The Opposite of Heaven

In recent times, I have found myself responding to threads with a question on what people exactly mean when they say "hell", or refer to things such as punishment. I know this thread is going to be a long opening post, so I've broken it up into three or four smaller chunks (note the line breaks throughout - "~~~~~~~~~~~~~~") in case you want to catch your breath and digest the information a piece at a time. For starters though, since this thread is titled "the opposite of heaven", I think it important to define what heaven is. Without a clear understanding of this, it is impossible to understand its opposite.

Biblically speaking there are three places which are given the name "heaven". We have first the generic "sky", which refers to the dwelling place of birds. By "dwelling place" it is more correct to say "where birds fly", since birds technically dwell in trees and on mountains and the like, while some flightless birds nest on the ground. However, biblically speaking, the sky - where the birds fly is the most correct application of this first heaven. The second heaven refers to the dwelling place of the stars - or what modern vernacular would likely call "outer space", or more generically "the universe". The third heaven described in the Bible is not the dwelling place of the birds or the planets, but rather the dwelling place of God.

It is this third heaven of which I speak here. But I think it important to distinguish between where God is at the moment (nobody knows - certainly it is not a physical place, though the Bible does speak of God dwelling in each of our lives) and where God will be at the end of Time (after what Christians call the "Second Coming"). At this time, when Time comes to an end and God comes to Earth, each person will be Judged (I'll speak of this later). Then the heavens (outerspace) and Earth will be destroyed forever, and in its place will be created a New Heaven and a New Earth, just as those who are found in Christ will be transformed into New Spiritual beings. As such, the "heaven" as I speak of in this thread does not yet exist. It will be the place where God dwells, so is in line with the third definition of heaven, but as it has not yet been created, it is not a place anyone could have yet come to. It will be created at the end of this world, and only then will people be granted access to "heaven" (the New Creation of God - where he will dwell).

Thus, it is in some ways a fallacy to argue that Christians will "go to heaven when they die". However, God does promise that his followers will immediately be with him in "paradise" (see Luke 23:43, for example). The nature of this paradise is of largely unknown origin, though the implications of its term is of an "Eden" type scenario, a reference back to the original Garden in Genesis. It could be a reference to "Abraham's Bosom" but this is unclear (see the next section for further details on this concept). While a biblical canvas of beginning and ending in Eden-type paradises might give a sense of completion, this is not the heaven spoken of when we think of being with God. As noted, this "heaven" has not yet been created and will be modelled/created only when God returns.

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Now that heaven is defined, it's time to move on to its opposite. For the next step in this discussion, I thought I'd start with the actual biblical view of the opposite of heaven, this place that in modern society people call Hell. Of course, at its most basic level, Hell does not exist in the Bible. It is a mish-mash misappropriation of 5 different concepts in the Bible. Over the centuries, people have popularly come to know of this place as "hell", but it is a complete misunderstanding of these 5 concepts. Four words are translated as "Hell" in the Bible, and a fifth is used as reference to Hell. Below is a list of those words, and a brief description of their meanings:

she'ôl - This is what Jews refer to as "Abraham's Bosom". It is a place the dead go to rest. King David and Abraham (possibly the two most influential patriarchs in Israel's history) are both in she'ôl according to the Bible!

Hades - Literally translated it means "hole in the ground". Most often it refers to a grave or burial site. All people who die are destined to be buried in this place (unless of course one gets cremated - the irony being that the only way to avoid this Hell is to go through burning fire).

Gehenna - The Valley of Gehenna sat outside Jerusalem. It was essentially a giant garbage dump, where people would take their rubbish and burn it. Sometimes, mostly for poorer people, it was also the place where people came to burn their dead. The Valley of Gehenna still exists today, and if you really wanted, you could make trip there and visit it - make a booking with your local travel agent.

Tartaros - This is only mentioned once in the entire Bible (2 Peter 2:4). This is indeed a place of torture and torment. However, it is a place set aside for Satan and the demons. No human is ever described as going to this place.

limnē pur - This doesn't directly translate as "hell" but rather "Lake of Fire". This is referenced in Revelation 20 and is often considered to be the same as the four previous words. However, by now I hope you have realised that this is illogical. It is even more illogical when you consider that in this chapter, Hades is described as being thrown into the Lake of fire (20:14). More to the point, for many translations, it is often one of the few times that the word Hades is left in its original Greek. the majority of the time, it is translated "hell", except for this one place (though to be fair, some translations do actually translate it as Hell). *think about the implications of these two phrases. If both are references to Hell, what we essentially have is Hell being cast into Hell

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I'm sure you can see how these five words which have such different meanings simply cannot logically be the same thing. Yet it is often the case that people arguing for the existence of Hell will quite frequently jump from one word to the next, using them all as if they are interchangeable for the same place of torment - usually by people with no understanding of the original Greek/Hebrew. I don't claim to be a scholar but even a cursory understanding based on limited reading with a Greek/Hebrew Bible and Greek/Hebrew dictionary shows the obviousness of this.

Add into the mix a significant dose of history, and we come up to the work of Dante and his "Divine Comedy". In this text, Dante wrote a fictional account of what the afterlife will be like, loosely basing it off the Bible. He invents sixteen levels of Hell and describes them in detail, stating that each person is destined for one of these levels, on the basis of how good they were in life. It was only after this was written that the Roman Catholic Church adopted some of the imagery of pain and torture and formalised it into doctrine - just one more string they could tie to the uneducated masses (most of whom could not read, particularly Latin which was the only language the Bible was written in then). When the Reformation split the Church, the Protestants did not place the same level of emphasis on Church Authority. The emphasis was rather on personal interpretation. However, even with this change of emphasis, Hell was such an ingrained doctrine by this time that it managed to spread over to popular Protestant teaching and was never truly questioned until the 20th Century. When it was, many ran around trying to justify its existence based on crunching the previous five terms together as one, but slowly it has come to be known that the place of eternal torture was nothing more than a fictional invention by Dante.

So if "hell" does not exist, this of course begs the question as to what exactly is the opposite of heaven, since the Bible does clearly acknowledge a heaven and an opposite to it. Some of you are probably thinking back to passages you know that say "burn in hell" and such. I can see the skeptics baring their fingers now, lol. This thread is already too long, so I won't go into every single verse. What I will do is provide a reference list for each of the words translated as Hell, and if people want to research them, feel free. Of the 24 references to "hell", only 2 (from memory) can be considered genuine possibilities as references to fire and torture. All the others are either literal references to the Valley of Gehenna (which is already known to be a place where people burned their garbage and sometimes their dead), or parables (stories not necessarily written to convey a literal depiction of things). But since the Bible also refers to the opposite of heaven in many other forms of imagery (darkness, a barren wasteland, the night streets of a city, and I even remember a reference to cold, though I can't quite recall the passage) it is not correct to use these two isolated examples as blanket statements saying "this must be what it's like".

But I digress. As noted, the following are all the New Testament references (I have not included the Old Testament, since she'ôl is the destiny of all people in these passages, and most modern translations leave the word untranslated - the ESV, for example, does not have a single Old Testament reference to "hell"):

Hades - Appears in the New Testament on 11 occasions - Matthew 11:23, 16:18; Luke 10:15, 16:23, Acts 2:27, 2:31; 1 Corinthians 15:55; Revelation 1:18, 6:8, 20:13

Gehenna - Appears in the New Testament on 12 occasions - Matthew 5:22, 5:29, 5:30, 10:28, 18:9, 23:15, 23:33; Mark 9:43, 9:45, 9:47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6

Tartaros - Appears in the Bible on 1 occasion - 2 Peter 2:4

And for the Lake of Fire - Appears in the Bible on 4 occasions, all in the Book of Revelation - 19:20, 20:10, 20:14, 20:15

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Now that it has been established that it is unbiblical to refer to the opposite of heaven as "hell", the next thing to establish is what exactly the opposite of heaven is. I have taken the liberty of compiling a few quotes for people to consider. This is my personal view of the opposite of heaven:

"Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. ~ Matthew 7:13

"What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction" ~ Romans 9:22

"Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things." ~ Phillipians 3:19

"But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly" ~ 2 Peter 3:7

"They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might" ~ 2 Thessalonians 1:9

Particularly the last of these clearly announce the opposite - those who are not to be saved will "suffer the punishment of eternal destruction". Destruction, complete and absolute is the opposite of heaven. Or to use a synonym - death. Where heaven is the equivalent to Eternal Life, the opposite of heaven (Destruction) is the equivalent of Eternal Death. In many ways, this is almost identical to the view of many atheists, who find great comfort and joy in living this life and knowing that it is all there ever will be and after this comes a peaceful Nothingness, not even the knowledge of peace - just, for lack of a better term, worm food.

This is somewhat backed up through the Bible's references to Eternal Life in Jesus as a "gift" - the "gift of eternal life". If we take the popularised view that we all have eternal life anyway and the only question is where this afterlife will be spent (with God in heaven, or without God in pain/separation), then it begs asking why eternal life is a gift in the first place. Moreover, it stands to reason that the opposite of Eternal Life would indeed be Eternal Death, not Eternal Punishment - that isn't even an opposite (though to play Devil's Advocate, there is nothing inherent in the concept of heaven that demands its opposite be a polar opposite in every way). Though to be absolutely biblically honest, as it stands it is technically both Death and Punishment. As noted in the last passage quoted, 2 Thessalonians shows that eternal destruction is indeed a punishment. Though God, being merciful, has made this "punishment" one that is fair and not unequal to the crime - no torture, no screams of pain, no howls of anguish. Just.... death.

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To quickly conclude, I would like to say that this is of course my opinion of the opposite of heaven. One that I feel is backed up through a thorough reading of scripture, but mine nonetheless. There is a strong biblical case to argue one other possibility, and it will probably come out during discussion anyway, but for the purpose of this post, I will not go into it. As unfortunate as this is, even with the breaks in this post, it is unlikely many will read it simply because it is quite lengthy, and to make it even longer would be an injustice to those reading up to this point. I'm sure it will come out during discussion whatever the case. As it stands, I will leave you with these thoughts on the biblical view of the opposite of heaven and ask for any questions or comments for discussion you would like to make. In short though, it is clearly not biblical to call it "hell" (considering the five different words that people for some perplexing reason all use to refer to the same thing), and the opposite is clear through the passages presented as to what it actually is - destruction.

All the best. I hope to hear some constructive discussion of the topic, and maybe have challenged a few people to broaden their horizons as to the understanding of this concept from the Bible (regardless of whether you believe the Bible as true or not, having an understanding of what it says can only be beneficial to discussing the topic, particularly in light of questions about "Why would God punish you, torment you, etc...")