Do Not Pass Go

Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, you accursed people, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;  Matthew 25:41  NASB

Eternal fire – Matthew 25 is essentially a collection of parables about the Kingdom.  The foolish virgins, money given to servants, and the separation of sheep and goats are all parabolic descriptions of aspects of the Kingdom.  And as you know, parables are pointed lessons for maximum impact, not theological treatises.  But non-academic exegetes often ignore this, selecting verses from parables to support theological claims.  Ignoring the context and the genre, they find verses that appear to affirm prior belief commitments.  The article about the reality of Hell written by Terry Watkins (https://www2.gvsu.edu/pontiusd/hell.html) is a good example.  Removing the context and treating the verses literally, Watkins attempts to enlist biblical support for the location of Hell (under the earth, of course), the temperature of Hell, and the eternity of Hell.  His goal is the same as the paintings found on walls of Catholic churches throughout Italy: to scare you into repentance with statements like this:

Your body is now madly thrashing and convulsing from the horrible pain. “Why don’t I die?”, you scream. You begin weeping and gnashing your teeth with the millions. “When will this pain stop?” But you know it will never stop. . .

It’s a good script for a horror movie, but it’s worthless exegesis.  Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that the idea of Hell has been around for at least 2000 years.  Perhaps we should ask why?  The answer is found in the Greek concept of justice.

Most careful exegetes realize that there is almost no information about heaven or hell in the Tanakh.  The few hints that are there do not describe the underworld (She’ol, not Hell) as a place of torment.  At most it is a place of powerlessness and silence.  Descriptions of heaven as a reward for the righteous are even harder to find.  From the perspective of the Hebrew Bible, we live and we die, and what happens afterward is basically unknown.  However, by the time we get to Yeshua’s culture, heaven and hell are clearly associated with reward and punishment, although not like Watkins’ horror movie.  How did this happen?  How did the Jewish religious community embrace a description of the afterlife not found in their Bible?

The Hebrew Bible leaves the believing community with a huge problem.  The wicked are not always punished in this life.  In fact, more often than not they get away with their wickedness.  They don’t suffer, but the righteous often do.  Where is God’s justice?  Where is the fulfillment of the promise in Exodus 34:7 that God will not let the wicked go unpunished?  The answer in the Hebrew Bible seems to be that God will “visit” the iniquity of the wicked on their children.  Of course, we know that this King James language is not the real meaning of pāqad.  Furthermore, the prophets clearly state that children are not held guilty of the sins of their fathers.  So, this generational solution is excluded.  The problem remains unresolved in the Tanakh.

But the Greeks found another solution—reward and punishment in the afterlife.  If the wicked are not punished in this life, and their children do not pay for the sins of the fathers, then there is only one other way to reconcile God’s justice with observable reality: there must be justice in the next world.  Heaven rewards, Hell punishes.  Problem solved.  By the first century this Greek idea was common coinage in religious circles including rabbinic Judaism, so, of course, it was also part of the thinking of Yeshua.  His parables about fire and gnashing teeth are expressions of his contemporary culture.  God’s justice is maintained because there is another life after this one where God corrects the balance scales.  By the way, that’s just about all we can really determine since the descriptions of final justice are parabolic.  The point is not to scare people to repent.  The point is that there is a solution for the problem of justice.  The Great Equalizer is the next life.  By adopting the Greek solution, we can continue to claim that God will fix it in the end.

Nothing more.

Topical Index: Hell, justice, Exodus 34:7, wicked, parable, Matthew 25:41