My journey to hell, and why eternal conscious torment is not true. Part 1.

I can’t begin discussing hell with anyone, until I share with them what my hell on earth was like for decades.

I said the sinner’s prayer in a Baptist church at age nine. I was almost 10. I was raised in a Calvinist, Independent, Fundamental, Baptist church (IFB). I went to Bob Jones University at age 18 to prepare to be a missionary.

Money ran out a year before graduation. So marriage and three kids later, I became an insurance agent. It was that or sell used cars. Eventually, we’d go on to have eight kids.

During the decades that followed, I served in leadership at an IFB church, preached as pulpit supply, and led small groups. After our oldest children had left home, we became “kinder, gentler fundamentalists” aka… evangelicals, where we stayed until 2018.

That’s what it looked like on the surface. My “Christian Resume.”

But here’s the real truth:

Because of a childhood where I had to grow up way too soon, a firstborn with too much I felt I had to carry, I became a gambler. Not at the slots, and not at the tables. But in real-life business ventures. I had to control *everything* in life, and I couldn’t do that working for someone else. I won, lost, and drew. Never quite making the big time. But I always went back to it. In 1998, at 40 years old, I lost a 1.4 million dollar a year business. I was $400,000 in debt, and my employees did not receive their final paycheck. I lost literally everything.

Five years later, after swearing I’d never start another business, I started one again.

Through all these decades, I grew more angry each year. I lived in an inner hell of fear, stress, rage, and depression. Everything in life became extremes of winning or losing, friend or foe. I was harsh to my kids, and cruel to my enemies. Distant to my wife. You can read more about my story below:

https://atrestinhim.com/2022/07/15/my-story-2/

My hell was self-created, but it was no less real. I begged God to die, and cursed him every day I lived.

My decades of religion had always created for me an emotional picture of “God” and “Jesus” as somehow not the same… with much more separation than good trinitarian theology would affirm. But it was the emotional reality in which I operated.

God was distant and hard to please. His default, to me, was slightly annoyed with me. And that quickly changed to angry with me every time I sinned. Which over the years was more and more every day.

Jesus was my “formula” to get to heaven. The solution. The one who balanced the books on the cross for me. He took the hit for me, the punishment I felt I deserved, so God could tolerate me and let me into heaven.

No one taught it to me this way. But I’ve learned that I’m far from alone feeling some version of this.

Above and beneath all of this was fear of hell? Was I really saved? How could I be?

Heaven Came Down

All that changed in June, 2011.

I met the living God for the first time in a 12 week small group for emotionally broken people. I didn’t expect to meet God. I entered the group with my arms crossed, daring anyone to fix the unfixable.

I was 53 years old.

The God I met had Jesus’ face. He was love. He had loved me when I was a baby, and innocent. And his love for me had never changed. Not once. Not even when I was cruel to others. Not even when I had cursed him.

I knew all about the God I had been taught from the pulpit. But now God entered my soul. He didn’t just “forgive my sins.” That forgiveness had always been there. Offered non-stop unconditionally. I had “asked for forgiveness” thousands of times. It felt like it was a sham to keep asking.

Something different happened instead.

I was rescued.

Rescued from sin, which I hated. Rescued from shame, which clung to me. Rescued from the living death that I had existed in. Rescued from my earthly hell.

As I began to let God fill me with love, everything changed. I loved and forgave myself. I forgave everyone I’d ever held a grudge against. My fear was gone. I was at rest. My wife got a new husband. My kids got a new dad.

What I learned

I learned, experientially, from the loving Spirit of God, that “hell” for me was living with walls all around me. With God and others not allowed in.

I learned that God had never turned his back on me. I was his lost child, for whom he would never stop trying to free from “hell.”

I learned that God was a redeeming God, no matter how far gone someone was. I learned his heart. Intimately. And in that learning, I learned in my heart, from the Teacher, that he would never abandon anyone. Ever. It just wasn’t who he is.

It took me years before I would dare to start exploring what that meant. Because daring to explore that teaching from the Spirit of God, meant I was at risk for being expelled from the only community I had known since age 10. My whole identity was “Fundamentalist/Evangelical.”

Believing that God would never stop trying to rescue everyone, and would not let physical death stop his desire to save *all* was a deal-killing belief in my religious culture. Believing what the Spirit was teaching me meant being put outside the camp.

So I sat in quiet cognitive dissonance for years. But the dissonance grew louder, and eventually made me have to study, so my brain could catch up to what my heart knew was true.

The early path

First, I reexamined the only verse used to teach that a person has only *this life* to receive Christ:

And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,

Hebrews 9:27 (ESV)

This verse never says that at the judgment one is not allowed to receive Christ. It just doesn’t say that, no matter how hard one works to make it say that. This gave me some hope and a small amount of comfort. A “second chance” after death was the hope of C.S. Lewis. In that view, God is at least “fair.” As Lewis believed, “the door to hell is locked from the inside.”

Next, I dared to read the best seller, Love Wins, by Rob Bell. It was, as promised by evangelical gatekeepers, a fluff book. It lacked any scholarly depth.

But it gave me words for the unspoken questions I’d had for years.

Then I explored “annihilationism” which is the belief that God annihilates the “unsaved” after the judgment. In other words, the atheist gets his wish. Non-consciousness. This view has the advantage of being barely acceptable in the evangelical world, thanks to the theologian John Stott. (Though one would not be able to sign doctrinal statements in most churches.) But it’s not very good news for all those billions of people in history who never heard about Jesus.

Finally, I discovered the website, tentmaker.org. There I learned:

• Many of the early church fathers taught universalism. They referred to it as “universal reconciliation.”
• They taught that salvation was through Christ alone, and over the ages “aion” God’s metaphorical and redemptive “fire” would purge unbelief in every last unbeliever, opening the door for the sinner to receive Christ’s love. (Maybe not unlike my experience in that small group, which was hard and painful, but redemptive. Life-giving.)
• Many Christians through the years have believed this, including the famous Scottish author and preacher George MacDonald, and turn of the 20th century missionary and author Hannah Hurnard (Hinds Feet on High Places).
• Many modern day theologians, orthodox theologians… deep thinkers with degrees… have published defenses on universalism. They are silenced within the walls of evangelicalism. But as I would discover… they have arguments defending the character of God. Biblical arguments. Arguments I found both unassailable, but also singing in harmony with the song of Good News that the Spirit had already taught me.

I’ll end Part 1 with these questions:

• Does the thought of billions of people, including friends and family, burning alive forever disturb you? At all?
• Do you have pity or compassion on those who will burn forever? If so, are you more compassionate than God? How does that work?
• If Jesus told us to “love our enemy” so that we could be “perfect” like his Father in heaven is perfect… does that come with an off-switch? At death, in that instant, does God go from Love to Hate? And does that mean you have to do the same? To your former friends? Maybe your own family? That sweet old lady at Walmart who rings up your groceries each week?
• Will God have to purge your memory of everyone you cared for here on earth, but is now burning in hell, so you can survive the horror of knowing they are being tortured forever? If God purges your memory… are you even you anymore?

Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) is unworthy of God. It is an ugly and incomprehensible thought. We all know that deep down inside. We really do.

(If you’re reading this, and ECT doesn’t disturb you at some deep compassionate level, don’t bother commenting. This post is exclusively for those who “wish it weren’t so.” I still remember the old bumper sticker… “Mean People Suck.” If you’re a mean people, go argue on another blog. This place is for people who have heard the whisper of God and hope that God’s last word is, “And they all lived happily ever after.”)

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE BELOW, so you can get Part 2 in your email. That’s where I’ll get into the meat of the subject. It’s where you’ll learn that your brain, and your love of the Bible, can be reconciled with the whisper of God that says “I love you” to every single last one of His image-bearers.