Deliverance from Hell
Illustration
Stories
For this is reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does. (v. 6)
I had a Sunday school teacher when I was in sixth grade who liked to tell the story of a young man in our community who was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was known as a troublemaker, a “rebel without a cause,” angry teenager who loved to put on his leather jacket, jump on his Harley and make as much noise as possible as he rode down the road.
One day, he was with a group of his friends who watched as he jumped on his bike. “Where are you going?” one of them called out. “I’m going to hell,” he shouted as he roared off. And then our teacher would always add, “He said he was going to hell, and he did.”
Fear of hell was part of the atmosphere we breathed in that little church. We sang “Blessed assurance Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of glory divine,” but there was always a grim reminder that there was a choice to be made. In the Sunday School opening we sang the chorus: “One door and only one and yet its sides are two, I’m on the inside, on which side are you?”
The tunes and the lyrics of these old gospel favorites were imprinted on my soul. They were the ear worms in my young brain as I fed the rabbits and helped dad milk the cows. “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling” we sang: “Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming.”
My bedtime prayers were fervent and obsessive: “God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy,” and every relative in our large extended family; I prayed with eyes clenched, carefully naming each one. And I confessed long lists of personal sins, trying to make sure my soul was clear, lest I die and be condemned to the hellish suffering Billy Graham warned about in his televised crusades.
In his last book, Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity and Our Life Beyond, just three years before he passed at the age of 99 in 2018, Graham declared that non-Christians are destined for hell. He wrote, “…we cannot begin to imagine just how horrible the place called hell is… hell is a place of sorrow and unrest, a place of wailing and a furnace of fire; a place of torment, a place of outer darkness, a place where people scream for mercy; a place of everlasting punishment.”
The preachers in the church of my childhood never pounded the pulpit about fire and brimstone like Billy, but the nagging knowledge of the possibility of hell was always there. Could I be sure I would escape these eternal torments? During my high school years, there were earnest conversations with Roman Catholic friends who harbored similar fears. I envied them the absolution that came with the confessional.
Many years later, in my first pastorate after college and seminary, I preached a sermon entitled, “How Are You to Escape Being Sentenced to Hell?” It is the question Jesus asked of the scribes and Pharisees who were angry that he was spreading around too much grace and forgiveness to obvious sinners.
I started the sermon by asking, “Are you afraid of going to hell?” No hands went up and so I continued, “Feel that question deep down in your gut. Do you feel fear?” Then I softened my tone and said, “Let’s go from the gut to the brain. Do you think you should be afraid of hell?”
Fear of hell can be an effective motivator. The doomsday preachers believe that if you can put the fear of hell into people you might be able to scare them enough to keep them out of hell.
Jesus did not use fear as a primary motivator. Good news, not bad news, was the focus of Jesus’ message. God’s unconditional, unending love, like the love parents have for their children, enables all of us prodigals to turn our lives around and return to a caring father who is always waiting with open arms.
Jesus’ pronouncements about hell were directed at the scribes and pharisees to call them to account for their insistence that only those who were meticulously righteous were loved by God. Jesus was giving away what they believed they had earned, and that they could not accept.
Jesus shows us a God that never stops loving us, never gives up on us. God will wait for us forever, indeed like the Good Shepherd; God will search for us until we are found. Ours is a God who rejoices more over finding one lost soul than over all those who are already safe in the fold.
What about the billions of non-Christians in the world: Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists? What about any souls who have practiced any of the thousands of other religions in the history of the world? Billy Graham said they are all going to hell. Billy, God rest his soul, was mistaken. If the source of all being could really condemn billions of souls to eternal torture, then our Creator is not the loving God we know in Jesus.
When asked if there is a hell, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement said, "If there is, we prefer to believe that it is empty." Scripture makes it clear that God doesn't let a single soul slip between his fingers. We even know that Jesus "descended into hell to free any souls that might be there.”
Despite Wesley’s kinder and gentler thoughts about hell some of my Methodist colleagues cling to the harsh belief that all who do not accept Jesus as their “ personal Lord and Savior” will be sentenced to eternal flames.
My colleague, Bill Trench, now retired in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, is not one of them. Bill writes:
“There was a time when John 3:16 was one of my favorite Bible verses. And for good reason. It declares God’s unlimited love for the world and promises that everyone who gives his or her heart to Jesus will have eternal life, now and forever. What could be better? But for too many Christians, what it means is that those who believe in Jesus are saved, and go to heaven, while those who don’t believe in Jesus are lost, and go to hell. The uncomfortably common paraphrase would read something like this, “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that those who did not believe in him would go to hell.” Of course, if we phrase it that way, almost no one would own it. But for many Christians the idea that someone is going to hell is at the core of their beliefs. They argue that in traditional Christian theology heaven and hell are real places. And they say that though there are many issues that divide Catholics and Protestants; this is not one of them. The traditionalist critics believe that God loves everyone, but that those who do not believe in Jesus as their personal savior are condemned to hell.”
Bill adds, “One of the common arguments in favor of a belief in hell is that a good parent needs to punish “his” children, and God is a good parent. Setting aside the problematic nature of our temptation to personify God, the argument does not bear close scrutiny. Of course, parents discipline their children, but they wouldn’t throw them into a “lake of fire” to burn forever because they didn’t believe the right things. The argument turns God into a monster unworthy of our worship or belief."
I agree with the woman who posted this hopeful note on Facebook:
“When my ex-husband died suddenly of a heart attack in 2018, I lamented about his eternal soul, for the one I knew in this lifetime he was tortured and unhappy. He questioned everything with harsh skepticism. I was certain that he died without conviction, and as a person of Christian upbringing, I was concerned for his eternal life. Within weeks after his death, I was on retreat at a wonderful creek side village in the mountains of North Carolina. After a few days of work and exploration, I sat and talked with the retreat founder and spiritual director. He suggested that my ex-husband's tortured soul was in a hospital for souls, attended to by angels. This vision, this idea, helped soothe my soul tremendously…I cannot imagine leaving this world believing in a hell for eternal life. How sad for those that do.”
I had a Sunday school teacher when I was in sixth grade who liked to tell the story of a young man in our community who was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was known as a troublemaker, a “rebel without a cause,” angry teenager who loved to put on his leather jacket, jump on his Harley and make as much noise as possible as he rode down the road.
One day, he was with a group of his friends who watched as he jumped on his bike. “Where are you going?” one of them called out. “I’m going to hell,” he shouted as he roared off. And then our teacher would always add, “He said he was going to hell, and he did.”
Fear of hell was part of the atmosphere we breathed in that little church. We sang “Blessed assurance Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of glory divine,” but there was always a grim reminder that there was a choice to be made. In the Sunday School opening we sang the chorus: “One door and only one and yet its sides are two, I’m on the inside, on which side are you?”
The tunes and the lyrics of these old gospel favorites were imprinted on my soul. They were the ear worms in my young brain as I fed the rabbits and helped dad milk the cows. “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling” we sang: “Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming.”
My bedtime prayers were fervent and obsessive: “God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy,” and every relative in our large extended family; I prayed with eyes clenched, carefully naming each one. And I confessed long lists of personal sins, trying to make sure my soul was clear, lest I die and be condemned to the hellish suffering Billy Graham warned about in his televised crusades.
In his last book, Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity and Our Life Beyond, just three years before he passed at the age of 99 in 2018, Graham declared that non-Christians are destined for hell. He wrote, “…we cannot begin to imagine just how horrible the place called hell is… hell is a place of sorrow and unrest, a place of wailing and a furnace of fire; a place of torment, a place of outer darkness, a place where people scream for mercy; a place of everlasting punishment.”
The preachers in the church of my childhood never pounded the pulpit about fire and brimstone like Billy, but the nagging knowledge of the possibility of hell was always there. Could I be sure I would escape these eternal torments? During my high school years, there were earnest conversations with Roman Catholic friends who harbored similar fears. I envied them the absolution that came with the confessional.
Many years later, in my first pastorate after college and seminary, I preached a sermon entitled, “How Are You to Escape Being Sentenced to Hell?” It is the question Jesus asked of the scribes and Pharisees who were angry that he was spreading around too much grace and forgiveness to obvious sinners.
I started the sermon by asking, “Are you afraid of going to hell?” No hands went up and so I continued, “Feel that question deep down in your gut. Do you feel fear?” Then I softened my tone and said, “Let’s go from the gut to the brain. Do you think you should be afraid of hell?”
Fear of hell can be an effective motivator. The doomsday preachers believe that if you can put the fear of hell into people you might be able to scare them enough to keep them out of hell.
Jesus did not use fear as a primary motivator. Good news, not bad news, was the focus of Jesus’ message. God’s unconditional, unending love, like the love parents have for their children, enables all of us prodigals to turn our lives around and return to a caring father who is always waiting with open arms.
Jesus’ pronouncements about hell were directed at the scribes and pharisees to call them to account for their insistence that only those who were meticulously righteous were loved by God. Jesus was giving away what they believed they had earned, and that they could not accept.
Jesus shows us a God that never stops loving us, never gives up on us. God will wait for us forever, indeed like the Good Shepherd; God will search for us until we are found. Ours is a God who rejoices more over finding one lost soul than over all those who are already safe in the fold.
What about the billions of non-Christians in the world: Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists? What about any souls who have practiced any of the thousands of other religions in the history of the world? Billy Graham said they are all going to hell. Billy, God rest his soul, was mistaken. If the source of all being could really condemn billions of souls to eternal torture, then our Creator is not the loving God we know in Jesus.
When asked if there is a hell, John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement said, "If there is, we prefer to believe that it is empty." Scripture makes it clear that God doesn't let a single soul slip between his fingers. We even know that Jesus "descended into hell to free any souls that might be there.”
Despite Wesley’s kinder and gentler thoughts about hell some of my Methodist colleagues cling to the harsh belief that all who do not accept Jesus as their “ personal Lord and Savior” will be sentenced to eternal flames.
My colleague, Bill Trench, now retired in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, is not one of them. Bill writes:
“There was a time when John 3:16 was one of my favorite Bible verses. And for good reason. It declares God’s unlimited love for the world and promises that everyone who gives his or her heart to Jesus will have eternal life, now and forever. What could be better? But for too many Christians, what it means is that those who believe in Jesus are saved, and go to heaven, while those who don’t believe in Jesus are lost, and go to hell. The uncomfortably common paraphrase would read something like this, “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that those who did not believe in him would go to hell.” Of course, if we phrase it that way, almost no one would own it. But for many Christians the idea that someone is going to hell is at the core of their beliefs. They argue that in traditional Christian theology heaven and hell are real places. And they say that though there are many issues that divide Catholics and Protestants; this is not one of them. The traditionalist critics believe that God loves everyone, but that those who do not believe in Jesus as their personal savior are condemned to hell.”
Bill adds, “One of the common arguments in favor of a belief in hell is that a good parent needs to punish “his” children, and God is a good parent. Setting aside the problematic nature of our temptation to personify God, the argument does not bear close scrutiny. Of course, parents discipline their children, but they wouldn’t throw them into a “lake of fire” to burn forever because they didn’t believe the right things. The argument turns God into a monster unworthy of our worship or belief."
I agree with the woman who posted this hopeful note on Facebook:
“When my ex-husband died suddenly of a heart attack in 2018, I lamented about his eternal soul, for the one I knew in this lifetime he was tortured and unhappy. He questioned everything with harsh skepticism. I was certain that he died without conviction, and as a person of Christian upbringing, I was concerned for his eternal life. Within weeks after his death, I was on retreat at a wonderful creek side village in the mountains of North Carolina. After a few days of work and exploration, I sat and talked with the retreat founder and spiritual director. He suggested that my ex-husband's tortured soul was in a hospital for souls, attended to by angels. This vision, this idea, helped soothe my soul tremendously…I cannot imagine leaving this world believing in a hell for eternal life. How sad for those that do.”
