Hell | Bellevue | July 26, 2026

Spring Lake Church – Bellevue Campus

Sermon: Hell

Teacher: Ryan Groshek

Passages: John 3:16, Matthew 25:41–46, Revelation 14:9–12, and 2 Thessalonians 1:8–9

In “Hell,” we examine what Scripture teaches about eternity by exploring the major Christian views of hell alongside key passages including John 3:16, Matthew 25:41–46, Revelation 14:9–12, and 2 Thessalonians 1:8–9. Through the biblical images of destruction, torment, and exile, this message wrestles with God's justice, human choice, and the hope found in the gospel. Join us as we seek to understand this difficult but important topic with biblical truth, humility, and the invitation to trust in Christ.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, good morning, Spring Lake. How are we doing this morning?

unknown 0:02

Good.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

We haven't met yet. My name is Ryan. I am one of the pastors here on Sabbath Spring Lake. I'm the pastor of family ministries. It's my delight, my honor to be with you this morning. Uh, when I was in high school, a nearby town, uh not too far away from us, had a local church that every year hosted an event around Halloween called The Nightmare. And the radio ads for the nightmare sounded like this Coming this October, The Nightmare. And it was kind of a Christian haunted house. Don't raise your hand if you have been to something like this. But I did not want to go as a high schooler. I was terrified, you know. But then when I got into college in Stevens Point, Go Dogs, uh, I, again, and a couple of my buddies were like, you know, we should, we should check it out and see what this thing is all about. So we went and we stood in line and we waited while the creepy music played. And then we moved into this warehouse that had been transformed into the nightmare. And every stage of it, we were guided along by a performer dressed in like a drill sergeant kind of outfit who was yelling at us the whole time. And we moved from stage to stage, scene to scene. And within this event, we saw different scenes of people dying in kind of graphic and disturbing ways. And so there were people who had been engaged in kind of all sorts of illicit and dangerous activities, and you like saw them depicted as dying. Obviously, it was all you know performers. And we kind of moved through this, you know, series of stages, and finally we got to one of the last rooms where we were in what was supposed to be like hell itself. We're standing in the middle of this room and there are cages lining the wall with actors and actresses inside them reaching out through the cages and screaming and howling at the top of their lungs and reaching for us, and it was depicted like flames around the outside and kind of demonic creatures, and it was it was terrifying. It was terrifying. So then we move into the final room where a video, you know, uh sh plays and presents the gospel to us, like how that if you believe in Jesus, you could be saved from all of this, and we were invited to give our lives to Jesus in that moment. And I gotta tell you, I was already a Christian at this point in time, but the whole thing made me feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable at the tactic that's being used, and we'll talk a little bit about that, but also just uncomfortable at the thought of hell, the thought of people suffering for eternity. It still to this day makes me feel uncomfortable to think about. And so as we were getting ready for this series, and I had an opportunity to pick what it is that I wanted to teach on, I thought, well, this makes me uncomfortable. It's probably uncomfortable to a lot of us in the room. Because maybe you grew up in a church or you came to Christ in a setting that sort of talked about hell like that, like the nightmare. And it was really a fear-based tactic to kind of drive you into the arms of Jesus. Maybe you saw some kind of wild and crazy depictions of hell. And I think for some of us on staff, might I'll speak for myself, that that kind of way of talking about Jesus and talking about hell has maybe made me at least swing the pendulum too far the other way. Where I don't really like talking about hell. Like if you come to our services and you've been attending for some time, you don't often hear somebody stand up here and bang a pulpit and tell people they're going to hell. But because of that, maybe abuse or maybe uh unhelpful way of talking about that fear tactic, sometimes again, that's causes to swing too far the other way. And scripture really does speak quite a bit about hell. And so we need to understand rightly what scripture teaches about hell, because if not, we will listen to other voices or other uh, I guess, configurations or or distortions of the biblical teaching about hell. So that's what we're gonna be spending our time together in uh today. And so if you have a Bible, you know, you can open your Bibles up, you can follow along with the notes on the uh UVersion app. Before we dive in, I want to give just one caveat, which is this that when we speak about hell, we should never do so flippantly or cavalierly. We should never take delight in the thought of other people going to hell. So I teach on this not out of a sense of delight or joy or vengeance or any of that, but that scripture really does speak clearly about hell, and so we need to think biblically about it as well. So let me begin by summarizing, I think, the storyline of the Bible and where hell fits into that storyline. So the Bible begins depicting God creating all things good, this world and human beings, good, made in his image, made to rule alongside him and live with him forever. And God's intention was to give humanity uh eternal life to live with him forever. The first humans, Adam and Eve, they disobeyed God, and that plunged the world into sin and chaos and death. And so after Adam and Eve, all of us are subject to death and eternal separation from God if we uh disobey him, which we all do. God enacts a rescue plan them through the sky, Abraham and his family, and that rescue plan culminates in the person of Jesus. God himself becoming human, living the life that we can never live, dying the death that we deserve to die, so that if we believe in him, we will not face God's judgment, but we'll have eternal life. Because the Bible depicts the fact that one day God is going to make things right. He's gonna bring about judgment, he'll do away with wickedness and evil and remove it from his good creation. For those who believe in Jesus, we will join him in a new creation for eternity. For those who oppose God and oppose Jesus and reject his offer of salvation, they are part of the problem that God needs to solve in putting things to right. And so they will be removed from his good creation and cast into hell. And again, that idea of God's judgment, especially an eternal judgment, it makes us feel uncomfortable. So, because of that, people have modified the doctrine of hell in a couple ways. So I want to show you three different positions that you might hear when it comes to this doctrine of hell. The first two, I believe, are distortions of the clear teaching of the Bible. So the first one is this, it's called universalism. Universalism. And universalism is the idea that eventually everyone will be saved. There will be no one, uh, if you go a million years into the future, who is not reconciled to God. Sometimes this is called universal reconciliation or post-mortem salvation. The idea that people can be saved even after they die. If you were paying attention in the early 2010s, you maybe uh were familiar with Rob Bell and his book, Love Winds, that began to raise questions about the doctrine of hell and suggest that potentially people could be saved after death. The Shack, which was a popular book at the time, sort of leaned in a universalist direction. And I would say if you're on YouTube or podcasts and you're hearing anyone who calls himself an ex-evangelical or is maybe deconstructing their faith, a lot of times it begins with this kind of understanding of hell, that maybe hell doesn't last very long and eventually everyone is reconciled to God. So that's the first, I think, distortion. The second is called annihilationism. Annihilationism comes from the word annihilate, destroy. And this is the idea that those who die apart from Christ will cease to exist. Sometimes also called conditional immortality. The idea that living and existing forever is not something everyone gets, it's only for those who are saved. Those who are not saved just cease to exist, maybe after a time of punishment. This view is held by Seventh-day Adventists. So if you know Seventh-day Adventists, this is the teaching of there, the official teaching of the church there. Jehovah's Witnesses would also hold to this, and I would say a growing number of evangelicals, so-called evangelicals, are gravitating towards annihilationism. But I think both of those are distortions of what the scripture teaches. Instead, what our church holds to in our statement of faith, and our members and our staff would hold to this, this teaching of eternal conscious punishment. That those who die apart from Christ will suffer for eternity in hell. It's the idea that hell is never ending, that those in hell are aware of what's happening to them, and that hell is the just consequence for their sin and rebellion against God. Now, hell is a real place, it's not a figment of the imagination, it's not merely a mental state, but unlike later Christian writing about hell, like say in Dante's Inferno or other maybe cartoonish depictions of hell, the Bible actually gives us precious little description of what it is like. Instead, what we have in Scripture are images that are give us a sense of hell. And I believe they are images that are, you know, uh symbolic in a sense, but they're depicting real realities through these images. So I want to share with you the three main images uh for hell in the Bible. And again, these are in the notes on the app as well. The first main image for hell is that of destruction. We see a language of perishing or being destroyed or dying or being ruined. This is a common, very common theme in the scriptures. You might think of uh verse like Psalm 1, verse 6. It says this the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. Or if you're familiar with a very popular Bible verse, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. Doesn't say those who don't believe in him shall not suffer in hell for eternity. It simply says those, you know, they will not perish. So you see that language of perishing or dying. Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. Or we have in 2 Peter chapter 3, verse 7, it says by the same word, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. So again, that has led some people to go towards the annihilationist route. Oh, well, the wicked are simply destroyed, they cease to exist. But if you think about how we use the language of destruction in our day, you'll see that that is not necessarily what destruction communicates. Think about this. If there's a house fire and the entire house burns to the ground, we might say that that house was destroyed. It was utterly lost, completely destroyed. We don't mean that the atoms that the house was composed of ceased to exist, that they disappeared out of existence. What we mean instead is that it is now reduced to charred ashes. And for all intents and purposes, it no longer exists as a house. It is now ruined beyond all repair and unusable. I think something similar is going on in the language about destruction in the Bible. The idea is that God is the ultimate source of life, of flourishing, of abundance, and his original design is that we would live in communion with him forever, imaging him, flourishing, thriving. And when we rebel against him, we cut ourselves off from the very source of life. So when Scripture says that God destroys the wicked, often it's talking about the physical plane, especially in the Old Testament, simply that those who are wicked, they rebel against God and they die. But especially in the New Testament, the concept of destruction or perishing usually refers to eschatological judgment or end times judgment. And that's how we should think about hell as destruction. Those who die apart from Christ are cut off from God's life, ruined and corrupted to the point that they no longer image God as they ought to.

unknown 12:20

C.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

S. Lewis, famous Christian writer, was very big into this notion of character formation, the kinds of kind of person you are in this life, you're continually becoming a more heavenly creature or a more hellish creature. That's his language. And so he said that he thought that continues on into eternity. And Tim Keller, in a book called Reasons for God or The Reason for God, he's kind of riffing off of Lewis, and he's talking about hell, and he says this. He says, even in this life, we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now I ask the question: what if, when we die, we don't end, but spiritually our life extends on into eternity? Hell then is the trajectory of a soul living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever. In short, hell is simply one's freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity. I think this is a helpful way of thinking about hell as destruction. And that's the first image we see in the scriptures. The second main image we see for hell in scripture is that of torment. It's that of torment. So you'll see images of fire, of the lake of fire, burning sulfur, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. One of the most significant passages in the New Testament for our understanding of hell, I believe, comes from Matthew chapter 25, verses 41 to 46. I want you to see how Jesus himself talked about this final judgment for the wicked. He says, This, he's referring to the final day of judgment. He says, Then he that is God will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not invite me in. I needed clothes and you did not clothe me. I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. They will also answer, Lord, when do we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison and did not help you? He will reply, Truly I tell you, whenever you did not do, whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me. Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. So we can see that Jesus refers to an eternal fire, and then at the end of the passage he says, the wicked will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. So whatever eternal life is, never-ending life with God, that is parallel to eternal punishment. It's an ongoing punishment that lasts forever. Jesus in Matthew 13, unpacking the parable of the weeds, can also refer to hell this way, verses 40 to 43 of chapter 13. As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the sun at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like sun in the kingdom of their father. Whoever has ears, let them hear. So we see hell described as a blazing furnace, and those there are described as having weeping and gnashing of teeth, weeping because it's so terrible, and then you see gnashing of teeth. And for a long time I thought gnashing of teeth, that's just communicating agony. That's like grinding their teeth and in pain. But as they did some more research, you realize that that language, when it shows up in the Old Testament, is actually more of a language of anger, of bitterness, of resentment. That like a conquered king would be like gnashing their teeth at the king who had conquered them. And so I think it's actually communicating that those in hell are they hate God, they're angry at God, they're bitter, they're resentful, and that they continue to be in sin even in hell. If you were to read the probably the longest parable that Jesus tells dealing with hell, Luke chapter 18, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, you see, even there the rich man in hell depicted as kind of wanting to boss Abraham around and still being sort of self-righteous. Which, by the way, helps me at least understand why hell is eternal. It's ongoing. It seems unjust for a person to be punished for, say, 80 years of sin and rebellion against God, punished for an infinite amount of time, eternity? That doesn't seem just. But what if in hell people just continue to rebel against God? Every single moment, every millisecond, they are in rebellion and idolatry and selfishness and greed and anger and hate. Then it would make sense for hell to continue on, existing on into eternity. We see later language of lake of fire, we see that in Revelation, and again, fire comes up over and over again in depicting hell. I think fire is a powerful image for a few reasons. One, fire is a good thing most of the time. The fire produces heat, it produces light, we can cook food over fire. So fire is a good thing, and yet, fire, if you are exposed to it without the proper protection, without with the proper context, fire is damaging. It is it's painful. And in scripture, if you were to trace kind of a symbolism of fire, most often fire depicts the presence of God Himself. God is a consuming fire. And so I believe there's something to be communicated here about God's very presence that for those who do not embrace his lordship and worship him, they experience not his presence of blessing, but his judicial presence, the burning fire of his holiness, condemning and punishing. And while Dante's inferno and more cartoonish depictions of hell took the symbolism, I think, too literalistically, it is metaphorical language, but it is describing something real. So what will hell be like it will be like being on fire. It will be psychological and physical torment. It will be agonizing. This is the second main image for hell in the Bible. So we get destruction, we get torment, and then finally we get the image of exile or banishment from God's presence. Sometimes you'll see the language of outer darkness. Now you see why these are images, because on the one hand, there's a picture of God's presence, punishing, condemning, but also hell can be depicted as the absence of God's presence. Remember, God is omnipresent, he's everywhere. And so it's not that he's not present in hell, but hell can be described as the absence of his, you know, blessing, the presence of his blessing or his covenantal presence communicated in Scripture. So we see Jesus Himself describe the fate of the wicked as being outside or in the darkness. This comes from Matthew chapter 8, verse 12. It says, he's talking about, again, summarizing a parable and teaching. He says, the subjects of the kingdom, those are Jewish people who reject him as the Messiah, they'll be thrown outside into the darkness, where they'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth. If you're in the book of Revelation, the end of it, chapters 21 and 22, depict this amazing new creation that God will bring about when Jesus returns, the restoration of Eden. It's like my favorite chapters in the Bible. And then we get to the end of chapter 22, and we read this. The new creation is depicted as a city, and the wicked are outside. Verse 14 says, The blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs who practice mag those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. And then finally, I think, in a couple verses that really draw a lot of these themes together, 2 Thessalonians chapter 1, verses 8 and 9, Paul writes this. He says, He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might. So it describes them as being shut out from the presence of the Lord. Now, Jenny and I have three little kiddos. They're getting bigger every year. But when they were especially little, um, I would try and do my part in holding them and you know, rocking them and singing to them and all that sort of stuff. But what I noticed is that in the arms of their mom, they were certainly comforted. And sometimes mom has to go and and do something, she has to leave, go to work, cook, whatever it is, go to the bathroom. You know, mom's how it is. And she would like hand me one of our children, and immediately they would burst into tears. Or if mom had to leave to go grocery shopping or something, be like, mommy! You know, they'd like claw at the door, mommy, don't leave us. I'm sitting there being like, what give? You know, my chop liver here. But clearly, you know, her presence was a blessing to them, and her absence, just the removal of her presence, was experienced as a curse to them. And I think that's how we're supposed to think about this image of hell, as exile. God's presence is the very source of life itself and joy. But for those who reject Jesus, they will not experience that blessed presence for eternity. They will be, in a sense, removed from his face of blessing. Just as Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, just as Israel was exiled from the promised land, so those who reject Jesus will face an eternal exile outside the new creation, cut off from the presence of God. So these are the three main images for hell and scripture. And I I recognize that all this raises tons of questions. Raises questions about who goes to hell and what does a person need to know in order to be saved? All those kinds of things. There's big, gigantic questions that get raised when we talk about hell. But I want to address maybe the most common question that will come up when people find out about or learn about the doctrine of hell. It's this it's how can a loving God send people to hell for eternity? How do I hold those two things together? God is love, the Bible says that. And God sends people to hell for eternity. It just doesn't seem to compute. And I would say if you're wrestling with that question, first of all, if you came to me and you you wanted to talk about that, I would not immediately launch into a sermon, okay? There would be a dialogue, a question, okay, what do you mean by that? Let's talk more about that. I'd ask follow-up questions. Where's that coming from? Who are you thinking of? A lot of time, it's because we're thinking about people that we love. And so after some dialogue, I would want to offer a couple possible responses. And the first one reminds me a little bit of what a teacher, a friend of mine, said. She uh was near the end of the semester, and one of her students came to her and said, What gives? Why are you so mean? Why are you being so mean to me and so unfair? Why are you failing me in this class? Don't you know that I'm gonna have to repeat this class and this is gonna hurt my GPA and this is gonna make it so I can't play in the sports team, you know, all that sort of stuff. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you why are you being so mean? And she responded to this student, I'm not failing you. I give you every opportunity to retake the tests. You chose not to turn the assignments in on time, you chose not to come to my office for help, even though I offered it. I'm not failing you. You are choosing to fail my class. And I think there's a similar answer when it comes to this question. Why does God send people to hell? Well, in a sense, God does not send people to hell. We are all headed towards hell because of our sin, because of our rebellion against God. And he offers us a way out. He offers us rescue from the destination we are headed towards. More than that, he offers us his love, a relationship with him, union with Christ, transformation into the kinds of humans we know we ought to be, and eternal life with him forever in a new creation. That's what's on offer. But we have to choose. You have to choose. Do you want that or do you not? How can a loving God send people to hell in a sense we send ourselves to hell? The second, maybe, response or way to think about that is the question is really pitting two characteristics or two attributes of God against one another. Like how, if God's loving, how can he also be just? How can he punish people in hell? And we shouldn't do that. God always acts consistently within his character. He is always utterly loving and utterly holy and utterly just. So God is love and is just. He says, there are only two kinds of people. Those who say, Thy will be done to God, or to those, or those to whom God says in the end, thy will be done. All that are in hell, choose it. He says, ultimately, if you say, God, I want to do what I want to do, I want to be my own boss, I want to live my life my own way, God will at the end of the day say, Okay, if that is what you want, then that is what you will get for eternity. And so, in a sense, that is loving of God to honor our choices and say, if that is what you want, I will let you have it. So, how do we respond? There's a heavy message, I get it, I'm uncomfortable, I'm sweating, maybe you're uncomfortable. A couple thoughts. One is if you're here and you claim to be a follower of Jesus, I think the response is to humble ourselves. That if thinking about the doctrine of hell makes you proud or arrogant or judgmental or looking at other people, and you decide you think you know exactly where everyone is going, and there's a sense of pride that wells up within you, then I would say you have not wrestled deeply enough with the doctrine of hell. It should drive us to our knees to say, God, I deserve, I deserve hell. And it is only because of your grace, it's only because of your mercy that I can stand before you innocent in Christ because of what he has done. It should drive us to our knees in humility. And it should cause us to examine our hearts. So if you're you say you're a follower of Jesus, but there's no evidence in your life that you really are genuinely a follower of him, it should cause you to go back and say, man, am I really serious about this? Am I really truly following him? Have I accepted him as my Lord, as my Savior, and to examine our hearts? The consequences are serious if we're playing around with church, if we're playing around with God. So that's the first response. The second is that we should tell others about Jesus. That I if I can just confess for a minute, I probably am guilty too often of knowing people who don't know Jesus and kind of having this attitude in my heart of being like, uh, they'll probably be fine in the end, you know? Like, uh it's not really worth me to get uncomfortable or to say something and you know start that conversation or whatever. I don't want to ruin this friendship, I don't want to like be a weird neighbor now for the, you know, we're gonna live here for a while, I don't want to make enemies, you know? And be like, they're probably gonna be fine in the end. And while there's some hint of truth in that, like God's God's big, God can do stuff apart from us. Man, if we care about people deeply and they're headed to hell, then we should share about Jesus with them. Amen? Amen. So it should, amen. Yeah, absolutely. So it should drive us, it should drive us to be active in sharing our faith with those we know don't know Jesus. Share more boldly. So we need to humble ourselves, we need to be sharing Jesus. And then finally, probably the most obvious is that if you're here today and you are not yet a follower of Jesus, then the response from you is to recognize where you're headed. That this is this is serious business we're talking about. This is not merely about, you know, whether or not you have a good life here and you have blessing in your life or anything like that. This is about where you will spend eternity. And so I want to I want to give you just a minute in a second, I'm gonna have the worship team come on up, and I just want to give you a minute to reflect on where your heart is. That each and every one of us are headed towards hell, but there is a way out that God loves you, that he sent his son Jesus again to live the life that you can never live, to die the death that you deserve to die. That on the cross, Jesus took upon himself the destruction that we deserve, the death that we deserve. On the cross, he faced the torment, the wrath of God that we deserve for our sins. On the cross, he cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He felt abandoned by God, felt exiled from his presence, took that on himself so that he can offer us eternal life. So if you trust in Jesus, you will never have to fear any of that. He's waiting for you, he loves you. And I want to give you a chance to respond to him this morning. So would you bow your heads with me? I'm not gonna ask you to stand up, I'm not gonna ask you to raise your hand, but I want you to search your heart. And if you have never said yes to Jesus, I want to give you the chance to talk to him right now. You just go ahead and say, God, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for how I've sinned against you. I've broken your commandments, I've broken your heart. I've lived for myself, I've hurt others. I turn from that now and I turn to you. I thank you for Jesus, for his death on the cross, for his resurrection. I turn my life over to you. Would you forgive me? Would you give me your Holy Spirit to come into my life, transform me from the inside out? I want a relationship with you now and for eternity. If that's you this morning and you have never before said yes to Jesus, but today you've made him your Lord and your Savior. Please don't leave without telling someone. We want to pray with you, we want to walk beside you and teach you what it looks like to follow him. Let me pray for my brothers and sisters and Father. Would you humble our hearts? Would you remind us of how desperate our situation is apart from you? Would you deepen our gratitude for your grace and your mercy? And would you embolden us to share your love with others? God, I confess I am such a coward sometimes. And so, would you give us courage to share you with others? Now, as we sing about Jesus and how he is our only hope, would you fill our hearts with joy and gladness at the salvation we have in Christ? We pray in Jesus' name. Can everybody say? Amen.