Audio Transcript
All of us have tasted revenge. Getting back at others. Getting even, as we call it. Hopefully we don’t know that feeling intimately, but we all know it. It can make us feel a little glad, sinfully glad. But what about perfect justice? What does that feel like? And what does it look like? It’s one of the more challenging topics on the podcast, talking about how to rightly align our affections with God’s eternal judgment. Especially when we consider God’s judgment of ordinary people we rub shoulders with on the subway, bus, or jet. Today on Ask Pastor John: When the nicest unbeliever you know faces God.
This episode is sobering. A seminarian, a Calvinist, and a Christian Hedonist writes in about Romans 9 and God’s final purpose for those vessels of wrath. “The main question for me comes down to this,” he writes. “Does God’s plan, which includes eternal judgment, bring him the most possible glory he could have received? I struggle to understand why God creates vessels of damnation when he takes no pleasure in their end, unless it is for the sake of a greater display of his own glory. Would God be more glorified by saving everyone, or is there a ratio of saved to condemned that perfectly displays the full spectrum of his character and reveals his justice and mercy and his wrath and grace to the world? As a Calvinist, of course I cannot appeal to human free will as the ultimate reason. Therefore, the only motivator must be his passion for his glory. But as Christian Hedonists, how are we to find gladness in this?”
Watershed Doctrines
I’m going to focus on that last question especially: Given the existence of eternal conscious torment, can a Christian Hedonist, can a human be glad about that?
And one of the reasons I feel a burden to at least try to answer this question is my concern that many Christians can be so influenced by the spirit of the age that they reject certain watershed biblical teachings, and that this causes almost everything else that they look at in the Bible to be skewed because they are looking at it through a compromised lens.
Three of the watershed doctrines that I would mention are these: First, the centrality of God in his own purposes for the universe, that he does all things for the display of his glory. A second one would be the existence of hell as everlasting conscious torment for those who did not believe on Christ. And the third I would mention is the fact that, in our personal conversion to Christ, God is ultimate and decisive, not man. Man does not have ultimate self-determination. Only God does.
“Man does not have ultimate self-determination. Only God does.”
I find that most people who profess Christian faith but resist one or more of those three watershed doctrines (and others) look at a text — text after text in the Bible — through a distorted lens. If you reject one of those, everything gets skewed. Issue after issue in the Bible is given a slant in a man-centered way if those doctrines are rejected or resisted. And so, that’s one of the reasons I feel like I should at least try and do my best to answer this question about hell.
One way to put it would be, “Can we, should we be glad that God has planned that unbelievers will suffer in hell forever?”
Perfect Justice
Now, the key passage of Scripture that answers this question is Revelation 18 and 19. Babylon represents in these chapters the sinful city, the center of unbelief and opposition to God. God brings his judgment on her. He devastates her, the wicked city. She was laid waste in a terrible judgment from God, and then comes the command to God’s people, and it goes like this:
Rejoice over her, O heaven,
and you saints and apostles and prophets,
for God has given judgment for you against her! (Revelation 18:20)After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,
“Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power belong to our God,
for his judgments are true and just;
for he has judged the great prostitute
who corrupted the earth with her immorality,
and has avenged on her the blood of his servants.”Once more they cried out,
“Hallelujah!
The smoke from her goes up forever and ever.” (Revelation 19:1–3)
And then you connect that with the same wording in Revelation 14:11, which is describing the final judgment and the lake of fire like this: “The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast.” So, this is eternal conscious torment as an extension of the judgment on Babylon, and the response of God’s people in that day is to be rejoicing and “Hallelujah!”
The joy is not in the suffering of persons as an end in itself. The rejoicing explicitly in these texts is over God’s judgment, like Psalm 97:8, where it says,
Zion hears and is glad,
and the daughters of Judah rejoice,
because of your judgments, O Lord.
In other words, because of the manifestation that, when all is said and done, “You are just, God. You are just, righteous, holy. Your righteousness is fulfilled, your holiness is vindicated, and your infinite worth is made plain to all those who scorned it.”
The fact that God’s final judgment is going to be perfectly just and holy and righteous, and that we are going to be made perfect — we ourselves, who are not yet perfect at all, we are going to be made perfect — so that we can see it for what it really is and feel it (really feel it) as we ought to feel it, that’s one of the reasons Christians do not take judgment into our own hands now. We do not feel vindictive toward our adversaries.
“We’re to pray for the lost, that they would be converted to Christ. We long for their salvation.”
On the contrary, Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27–28). We are to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). We’re to pray for the lost, that they would be converted to Christ. We long for their salvation. We are to join Paul in the tears that he shed over the perishing enemies of the cross in Romans 9:2 and in Philippians 3:18. He was a weeping apostle.
Refuge in Jesus
Vengeance belongs to God, not to us (Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19). We are not yet suited, in our sinful state, to join God in his judgment. Only when we are perfected and given his eyes can we no longer see in a glass darkly and be able to rightly rejoice over God’s judgment on those who have rejected him as we ought (1 Corinthians 13:12).
In Lamentations 3:33, even God, it says, “does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men.” That’s very strange, and you have to ponder this a long time. It seems to me that God has the ability to see suffering — the suffering of those he judges — through a narrow lens. And when he looks through the narrow lens and focuses on the suffering, pity is what he feels. He pities the suffering considered by itself. And then he opens the lens, the broad lens, takes everything from eternity to eternity into account, and rejoices in his judgments as righteous and just and holy. And I suspect he will perfect that same ability in us in due time, and then we’ll be able to rejoice over his judgments, including hell, without being cruel or sadistic or pitiless.
One of the things that makes it so hard for us, I think, to feel the rightness of eternal conscious torment is that God is so small in our understanding and our affections that we can’t feel as we ought the outrage and the indignity and the criminality and the abhorrent evil of treating God as if he were no more than the carpet on our floor, which is the way 99 percent of human beings treat him, it seems.
Try to imagine this: What would the judgment day look like? What might it look like when the true greatness and infinite worth and beauty of the Creator of the universe and the Redeemer through Jesus are revealed, and every manifestation of his goodness comes to light, along with a lifetime of ingratitude and neglect and resistance and trivializing disregard, which most people have in treating him that way? It will be plain on that day that he sustained, for example, about one hundred thousand safe takeoffs and landings of commercial flights every day — day after day, year after year — with scarcely a single accident, and what does he get? Almost nobody thanks God for safe landings and safe takeoffs.
He causes the sun to rise on thirty thousand days of the average American life with almost no thanks (Matthew 5:45). He sustains the infrastructure of thousands of days so that food can arrive at our stores, and electricity and gas and water arrive in our houses, and he gets no thanks. He has sustained three billion heartbeats for every eighty-year-old like me on the planet and 630 million breaths with a diaphragm that he worked — not you. You didn’t ever tell your diaphragm to do anything.
And this list could be multiplied. This little teeny list of benefits could be multiplied hundreds of times over, and my guess is (and I say it with trembling) nobody on that last day — not the nicest unbeliever you ever knew — will expect anything but hell when all is revealed. Shame will cover our faces except for one thing: We have taken refuge under the blood of Jesus.
