What Happens to Bad People?

I’ve chosen to preach a series around 3 questions that I find I cannot answer with any degree of certainty.
What happens when I Die?
When will the world end?
And what happens to bad people?
These are what we call eschatological questions - questions about the end of all things.
In one respect the end of all things is a bit airy fairy and far removed from the hustle and bustle of daily life, yet ‘end’ also means purpose and as we ask questions about the end of all things in terms of the end of history we are also asking basic questions about the end or purpose of human life. It may be a luxury to contemplate such things but you have the opportunity to do so and therefore direct your own affairs with a sense of purpose and hope.
Today’s question is one that has bothered me for as long as I’ve been a Christian. What happens to bad people? It bothers me because none of the answers that are said to be orthodox satisfy me.
The typical answers relating to the doctrine of hell seem to me to be out of kilter with everything else I’ve come to learn and love about God. Yet on the other hand any answer that suggest that bad people will ultimately get away with their gross and evil deeds is manifestly unjust and immoral.
So what does happen to bad people?
This morning I’m going to provoke your thinking I’m going to introduce a range of answers that have been offered and I’m going to throw some things into the mix that you might not have considered before.
Firstly, the answer to our question What happens to bad people? Has been variously answered and we might put up a continuum of answers with a scale of how tough the punishment gets for bad people beyond the grave.
1. Eternal Torment
2. Eternal Separation
3. Punishment followed by Annihilation
4. Purgatory/Punishment followed by heaven
5. Heaven (universalism)
Before we decide whether any of these is more right than any of the others we need to explore the question a bit more. If we assume that bad people get punished or face some consequence for their sins beyond the grave we need to define what we mean by bad people and here things begin to get a bit complicated. Who deserve to go to hell?
1. Extreme Evil doers; Hitler, Pol Pott, George W Bush?
2. Sinners
3. ‘Unsaved’ sinners
4. Ignorant sinners
5. Faithful Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Humanists
6. People who have failed to do enough good
Which is the correct bible answer?
Some research out of the US is interesting on this.
· When polled about belief in hell of those who believed about 5% of them thought that that was their destiny.
· Some conservative groups believed that between 95-99% of the world’s population were destined to go there.
· A vast majority of people thought that only real bad people went there.
But what did Jesus teach about bad people? Are some people so bad that they are beyond redemption, beyond mercy, beyond hope?
Jesus certainly does warn some people about Hell mostly the religious leaders and I want to come back to that but I want to look at the parables because I think they are most instructive on this issue.
Take the parable of the sheep and he goat.
Jesus brings the nations before him at the end of time to be judge and just as a shepherd divides the sheep and the goats so he divided the nations according to what they have and have not done.
Three point to consider.
1. Sheep and goats were almost indistinguishable and only the trained eye of the shepherd was capable of judging between the two
2. This judgement is about what people have done in terms of looking after the most vulnerable people in society; that is the sole criteria of this judgement.
3. The judgement is practically impossible - Here’s what I mean!
Read through the criteria to be welcomed into your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world
Have you done any or all of these?
· Fed the hungry,
· Given water to the thirsty
· Given Hospitality to a stranger
· Provided clothes for the needy
· Cared for the sick,
· Have you visited anyone in prison?
If you answered yes to all of these you are probably a sheep and if you answered yes to one or more you may be a sheep.
But ask yourself this also have there been times when you have had the opportunity to do any of these things and failed to do so.
Have you ever missed the opportunity to do any of the above?
Maybe Mother Theresa comes close but even she I suspect was not perfect in this regard there would have been times that she failed to do some of these things.
According to the parable that makes Mother Theresa bad, that makes her a goat.
But she is not all bad, she is not all goat and neither are you or I we are part sheep and part goat.
The division of good and bad doesn’t run between one group of good people over here and another group of bad people over there, the division is though the middle of each of us.
The separation which begins at the judgement is one which removes all vestiges of evil and selfishness, of ill motive, of twisted thinking, of unforgiveness, bitterness and deep hurt. I’m of the opinion that this may take some time. I think we may continue to grow and develop as a result of the final judgement. I have a feeling that the ‘punishment’ that we face beyond judgement is the coming terms with ourselves and the working through of issues that are raised – it will be to some extent self-inflicted punishment a little like an athlete punishes their body to bring out the best.
In a moment I will comment on the passages that seem to most directly refer to Hell as a place of eternal punishment and damnation, but first I want to touch on what I think is our psychological need for hell.
When I look at the angry reactions of families who are victims of violent crime or sexual crime or other gross injustice as they confront the perpetrators outside the courthouse or as I see the way activists and legislators agree to get tough on crime building more prisons removing bail and parole calling for the death penalty and so forth I see a society that ‘needs’ to punish bad people. Unfortunately the punishment is all about revenge and vindication it’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It’s about making people pay for their crimes. This idea that crime must be matched by punishment is deeply entrenched in our collective psyche even though in most case it does nothing to prevent reoffending. Punishing criminal makes them tougher, they grow to hate the system with intensity and lose all respect for authority, for property and for life.
Underlying our penal system is a deeply held belief that most if not all bad people are beyond redemption and are deserving of hell. Punishment is seldom viewed as corrective, merely punitive in a way to make the victim feel vindicated, to make society think that some equilibrium has been reached and justice served.
We live in a blame society where if we have someone besides ourselves to blame for our problems then we can feel better about ourselves. We seem to need to have others who are bad people others who are at least worse than ourselves and onto whom we can deflect our own faults. It makes life simpler to divide the world into us and them, the good and the bad, the saved and the damned. I think it is this underlying psychology that influences our interpretation of scripture.
There are a number of scripture passages that are universalist, we have one read to us this morning yet the dominant theme over centuries of Christianity has been to give precedence to those passages which are exclusive and portray bad people or unsaved people as eternally damned. Leading figures in the church including Mega church evangelicals and Pope Benedict still hold to a view of a literal hell. I don’t and I think the church needs to think long and hard about this doctrine.
The doctrine of Hell has served the church well, for fund raising purposes, evangelistic drives, crusades, for enforcing good behaviour and discipline.
It leads to a distorted image of God-portraying God as vengeful, unforgiving, merciless vindictive.
It leads to a distorted view of justice- We’ve inherited this economic view of justice, that is to do with balance sheets and repaying debt an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth model.

Justice is about putting things right, it’s about seeing what is wrong and making it right it’s about correction not punishment. When you make a mistake God is not out to punish you for it, but God does want to correct you, correct your thinking, your attitudes and your behaviour.
The doctrine of hell, leads to a distorted view of people who are different and we want to apply our own categories of good and bad.If they are not like us they are bad
If they do bad things they need to be punished and so countries are invaded, bombs are dropped and hell comes to earth.
Let’s now then look at some of the passage that speak explicitly of “Hell”

Matthew 5:22But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca, ' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
Matthew 5:29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
Matthew 10:28Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Matthew 18:9And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
Following last week’s sermon where I began to explore literary device used by Jesus you should be able to recognise these sentences as hyperbole. They are expression used to strengthen or amplify a point. The point of each verse is not hell per se but some behaviour that should be avoided. Now we can’t dismiss the possibility of a literal hell just by noting that these phrases have a literary meaning rather than a literal one; however we need to recognise that Jesus is not teaching anything about hell here he is using the idea of hell regardless of its actual existence to make a point.
Matthew 23:15"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.
Matthew 23:33"You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?
These last two instances from Matthew’s gospels are interesting. Jesus is addressing the teachers of the law and Pharisees. It is only the religious leaders that get such harsh treatment from Jesus. Why does Jesus threaten these religious leaders with hell – most likely it is because they were threatening others with the same and using the threat of hell as a way to manipulate their followers – that sounds rather familiar. John doesn’t use the word Gehhena/Hell in his gospels and all of the other passage in Mark and Luke that use the word are parallels of the Matthean texts
Mark 9:43If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.
Mark 9:45And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell.
Mark 9:47And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,
Luke 12:5But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.
...the one exception being the story of Lazarus and the beggar at the gate.

Luke 16:23In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.
Again we have to ask of this story, what is the main point. Jesus is not teaching about hell, he is teaching about our responsibilities in the here and now. We have only one chance to get it right after your gone it’s too late to do that good that you had always thought about doing.
There are just 2 other uses of the word hell in the NT
James 3:6The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.2 Peter 2:4For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment;
The expression in James set on fire by hell is a metaphor that speaks of the evil potential of the human tongue. It’s not teaching about hell but a warning about controlling our speech.
2 Peter seems to have access to some extra-biblical sources that teach about angels, but note that his use of ‘hell’ here is more akin to the Old Testament notion of Hades a holding place until the judgement.
I have now shown you all the NT uses of the word “hell” now that by no means is meant to end the discussion, there are numerous other texts that talk about eternal punishment, eternal darkness, gnashing of teeth a great lake of fire and so on. I’m happy myself to believe that in spite of all these references that Hell exists only as an impossible possibility.
I believe that if a human being freely chose to be eternally cut off from God that God would not stop that and that such separation whether it meant annihilation or eternal isolated conscious being would in fact be hell.
But because I believe that God is love and God is fair, I believe that God would give every human being a reasonable and fair choice.
For such a choice to be reasonable and fair, the person making the choice must be of sound mind, and fully aware of all the facts and consequences of their decision.
In those circumstances I think it is impossible that anyone would choose separation from God.
Of course I am basing my argument on the eternal goodness of God and nothing yet has persuaded me that God is less than perfectly good or that Hell is compatible with such goodness.
So finally what do I believe happens to bad people?
The same as happens to me for I too am bad. I might be saved but I’m a saved sinner and there’s work to be done on me yet.
Death
Paradise
Resurrection
Judgement
Correction restoration rehabilitation Glory.
I’m more than comfortable if any of you take issue with what I have said this morning. For me this is the good news – but I appreciate other see things differently let us be adult about it and discuss it as friends on a journey together.

A footnote:

Is there then any point in being saved?

Yes
1. You have a relationship with God in Christ now
2. You have a certain hope
3. You know the eternal forgiveness of God
4. You can start work on your faults here and now knowing that will make an eternal difference
5. You have the spirit to help you
6. The truth shall set you free to live and love as an authentic God-loved human being
7. You can be sure that all the good work you do now is for a good end.