What is Hell? An Excerpt from the soon to be released Treason 2-24-2020
God Strives with Man
God does not war as we know it. Even so, He is profoundly emotional, and so are we because He created us in His image.
Because God loves us, He willingly strives with us. God’s striving is not war but passion fueled by love. When we scorn God, His heart is impacted with pain and a jealous desire for us to understand the power and privilege that we are trading for our momentary pleasures. As the emotions of God rise in a powerful crescendo, love remains as His intrinsic and ruling passion. Because of this, He handles us with gentleness; pulling us into His heart and His presence as much as we can endure. The center of God’s heart is the paradise in which we were created to live. Nothing else will ever satisfy.
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. —1 John 4:8 NKJV
Death
Separation from God is death. When Adam and Eve chose the lies of Satan over the truth of God, the entire human race partook of their treason. Everyone is born into this sin, and it separates us from our Creator, which is official death (Rom. 5:12). At the end of the age, every human who chooses allegiance to Satan’s lie, will be relocated to the “second death,” also called hell or the lake of fire.
14 Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. 15 And anyone not found written in the book of Life was cast into the lake of fire. —Rev. 20:13-15 NKJV
Where does this fire come from? It comes from God.
God’s Wrath
God is Omniscient. Before He created, He experienced the entirety of creation and the uttermost consequences of creating children with free will. God saw the evil in the fallen angels and the humans who would follow them. He saw and felt the horror and the pain they would inflict on creation. In that instant, the power of His love exploded in a fire called wrath which engulfed every speck of evil for all time and restored peace in creation.
Because God is holy—intrinsic love, absolute peace, and utter congruence—the fire of His wrath was unable to find a resting place in His personhood. Therefore, God separated it out from Himself and sent it to the farthest corner of creation where it burns today.
The wrath of God is entirely original to Him. It is a spontaneous surge of holy love from God’s heart that violently rushes upon evil, envelopes it in flames, and removes it to a graveyard called the lake of fire.
Because the wrath of God originated in His heart of love, it is eternal. This is why hell is eternal (Matt. 25:41-46; Rev. 14:10; 20:10).
By the very act of creating us with free will, God experienced wrath. Before Creation, He lived only with Himself in absolute love; evil did not exist. To gain children with the experiential ability to know Him and love Him on purpose and of their own volition, He has paid the price of experiencing evil and wrath.
The wrath of God occurred pre-Creation—before He ever started. Therefore, the judgment of evil was finished before He began. It had to be this way for God to proceed to create because His love and His holy personhood require it.
God’s wrath is not war or an act of war. For God to war assumes that He has a rival who is capable of usurping Him. Since He has no equal, war as we know it is not possible for Him.
The Removal of Wrath
From Adam and Eve onward, all humans have participated in the evil of treason. Therefore, every single one of us is an object of God’s wrath. When God saw evil pre-Creation, He saw us as we participated in sin (Rom. 5:8-21).
When His wrath enflamed the evil, it was us. Therefore, it could be said that our holy God judged and sentenced us to the lake of fire—the eternal location of wrath—before we ever began.
On the other hand, God would never have created us if this were the only outcome. He is love, and there is no point in creating us apart from His desire to have a family rooted in His love. So, what is the power that overcomes wrath? Love.
As God made His plans for us pre-Creation, He saw and experienced every moment and every outcome forever-all-at-once. When His wrath erupted, His saving grace was already there. Because His holiness requires the death of evil by wrath, God had already placed His only begotten Son—a member of the Godhead—on the altar and then placed every sin committed by mankind upon Him so that when His wrath went forth, it detonated upon Jesus Christ (Rev. 13:8; Rom. 5:9; 1 Peter 1:18-20; 2:24).
Jesus submitted to His Father of His own volition and received every human sin upon Himself (Phil. 2:5-11). When the fiery wrath of God consumed the sin, Jesus passed through and came out unharmed and without the smell of smoke because He is pure holiness. Finally, the fire of God’s wrath fled from His body and was sent to the farthest corner of creation where it perpetually entombs evil.
Everything needed for our deliverance from sin and the punishment that God’s holiness requires was done pre-Creation. In ancient Israel, they participated in the Passover sacrifice to signify their reliance upon God to cover their sins and to someday send the Deliverer, who would once-and-for-all do away with the penalty of sin so that all men, both Jew and Gentile, can call upon His name and be saved from wrath (Rom. 5:9).
God has made our salvation easy and free, which is the right thing to do. He is, after all, our Creator and we are utterly beholden to Him and at His mercy. Thankfully and gratefully, He is love and perfect holiness. He has none of our ignorant and selfish attitudes which should make us jump for joy because He can be trusted and He never changes.
Pre-Creation God removed our sins through Jesus Christ, and then He burst forth with the explosion of material wealth and wonder that we call Creation. God did all of this with one goal: to gain children in His image with the capacity to receive His love and respond with love. What an incredible honor that God has gone to such lengths to have an intimate relationship with us! This is the paradise we long for.