No Hell in Four Thousand Years

            Many have struggled with the idea about the teaching that is prevalent in the Protestant world of good-meaning people going to Hell when they really had no chance to hear the gospel preached during their lifetime. These people didn’t know about the Hell that many preach about as part of their gospel message. The gospel of salvation is not about Hell but about redemption from the penalty of sin, which is death. Christ redeemed us from spiritual death by his life of obedience free from sin and paid the penalty of physical death for us by his physical death. Through Christ’s life, death and resurrection, God reconciled mankind to himself (2 Cor. 5:17-19). Now our witness to others should be to tell them of this announcement so they can come to believe that they too have already been reconciled by God and begin experiencing this newness of spiritual life in Christ.

            Adam was warned that if he sinned, he would die that very day (Gen. 2:17), yet he actually lived to be 950 years old (Gen. 5:5). It was a moral, spiritual death that he experienced that day when he sinned. The death God threatened Adam with was in the day he sinned, in this life, not the hereafter. His physical death occurred later when his mortal body gave out since he had been left mortal because he sinned. He was made mortal from the dust or dirt of the earth and was denied access to the tree of life that would have given him eternal life (spiritual life) and eventually immortality. This spiritual death, however, could be recovered. It was not the end for Adam nor was it for anyone else.[1] Eph. 2:4-5 informs us, who are believers, that because of God’s great love for us he made us alive (συνεζωιποίησεν) with Christ even when were dead in transgressions. In 1 Cor. 15:22, Paul uses the same Greek word to say that in Christ all will be made alive (ζωοποιηθήσονται), which is referring to the same “all” who in Adam died spiritually. This is about more than just a literal resurrection but also about a spiritual resurrection in Christ from spiritual death to spiritual life, which can occur in this life when we become believers or in the next age of judgment for unbelievers under Christ’s direction and chastisement necessary to bring them to repentance and faith.

            Here is something else to think about. Adam was not told that if he sinned he would risk being tormented in an everlasting hell-fire. The physical consequences of his sin were laid out to him but not a word about Hell. The penalty for Cain being the first murder was laid out to him, but nothing was mentioned about an ever burning Hell to come after his death. His punishments for murder were all temporal and explained to him. How about the antediluvians? Noah preached and warned them of drowning. He never warned them of a post mortem Hell of endless suffering.[2] Sodom and Gomorrah was about the punishment of a wicked people. They suffered fire and brimstone in this world, but they were not warned of endless punishment to await them at death, and there is no record that they ever experienced it.[3] God gave Moses the Law of commandments, statutes and judgments, but he never warned them of endless suffering in Hell if they failed to live up to these laws. Temporal punishments were handed out for disobedience, not Hell.

            In the Bible we have all of the nations of the earth living without any revelation from God of such a place. Pagans developed their own ideas of some kind of post mortem punishment to satisfy themselves that the wicked would eventually be punished, but they did not get these ideas from the God of the Bible. There is no record of anyone ever hearing a warning of Hell in the four thousand years before Christ. We have to ask ourselves, would the gracious, merciful God of the Bible, who “… has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Ro. 11:32) deliberately withhold the knowledge of the dire consequences of Hell as the ultimate payment for sin? God has only said that the wages or penalty of sin is death, never Hell.

[1] John Wesley Hanson, Bible Proofs Of Universal Salvation: Containing The Principal Passages Of Scripture That Teach The Final Holiness And Happiness Of All Mankind, 10^th ed. (Boston: Universal Publishing House, 1903), 7.

[2] Hanson, 9.

[3] Hanson, 10.