Heaven and hell are ideas of tradition. The ideas they express are not found in the Bible. Believers often suffer from the horror stories of hell for the rest of their lives. These ideas are thought to be found in the Bible, but this is more an assertion than a real statement.

In these traditional stories, there is a vengeful, merciless and unpredictable God who throws the majority of his creatures into hell to torment them endlessly. Anyone who has to listen to such ideas for long enough becomes disoriented. You don’t read this directly anywhere in the Bible, but you have to believe it if it “sounds similar to this idea of hell”. If you ask at the beginning how this can be, objections and questions often disappear due to the pressure of the teaching and the community.

Anyone who has experienced this may think that hell is the problem and heaven is the solution.

The beginning

When considering this peculiarity, let us start at the beginning, with Adam and Eve. This is where the problem that is commonly described as the “fall of man” arose. There is a lot more that could be said about this, but let’s stick with the idea that hell is the problem. Were Adam and Eve shown hell as a punishment in paradise if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

It’s not like that! Adam and Eve were threatened with mortality. The Elberfelder translation, for example, reads: “And Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may eat as you please, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it, for the day you eat of it you will surely die'”. (Gen 2:16-17). If we look at how it can be translated more precisely, the conclusion reads: “you will surely die”. Man is not only confronted with the certainty of death, but also with mortality. Until the moment when man ultimately dies, after which he is dead, he will “be dying”. That is our daily reality.

If you ask what the Bible deals with, for example, you could say that the Bible takes human experience as its starting point. This is not pious at all, but sober. This human experience forms the background for the world view, image of God and image of man that develops in the Bible as an ongoing story. The mortality of man, his inadequacy and these other things are real challenges. The solution described in the Bible is not a religious endeavor, but an acquaintance with a living God who, through His works and His purpose, sets our lives free for Himself. This solution is called salvation.

Neither heaven nor hell

The idea of heaven and hell is a late flowering of human imagination. Adam was not threatened with hell and heaven is not the solution. The Bible describes it all quite soberly. Adam is confronted with mortality and therefore death. The solution to death is life, not heaven.

The Bible is primarily concerned with death and the inadequacy of man (also called sin or missing the mark). The solution to these two things is an important theme of the Bible.

• Death is compensated for by overflowing life (resurrection leads there)
• Missing the mark is replaced by finding the mark, or man’s injustice is more than compensated for by God’s justice.

It should be noted that heaven and hell play no role in this. However, if the biblical words are replaced by others and the history of the Bible is replaced by alternative ideas, this inevitably leads to a distorted view. The distortion of the subject matter inevitably leads to false assumptions

Deepening

Talk to friends or family about the ideas you have about God and the world. What do you see as the problem of the world, of people, and what is the solution? Think out loud about things like “sin and death”, “heaven and hell”, “God’s expectation and God’s promise”. How does this work according to your understanding? What is still unclear? What could be investigated? When you pursue these things, you may not be able to substantiate some of these thoughts, but simply “assume” them. You may never have thought about it before. What do you want to do with this realization?