The actual Bad Place
Michael: Jason figured it out? Jason? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.
(Season 2, episode 2)
Tahani: I’m gonna miss these little perks when I’m down in the Bad Place, being forced to wear a knock-off handbag and drink tap water.
Chidi: That’s what you think hell is??
(Season 1, episode 12)
According to The Good Place, hell is a place demons torture bad people for eternity – and quite enjoy doing it. Michael’s original motivation for creating a fake Good Place was just to spice things up:
Michael: The time has come to innovate. The human afterlife can be more fun. For us, obviously, not for the people we’re torturing. Who cares about those dummies? I present to you the perfect recipe for my proposed experiment. Four people, perfectly suited to make each other miserable. I’m going to design an afterlife where they torture each other.
(Season 1, episode 13)
This is slightly different to the Biblical version. Hell was intended as a place for Satan and the fallen angels (demons): “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Demons are not in charge there; they are the ones being punished.
Just as heaven is a place where people directly enjoy God’s presence, hell is the complete absence of God and everything that goes with his presence. The planet earth, although it is not how it was originally created to be, is neverthless full of God’s gifts – there are a lot of wonderful things to enjoy in spite of the imperfection. In hell every trace of those good things is gone.
This is not a particularly fun subject, but Jesus was loving enough to warn people about what was coming. The most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, mentions both heaven and hell: God loved the world so much that he gave us Jesus, so that no one would perish (suffer the punishment of hell) but everyone could have eternal life (with him in heaven).
If there was a tornado or other natural disaster on the way, a reasonable person would want to warn others of the danger. There is a day coming when everyone will stand before God, and if they have not taken shelter from the storm by accepting God’s free forgiveness, they will be exposed to his judgement: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”
Another verse says that Jesus “rescues us from the coming wrath.” Why would God be angry at people? Isn’t he loving, compassionate, gentle and kind? Not to mention accepting and forgiving?
He absolutely is all of those things. His attitude towards you is overwhelming love. He is not out to get you but to embrace you and make you his own. The last thing he wants is to condemn you: “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
In fact Jesus effectively went through hell so no one else would ever have to. When he was dying he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He took all of our sins on himself, which separated him from God the Father for the first time ever: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” In doing so he took our full punishment, so that we could be forgiven and accepted at no cost to ourselves: “the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
God has done everything possible to avoid judging us, but in the end it is our decision whether to accept his gift or not. Heaven is about being in the presence of God without any hindrances in the way; if someone ultimately wants their independence from him, he won’t force himself on them.
If people don’t accept God’s offer of forgiveness and mercy, what they are left with is his justice. It can be hard to comprehend, but our rejection of God is a terrible crime, and justice demands that it be paid for. You can get an idea of the severity of this crime by looking at Jesus on the cross: he took the full punishment for our sins. That would have been us – our crime deserved death.
The heart of the problem is not our tendency to do wrong things, but our rebellion against the one who made us. This reached its fullest expression when Jesus became a man, and human beings rejected him to the point of actually killing God in the flesh. But that was his intention from the beginning.
The Bible is a love story. Humanity betrayed and turned away from God, but he pursued us with incredible love, mercy and compassion to woo us back into his arms again. Although it is important information, hell is not the focus of that story. We were destined for destruction but God intervened by sending Jesus to die for us so that we could be restored and never be separated from him again.
There is a verse about Jesus that says, “For the joy set before him he endured the cross.” You know what that joy was? The thought of rescuing you and having a relationship with you, the way it was always meant to be.
Next: The Actual Good Place – does heaven get boring? Life versus death.
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