In the End, Hell Has Gotta Go. Otherwise, God's Victory is No Victory at All.

Gosh, at this year's Oscars, I wish it had won something, even been nominated.   It got great reviews (a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes).  More crucially, it got great reviews from those who mattered most, those who had been there, the men who survived it, who survived the Battle of Kamdesh.  

In 2009, at a very vulnerable outpost in Afghanistan, Outpost Keating, 48 American soldiers (along with a few Latvians and Afghans) withstood a brutal attack by over 300 Taliban.  Outnumbered nearly 6 to 1, over half of them were wounded. Eight, almost a fifth of their number, died.   And because of their gallantry in that battle, 21 received Bronze Stars.   Nine received Silver Stars.  Two received the Distinguished Service Cross.   And two others received the highest honor of all, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

And last year, based upon the book by Jake Tapper, a remarkable movie simply called, The Outpost told the story of that battle.   The film begins a few months before.  But from the beginning, you sense the tension.  You know what’s coming.   You can’t help but feel how vulnerable these soldiers are, sitting deep in a narrow valley, surrounded by the mountains of the Hindu Kush.   And then the attack happens, seemingly out of nowhere.  Just seeing it on the screen is terrifying.  I cannot imagine what it was like in reality.      

And all through the brutal scenes, one thing struck me.   These soldiers, some of whom didn’t like each other, risked their lives again and again for each other. They ran through literal rains of bullets to get one of their own to safety.  It didn’t matter if that soldier, wounded, had little hope of even surviving.  They had a commitment to each other.  They would not leave each other behind.   And they kept that commitment, no matter the risk or cost.

At the end of the film, you discover, one of the actors was indeed one of those very soldiers.  Then you hear interviews with the rest.   I remember one soldier in particular.  He said that place was like Hell and it was like Heaven.   I understood the hell part.   If you’d seen the movie, you’d get that.  But he explained the heaven part this way.  He talked about their love for each other, their unwavering commitment.  And after seeing the movie, I got that too. 

Why do I bring that movie up?  It’s because that film, especially in those soldiers’ unshakeable commitment to each other, how they did whatever it took to get everyone, even the dead home, you see a picture.  You see a picture of why Hell can’t be forever.  You see, why, in the end, God will not leave anyone behind.  So, why will hell not be forever? Why will God not, in the end, leave anyone behind?  In these words, from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

1 Corinthians 15:20-28

Until about a year or so ago, I didn’t think about hell a lot.  I saw it as an uncomfortable thing Christians believed but not one I wanted to look at too deeply.  Then my favorite Christian thinker, a guy named David Bentley Hart wrote a book about it.   And I read it.  And as I did, I became embarrassed.  I realized.  In avoiding this topic, I had looked past scripture after scripture that told a very different story than I had believed.   And today, I turn to the heart of that different story, to a point scripture makes again and again.  In the end, God will settle for nothing less than complete victory.  Why?  Anything less is not a victory at all.

You see.  In this part of Paul’s letter to Christians in Corinth, he is making something really clear. If you don’t believe Jesus rose again, literally, physically, then you don’t got squat. And he lays out the evidence, the hundreds of witnesses, including, Paul notes, hundreds still alive that the Corinthians can speak to.   Then right before these words, he lays out the stakes.  He says: if Jesus died on that cross and that’s it, then: “we are of all people, most to be pitied.”   Thousands have died like Jesus did.  That’s not what makes the difference.   What makes the difference is only one came back.  Only one human history and that’s Jesus.   

But why did Jesus do it?  Why did Jesus rise? Why do you need the resurrection?  And, in these words you just heard, Paul lays it out.    

You see.  God did not create death.   Death came later.  Death came only because something went wrong; went terribly wrong.   Adam and Eve stopped trusting God’s love.  And when that relationship broke, it unleashed brokenness and death for everyone and everything.   And since a person, as Paul puts it, Adam, opened the door to death; only another person could close it.   And Jesus became that person.   If Jesus died and did not rise, death’s door stays open.  But when Jesus rose, when the stone rolled away from the tomb, death began to roll away too.   Everything began to change.   And God, in Paul’s words, makes it clear, when God says everything, God means everything.

When Jesus rose, he began a revolution.   And God won’t stop until that revolution overturns everything that stands against God’s love.  At the end of time, when the final victory comes, even death itself will fall.  Nothing in the universe will exist without living in communion with God’s love.  Nothing.    So that, as Paul puts it here, “God may be all in all.”   And when you think about it, that makes sense.   That’s what victory looks like, right?  

Imagine, if after D-Day, General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, had gone to President Roosevelt and said: “Well, Mr. President, we have won. We have the victory.”    And Roosevelt asked. “So, Germany has surrendered?  Berlin has fallen?”   And Eisenhower said. “Well, Mr. President, we got Paris, Belgium, a bit of Germany, just missing Berlin, Munich, a few others.  We figure. That’s good enough.  So we’re going to declare victory and go home.”    Well, if that conversation had happened, you can imagine.  It would not have gone well.  But of course, it never would have happened.  Eisenhower knew.  Victory means victory.   And any world in which the Nazis held power would be a world in which the Allies had lost.   It would not be victory at all.

That’s why no one is happy we’re leaving Afghanistan.  Even the two Presidents, our past one and our current one, who have decided it’s the only thing we can do aren’t happy about it.  Why?  We can’t declare victory.  We know victory hasn’t come.  Maybe victory will come.  The Afghans have to decide that.  But we know this.  Our nation and our NATO allies, we did not bring it.   We did not get that job done.  Our power, as daunting as it is, met its limits. 

But here, Paul is talking about God, a God who, in a few centuries, will convert even the Roman emperor to follow Jesus.  And for this God nothing is impossible.  This God’s love has no limits.   In this love, not even death stands a chance.      In the end, as God proclaims in Philippians: “at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”   And those knees won’t be bending in fear.  They will be bending in love.  For scripture tells us.  God’s perfect love casts out fear.  There can be no fear there.  In those moments, God will be all in all.  

But do you see what this means?   If God will, in the end, be all in all, then at that point, even Hell has gotta go.   That’s where evil lives, what the Bible calls the second death.   So, if God’s love has conquered death, God’s love has conquered hell.   Hell can’t be forever.  Only what God creates lives forever.  And God did not create Hell.  Evil did.  Human brokenness did.   And where evil and brokenness go, so goes hell.  That is what victory looks like.

That’s why the early Christians said hell had to be for healing, for restoring people to God.  After all, God promises restoration again and again for those who are lost.  In Ezekiel, God promises restoration even for Sodom!  So, in light of scriptures like that, and God’s ultimate complete victory, where all, all, that means everyone, will be made alive in Christ, it’s the only thing that’s possible.  As Sherlock Holmes put it: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Now some say, those left in hell, will simply disappear, be annihilated.  It’s an interesting idea.  You just don’t find it anywhere in the Bible.   Instead, you’ll find words such as these.  As all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.   It doesn’t say, all who believe.  It says all who died, everyone, everyone will be made alive in Christ.   And if it’s not that way, then Jesus doesn’t have the last word.  That yahoo Adam does.   But Adam doesn’t have the victory.  Jesus does.   

You see, Jesus, like those soldiers at OutPost Keating, will not leave anyone behind.  If this God in Jesus, became a human being.   If this Jesus offered up his very life.  If Jesus went to a gruesome death, if he went to the tomb and beyond.   Then no place exists that Jesus will not go to bring his lost sisters and brothers home.   And in the end, what Jesus began on that cross and in that empty tomb, he will finish.  Jesus’ love will bring God the victory, and not even the gates of hell will be able to stand against it.