Why a Good God Had to Create Hell

James W. Miller
Nov 16
3 min read

Gray sculptures of raised hands reaching upward, densely packed, create a dramatic and chaotic scene, conveying a sense of desperation. — Photo by Yaopey Yong on Unsplash

The mantra often rises in secular society: “How could a good God create hell?” How could a benevolent divine being, capable of seeing how things are likely to pan out, create a scenario in which some (or many) of his precious children innocently stumble into a covered pit of molten lava and haunted house horrors and torture?

The answer is simple — when you see what we’re actually talking about here, you’re going to wish for it, want it, and hope it’s really true.

Hell is one of the best promises the Bible has to offer. I can prove it in three points.

Imagine no hell below us

The opposite choice is worse. Imagine being dragged against your will into the heavy embrace of a glorious being who completely overwhelms your independence, leaving you powerless and overcome by a love you didn’t want or choose.

And not just in the afterlife. To get you to paradise, he has to completely subsume your will from birth so as to make sure you never err, preparing your sinless entry into eternity. As a consequence, you may only watch your life passively, never actively making a decision of your own until you are vacuumed up into an irresistible heaven that you never asked for.

That’s a hard pass for me.

I’d take the freedom to choose or reject God over a guaranteed entry into heaven that required me to lose my freedom, my autonomy, and my identity. Choice requires alternatives, and the alternative to forced union with God is the ability to reject Him. That’s what hell is. Hell is the consequence of rejecting the source of life.

Eternal weed burning

Secondly, one of the mistakes we make in considering hell is trusting Dante over Jesus. Dante, in his 14th-century work The Inferno, describes descending levels of hell in which luckless victims (mostly Dante’s political opponents) suffer endless horrific tortures. The Church has used that imagery as a tool for manipulation ever since.

That’s not what the Bible describes. The most common image of hell in the teachings of Jesus is weeds that are gathered up to be burned. That’s not an ongoing thing. That’s a one-and-done.

The language of conscious torment comes primarily from a parable of Jesus in which a rich man descends and a poor man ascends, and then they have a conversation. What readers miss is that one version of this parable preceded Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud, and Jesus takes this preexisting story and riffs on it to make his own point. It shouldn’t be taken as a description of metaphysical reality; it’s a story with a moral that matters.

There is not much case to be made for a hell that is endless conscious torture. It’s final, and eternal in its finality. But it’s the end.

Let justice roll down

So, thirdly, in addition to the fact that hell is the final cessation of those who reject God, it’s the final promise of justice for those who have been abused, raped, tortured, exploited, trafficked, and discarded. Don’t you dare steal this from them. Their Father loves them too much to let the crimes against them go unchecked and unpunished.

The rejection of hell is largely an elitist, privileged, developed-nation view of apathetic secularists who talk about justice while doing nothing about it. They recycle and vote, but they’re not doing anything sacrificial, and they don’t donate much financially. Outside of the wealthiest cultures, oppressed people don’t bemoan the possibility of a judgment day. They look forward to it.