Fight or Flight?
How can hell be both “outer darkness” and “eternal fire”, very hot and very cold? It is Jesus himself who tells us it is both (e.g. Matthew 25:30, 41, ESV) – and presumably he knows what he’s talking about? To be honest, it’s something I’d simply accepted without really asking why it should be so. But why is it appropriate to describe hell in both these ways? Yes, it’s picture language, but to say so hardly answers the question. Why are both fire and darkness appropriate pictures for what hell is like?
It’s because sin is both a fight against God and a flight from God. That’s true from the very first sin, when Adam and Eve reject God’s simple command not to eat from a certain tree, fighting against what he has told them. And then? Fight turns to flight as they refuse to take responsibility for what they’ve done. Their son Cain then repeats the pattern. He attacks and kills his brother Abel and, like his parents before him, ‘runs’ from his responsibility: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
For those who insist on fighting God, hell is fire: “Those who mount an attack on God … die like moths in the flame of him who will not and cannot be displaced.” For those who persist in their flight from God, hell is darkness: “those who, turning their backs on God, flee the light and move toward the eternal blackness that marks God’s absence.” (Henry Stob, in the outstanding Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be by Cornelius Plantinga Jr.)