What If Hell Is Not Just a Scare Tactic?

I used to think hell was just something the church used to scare people. Then I started reading what Jesus himself actually said.

Hell is a word that has done a lot of damage. It has been used to scare people, threaten people and sometimes even used as a spiritual weapon. Someone might snap in anger and tell another person to go to hell, without even stopping to think about what they just said.

But in the Bible, hell is not described as just a scare tactic or some inner state of mind. It is spoken of as a serious reality connected to God’s judgment, destruction, darkness, fire, weeping, gnashing of teeth and final separation from God. In other words, this is not just one frightening word. The Bible speaks about it through many serious images.

So it is no wonder that this whole subject feels unpleasant to many people. It felt that way to me too. For a long time, hell sounded to me mostly like something people or the church had invented to frighten others. But when I started reading the Bible, that explanation no longer held together.

This is probably not the lightest subject to sit down with next to a cup of coffee. Hell. Even the word itself is enough to make some people tense up before the coffee is even poured.

And I get it. This has been a hard subject for me too. It is not the kind of thing I feel like writing about lightly, as if: “Right, today let’s talk a bit about destruction, and then I’ll go make an evening snack.” Absolutely not.

But maybe that is exactly why it needs to be talked about.

I used to listen to a lot of very different teaching. Dolores Cannon, Bashar, A Course in Miracles and all sorts of things where life was presented more as a school for the soul than as a reality where a human being actually needs a Savior. According to Dolores, we come here to learn. For as long as it takes, until we learn. In Bashar’s thinking, hell is not a real place either, but more like a self-created state. In the world of A Course in Miracles, sin was not real in the same way it is in the Bible. It was more like an illusion, wrong perception or the imagined idea of separation. And if sin is not a real problem, then hell cannot be a real judgment either.

All of that sounded gentle at the time. The idea that a loving God could never allow anything like that.

And honestly? It sounds very good.

It sounds much nicer than the idea of judgment, sin, destruction and being accountable before God. In that way of thinking, a human being is not a sinner, but a student. Not lost, but evolving. Not someone who needs salvation, but a being expanding their consciousness and attending some kind of cosmic night school.

In a way, I completely understand why it appeals. You do not have to face anything final. You do not have to ask, what if I am actually wrong before God? You do not have to think about what sin really is. You can just think that everything is learning, everything eventually leads to growth, and surely a loving God will pat everyone on the head in the end.

But then I ran into the Bible.

And that is where the whole thing started wobbling pretty badly.

Because when I read the Bible, I do not get the picture that human beings are only here learning things through life experiences. Of course we learn. Of course life shapes us. Of course God can use even hard things to wake a person up and change them. But according to the Bible, our basic problem is not just that we do not know enough yet.

According to the Bible, our problem is sin.

“for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God;”
Romans 3:23, WEB

That is not some tiny side sentence in the Bible. It is a pretty big deal. All have sinned. Not just serial killers, dictators and the people who cut in line. All. Me too.

And in the Bible, sin does not only mean that a person sometimes does something forbidden. It is much deeper than that. It is life apart from God. It is the human desire to decide for ourselves what is true, what is good and what God should be like.

This was probably one of the hardest parts for me. I had been used to thinking that love means acceptance. That if God is love, he cannot judge. That if God is good, he cannot allow hell.

But the Bible does not let me shape God only according to what feels loving to me.

The God of the Bible is love. I do believe that. But he is also holy. He is just. He does not call evil good just because it would feel nicer to us. He does not sweep sin under the rug and say, let’s not talk about this so nobody feels uncomfortable.

And this is exactly where the cross begins to look completely different.

If sin is not serious, why did Jesus have to die?

If there is no destruction, what is Jesus saving us from?

If human beings are only learning, why does the Bible speak about atonement, forgiveness, blood, repentance and salvation?

Jesus did not come only to give us slightly better life advice. He did not come to run a weekend course in spiritual growth. The Bible says it much more sharply:

“The saying is faithful and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.”
1 Timothy 1:15, WEB

According to the Bible, a person does not end up in hell because they failed some life lesson or because they were slightly worse than other people. A person ends up there if they remain in their sins without Christ. And this is also where God’s grace is seen. It is not that a person has messed up their life so badly that there is no hope left. As long as a person is alive, God is calling them back. What saves from hell is not getting your act together. It is Christ.

That is why Jesus came. He did not come only to teach a better way of life, but to save human beings from sin and judgment. Jesus says:

“He who believes in him is not judged. He who doesn’t believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only born Son of God.”
John 3:18, WEB

That is why this thought stops me: Jesus came to save sinners. Not just to remind us of our own light. Not just to tell us that we are all on a journey toward higher consciousness.

To save.

And then there is the part that is hard to get around: Jesus himself spoke about hell.

Not just some angry preacher. Not the medieval church. Not some religious person who got a bit too excited about scaring people and was having a bad day.

Jesus.

“Don’t be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.”
Matthew 10:28, WEB

WEB uses the word Gehenna here, which is also translated as hell. And that is not exactly a small detail.

At the same time, I have had to correct one strange image in my mind. Hell is not Satan’s own kingdom in the Bible, where he sits somewhere on a dark throne holding a pitchfork. It is not his place of rule. It is the place of his judgment too. Jesus says:

“Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels;”
Matthew 25:41, WEB

That makes the whole subject even more serious. This is not horror-movie imagery. It is about God’s judgment.

I still cannot draw some exact picture of hell. Is it literal fire, darkness, a place, a state, or something human words cannot even properly reach? I do not know. The Bible uses very hard imagery: fire, darkness, weeping, gnashing of teeth, destruction and the second death. But this much I do understand: the Bible does not present hell as just a human state of mind or some self-created state of consciousness. It presents it as real judgment and final separation from God.

I use the word hell in this text because it is the most familiar word. In the Bible, the same reality is also described as destruction, judgment, eternal punishment and the second death. They are different words describing the same serious thing: final separation from God.

Can hell, then, mean life without God? In some way, yes, but not only that. According to the Bible, a person can already live apart from God in this life, in spiritual darkness and without real connection to him. But hell is not just the emptiness or pain of this life. In the Bible, it is final destruction, God’s judgment and separation from his saving presence. In this life, God still calls people back. In hell, that return is no longer described as possible.

These passages do not sound like hell is only an uncomfortable inner state created by the person themselves. And they do not sound like life is an endless round of lessons where you always come back again if the test went badly.

The Bible also says:

“Inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once, and after this, judgment,”
Hebrews 9:27, WEB

The idea of one life is very different from what I had heard so much in New Age circles. No endless retry loop. No “I’ll come back and learn it next time.” Life, death and judgment.

That is serious.

And this does not mean that I should start seeing God as cruel. This is an important point, because otherwise the whole subject gets twisted very quickly. In the Bible, God is not some cold and indifferent figure waiting for a chance to punish people. Quite the opposite.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only born Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
John 3:16, WEB

That verse is familiar. Maybe too familiar. So familiar that it can almost pass by on autopilot. But it says a lot. God loved. God gave his Son. So that whoever believes in him would not perish.

Love and destruction are in the same sentence.

And maybe that is what has opened this up for me in a different way. The love of the God of the Bible does not mean there is no danger. It means God himself has come to save us from that danger. Jesus did not come as a decoration in the spiritual landscape. He came because we need salvation.

That is a huge difference.

The message of Dolores and Bashar felt comforting at the time because it removed fear. But at the same time, it also removed the need for the cross. If everything is ultimately just learning, then the death of Jesus is no longer necessary. It becomes a beautiful symbol, not the heart of salvation.

And that is where I can no longer fit these two things together.

I cannot say at the same time that I believe the Bible, but hell does not exist because it does not fit my idea of love. I cannot say that Jesus is Lord, but his warnings were only symbolic drama. I cannot take from the Bible only the parts that feel soft and shove the rest under the rug.

Well, technically I can. Of course I can. But then I am no longer actually letting the Bible speak. I am only using it to support what I had already decided to believe.

I am not writing this because I can draw a map of who is where. That is not my place. My place is to take seriously what Jesus says, while also remembering that God sees a person far more deeply than I, or anyone else, ever can.

This does not mean I understand everything. I do not. Hell is still a heavy subject. I do not write this lightly, and I do not want to use hell as a spiritual weapon. That is ugly and wrong.

But I also cannot sweep it away anymore just because it feels painful.

If Jesus spoke about it, I have to take it seriously.

And maybe in the end, this subject does not primarily lead me to stare at hell. It leads me to look at the cross. Because if destruction is real, the cross is even greater than I had understood. If sin is real, grace is not some nice little extra. It is a matter of life and death.

For me, this has been a pretty big shift. I used to think that a loving God could not judge. Now I am beginning to understand that a loving God did not leave human beings without salvation.

That is a completely different thing.

And that is exactly why the gospel is not just a beautiful thought. It is actually good news.

Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB), Public Domain.