When most people hear the word hellfire, they think of eternal conscious torment, punishment, and separation from God. They imagine fire to imply endless suffering inflicted by an angry god, or by Satan and away from God. But what if hellfire actually is the presence of God and what if God is still unfailing love?
The Bible repeatedly uses fire as a symbol of destruction and purification. Malachi 3:2 describes judgment day or the coming of God as the “refiner’s fire.” Zechariah 13:9 says God refines people like silver and gold. Isaiah’s guilt is burned away by a live coal from God’s altar. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3:15 that a person’s works may be burned up and yet the spirit “will be saved, but only as through fire.”
Fire burns away impurities. Fire regenerates forests. Hellfire “destruction” is for purification.
What’s more, this fire emanates from God. Deuteronomy says, “Our God is a consuming fire,” echoed later in Hebrews 12:29. God spoke to Moses through a burning bush. The Holy Spirit descends as tongues of fire in Acts 2. These Scriptures reveal the symbol of fire to be intimately linked with who God is.
Simultaneously, Scripture tells us, “God is love.”
God. Is fire. Is love.
Even human language instinctively connects love and fire. We speak about “burning love,” passion, heat, desire. Song of Songs 8:6 says: “Love is as strong as death… It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.” The fire of God is the love of God. They are the same reality experienced in different ways.
This changes how we understand hellfire.
Jesus says something remarkable in Mark 9:49, “Everyone will be salted with fire.”
The fire of God touches all of us. In this life and/or the next, we are confronted by divine love, and that love burns. It hurts when we resist it. It refines us as we work with it. Hellfire is a combination of wrestling with God’s love and being molded by that love.
I increasingly believe there are two dimensions to hellfire. The first concerns our relationship with God. Many people—especially within religious systems—struggle to accept salvation by grace alone. Like the Pharisees, we want to earn worthiness. We want to believe our theology, morality, denomination, politics, sexuality, nationality, or religious performance makes us superior. But the Kingdom of God dismantles self-righteousness.
Jesus says the last shall be first. The outsiders enter before the religious elite. Grace humiliates the ego because grace cannot be earned. The fire of God burns away the illusion that we can save ourselves. This is repentance, metanoia, a change of heart and mind. We repent of believing that God’s love must be deserved or earned. We surrender to the reality that God already loves us—all of us.
That is painful for people who want revenge instead of mercy. Many Christians can accept God loving them, but struggle with God loving their enemies. They want “hell” to be eternal conscious torment because they want justice to mean punishment. But God’s justice looks more like restoration than revenge—like the refiner’s fire, the fire of God’s love.
The second dimension of hellfire concerns our relationships with one another.
The fire of God does not only reconcile humanity to God, it results in reconciliation between human beings. This is why forgiveness matters so deeply in the teachings of Jesus. Human beings are profoundly wounded creatures who wound each other constantly. Families fracture. Nations go to war. Communities divide. Churches condemn. Relationships break apart because of fear, shame, violence, prejudice, and misunderstanding. Reconciliation hurts. Real forgiveness requires truth, humility, empathy, confession, accountability, and healing. It requires us to see one another clearly. That process burns.
Returning to Mark 9, the context in which everyone is salted with fire, is the context of gehenna, translated “hell,” and is described this way in the NRSV:
If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire … For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.
Did you notice the relational tones? This passage is all about not causing people who you are in relationship with to stumble and living at peace with one another.
This is why Revelation describes tears still being wiped away even in the new creation. The nations still need healing. The leaves of the tree of life are “for the healing of the nations.” Why would healing still be needed if everything were instantly perfected?
Because God’s love heals relationally, not mechanically.
The hellfire of love continues its work until all things are reconciled. Colossians 1:20 says, “through him [Christ], to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”
All things.
God’s love does not fail just because human beings resist it. Love has an enduring quality. In my previous blog, I talked about the word aionios, which is translated “eternal,” “everlasting,” or “forever.” This word indicates a quality of time rather than a quantity of time. The “eternals” have an “eternal” quality. This is a quality of endurance, of never breaking, never ending, never failing. Do you know what else the Bible says “endures all things” and “never fails”? Love.
The quality of the afterlife is one of unfailing love.
Psalm 136 repeats the phrase “His love endures forever” twenty-six times.
Love isn’t temporary or conditional. It’s eternal, never ending, enduring all things.
Maybe this is what the Bible is talking about when it refers to an “unforgiveable sin.” Anything that “blasphemes” or contradicts the spirit of God as love, is unforgivable. Unforgivable doesn’t mean “no second chances.” Unforgivable means that God’s love will outlast it, persuade it and undo it. In that sense it is not forgiven, because God insists on undoing the blasphemy.
Traditional depictions of hellfire often create a contradiction: God supposedly loves people endlessly while simultaneously abandoning them to endless torture. But enduring love that ceases to pursue, heal, forgive, and restore is not unconditional or eternal in quality at all.
If God is true love, then nothing—not sin, death, rebellion, trauma, religion, or hell itself—can extinguish that love.
Hellfire is not the opposite of God’s love. Hellfire is God’s love experienced by everything in us that opposes love.
It burns away hatred, violence, shame, self-righteousness, our inability to forgive, and our need for revenge. Not because God uses coercion or force, but because “Christ’s love compels us.” There is nothing more convincing and convicting than God’s love. Nothing more healing and restorative. Nothing more enduring, eternal, or everlasting. It will outlast and outburn everything in us that needs to be done away with.
Hellfire is the love of God full blast, burning away everything that tries to contradict it.
God’s love endures forever because God is love forever. And love never stops loving.
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Thank you for this! Thank you! Thank you!
Excellent!