Spurgeon on what believers in heaven will think of people in hell

I’ve been thinking through hell, eternal punishment, and justice for some time now. A year ago I was praying and asking God how he would feel should any person be condemned to endure an “eternity of conscious punishment” (regardless of the form that that punishment takes: passive or active), and secondly how he would feel should any person be “annihilated” (again, whatever the form: entropic or sudden). I remember as I prayed I became filled with grief and yet the intensity just increased until I was overcome by an overwhelming, phenomenal sense of grief and despair. And then it stopped. And then the grief started again, but this time it was brief, it stopped but I was left with a sense of sheer despairing emptiness.

Of course it’s not wise to base any belief on something one has felt, sure, but this was a clear, prophetic experience, and I’m really not given to prophetic experiences every week – I would say there I have had a handful of significant ones in the past decade. I took me some time to put what happened together, but I think God responded to my questions right there (which doesn’t happen very often!), but I’m very thankful that he did. I had asked how God would feel if a human were to endure Eternal Conscious Punishment and so God let me feel how he would feel for a few minutes, I was overwhelmed by grief, like nothing I had ever experienced, and the same again regarding someone being annihilated, but this time grief followed by sheer emptiness and loss. It took me a while to put it all together and make sense of what had happened, but if much of the pinnacle of God’s creation, us humans, His children, had to endure eternal conscious punishment then that phenomenal sense of grief is, I think, what God would feel – constantly.

God’s connection to his creation is a necessary fact of his divinity, and there is much within scripture that declares this. If someone is experiencing Eternal Conscious Punishment (ECP) then we can be sure that God is experiencing it too, and we can be confident too in saying that we would experience it also. Could I enjoy heaven if I knew someone was experiencing ECP? How could I be happy in heaven if you’re not there? The promise of reconciliation of God with people and the world means that we would not be isolated and protected from the fact – God promises that we’ll be more connected with him & other people, not less. Could heaven be truly enjoyed, or would it just become a safe place for mourning? This, in my mind, was the final nail in the coffin regarding unending ECP – scripturally, logically, morally and philosophically I thought it was unsound anyway, but I couldn’t quite let go of it – this experience finished it off.

The old line is that believers will be happy in heaven because they’d be so satisfied in God, they’d just forget about the people in hell. I find this abhorrent view cold, vacuous and outright anti-scriptural. I was reminded about it when I was reading Robin Parry’s blog and he found that Spurgeon articulated this isolationist view. Spurgeon, of course, was a product of his time, much like we are a product of ours, and so I should probably not judge his words so harshly. It would seem the Christianity of 1885 was a tad cold:

…the righteous in heaven will be quite satisfied with the damnation of the lost. I used to think that if I could see the lost in hell, surely I must weep for them. Could I hear their horrid wailings, and see the dreadful contortions of their anguish, surely I must pity them. But there is no such sentiment as that known in heaven. The believer shall be there so satisfied with all God’s will, that he will quite forget the lost in the idea that God has done it for the best, that even their loss has been their own fault, and that he is infinitely just in it. If my parents could see me in hell they would not have a tear to shed for me, though they were in heaven, for they would say, “It is justice, thou great God; and thy justice must be magnified, as well as thy mercy;” and moreover, they would feel that God was so much above his creatures that they would be satisfied to see those creatures crushed if it might increase God’s glory. Oh! in heaven I believe we shall think rightly of men. Here men seem great things to us; but in heaven they will seem no more than a few creeping insects that are swept away in ploughing a field for harvest; they will appear no more than a tiny handful of dust, or like some nest of wasps that ought to be exterminated for the injury they have done. They will appear such little things when we sit on high with God, and look down on the nations of the earth as grasshoppers, and “count the isles as very little things.” We shall be satisfied with everything; there will not be a single thing to complain of. “I shall be satisfied.”

From The Hope of the Future (Spurgeon’s archive), pointed out by Robin Parry.