Hell

Permanent separation from God

Hell is the place where people are who are not a bit sorry for the wrong things which they have thought and said and done; in other words, the place where unrepentant sinners are.  When people sin, they separate themselves from God.  When they are sorry, or repentant, they come back to God again; but otherwise they stay away from God by their own choice.  Just as sin is a state of separation from God, so Hell is that state of separation made permanent, a place where God is unfelt, unseen and unwanted.

That is why it is a place of misery, because in the end there can be no happiness apart from God, for God is the source of all true joy and of all beauty and goodness.  In this life, of course, people who have separated themselves from God by their sins can find plenty of other things to keep them interested or busy or amused.  It may be their work, or the newspaper or the television or the Internet.  But there are no such things as these in the next world.  So the people in Hell are for ever discontented, always trying to find something that will satisfy them, but never succeeding simply because only God can satisfy the true needs of the human soul, and they refuse to have God.  St Augustine summed up our need for God, “You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You”. (1)

So sin is actually its own punishment.  By separating themselves from God, unrepentant sinners also separate themselves from happiness.  The Jews called Hell “Gehenna”, the same name they gave to the valley outside Jerusalem where all the refuse of the city rotted and burned, and which was the most horrible place they knew.  And that is also the name which Jesus himself used.

God does not send people to Hell

But it is very important to understand that God does not send people to Hell.  They go there of their own free-will, simply because they really prefer sin to holiness and themselves to God.  And even God cannot save people against their will when they prefer Hell to Heaven.  God says, “…go away from me” (NRSV, Matthew 7:23) only to those who have already gone away from God because they wanted to.

The pure in heart will see God

For Heaven is where God is seen, and the Blessed Saints, who are there, not only see God but are filled with him like a clear crystal ball is filled with the sunlight – the two cannot be separated.  That is why they are for ever happy, because they love God more than all else besides.  But unrepentant sinners would be more miserable in Heaven than Hell because they have no use for God or for his holiness.  So the soul of an unrepentant sinner would be like a ball of dark glass into which the sunlight could not enter.

Nor could the unrepentant sinner see God, for, as Jesus has told us, it is the pure in heart who will see God (Matthew 5:8).  So when St Paul, or Saul as he was then called, was on his way to Damascus to arrest the Christians there, and Jesus appeared to him, he did not see Jesus.  All he could see was a bright light in the sky (Acts 26:13).  But shortly before St Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned to death because he was a Christian, he saw the heavens opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55,56).