righteousness, the goodness and the justice of God that He cannot and He will not permit evil to have its way. Only out of love for the human race has he deferred the full force of His judgement, thus far, to afford an opportunity for more to abandon the path of evil and choose the Way of God.
God does not send people to Hell so much as they send themselves through their suicidal allegiance with sin. There is no ‘side-stepping’ of God’s judgement – evil is a dead man walking!

This, in essence, is the message of the Christian Gospel. Many wrongly assume that Christ’s Cross is primarily a matter of forgiveness. It isn’t. The agony that Jesus Christ endured – physical and spiritual – was not chiefly in the cause of forgiveness but of justice. On that infamous day, Jesus of Nazareth – God Incarnate – took upon Himself the sin, the evil and the wickedness of all the World and He bore the righteous punishment for that sin that was owed to us. This, for the theologians amongst you, is the doctrine of penal substitution – that God, in Christ, received the just punishment for humanity’s evil upon Himself.

Many people that I speak to assume that the Christian faith promotes the notion of evil and sin going ‘unpunished.’ Such an attitude is to completely misunderstand the point of Christ’s Cross. In those dark hours at Calvary Jesus Christ became sin; he took upon His person all the evil, darkness and iniquity of humanity and there incurred the full righteous wrath of God. The gospel writers record some of Jesus’ final words as He hung on that instrument of torture: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” So absolutely did Christ empty Himself of all His divinity and take upon Himself every ounce of human evil that God’s presence departed from Him. Such was the concentration of sin instilled within the Son that the Father could not look upon Him. God literally turned His back on Him.

To assert that God does not punish evil is to make a mockery of the Cross itself. If evil can be tolerated, if sin can go ‘un-judged,’ then what in Heaven’s name was the purpose of the hours of indescribable agony that Jesus Christ endured? It would all be for nothing.

In those moments on that infamous Roman cross, humanity witnessed the perfect culmination of justice and mercy. Justice, as humanity’s evil and barbaric wickedness received its just punishment and judgement, and mercy as God agreed to take such a punishment upon Himself, in the form of His Son Jesus Christ, on our behalf.

And so humanity is faced with a simple choice. Evil, sin and wickedness are the enemies of a loving God who, in His righteousness and justice, has determined to purge them from the Universe forevermore. There is no scenario in which evil goes unpunished; the only question which remains is who bears that punishment – God or us? Either way, justice will be served; the choice is whether we will accept God’s mercy and thus permit Christ to take the punishment or else reject that mercy and take the punishment upon ourselves. Looked at like that, it’s a no-brainer, but then I suppose I would say that!