Hell

Scriptural discussion of Hell What does the Bible reveal about Hell? A wonderful, thorough survey of all Scripture says about this place of the dead, dispelling myth and revealing the love and goodness of God towards men.
Right click here to download the pdf version of "What the Bible really says about Hell".

What the Bible really says about HELL

Footnotes

1 Understandably, there have been questions raised as to the appropriateness of using material from ancient heathen mythology in such a study as this. My response is that I have found elements of truth, remnants of truth once revealed but long forgotten, imbedded in many ancient myths. I believe that the evidence shows a significant portion of the mythologies of the ancient world had roots in revealed truth, but truth which had been twisted, and grossly at times, by the vain imaginations of men.

For example, it is a known fact that stories of a world-wide flood may be found in unconnected cultures all around the globe. It seems obvious that there had to have been a common basis for those flood stories and that the common basis for them was the truth about the Flood that is recorded in Genesis 7-9. I also believe that the non-biblical flood stories that existed in ancient heathen cultures were written after Noah's Flood and are perversions of that holy biblical story.

When Homer, Virgil, and other ancient poets and writers began their work, they would open their work with a prayer to certain goddesses called Muses for revelation of the events they were about to relate and for aid in telling the story accurately and well. Inasmuch as Moses, David, Paul and other wise and godly men said that the gods of the Gentiles were in fact demons (e.g., Deut. 32:17; 1Cor. 10:20), I believe that these men were contacting real spiritual beings, and that those spirits really did communicate historical truths to those poets, mixed, of course, with error. We know that demons can reveal otherwise unknowable information to humans, and even perform miracles through them; the Bible presents us with many examples, such as the fortune-telling slave girl in Philippi that Paul and Silas dealt with (Acts 16:16) and the Egyptian magicians in Exodus 7:11-12. The epic poets, I believe, had a real connection with fallen angels - demons - who sometimes spoke to them, revealing elements of the hidden past and inspiring fanciful elaborations on it.

Because I believe that there was known truth that predated the myths of Classical Greece, I have confidence that once we are grounded in the truth of Christ, we can discern the remnants of truth that exist in those myths. Pride, the product of carnal knowledge (1Cor. 8:1) and the eldest child of the evolutionary mind, tempts modern man to entirely dismiss the works of ancient poets as the childish fruit of an insufficiently evolved species. But history teaches us not to be quite so smug and skeptical. The ancients were not as ignorant and gullible as proud modern man would like to think. Heinrich Schliemann was publicly ridiculed by Classical experts in the late 19th century because of his opinion that Homer's epic, The Iliad, had an historical basis, that there were elements of historical fact mingled with obviously fabricated material. When he set sail to search for ancient Ilios (Homer's other name for the city of Troy), no one expected him to discover it, confident as they were that Homer's entire story was a product of a fertile, unsophisticated human imagination. But when Schliemann, following Homer's detailed geographic information, discovered the ruins of the city of Troy in northwest Asia Minor, the entire scholarly world was stunned. Once again, the solemn declarations offered to the world by scholars and experts were proved to have sand as their foundations. And the confidence and pretensions of scholars and experts were exposed, again, as based more on pride for what little they know than on humility before God for their obvious ignorance.

So, I believe that it can be helpful to refer to truth, or elements of it, regardless of where that truth is found. Doing so can add color to one's story and increase interest; it can give the reader a wider and better perspective of the issue involved; it can enlighten as to how certain issues developed. And, yes, it can also at times turn out to be useless clutter. I hope that I have successfully avoided that last possibility.

2 A prophecy in Isaiah 14:4-17 suggests, contrary to what we concluded in this study, that the Devil may actually go, or may have gone, to Hell at some unrevealed point in time. All other biblical evidence agrees that the Devil was cast out of Heaven onto the earth, that he has been walking about on the earth since that time, and that, far from being the ruler of Hell (as Christian myth has it), he has never even been an occupant of it. So when or how, then, this prophecy of Isaiah was or will be fulfilled, I cannot say.

3 The question has also been asked, since there will be a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1), what will become of the heavens and the earth that now exist? We are not told that they will be cast into the Lake of Fire; therefore, I assume they will not be. Jesus told us that "heaven and this earth will pass away" (Mt. 24:35), but he says nothing about how they will pass away or what will be done with them. Peter gives us more detail in 2Peter 3:7-13: "The heavens and the earth which exist now are kept in store by the Word [of God], reserved for fire against the Day of Judgment and destruction of ungodly men. . . . The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat. The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. . . . The heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new Heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness."

4 Peter explained that when Jesus descended into Hell, he did so in order to "preach unto the spirits in prison, who sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing" (1Pet. 3:19-20).

At first, it is unclear as to who exactly are "those in prison". We know that they are at least those who lived before the Law was given, for Peter expressly says so. Paul also wrote that "until the Law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law" (Rom. 5:13), and so "death reigned [over man] from Adam to Moses" (Rom. 5:14). The basic question is, does the phrase "spirits in prison" include those who lived under Moses' Law or does it refer only to those who lived before it was given? Paul explicitly said that those who lived during the time of Noah (that is, before the Law) had nothing by which they could be judged, and their sins were not imputed to them because God had given no Law to men at that time. However, Jesus plainly told the Jews that Moses would stand in the Judgment against those who transgressed the Law (Jn. 5:45). So, the question is, if those under the Law already had something by which they could be judged, then why would Jesus go preach to them? It seems very unlikely that Jews disobedient to the Law of Moses would be visited in hell by Jesus and given another chance. This seems true for two reasons. First, because Abraham told the rich man in Hell that if the Jews would not hear Moses, they would not hear Jesus (Lk. 16:31). Jesus himself said the same in John 5:46-47. Second, if God has appointed Moses to stand in judgment against the Jews who lived under the Law, then Moses will judge them by the Law that they transgressed. And if they are given another chance by having Jesus descend to preach to them in Hell, then on what basis could Moses any longer judge them? Would they not then be judged by something greater than the Law because the one greater than the Law had come to them?

When Lazarus, the poor beggar in Jesus' parable, died, he was taken by the angels into the comfort of Abraham's bosom (Lk. 16:22). That scene has been a wonderful encouragement to the poor among men since Jesus described it, but it also raises a question. Lazarus lived and died under the Law, but Abraham lived and died centuries before God gave the Law; and yet, they were together in the same place in Hell. If Abraham is to be counted among "the spirits in prison", then would not Lazarus also be a spirit in prison with Abraham, being in the same place? Unless there was some sort of spiritual difference made between them, of which we are told nothing, the obvious answer is that they were in the same prison.

So, the question, for me, remains unanswered. Did Peter, in the verses quoted, consider Jews who lived and died under the Law to be among "the spirits in prison" in the heart of the earth? We are confronted with information that could lead to conflicting answers, and it is best, in my view, not to speculate too much about such things as God chooses to keep secret (Dt. 29:29).

5 The closest thing to one's sin being blotted out before Christ came was when God "put away" David's sins during his wretched affair with Bathsheba. That degree of mercy was not allowed by the Law of Moses. It was a forgiveness completely unexpected because unlawful. It was a shadow of New Testament mercy in an Old Testament setting, and it was so confusing to the Israelites that it eventually led to a terrible civil war; on one side were those, led by David's own son Absalom, who did not believe that God had shown such mercy to David, and on the other side, much smaller than the first, were those who believed that He had done so, even if they could neither understand or explain it.

6 The phrase, "the worm does not die" (used by Isaiah, 66:24, and three times by Jesus, Mark 9:44, 46, 48) was in use in the mid-17th century as a reference to a gnawing, guilty conscience. A collection of sayings concerning etiquette for young men, attributed to one Francis Hawkins, included this admonition: "Labour to keep alive in thy breast that little sparke of Celestial fire called Conscience, for Conscience to an evil man is a never dying worm, but unto a good man it's a perpetual feast."

Incidentally, as much as two centuries later, this phrase, with the same meaning, was used by James Fenimore Cooper, America's first great novelist, in his Last of the Mohicans.

7 It is obvious, from the words that Homer places on Zeus' lips, that in very ancient times, the Greeks believed in this extremely gloomy place, far worse than Hell, called Tartarus. The fact that Peter knew and used the word (Tartarus) that Homer used many hundreds of years earlier does not mean that Peter was imitating Homer; it only means that there was a basis of truth behind some of Homer's work, truth that was perverted and lost as generations of men after the Flood fell deeper into sin.

Homer's mythological perversion of the truth about the existence of a place worse than Hell does not in the least make that place itself a myth. And Peter's use of the word Tartarus (in a verb form) does not mean that he was formulating doctrine based on popular Gentile mythology. He was not; he was an anointed man of God moved by the Spirit of truth to write the things he wrote. Knowing that some would think otherwise, Peter himself declared to his readers that "We have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2Pet. 1:16).

I believe that Peter was moved by the Spirit of God to tell the unadulterated truth. I also believe that Homer was moved by demons to fabricate myths, sprinkled throughout with vague remnants of truth that demons knew, or truth that had been revealed to men in generations before Homer but had been neglected by them and lost.

8 Much of what is said here concerning the place and status of fallen angels hinges on them being the demons mentioned throughout the Bible. The Bible never explicitly states that the fallen angels are demons, and we should at least note that. Of course, the Bible never explicitly states that it was the Devil who deceived Eve, either.

That said, it must be pointed out that we lay a trap for our own feet when we insist that no truth exists unless it is plainly stated in the Bible. Even Paul, in some of his instructions to the saints, felt free to appeal to common sense (1Cor. 11:14) or to offer his own opinions about a matter (1Cor. 7:6-7), even if he had no specific Scripture to prove his point, and even if the Spirit had not revealed anything specific to him about the issue (1Cor. 7:39-40).

9This key to the Bottomless Pit is found in the hand of another angel in Revelation 20:1, an angel about whom nothing is said about falling from Heaven. The first angel who opened the Pit, Apollyon, may have been a fallen angel.

10Apollyon, the "king" over the creatures from the Bottomless Pit, seems to be a fallen angel of great authority, one of the most powerful of the "stars" drawn down to earth by the tail of the dragon (Rev. 12:4). "Apollyon" means "Destroyer". In the Old Testament, he passed over Egypt to kill all the firstborn of the Egyptians (Ex. 12:23), and he is mentioned elsewhere (Job 26:6; 28:22; Ps. 17:4; Prov. 15:11).

11I do not insist that Hitler is the coming Beast, but he does serve as an example of how a world ruler could "die", and yet there be no actual proof of his death. All that was ever found of his body, according to Russian officials and documents, was the very charred remains of a man about his size. Tests performed on bone fragments eventually made available to Westerners after the 1993 collapse of the Soviet Union seem to indicate the body which the Soviets hid from the West was actually Hitler's. Therefore, it is very possible that Hitler actually did kill himself, as was first announced by the Soviets. On the other hand, it is also possible that the burned bodies they found in a shallow grave outside Hitler's bunker on that April day in 1945, were not those of Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun.

Again, I do not teach that Adolph Hitler is the Beast of Revelation. I only use him and his mysterious death as an example of how men may assume a death took place when it may not have. At the same time, I should point out that it is not only Hitler's death that serves as an good example of the kind of man the Beast will be, for Hitler's deeds while living on earth certainly exhibited enough of Satan's vicious hatred of the Jews for him to qualify to be the Beast, even if he is not.

One more element important to the Beast's story that should be noted is that when the Beast returns to live on earth, he will be recognized as truly being who he claims to be. This could hardly be the case with any earthly ruler, regardless of how evil and powerful he was, if he lived before the time when pictures or film were invented. For example, if a man arose to power and claimed to be the Roman Emperor Nero returned to earth, he would immediately be dismissed by all mankind as lunatic. It would be impossible, with the technology and information we have today, for him to prove his claim and convince the masses. But someone such as Hitler would be easily recognizable to billions of people. Television has made his face familiar to people in every culture around the earth. Indeed, because of the obsession with Hitler of many television producers, book publishers, and movie makers, Hitler's face is arguably the most recognizable face of anyone who has ever walked the earth.

Whether or not the Beast proves to be Adolph Hitler, the Beast will be recognizable to the inhabitants of earth as someone who has previously lived and ruled on earth. He will be a well-known ruler in history who is presumed to be dead, but he will re-appear on the world stage, still lusting for earthly political power and still hating the Jews with all his heart.

12Hell (1Pet. 3:19) and the Bottomless Pit (Rev. 20:7) are both referred to as prisons.