Her Gates Will Never Be Shut

The Gospel of hope that I can preach boldly is this: God is not angry with you and never has been. He loves you with an everlasting love. Salvation is not a question of “turn or burn.” We’re burning already, but we don’t have to be! Redemption! The life and death of Christ showed us how far God would go to extend forgiveness and invitation. His resurrection marked the death of death and the evacuation of Hades. My hope is in Christ, who rightfully earned his judgment seat and whose verdict is restorative justice, that is to say, mercy.

Moreover, between the covers of our Bible, the authors plainly teach infernalism, annihilationism, and universalism—and none of these briefly!

the goats of Matthew 25 are not dismissed to eternal, retributive torment. Rather, we have something more like Malachi’s refiner’s fire, which by implication, finds its terminus when the subject’s “pruning”—the root meaning of kolasis—is complete.

Gehenna is judgment to be sure—and may even point secondarily to final judgment—but the picture is first of all about the destructive wake left behind by our sin here and now, not an afterlife of eternal, conscious torment. It is quite literally “the way of death.”

We ought to also note the irony and incongruence of the Church utilizing the very place where God became violently offended by the literal burning of children as our primary metaphor for a final and eternal burning of God’s wayward people in literal flames. Thus, God becomes the very Molech who decrees that the angels must deliver his children to the flames, even though this was the very reason he ordered Hinnom to be desecrated in the first place!

The bulk of Christian theology through the centuries has equated the Gehenna of the Gospels, the lake of fire (limne tou puros) in Revelation, and a post-resurrection hell. As we have seen, biblically, Gehenna represented this-worldly judgments of destruction with historical and geographic ties to Jerusalem’s Valley of Hinnom.

We’re not out of bounds to ask, “What is the beast in our age? Who is the horn now? What form does the destructive fire take this time?” But our first order of business in interpreting Revelation and its lake of fire is to look for the intended referents in John’s day. The book of Daniel should have already trained us for this by walking us through that process several times. The tendency is to default into “last days” mode, because we think they refer to the final generation of humanity on planet earth. Rather, the last days are days of cataclysmic “transition” (think in terms of that stage of a mother’s labor between contractions and pushing) between the old age and the new age whose birthing is prophesied in Joel

In Hosea 11, God reveals something of his nature that our own sense of the divine would not have fathomed. Yahweh is able to break his own promise of punishment, even without our repentance!

The River of Life flows into the Arabah Valley, the area between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea: the land of Edom. Note the fact that the Temple of God is supplying supernatural nourishment to Edom, the children of Esau, sworn enemy of Israel and one of the nations whom God had promised to destroy like Sodom. In this new world, even the estranged brother and his betraying descendants are given the birthrights once lost for a pot of soup. In Ezekiel’s vision, all is restored in Christ; all are reconciled. When? Now, with the inauguration of Christ’s kingdom and in the context of the church’s mission in human history. And not yet, for we await the consummation of that kingdom when the river of life transforms even the lake of fire (divine judgment, demonic infestation, and human destruction).

the infamous lake of fire is a loaded historical reference to the Dead Sea, the scene of Sodom and Gomorrah’s fire and brimstone destruction. When referring to “the lake of burning sulfur,” the book of Revelation is not speaking of a traditional post-death hell. John was warning believers that Jerusalem is facing the end of the world as they know it.

If we demand that every word of Scripture is literally true, we make Jesus and the Bible self-contradictory. E.g., Jesus says both, “I judge no one,” and also “Depart from me you evildoers, into the lake of fire.” But the Hebrew mind has long been able to hold a multitude of descriptions in open tension. What makes us dizzy—God is a punisher, God is not a punisher; I don’t judge, I do judge—is less confusing if we start by just looking for the point in each case rather than trying to build an impermeable fortress of truth.

If we take all these descriptions into account, we have good reason to be agnostic about our ability to know the precise destiny of the lost. Still, the warnings are there. Are they to be taken seriously? Is their content to be taken literally? Do they represent real warnings of real possibilities? What truths do they convey? Taken seriously, the above passages curtail any grounds for presumption of an automatic, all-in universal salvation regardless of the state of one’s life and soul. I do not like what I read in the Bible about divine judgment—especially from the mouth of Jesus. Frankly, I worry about those who do. But I am unwilling to discard biblical orthodoxy in favor of some fluffy, self-made spirituality that comforts me with lies. Reviewing these passages shakes me, leaving me wondering with the disciples, “Who then can be saved?”

Whether the process of salvation looks like a lost son returning home to his father or a shepherd going out to pursue the lost sheep, God’s commitment as Father is to welcome everyone into his house and to continue seeking and saving every lost soul until they are found (Luke 15:4). Again, these texts present that mission as incomplete until all are found and brought home.

what if the last great judgment (verdict) of God is mercy?

After all, “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:6). What? Unless we die first? Or even thereafter? Notice: the day of Christ signals and coincides with the completion of our faith-history—personal and social—not its interruption. But how does it work? What really changes us? In our moralism, sometimes we forget that transformation is God’s work in us, not our capacity to behave.

Since the fourth century, via the Reformers and the Revivalists, the Western Church and its Evangelical wing have inherited Augustine’s infernalism as the only biblical view of judgment and hell, typically writing off the early universalist Fathers as heretical and their modern proponents as liberal.

our doctrine of judgment needs to be Christianized. It needs to represent God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Lest the invitation be misunderstood as an anything goes pluralistic universalism, there is a hard pause. Anyone can come, but only if they have their robes washed in the blood of the Lamb. Only upon a specifically Christian redemption can one enter the gates and eat from the tree of life that grows in the city (another picture of Jesus).

Without forcing answers into a particular eschatological system, let us accept once again the possibility of a next-world process of healing where the Lamb, himself, will shepherd us to the waters and will wipe away the last vestige of tears from this present evil age (Rev 7:17; 21:4).

So much of the activity we read about in Revelation 21–22 involves processes (invitation, cleansing, healing, entry) to which traditional theology has barred the door at death that it is tempting to either ignore or transplant these processes. If we don’t treat them as already realized eschatology, the Bible forces us to consider the possibility that the lost who perish still have hope of eternal life after the Day of the Lord.

We need to become even more biblical than that, allowing Scripture to trump our inherited ideologies even when we’ve invested so much of our hearts in those systems. Dare we let Scripture say what it says without reinterpreting what it “really means” into the margins of our Study Bibles?

To this, I would respond: If your only reason for being a Christian is to avoid hell, I wonder if you have ever encountered the love of our precious Savior. Have you met him? We follow Jesus because he loves us and we love him.

It is worth reminding ourselves, especially in this age of ecological violence and crisis, that the annihilation and destruction of God’s good creation is precisely the aim and goal of evil, not evidence of its defeat. The destruction, including the self-destruction, of those made in God’s image represents a victory for the forces of darkness.

All of Jesus’ references to Gehenna, which are widely thought by believer and non-believer alike to refer to a Last Judgment at the end of time, are actually about the coming judgment on Israel, Jerusalem and its temple. Here we should not be misled by the fact that Jesus’ language is apocalyptic in character.