To understand hell in Scripture, three terms must be distinguished: (1) Sheol/Hades — the intermediate state, the realm of the dead where souls await the resurrection and final judgment; it is not yet the final hell. (2) Gehenna — the place of final judgment and punishment, named for the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem where child sacrifice once occurred and where refuse was burned; Jesus uses this term most often in the NT. (3) Tartarus (2 Peter 2:4) — a place of imprisonment for fallen angels. Gehenna is described as "unquenchable fire," "the outer darkness," "the second death," and a place of "weeping and gnashing of teeth." It is the final, irreversible consequence of rejecting the God who made you and the Christ who redeemed you. Critically, it is Jesus — not the OT prophets — who speaks most about hell in the New Testament. He who most loved people also most warned them.
HELL, n. The place or state of punishment for the wicked after death. In scripture, hell is the place of the dead, or of souls after death, corresponding to the Greek Hades. It denotes the place of the damned, used in this sense in Matthew 5 and 10. In theology, the place or state into which the wicked are sent after death — a place of torment, anguish, and eternal separation from God and all good.
Hell has been sanitized out of contemporary preaching — seen as too offensive, too dark, too culturally untenable to preach. The result is a gospel with no urgency and a God with no justice. Rob Bell's Love Wins (2011) crystallized a popular move toward universalism or annihilationism (the idea that the unsaved simply cease to exist). But the same Jesus who said "God so loved the world" (John 3:16) also said "fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). You cannot accept the Sermon on the Mount and quietly delete the passages on eternal judgment — they come from the same mouth. "Hell" has also been degraded to a casual expletive, stripping it of its grave doctrinal weight.
Matthew 10:28 — "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell."
Matthew 25:46 — "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life."
Revelation 20:14–15 — "Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire."
Mark 9:43–48 — "It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out."
2 Thessalonians 1:9 — "They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might."
H7585 — שְׁאוֹל (Sheol) — the realm of the dead, the underworld; not yet the final hell
G86 — ᾅδης (Hades) — the unseen realm, intermediate state of the dead
G1067 — γέεννα (Gehenna) — the place of final judgment; Jesus's primary word for hell
G5020 — τάρταρος (Tartaros) — deepest abyss, place of imprisoned fallen angels (2 Peter 2:4)
"A preacher who never mentions hell is either a liar or a coward. The most loving thing Jesus did was warn people about it."
"Hell is not God's revenge on sinners — it is the judicial consequence of rejecting the only One who could save you. It is, in a terrible sense, what people choose."
"The doctrine of hell protects human dignity: it says your choices have eternal weight. A universe where nothing matters forever is one where nothing matters at all."