What is Hell

Jeremiah Knight, May 7, 2026

We use the word hell casually all the time and it has lost most of its weight in our daily speech. “War is hell.” “I went through hell.” “The week from hell.” The expressions roll off our tongues without anyone pausing to consider what is actually being referenced when the word is used. And the casual use has slowly drained the word of its biblical meaning until even most Christians, when they hear the word in a sermon, do not feel anything close to what the word should produce in them. We have made the word ordinary, and in making it ordinary we have lost the capacity to feel what Scripture actually teaches about the reality the word names.

No human experience on earth is genuinely comparable to hell. If we tried to imagine the worst suffering we could conceive of, the most prolonged agony, the deepest despair, the most complete loss of every comfort, we would still not have reached the dreadful reality of hell. The most extreme images of human suffering are not even adequate as starting points. The mind that has not been transformed by Scripture cannot begin to grasp what hell is, because nothing in our experience prepares us for what eternal punishment under the wrath of a holy God actually involves. And the trivial use of the word in casual conversation is not just bad linguistics. It is a refusal to take seriously what Christ Himself spent more time warning about than any other figure in Scripture.

That last fact is one most contemporary Christians have not allowed themselves to feel properly. Almost all the biblical teaching about hell comes from the lips of Jesus. The same Jesus we are told was all about love, all about acceptance, all about meeting people where they are. The Jesus who wept at Lazarus’s tomb and who held children in His arms is also the Jesus who said more about hell than any other person in the New Testament. Matthew 25:41 records Him telling the unrighteous, “Depart from Me accursed ones into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.” Eternal fire. Prepared. The fire was already there waiting. The destination was real. And the warning came from the most loving person who ever lived precisely because love does not lie to people about where they are heading.

Modern Christianity has spent decades trying to soften what Jesus said. Theologians have suggested that hell is annihilation rather than ongoing suffering. Pastors have suggested that the language of fire and darkness and weeping and gnashing of teeth is metaphorical and therefore should not be taken too seriously. Authors have written entire books arguing that a loving God could not possibly send anyone to eternal punishment. And every one of these efforts to lighten the doctrine has had the same effect on the church that has absorbed it. It has produced a Christianity in which the urgency of evangelism collapses, the seriousness of sin diminishes, and the cross becomes an act of generosity rather than the only possible rescue from a destination too terrible for words.

The biblical descriptions of hell are not chosen at random. Jesus spoke of outer darkness in Matthew 8:12, of the lake of fire in Revelation that bears His own teaching forward, of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Matthew 13:42, of a place where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched in Mark 9:48. He drew on the imagery of the valley of Gehenna outside Jerusalem where rubbish burned continuously and where child sacrifices had been offered to Molech, and He used that valley as His primary picture of what awaits the unrepentant. The images are deliberately horrific because what they point to is genuinely horrific, and softening the language does not soften the reality. It only deceives the people who are heading toward the reality.

The question of whether these images are literal or symbolic is the question almost everyone asks first when they begin to grapple seriously with this doctrine. The honest answer is that they are likely symbols, but the symbolic reading offers no comfort whatsoever. Symbols by their nature point to something beyond themselves and the function of a symbol is to gesture toward a reality that the symbol itself cannot fully contain. If the lake of fire is symbolic, then the reality to which it points is more terrible than the symbol, not less. The sinner who imagines that a symbolic reading provides relief has not understood how symbols work. Jesus chose the most dreadful images available to Him because what He was describing exceeds even those images, and the images function as the closest approximation our minds can begin to comprehend of something we cannot fully imagine until we encounter it.

The same problem applies to the popular suggestion that hell is simply separation from God. This idea offers comfort only to people who do not understand what the presence of God actually means. The ungodly do not want to be near God. They have spent their lives avoiding Him, suppressing the truth about Him, refusing to acknowledge His authority over their lives. Romans 1:18 to 21 describes this active suppression as the daily reality of every unregenerate person. If hell were merely separation from God, it would be exactly what the unrepentant have been pursuing their entire lives. The horror of hell is not that God will be absent from it. The horror is that God will be present in it in the fullness of His holy wrath. Revelation 14:9 to 10 describes the final destiny of those who reject Christ in language that should make every reader pause. “He also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” In the presence of the Lamb. The very Christ whose mercy was rejected becomes the one in whose presence the rejection will be punished. Hebrews 12:29 describes our God as a consuming fire, and that fire is what the unrepentant will encounter forever as the just response of His holiness to sin that was never covered by the blood of His Son.

The accusation often raised is that hell sounds cruel, that eternal punishment for finite sins is disproportionate, that no loving God could justly impose such a sentence. But the accusation rests on a fundamentally flawed understanding of sin. Sin is not measured by the duration of the act that committed it. It is measured by the dignity of the One against whom it was committed. An infinite God offended by finite creatures suffers an infinite offence, and the punishment that justly answers an infinite offence must itself be of infinite duration. This is why Scripture teaches eternal punishment in the same breath that it teaches eternal life. Matthew 25:46 places them side by side. “These will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.” The same word for eternal applies to both. If the life is forever, the punishment is also forever, and any reading that softens one without softening the other has departed from the text.

God is not capable of cruelty. Cruelty by definition is the infliction of punishment more severe than the crime deserves, and Scripture is plain that the Judge of all the earth will do what is right. Genesis 18:25. No one in hell will be there unjustly. No innocent person will ever suffer under the hand of God. The damned will know with absolute clarity that what they are receiving is the just response of holiness to the rebellion they chose with full knowledge and without excuse. “There will be no cruelty there” is not a denial of the horror. It is the recognition that the horror is exactly what the rebellion deserved, and the justice of God is not diminished by the severity of what justice requires.

The eternal nature of hell is what makes it most unbearable to contemplate honestly. People can endure great suffering if they know the suffering will eventually end. The hope of eventual release is itself a comfort in the worst earthly afflictions. In hell there is no such hope. The suffering does not end. The wrath does not exhaust itself. The torment continues forever because the offence that produced it remains forever, and the duration of the punishment is not a function of how much time has passed but of the dignity of the One against whom the sin was committed. The annihilation theory tries to remove this horror by suggesting that the unrepentant are eventually destroyed and cease to exist. But destruction implies no ongoing pain, and Scripture is clear that the punishment of hell involves conscious suffering. Revelation 14:11 says, “The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever and they have no rest day and night.” Forever and ever. No rest. The wicked in hell would gladly accept annihilation if it were available, because they would prefer non existence to the experience they are enduring. The fact that annihilation is not available is part of what makes hell what it is.

This is the doctrine that should drive us to our knees in gratitude for the cross and to our feet in urgency for evangelism. If hell is what Scripture says it is, then the work of Christ in absorbing the wrath that sinners deserve is the most precious reality in the universe. Every drop of blood He shed at Calvary, every moment of His agony, every breath of His suffering as He bore the wrath of His Father against sin, takes on a weight that cannot be measured when set against what He was rescuing His people from. Without hell, the cross becomes a moving display of divine love. With hell, the cross becomes the necessary intervention of a holy God to rescue sinners from a destination so terrible that the cost of rescuing them required the death of His own Son. The two are connected. Diminish hell and the cross diminishes with it. Restore the doctrine of hell to its biblical weight and the cross becomes infinitely more glorious than we previously understood it to be.

The same truth produces urgency for the people around us who are not yet in Christ. Every neighbour, every coworker, every family member, every stranger we pass in the street is heading toward one of two eternal destinies, and there are no other options. The God who has commissioned us to be witnesses has placed us in the lives of these people for a reason, and the reason is not so we can be friendly to them while they walk toward eternal ruin in silence. “How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?” Romans 10:14. The preaching is ours. The result belongs to God. But the urgency must come from a clear understanding of what is actually at stake, and the contemporary church’s loss of the doctrine of hell has produced a corresponding loss of the urgency that drove earlier generations to give their lives for the spread of the gospel.

The God who loved us enough to send His Son to bear the wrath we deserved is the same God who has made the doctrine of hell painfully clear in His Word so that none of us would treat the gospel as optional information. The horror of what He saved us from is the measure of the love that saved us. The weight of what awaits the unrepentant is the measure of the urgency that should drive our witness. And the Christ who spoke more about hell than any other figure in Scripture is the same Christ whose hands and feet bore the marks of the price He paid to keep His people from ever entering the place He warned them about. May we recover this doctrine in its full biblical weight, may it produce in us the gratitude and urgency it should produce, and may we proclaim with our whole lives the only Saviour who can rescue any soul from a destination too terrible to imagine and too real to ignore.

He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Jeremiah Knight