When the God We Inherit Isn’t the God We Discover
Why questioning one doctrine forced me to look again at the character of God
Welcome to today’s reflection for all subscribers
Some questions refuse to leave us alone. Today, I’m reflecting on one of the biggest, the question of hell, and what it taught me about the God I thought I knew. It’s also a glimpse into what Sacred & Secular is all about: taking Scripture seriously, asking honest questions, and discovering that faith often grows deeper on the other side of certainty.
If you’ve recently joined us, you may also be interested in my new book, Sacred & Secular: Find God in the Ordinary, which brings together some of the most popular and thought-provoking reflections from this journey so far.
There are some conversations that stay with you for decades.
You probably don’t realise it at the time because they seem like ordinary moments, one discussion among many. Yet years later, you can still remember where you were sitting and how you felt.
For me, one of those conversations happened when I was a teenager.
The church I attended was thriving. Looking back, I realise how fortunate we were. There were plenty of people my own age, youth groups most evenings of the week, Bible studies, camps and countless opportunities to grow in faith. The people leading us genuinely cared, and they wanted us to take God seriously.
One evening, a small group of us were sitting together with one of the leaders. The conversation drifted from ordinary teenage life towards something much deeper.
One of my friends asked a question that many people have wondered, even if they’ve never dared say it out loud.
“Why would God send people to hell?”
It felt like the elephant in the room.
The leader paused before answering. I still remember the seriousness in his voice. He told us, in no uncertain terms, that we needed to make sure we behaved because the prospect of spending eternity in hell was very real.
There was no discussion. No exploration. No acknowledgement that this was a difficult question Christians had wrestled with for centuries. Just certainty.
At the time, I accepted what he said. I didn’t know enough to question it.
But something changed inside me that day.
Looking back now, I think that conversation marked one of the turning points that eventually led me to drift away from church. It wasn’t because I suddenly stopped believing in God. It was because I couldn’t reconcile the God I was hearing about with the God I glimpsed in Jesus.
The question that lodged itself in my heart wasn’t really about hell at all.
It was much simpler than that.
How can a loving God do that?
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For years, I carried that question around without knowing what to do with it.
Like many people, I assumed the Bible spoke about hell with absolute clarity. I imagined there was one straightforward teaching that everyone had always believed, and that questioning it somehow meant questioning God himself.
Only much later did I discover that things weren’t nearly as simple as I had imagined.
The first surprise was that the Bible doesn’t actually present one neat, systematic description of hell. Jesus most often speaks about Gehenna, a real valley outside Jerusalem with a dark history that had become a powerful symbol of judgement. Elsewhere, the New Testament uses words like Hades and Tartarus, each carrying its own meaning and context.
That doesn’t automatically make the conversation easier, but it should make us pause.
Perhaps we’ve sometimes treated biblical imagery as though it were a detailed map of the afterlife, when the writers themselves were doing something rather different. But the more closely I read the Gospels, the more I noticed something else.
Jesus certainly warns about judgement. He doesn’t minimise it or explain it away. His language is often startling and deliberately challenging.
Yet he never stops to provide the kind of detailed doctrine that many Christians seem eager to construct. Instead, he speaks in vivid images, powerful metaphors and urgent invitations that call people to examine the direction of their lives.
Jesus seems far less interested in explaining hell than he is in calling people towards life.
His concern is whether we are becoming the kind of people who are learning to live in the Kingdom of God.
As I continued reading, I discovered that faithful Christians have understood these passages in different ways throughout history. Some have believed that hell involves eternal conscious punishment. Others have understood it as ultimate destruction rather than endless torment. Still others have hoped that God’s judgement is ultimately restorative, however difficult that process might be.
These aren’t modern inventions designed to make Christianity more palatable. They are longstanding attempts by thoughtful Christians to wrestle honestly with the same biblical texts.
That doesn’t mean every interpretation is equally convincing.
But it does mean the conversation has always been more complicated than I was led to believe.
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When I was younger, I thought faith meant having an answer for every difficult question. Now I think faith sometimes looks more like trusting God while admitting we don’t have all the answers.
That isn’t a retreat from Scripture; if anything, it’s the result of taking Scripture more seriously.
The Bible often refuses to flatten complex questions into simple slogans. Again and again, it invites us into tension rather than rushing us towards certainty. That can feel frustrating, but perhaps it is also deeply wise.
After all, our understanding of God is always smaller than God himself.
Today, I still take Jesus’ warnings seriously, perhaps more seriously than I did as a teenager. But I no longer hear them as threats shouted from a distance. I hear them as the words of someone desperately trying to stop people from walking towards destruction.
There is a profound difference between a threat and a warning. One seeks to control, the other seeks to rescue.
That distinction has changed the way I read these passages, and it has also changed the way I think about God.
I find myself asking a different question. What kind of God do we see when we look at Jesus?
Because if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s character, then whatever judgement ultimately looks like, it cannot be less loving, less just or less holy than the person we meet in him.
I don’t pretend that all my questions have been answered. Some probably never will be. But I’ve discovered that certainty isn’t always the opposite of doubt. Sometimes certainty can become the opposite of curiosity.
And curiosity, when it is rooted in humility, has a remarkable way of leading us back to Christ.
I’ve come to realise that my biggest question was never really about hell.
It was always about the character of God.
And the more closely I look at Jesus, the more I trust that whatever I don’t yet understand, I can trust the One who stands at the centre of the story.
Perhaps that’s where faith begins to mature.
Not when every mystery has been solved, but when we discover that even our hardest questions can draw us closer to the God we thought we already knew.
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It’s a place for thoughtful, daily reflections where faith is explored honestly, Scripture is taken seriously, and difficult questions aren’t rushed to easy answers. Above all, it’s an invitation to keep discovering the God revealed in Jesus.
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I've been thoroughly enjoying your writing this summer. I usually read you early in the morning on my phone and I am almost always wanting to respond as I feel your writing is almost conversational and invites the reader to do so. I've even started a number of responses but failed to finish them as my aging hands have difficulty writing on my phone. But I wanted to be sure you knew that your words are finding their way into the heart and mind of a fellow pilgrim in Pearisburg, Virginia in the US. Thank you!
This particular post brought to my mind and heart a friend and former co-worker at a small Christian school. I met him in the late 90s at church and eventually hired him to teach photography, film, and art, PE, and a few other classes as needed. In the early years he traveled extensively with my varsity basketball team taking photographs. Those were amazing times and we grew quite close. He was one of those friends you can go from zero to sixty directly into deep conversations without having to go through weather, news, or sports on the way to more serious topics. After 15 years or so of friendship and working together he moved back west to Oregon to be nearer his family. We have stayed in touch through texts and the occasional lengthy late night (for me) phone call. Through the years he has stepped away from his faith. He has shared with me why over the past year. He says he can't believe in or follow a God whose believers would simply forget and not care about all those left behind in the afterlife. The concept of "no more tears" in heaven has convinced him that God's character as revealed in Scripture is anything but loving. One of his close friends from Virginia visited him out west for the express purpose of understanding why he walked away from his faith. His visitor's eventual response to his concern was simply, "well you're right," he explained that in heaven we will be so overcome with the glory of the presence of God we will forget everything and everyone else. My friend's questions/struggles break my heart but not as much as the "certainty" of his visitor's response. First, the more keenly I feel the presence of my Lord in my life the more I am overcome by those struggling and hurting. I am moved to prayer, action, and yes tears. I don't believe that will ever change. Second, can't we see that through history and in our own lives the more "certain" we are about secondary doctrinal issues the further we divide, distance, and harm others. I am certain of my risen Savior, but what life after death is really like, describing life in heaven or hell, these are matters on which Scripture is at best deeply veiled. In reading your posts I feel you share this opinion.
At my school I received a great deal of pressure from more conservative elements to teach a literal 7 day creation in Bible classes. My stance was always, why? We don't know, I don't know, and frankly I don't care "how" God created the world. I'm much more interested in why! And I'm amazed that a loving God knew what it would cost him personally to create the world and chose to pay that price for us. That a loving God bows before a lost soul like me and you to wash our feet.
I can feel your feels in that youth room and I wish your leader had told your group "great question, I just don't know, but maybe we can trust a loving God!" "And maybe we should base our conclusions on what we do know about Jesus?" Maybe Jesus answered so many questions with questions so that we could learn to do the same...
Thank you sir!
Your opening paragraph is a beautiful description of the Methodist Youth Fellowship in Niagara Falls, NY, that I attended in my teens. My parents became the youth leaders, along with the Associate Pastor. I was delighted to be sharing my parents enlightened version of Christianity with friends, many of whom were schoolmates. Some of those people became lifelong friends of my parents and I am still in touch with a few of them. For me, the crisis came later in Toronto when my dad again was leading a prayer group that was much more about discussion than prayer. For weeks people sat in a circle talking about their problems until one evening I burst into tears (shocking even to me for I was 26 with a BA) and sobbed that everyone was talking about problems, such as illnesses and deep theological questions, but they had no answers. The woman next to me, who I did not know, said there was someone I needed to talk to. She sent me to Fr. Ron Armstrong, one of the shepherds of the emerging charismatic movement in Canada, and he became my introduction to the kinds of miracles we read about in the Bible, including healings physical and psychological. Not every question was answered in that context, either. But it set me on a path to answer some deep ones. Eventually, my parents came into that renewal, too.