Exploring what the Bible says about Heaven and Hell

By Pip Witheridge

Note: the views presented in this article are not necessarily shared in every detail by the entire pastors’ team—I am speaking from my own understanding based on research I did during my time at Moore Theological College. If you want to discuss anything in this article with me, I’d be happy to—please reach out to me at pipw@stpaulsanglican.org.au.

Weighty Matters

Heaven and hell are heavy topics. We’re talking about life and death, the justice of God, the eternal fate of us and the people beside us. I’ve written this short article not to answer all the questions on these topics, but to explore some of the images the Bible uses when it speaks of heaven and hell.

Up, Down, Inside, Out

The Bible authors use images from the culture and cosmology of their own times to help people understand the eternal stakes of life and death.

The word for “heaven” in the Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek means “sky”—up there. God speaks from the sky (Deut 4:36); Jesus came “from above” (John 3:31); Jesus ascended through the clouds in the sky (Acts 1:9); the Spirit of God descends from the sky (Matt 3:16); and in the end the new Jerusalem will come down from the sky (Rev 21:2).

Heaven is sometimes spoken in connection with Jerusalem, because through much of the Bible God’s temple and God’s people dwell in Jerusalem. Therefore, when thinking about heaven—God’s dwelling place—Jews probably thought about up there in the sky, as well as inside their own gates.

There are a few different words which get translated as “hell” in the Bible. Many modern versions translate the Hebrew word sheol as “pit” or “grave”, but many versions have translated it as “hell”. This is because there is disagreement over the extent to which the Hebrew understanding of sheol corresponds to the traditional idea of “hell”—i.e. a place of conscious suffering in the afterlife.

In the 3rd century BC, when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek, the translators chose the Greek term Hades to convey the Hebrew term sheol. This is interesting because Hades was understood within Greek mythology as a place full of conscious experience. In the epics of Homer, Hades is a place under the earth where the dead go to experience reward (if you lived righteously) or punishment (if you lived unrighteously). It’s interesting that in attempting to convey the Hebrew idea of sheol to the Greek-speaking world, Hebrew translators thought the word Hades was a helpful referent.

In the New Testament, the term Hades appears ten times, most famously in Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). There it seems Hades is a place where people go when they die. It contains both reward and punishment: reward for Lazarus, punishment for the rich man. That is, Jesus considered the picture of Hades useful in conveying something about what happens after death.

Besides Hades, the other New Testament term often translated as “hell” is Gehenna. Gehenna is a valley right outside Jerusalem. It was not a place anyone wanted to go. At times it was a site for child sacrifice to the god Molech, and at other times it was likely used as a garbage dump. Jesus refers to Gehenna several times in the New Testament, sometimes in contrast to “life” or “the kingdom of God” (Matt 18:9; Mark 9:43, 47).

Interestingly, the word hell is nowhere to be found in the writings of Paul (in almost all English translations of the New Testament). This is perhaps because for Paul’s primary audiences—who lived in places far from Jerusalem and saturated in Greek myths—the word Gehenna carried too little meaning and the word Hades carried too much. He still acknowledges the common understanding of heaven being “up” and hell being “down”, as when he says, “in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth” (Phil 2:10), or when he implies that heaven is up and the place of the dead is deep down (Romans 10:6–7).

So—where is heaven and hell in the Bible? Heaven is a place up there (i.e. the sky), hell is down below (i.e. sheol, Hades); to be in heaven is to be inside God’s city (i.e. Jerusalem), and to be in hell is to be outside (i.e. Gehenna, outside Jerusalem).

What are we to do with these images?

When Jesus speaks of heaven and hell, he doesn’t spend a great deal of time elaborating on the physical details of either. The images speak for themselves; those who heard them knew what they were meant to feel: delight in contemplating being in the presence of God, sorrow in contemplating missing out.

There are two opposite mistakes we can make as we come across these images. One mistake is to minimise and dismiss them; to think that heaven is not that great, hell not that bad, and so not worthy of our consideration. The other mistake is to obsess over the details of these images such that we are distracted from their real message.

The Bible’s images of heaven and hell are not meant to give us a scientific or mechanistic understanding of the afterlife, but rather a theological message about the world to come. Christians expect a bodily resurrection unto eternal life in the presence of God because Jesus rose bodily from the grave and ascended to the Father. Christians expect God to bring a just, eternal judgement on those who reject Jesus, commensurate with the spiritual crime of rebelling against our heavenly Father. The images of heaven and hell confront us with these realities in a visceral way.

We should trust Jesus when he warns us of hell and encourages us to seek first the kingdom of heaven, not only because Jesus came from heaven and suffered on our behalf, but because he rose triumphant from the grave, so that we might believe in him and have life in his name.