Most of us have wondered what hell is like. One of the best clues we have about the nature of hell is what happened with Jesus on the cross and in the grave.
Jesus laid down His life to absorb the direct consequence of sin. With His death, He fully paid the wages of sin for those who trust Him for their salvation.
Those who do not trust Jesus for their salvation will pay the wages themselves. They will absorb the direct consequence of their own sin. How? The same way Jesus did — by dying the second death. This is the death from which there’s no resurrection (unless you’re God and you are the life force yourself).
Jesus is not suffering endless torment to pay the wages of sin. Those who trust themselves for their own salvation will not suffer endless torment to pay the wages of their sin. They will go to the grave, as Jesus did. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the words translated as “hell” in English Bible translations means “grave” and another word refers to a place of destruction. It makes sense that the Bible sometimes calls hell “the second death.”
Hell Is Death
So, when we ask what hell is like, we ask what the death and the grave are like — basically, what it’s like to be dead. After Jesus’ resurrection, He had no experiences to report. After Lazarus’s resurrection, he had no experiences to report. In the Bible, people whom God raised from the dead had nothing to report. God resurrected them from nothingness: “The dead know not any thing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
Just as God brought Adam into existence from nonexistence (see Genesis 2:7), we return to nonexistence when we die (see Ecclesiastes 12:7). That’s why the words usually translated as “hell” in English Bible translations refer to a place of decay and destruction (Sheol, Gehenna). That’s why the Bible refers to the final judgment of the unrepentant as “the second death” (see Revelation 2:11, 20:6, 20:14, 21:8).
When we seek to understand what hell is like, we can take clues from Dante’s Inferno (still good for literary value), Far Side cartoons (still good for a laugh), or God’s word. (I urge you to read my article about the story of the rich man and Lazarus if you believe that’s the biblical model for hell).
“It Is Finished”
It comes down to this:
- Why would the unrepentant receive a different consequence for sin than Jesus did?
- Why would Jesus pay a different price for sin than the unrepentant will?
The old covenant atonement system required the death — not the endless suffering — of an innocent lamb. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
Jesus’ act of atonement is finished; it was completed with His death. In the same way, the sin of the unrepentant will be handled with finality and completeness with their deaths. There will be an end to suffering. “There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4).