The Bible’s teaching about Heaven and Hell is rich. When teaching Chapters 4 and 5 of Making Me, however, I realized that the temporary aspect of these locations seemed difficult to grasp. Perhaps a concise summary will help. What follows amends an earlier version of this post, this time including an insight from Bible translation that helps explain our confusion.
It is common to think of Heaven and Hell as the two eternal states of all people and all condemned angels. This is quite understandable, because when consigned either to Heaven or Hell, our future is fixed, so in the Bible and in everyday use, Heaven and Hell might easily be used as shorthand for the entire future ahead.
The Bible clarifies, however, that all disembodied human spirits exist in temporary locations until Christ’s return. Remember that God does not immediately execute judgment after death, but suspends it until his entire human family is called in Christ. That means that there is a period of time when the spirits of all deceased human beings must be sheltered or kept until Judgment Day, at which time everyone is resurrected, judged, and sentenced (Revelation 20:3-15). Some angels are remanded to the same location as unsaved humans (2 Peter 2:4). The generic names for the location of these spirits are Sheol in the Old Testament and Hades in the New Testament. The Bible further distinguishes the experience of those spirits using other names: Tarturus, which describes the negative experience of the unsaved, and Heaven or Paradise, which describe the positive experience of the saved.
No spirit remains in these locations forever. They are moved from there to God’s judgment throne. After judgment, the unsaved join disobedient angels in what is called a lake of fire or eternal fire (Matthew 25:41). The saved move on to a transformed, enhanced, and glorified new earth (2 Peter 3:11-13; Revelation 21-22).
The confusion comes with the word Hell. Hell does not represent any single biblical word. It is an Old English term for the place of the dead, a Germanic or Norse equivalent of Sheol with implications of suffering, like the word Tartarus. The King James translators chose to use this word to translate both the Old Testament term Sheol and Jesus’ colorful use of Gehenna to picture eternal judgment (Gehenna is a literal geographical location referred to by Jeremiah in a vision of God’s judgment – the Hinnom of Jeremiah 7:31-32). In effect, the English word Hell has been used to describe both the place where spirits await Judgment Day and the place of eternal condemnation after Judgment Day. These are two different places, causing unnecessary confusion.
We typically say that when people die, they go to either Heaven or Hell, which is true if you understand “Hell” to refer to the temporary location of the lost. The problem is that people more often associate Hell with the final and eternal location of the lost. That makes people think that the Heaven and Hell experienced directly after death are both permanent locations when, in fact, neither are. Spirits leave “Hell” (translating Sheol, Hades, or Tartarus) to be judged and then pass on to “Hell” (translating Gehenna and referring to the lake of everlasting fire). Unnecessarily confusing, right? This is what can happen when you translate two different ideas with the same word in another language.
So what?
This confusion about Hell is important for Christians because it has confused our understanding of Heaven. We need to understand that Heaven or Paradise is not the eternal home for believers any more than Tartarus (the negative experience of Sheol) is the eternal home for the lost (see 2 Peter 2:4). We will leave Heaven when we are resurrected at Christ’s return (Christ, the New Jerusalem, etc. come down from heaven to a renewed earth).
We need to understand this, lest we confuse the impossible-to-imagine non-physical Heaven (see 2 Corinthians 12:2-4) with our eternal future in a renewed physical Creation. Over time, prophetic visions of Heaven have been confused with our forever home, and many Christians think that for all eternity we’ll be playing music on a cloud, just looking at God. While basking in God’s unfiltered presence will be one of the few wonderful things we can do in Heaven while we are there, the new earth will unleash all the physical potential God built into Adam and Eve. They were not made to play music all day, every day, in worship. Human beings were meant to enjoy God’s fellowship in the great endeavor of building a civilization to rule the earth to God’s glory as his children, citizens, and stewards. That is the eternal future of the redeemed!
Thank for clearing it up. I long for heaven and especially the new earth.
This post strengthens chapters 4 and 5 by including references and reminding us to look carefully.
Forever grateful,
Flo
Precious clarification. Thank you Glenn. Gratefully, Jeanne
Thank you, Glenn for this explanation. I have enjoyed learning the truth about Heaven. My teaching thus far, has never revealed this fact. It makes me long to read and learn more and more. I long for both Heaven and The New Earth.
This clarification is so helpful. Perfect timing for a discussion with my grandson. I Can’t wait to see what the earth was meant to be
Datina
What is Gehenna, the lake of everlasting fire, like?
The fact that Jesus would speak of eternal punishment in terms of Gehenna, a non-literal illustration from Jeremiah’s vision, tells us that we really don’t have a literal description of what it is like. Jesus described it in two ways: as a place of fire, and also as a place of outer darkness. When you think about it, those two descriptions would seem to be mutually exclusive. That’s because they are both intended as evocative pictures of what eternal damnation is like.
However, I remember John Stott commenting that knowing those descriptions are not literal should not feel comforting, because whatever the images suggest must be pretty grim. Unquenchable fire may suggest never-fulfilled longings and the pain of ongoing anger and fear. Outer darkness may suggest utter aloneness and lostness. And, of course, the images may very well reflect actual physical punishments of some kind.
The important thing to remember is that God is a good person! What he does is always transparently fair if understood from his point of view. He specifically says that he takes no pleasure in the destruction of the wicked. But neither is he embarrassed about condemning people who deserve condemnation. Given the way God expressed himself (e.g., Ezekiel 33:11), I think it’s fair to say that God mourns for those who are condemned. They could have lived as his image and in his likeness. At the same time, I don’t think God feels sorry for them, as if they are somehow unfortunate or being treated unfairly. God is comfortable with his decisions.
If you could read his book as C. S. Lewis intended, as a piece of imaginative fiction and not rigorous theology, you might enjoy The Great Divorce. It’s one of my favorites. His creative imaginings of Heaven and Hell suggest some profound ideas. Perhaps the main idea is that those who are bound for (eternal) Hell would not want to live in either Heaven or the new earth cherishing the goal of glorifying and enjoying God forever.
Another resource you might like is one of a series of videos I did explaining the Apostles’ Creed, a video addressing the statement that Jesus descended into Hell. It includes a photo I took of Gehenna. You can find it on my YouTube channel by just typing in “growthground,” and looking for the Apostle’s Creed series.
One final thought. When you study the history of Gehenna, the ravine just to the south of Jerusalem, you find that there were actually several other ways that it was associated with fire besides the sacrifice of infants to Molech. It was also a place where the bodies of condemned people were burned, and later, it was a kind of landfill where garbage was burned. I don’t know if either use goes back so far as Jesus’ day. But the notion that a life in Hell is an absolutely tragic waste is compelling.
Thanks Glenn, see you Sunday. Pat