What is the difference between heaven and hell?
Quick Answer: The difference is not where God is — He is present in both. It is what He is doing there. In heaven His people see His face; in hell the lost beg the mountains to hide them from it. Earth is neither, because here God’s kindness and His restraint of sin are still at work.
The obvious answer is that heaven is where God is and hell is where He is not. Scripture will not allow that answer. There is no corner of creation God has vacated, and He is present in hell as surely as He is present in heaven. The difference between the two places is not where God is. It is what He is doing there, and what you are when you meet Him.
John saw both. Of the redeemed in the city he writes four words: “They shall see His face” (Revelation 22:4). Of that same face on the day of God’s wrath, he writes this.
Revelation 6:15–17 (NKJV)
And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
They are begging a mountain to crush them. Being buried alive is what they would prefer to the sight of God. And the face they cannot bear is the face of the Lamb — the same Jesus who calls sinners to come to Him now. Nothing has changed about Him between those two scenes. What differs is the people looking at Him.
That is not a division between good people and bad people. Scripture’s verdict on the whole race is flat: “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). Nobody in that city walked in on merit. The difference is Christ, and nothing else.
None of this is easy to picture from where you are standing, because nobody alive has experienced either condition. Earth is neither one. Jesus said so in a sentence about the weather.
Matthew 5:45 (NKJV)
that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
The sun does not check who deserves it, and neither does the rain. Every person who wants nothing to do with God is living off His kindness at every moment and receiving it as though it grew on trees. Christians have a name for this: common grace — God’s goodness handed out to people who never asked for it and give Him no credit for it.
His kindness is not the only thing holding this world together. He also holds sin back. Abraham once told a foreign king that Sarah was his sister rather than his wife, and the king, Abimelech, took her into his household to marry her. He never touched her. God told him why, in a dream.
Genesis 20:6 (NKJV)
And God said to him in a dream, “Yes, I know that you did this in the integrity of your heart. For I also withheld you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her.”
Abimelech was a pagan king with no covenant, no law and no interest in the God of Abraham. God stopped him anyway, and then told him to his face who had done the stopping. What looked like a king’s restraint was not the king’s at all.
What God did with one king He does with every king.
Proverbs 21:1 (NKJV)
The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, Like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes.
A king is the one man nobody can overrule. There is no court above him and nobody who can tell him no. Solomon — a king himself — says God turns that man’s heart wherever He wishes. If the one person nobody can steer is steered by God, so is everybody else.
This is why people conclude that hell cannot be all that bad. They are reasoning from the only world they have seen, and that world is being propped up from both sides — kindness nobody earned, and restraint nobody asked for. Take both away and you are not left with a harder version of this life. You are left with hell. Give both without limit or interruption and you are not left with an easier version of this life either. You are left with heaven.
The difference does not begin at the moment of death. The people who will see His face and the people who will beg the mountains to hide them are living in the same street today, under the same sun, held back from their worst by the same hand. Neither of them deserves the sun. What separates them at the end is not that one was better. It is Christ. Come to Him.