There Are No Atheists In Hell

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

One of the fundamental propositions of the Bible is assumed from the start: God exists. Not only does He exist, but He is also the Author and Creator of all life, and therefore, all things in existence owe their existence to Him. In a concise sentence—a mere eight words in Hebrew—the foundations of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures answer several of life’s biggest questions and introduce several other important questions.

It is little wonder that the book of Genesis is subject to some of the fiercest critiques from avowed sceptics of every sort. If you can demonstrate the first sentence as false, every other line in the context of Scripture proves false. The rest of the Bible can be summarily dismissed if God does not exist. Likewise, if God did not create all that exists, He bears no intrinsic authority to impose Himself as the Ruler above all creation. Mankind need not be subservient to God if He is not Creator simply because He has no rightful authority to claim any infringement upon one’s autonomy. Yet if He is Creator, He is Lord over Creation and has every right to infringe upon our perceived freedoms.

This is rightly seen by sceptics as a bad thing, yet not for the reasons they necessarily hold. If God is the rightful Ruler of all and has the Divine right to impose His will upon created order, no man has the right to talk back. 

One might do so, of course, but it is of little consequence simply because they are finite creatures positioning themselves as arbiters of truth and morality before the Infinite One, whose essence is the basis of truth and morality. To clarify that, one might baulk at God’s ways, but God’s ways are informed by His being. He is good. Therefore, goodness finds its meaning in Him, just as mercy, love, holiness, wrath, and in our case today, truth and ethics.

It is a bad thing, though, because this fundamental proposition creates a realization of a fundamental problem: we have all rejected His authority and formed our sense of truth and morality from our own being. In essence, we have played the part of the Creator, acting as if we have the fundamental, sovereign right over such matters. 

Then subsequently, we have made arbitrary decisions informed by our usurping of the throne. We may not call it such. No, to say we are usurping the throne is tantamount to admitting God actually does have the authority to impose His will upon creation. Instead, we often place our unbelief and immorality under true belief and morality.

To make matters worse, many have gone the way of the fool in proclaiming that there is no God (Ps. 14:1). Again, if you deny the first central premise of the Bible, it logically follows that you can deny the second (i.e. God as creator). While many attribute the role of the creator to some other outside force, the decision is reached arbitrarily on the merit of our own individual and/or collective insight, rationale, and experience. To state that more clearly: we cobble together answers to life’s biggest questions based on our authority rather than an objective, external authority. Thus, many simply conclude God does not exist, but even if He did, God is immoral. Mankind has found a better way.

However, if all of this reasoning is false, that is, if God does exist and He did create all things, it brings incredible responsibility upon the life of every man, woman, and child. Every individual under the sun is responsible for acknowledging their Creator and giving Him thanks as their Creator. They must order their life around their Creator’s desires rather than their own—and this is where the bristling starts to happen. 

If God exists and He is the Creator of all things, this informs the whole of one’s life. One must not only acknowledge Him as Creator and give Him thanks (an impossible feat all of its own for the unbeliever), He must live according to how God has prescribed. Every aspect of man’s life must then come under total surrender to the One who is the Author of life—and the one who rejects God surely does so based on their desire to reject His authority.

It is all good and acceptable if a Creator doesn’t impose His will upon the masses of His creation. Indeed, the kids delight in running free from any semblance of rule and order when mom and dad are out doing their own thing—but the moment authority is exercised, and rule and order are brought to bear, there is a sort of visceral reaction to the kid that hates everything mom and dad stand for. The child can pretend mom and dad don’t exist, but the firm slap to the buttocks is as good a reminder that they indeed do exist and are in charge.

Obviously, the analogy above breaks down as we consider Mom and Dad sinful, finite beings who owe their allegiance to the infinite, sinless Creator, but the point still stands. It doesn’t matter if one plays the atheist card in God’s world. He is Creator and Man the creature. The atheist stands on borrowed ground. He eats borrowed food and drinks borrowed drinks. 

He breathes in borrowed air and, ultimately—lives on borrowed time. He can no longer diminish God’s glory and authority than if a flea were to try and blot out the sun's light by standing before it. This is mainly why many tend to dismiss God’s existence to conceal their hatred of God, yet in the end, it will prove just as fruitless as an open hatred of God.

At the end of all days, every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. They will not confess that He is Savior then because He will not be a Savior to them then. There is nothing they can be saved from. They squandered away a lifetime of opportunity to repent and believe the gospel; there are no second chances. 

It is assigned once for man to die and meet judgment. There is no hope for the one who dies under the consuming wrath of God, but just as there remains no hope for those who do not believe in Christ before their death, there will be no lingering scepticism. There will be no doubt. There will be no unbelief. All will believe and either go away to eternal death or eternal life, for there will be no atheists in Hell.

The good news is that Christ Himself made way for the sceptic. I was one myself and had been for the whole of my life. I was raised as a religious “none” in a home that set foot in churches only when a wedding or funeral of a distant relative took place. My parents were not forceful proponents of any belief system; it was simply not a matter of importance. 

In later years, I was a rather unhappy atheist in that I came to embrace what I believed to be the logical conclusions thereof in nihilism, but I held no qualms about my unbelief. I made it my delight to try and twist up immature and untaught Christians; I was not simply an atheist but an anti-theist. To make a long story short: to further my fun, I decided to do a comparative study of world religions and an in-depth study of Christianity in particular, all to continue in my quest to disprove the existence of God.

What I found, though, was a rather disturbing thing: try as I might to remain an objective sceptic; I found myself intentionally twisting the words of Scripture to try and escape the implications of it. Little by little, the text itself eroded many false conceptions I had about Christians and the Judeo-Christian God, yet little by little, a rather exciting dilemma arose. 

I started to actually entertain the idea that I might be wrong. We now know how that story ends, but suffice it to say, there was a watershed moment where I realized I had to reconcile with the implications of Scripture, most notably in the person and work of Jesus Christ Himself. I could have easily denied those implications by denying their plausibility at the onset, but that is a rather disingenuous way to give things a fair appraisal.

I’m not so naïve as to think that anyone and everyone who has read the Scriptures for themselves will come away with the same story as myself. For some, the Scriptures soften their disposition; for others, the Scriptures harden their disposition. No matter how one stretches it, one thing is clear: The Bible is not all that interested in bending backwards to prove itself to you. That is not me saying that it doesn’t prove itself—I believe it does, and quite well at that. However, it is to say that Scripture has more of a declarative stance in that it levels certain propositional truths every man, woman, and child must grapple with. This is mainly why I believe it creates such a visceral reaction when confronted with such statements.

The underlying dilemma the Scriptures present is that God is not the one on trial. You are. And unless you have Christ as your Advocate, you stand no hope outrun the implications of what all Scripture has to declare on your eternal state. You can be found in Christ and go to eternal life or you can be found outside of Christ and go to eternal death. Yet the one thing you cannot do is retain your unbelief. There are no atheists in Hell.