God’s Love, Hell and Humanity: A Few Thoughts on the Purity and Uniqueness of God’s Love by Don Steve

God’s Love, Hell and Humanity: A Few Thoughts on the Purity and
Uniqueness of God’s Love

by Don Steve


(I realize that not all my brothers and sisters in Christ will agree with
my convictions. I wrote the following with respect for all and with no
expected response. God is free to convict anyone who may read of truth
or error. Our security is in a Person not a position.)

Scripture refers to God’s love as agape love. God’s love is unique. In
holiness and purity it stands far above the love of man. The activity of
agape love is opposed by the selfish deceit of the enemy of souls. Agape
love, due to its holy purity and divine nature, is often misunderstood.
The Bible teaches that God is love and that all of His ways are founded
upon love. I John 4:8 (NIV) states, “Whoever does not love does not
know God because God is love.” The word love in this passage is
specifically referring to the God type of love called agape love. An
individual is able to perceive agape love only because the Spirit of God
has chosen to reveal the nature of agape love through the uniform
witness of the Word. Bottom line is that God’s love is still a mystery
regardless of how much the Spirit reveals the love of God! We can’t
plumb the depths of His love or measure its bounds any more than Job
could measure the foundation of the earth and find personal value as a
consultant to its maker! Our consolation in this dilemma is that we are
not designed to comprehend God’s love in its totality. We are designed
to know it intimately by faith as we relate to God. Love’s target is the
heart of man. The heart is far more than just the mind.

A tendency of human beings is to mix our perceptions of God with Spirit
revealed truth about God. Because God’s ways are higher than our own,
the result is a very distorted picture of God—an image drawn by an
aspiring artist suffering from spiritual vertigo who can’t tell the bottom
of the canvas from the top! Theologians call this anthropomorphic
error. It is making God in the image of man. Romans 1:22-3 (NASB)
explains “Professing to be wise, they [mankind] became fools and
exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form
of corruptible man.” No one is immune to this tendency. The solution is
radical dependence upon the God who delights to reveal Himself by the
authority of scripture.

One of God’s truths under anthropomorphic assault today is the Biblical
doctrine of a literal hell. Arguments against a literal hell have their
roots in philosophical beliefs about the nature of God and His love.
One such belief is the age-old supposition that a loving God could not
have created a literal hell and could not tolerate any individuals ending
up in the torment of such a place. Many scriptures speak of a literal
hell. II Thessalonians 1:8-9 and Revelation 20:14-15 are two passages
that speak explicitly of the reality and finality of a literal hell. In an
attempt to substantiate teaching to the contrary a quantum shift is made
away from orthodox methods of Biblical interpretation to a subjective
figurative interpretation of scripture. In doing so individuals abandon
the common sense assumption that God meant to communicate specific
truth through the writing of scripture. If God meant what He said He had
to use language in the literal sense to communicate.

One Bible scholar compared the recent trend towards figurative
symbolic Biblical interpretation to ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s. I
will expound upon his thoughts a bit: Can you imagine going up to the
counter placing your order for a Big Mac and hearing the individual at
the register yell back to the grill, “He said he wants a Fillet-o-Fish!” “Hey
wait a minute,” you would protest, “that’s not what I said!” Your jaw
would drop even more if the individual taking your order said, “Yeah,
but that’s what you meant.” You used language in its normal literal
sense to communicate. The individual hearing your words chose to
interject subjective meaning and was forced to deconstruct your literal
words! One can imagine how the conversation may have continued:
(Team member)”Yeah, but when you said ‘Big Mac,’ I knew you really
meant a Filet-O-Fish because our filets are made of only the finest
extra-large mackerel fresh from the ocean!” Unless the one wearing
the Golden Arches on their name tag was willing to acknowledge the
literal meaning of your words, the conversation would either be useless,
endless, or abruptly ended.

The fishy thoughts of the McDonald’s team member illustrate why the
literal, grammatical, historical approach to Bible study is so important.
We must interpret the Bible literally unless the literal meaning gives
validity to a symbolic expression as implied by the context. To abandon
the literal meaning of Scripture is to open the door to endless types of
useless heretical interpretations of God’s word. One’s own thoughts
then supersede those of God. “Oh, did God say a lake of fire? What he
really meant was…(cue the philosophy of man).”

Romans 1:21-22 tell us that the speculative “wisdom” of man is both
futile and foolish. The futile wisdom of man caves in on itself when
exposed by the light of God’s truth. The philosophical supposition that a
literal hell could not be a reality because God is love cannot stand under
scrutiny.

In spite of contrary erroneous assumption, the Biblical truths of a literal
heaven and a literal hell are totally congruent with each other. They are
as compatible as the Biblical truths of life and death. No Bible scholar
with any credibility would attempt to argue that death is symbolic.
Death is self-evident. We are faced with the reality of death each day
in many ways. Death finds its essence in its relationship to the nature
of life. Death stands in opposition to life. Death is the polar opposite
of life. But it would not be correct to say that death is inconsistent or
incongruent with the fact of, or the existence of, life. In fact, a Biblical
definition of death is that death is the absence of life in the spirit of man
(zoe life or the God type of life to be specific) and degradation of life in
the physical world due to the curse of death. The correlation between
the two is evident in the Genesis account of creation. One the one hand,
Adam and Eve were given the opportunity to eat from the tree of life.
On the other hand, the opposing choice was the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. Partaking of one tree led to life. Partaking of the other
tree led to death. Death was a natural consequence of Adam and Eve’s
choice to forsake life! The fact and presence of death in Eden was totally
consistent with the fact and presence of life. Hell is a component of
death, just as love is a fundamental aspect of the God who is life. The
constitution of death finds its reality in the absence of God’s life and
degradation of existence that results.

In the mind of man, God’s love and hell may seem like polar opposites
and therefore incongruent and incompatible. Nothing could be further
from the truth! Death and hell are the literal reality of rejecting a God
who literally loves you, who literally sent His Son to rescue you from
the concrete facts of sin and death. The fact of sin, hell, and death are as
real as the facts of righteousness and life. Here’s a simple illustration.
If I place a quarter in my pocket, my pocket becomes the container for
that quarter. Turn my pocket inside out and it becomes a dispenser
of the quarter. Containing and dispensing are opposite concepts but
they are congruent with one another due to the physical nature of the
pocket. The wisdom of man, which is foolishness to God, has confused
congruent opposites with incongruence! In order for those who argue
against a literal hell to be consistent they would also have to argue
against a God who loves us literally! The absence of God’s life is death.
If one is literal so is the other. The culmination of death is Biblically
referred to as the Second Death (Rev. 20:14). The Second Death is as
real as the love that held Christ upon the cross. Oh how foolish the
wisdom of man can be, when standing in opposition to the revealed
wisdom of God!

The fact is that any time we attempt to diminish the reality of sin, death
or hell we also attempt to diminish (albeit inadvertently) the work of
Christ on the cross and the love that made redemption possible. May the
nail-scarred hands forever tell of the literal reality of sin, death, and hell
as sure as they tell of God’s love!

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