People avoid the subject of hell because they find it unbearable. Jesus did not avoid it. He spoke about hell more than anyone else in Scripture, and He used the plainest word available to Him. The Greek word translated “hell” in the Gospels is Gehenna, the name of a real valley on the edge of Jerusalem where Israel’s worst kings burned their own children in sacrifice to the god Molech (2 Kings 23:10; 2 Chronicles 33:6). Jeremiah called it the Valley of Slaughter (Jeremiah 7:32). That word appears twelve times in the New Testament. Eleven of those twelve times, it is Jesus speaking.

C. S. Lewis wished the doctrine were not true and said so in print. There is no teaching, he wrote in The Problem of Pain, “which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this.” Then he explained why he could not remove it: Scripture supports it fully, the words of Christ support it, the church has always held it, and reason offered him no way out. Wishing a doctrine away is not the same as answering it.

Hell was not built for people. Jesus said it was prepared for the devil.

Matthew 25:41 (NKJV)

Then He will also say to those on the left hand, “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

That sentence settles two things at once. Hell exists because creatures rebelled against their Maker and He did not overlook it. And hell is not the devil’s kingdom. John saw him “cast into the lake of fire and brimstone… tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:10). He is a prisoner there, not a warden. Popular pictures give us a red figure with a pitchfork running the place. Scripture gives us the reverse. Jesus told His disciples to fear “Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28), and that is not Satan. John MacArthur said it plainly: God is hell’s jailer, and there is no key.

Most people also picture hell as the place where God is not. That is backwards. Hell is separation from God’s gracious presence.

2 Thessalonians 1:9 (NKJV)

These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,

What is lost there is God’s kindness. Every person alive today is receiving something from God’s hand: daylight, food, sleep, company, the ability to think a thought. Even the most wretched life on earth is being held up by mercy the sufferer never asked for. In hell that supply is withdrawn entirely. But withdrawn kindness is not an absent God. There is nowhere in creation where God is not.

Psalm 139:7–8 (NKJV)

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.

R. C. Sproul pressed this point for most of his ministry, and it is the correction most readers need. The terror of hell is not that God is missing. It is that He is present, and present as Judge. The lost are not merely absent from God; they are under His just judgment. Hell is what holiness does to unrepented sin.

If God is there, why does no one in hell turn to Him? Because no one there wants to. Sproul noticed that Scripture attaches the gnashing of teeth to rage as much as to pain: when Stephen preached, his hearers “gnashed at him with their teeth” (Acts 7:54). A man does not soften in hell. He arrives hating God and goes on hating Him. If the people in that place could vote one person out of it, they would vote out God.

His wrath there is not temper. God does not lose control and He does not change. His wrath is His settled opposition to evil, and it falls in exact measure. Jesus said the servant who knew his master’s will and disobeyed would be beaten with many stripes, and the one who did not know with few (Luke 12:47–48). Hell is graded. Nothing in it is cruel, and nothing in it is more than deserved.

The commonest way of softening all this is to suggest that it ends — that God eventually snuffs the lost out of existence, or that the fire burns itself out. Jesus shut that door in a single sentence.

Matthew 25:46 (NKJV)

And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

The NKJV gives two English words there, “everlasting” and “eternal,” but one Greek word stands behind both: aiōnios. Jesus used the same word for the punishment and for the life. MacArthur’s argument from this verse is the simplest there is. If that word does not mean forever when it describes hell, it does not mean forever when it describes heaven either, and the same word is used of God Himself. Shorten hell and you have shortened heaven, and you have shortened God.

Readers always want to know whether the fire is literal. Jesus described hell as unquenchable fire. He also called it outer darkness, the place where the worm does not die (Mark 9:48), and where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Those pictures will not sit together. Fire gives light and darkness is the absence of light, so at least some of this is picture rather than photograph.

Most people relax when they hear that. It is the wrong instinct. Jesus reached for burning, for blackness, for a body being eaten and never finished, for weeping that never stops. He took the worst things a person can imagine and used them as the nearest words available. A picture in Scripture never overstates what it points to; it falls short of it. If fire was the closest Jesus could come, the reality is not gentler than fire.

Hell is an eternal place of suffering where Satan, his demons, and unrepentant sinners endure the righteous wrath of God.

The Bible does not leave that sentence standing on its own.

Romans 6:23 (NKJV)

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Wages are earned. A gift is not. God still commands all men everywhere to repent and to trust His Son (Acts 17:30), and to everyone who does, Jesus made one promise: “the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out” (John 6:37).