When the idea of hell is brought up in our modern world, many scoff, some fear, and others might not even think twice about it.  For thousands of years Hell has been a place that mankind feared above all others.  You definitely didn’t want to go there. Eternal punishment, fire, pain, destruction, darkness… these are just a few of the things that awaited the morally reprobate who wouldn’t mend their ways in this life.  Hell is a place where justice is finally served and that you wanted to avoid at all costs.  People would go to church, get baptized, put money in the offering plate, buy indulgences, and many other things in order to insure that the place of fire and brimstone wouldn’t be their final resting place.

However, here in the 21^st century we have a new phenomenon.  Well, I shouldn’t say new.  This idea has been around for several thousand years as well, but it is just recently becoming more publically accepted. This is the idea that Hell doesn’t really exist, or perhaps it exists, but it surely won’t last forever.  Or, perhaps it will last forever, but people definitely won’t have to stay there forever.  This idea has become popular in the emergent church and has been put into the spotlight by the best-seller Love Wins.  The idea here is that God couldn’t possibly be so harsh as to send people to a place of eternal punishment for committing sins for only 70 or 80 years.  That just doesn’t seem right.

Preachers are now faced with a dilemma.  Do we preach against the Hell the place or the Hell the idea?  Do we preach about how we should fear to go this place and motivate our hearers to follow Christ as the only way to God or do we preach against the idea of Hell, not wanting to offend the more politically correct and tolerant congregations of this millennium?  Is Hell still a picture of God’s wrath juxtaposed with his grace and love shown in heaven or is it an antiquated notion best left with the revival preachers of old?

I would say that we have to come back to the question of whether or not we believe in scripture.  If we believe that scripture is absolute truth and our ultimate authority, then we have to see what it says about Hell.  Culture tempts us to view scripture through the lens of modern thought and the idea of tolerance.  Scripture tells us to trust God and accept what He says, even if it doesn’t make sense or sit comfortably with us.  Hell may not be a comfortable topic, but we must let scripture define what it is and how we should view it, whether we live in 2011 or 1811.  That is what we’ll attempt to examine this Sunday.