A student in my youth group once shared with me: “I can’t believe in a God who sends people to hell. I have friends who are Muslim, Jewish, agnostic, and they are genuinely good people. I can’t accept that they’re condemned just because they don’t believe in Jesus.”
If your students have ever said something like that to you, they’re not alone—and we don’t want them to feel bad for wondering about the reality of hell, or about whether God is actually good. Author Rebecca McLaughlin has said, “‘How could a loving God send people to hell?’ is the hardest question a Christian is ever asked to answer—every other question pales in comparison, because this one is about the end of the story.”1 I feel that too. Honestly, it’s easier for me to write someone off in anger than to truly wrestle with what it would mean for that person to face eternal judgment. If we have a genuine love for our neighbor, the doctrine of hell will be difficult for us.
So let’s not pretend this is an easy question. Let’s sit with it—what the Bible says about hell, why the idea rubs us the wrong way, and why, strange as it sounds, hell ends up pointing us toward some of the best news there is.
What the Bible Actually Says
Our students may assume hell is a topic Christians bring up to scare people, or an old idea the Church has quietly moved past. But go back to the source, and you find something surprising: No one in Scripture talks about hell more than Jesus does. Not Paul. Not the Old Testament prophets.
Jesus warned religious leaders who exploited others that they wouldn’t “escape being sentenced to hell” (Matt. 23:33). He described those who reject God’s kingdom being cast into a darkness marked by “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). He said sin was serious enough that it would be better to live maimed than to go to hell whole (Mark 9:43). This isn’t a minor thread in his teaching, but something he returned to again and again.
When Jesus wanted a picture people would recognize, he pointed to Gehenna, a valley just outside Jerusalem. Centuries earlier it had been a site of child sacrifice; by Jesus’s day it had become the city dump, a place of constant burning and decay. It’s a vivid, physical image standing in for something Jesus wanted people to feel, not just understand: fire for unrelenting anguish, darkness for total separation from God, weeping for a grief with no end and no comfort.
Strip away the imagery and here is what you have: Hell is what it looks like when everything good disappears, finally and permanently. No more joy or connection. No more chances to make things right. It’s the forever version of loss, sorrow, and grief.
I don’t say any of that lightly. But I’d rather be honest about what Jesus taught than soften it into something easier to swallow—especially since it was Jesus, more than anyone, who showed us what God’s love actually looks like, and he still didn’t shy away from this.
Why It Feels So Wrong
“Can’t a loving God just accept everyone?”
Here’s the thing: Love was never the only thing true about God. He’s also good—all the way through. And real goodness doesn’t just love, it also opposes whatever threatens what’s good. A God who never got angry at abuse, at cruelty, at people using and discarding each other, wouldn’t actually be loving. He’d be indifferent. What we’re really asking for, underneath this objection, is a God who cares enough to be furious at the things that wreak havoc—and that same God is the one who judges.
It’s worth being precise here, because it’s easy to hear “wrath” and picture God as simply short-tempered or volatile. That’s not it. God’s wrath isn’t a personality trait—it’s the necessary response of a holy God to everything that opposes his holiness. He doesn’t pour out judgment because he’s wrathful by nature; he pours it out because he’s holy, and holiness cannot coexist with sin and evil. Judgment is what holiness looks like when it meets rebellion.
“Okay, but forever seems like a wildly disproportionate punishment.”
This is usually where our students may push back hardest, especially if they think of themselves as reasonably good. No major crimes, no scandal—just an ordinary, decent life. Isn’t that enough?
It depends on what you think sin actually is. Scripture describes it as more than a scorecard of bad actions; it’s rebellion against God himself, a refusal to give him his rightful due (Rom. 3:23). And that changes everything. The weight of an offense isn’t just about the act; it’s about whom you’ve offended. That’s why David, confessing an affair and a murder, still prays, “Against you, you only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). Underneath every human wrong is a deeper one: rejecting the God who made us. An infinite God, infinitely wronged, is not a small thing to answer for.
And this isn’t abstract. Paul describes what rebellion against God looks like in real life: “lovers of self… proud, arrogant… without self-control… lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:2–4). This isn’t a description of some other category of person. It’s uncomfortably recognizable in all of us.
How Hell Speaks to the Good News
Hell isn’t just something Christians have to explain away. Understood rightly, it’s part of what makes the gospel good news at all.
Think about the difference between two kinds of relief. Someone voids your parking ticket, and you feel mild relief. Someone nullifies a death sentence you justly deserved—that’s not relief, that’s your whole world changing. Both are “good news,” but only one actually costs you anything to understand.
That’s the difference hell makes. Without a real sense of what we’re saved from, the cross becomes a nice story instead of the rescue it actually is. When Jesus went to the cross, he wasn’t just enduring pain, but taking on, in himself, the very separation from God that hell is. That’s why he cried out that he’d been forsaken. He experienced abandonment so we wouldn’t have to. Hell isn’t in tension with the love of God; it’s the backdrop that shows how far that love was willing to go.
And there’s a second piece: Hell means evil doesn’t get to have the last word. Every quiet injustice, every wound nobody ever answered for, every person who got away with cruelty—none of it stays buried forever. There’s a day coming where all of that gets set right, where “everything sad,” as one writer put it, comes untrue. And I am convinced that this will stir in our students a sense of enduring hope in the gospel, that their sense of justice is never in vain. It’s pointing them toward something real, lasting, and redemptive.
So if a student expresses something like, “the God I want wouldn’t allow hell”—I’d gently push back. That version of God is more comfortable, but he’s also smaller. He’s not the God who loved people enough to walk into their punishment himself. As Peter writes, God “is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
Where This Leaves Us
If this topic of hell and wrath unsettles our students, that’s not a red flag. Rather, it’s a good and human response to a genuinely weighty truth. Fellow co-laborer, let’s sit with our students in it rather than rushing them past it, and let them know it’s okay not to have it all figured out.
But underneath the hard question of hell is a deeper one: Is God actually good? Scripture’s answer isn’t just an argument; it’s a cross. Every honest conversation about hell eventually leads there, because that’s where this question stops being abstract and becomes the measure of how far God went to rescue us.
This isn’t an easy topic. It shouldn’t be. But it’s one worth wrestling with honestly—because on the other side of it is a God who didn’t just judge sin from a distance, but stepped into our sinful world himself, for us and for our students. So, let’s patiently walk with our students with steady compassion and great hope.
- McLaughlin, Rebecca. 2019. Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. Wheaton: Crossway. ↩︎
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