Are there different levels of punishment in hell?

I've often wondered whether there are different levels of punishment in hell. After all, it seems to make sense that some people deserve to suffer more than others. While there have been many books and articles written on the subject, at the end of the day there is only one actual authority - the living Word of God. 

Join us as we discover the answer to our question for today: are there different levels of punishment in hell?

"Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path" (Psalm 119:105)

Transcript

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Good morning everyone and welcome to fifteen minutes with Fritz, where Scripture meets the sidewalk. I want to begin today's podcast with a little story. In eighteen ninety eight, two traveling salesmen, John Nicholson and Samuel Hill, were forced to share a room due to overcrowding at the Central Hotel in Boscabel, Wisconsin. They discovered they were both devout Christians and they spent the night discussing the unique temptations and loneliness that traveling professionals face on the road. The two men decided to form an association for Christian businessmen to support one another. With the help of a third friend, William Knights, they named their association the Gideons, after a man in the Bible who led a small band of men to victory against a massive opposing army. Ten years later in november nineteen oh eight, the Gideons placed their very first Bibles in the rooms of the Superior Hotel in Montana. The goal was to provide spiritual comfort to travelers and to provide a tool for evangelism. These Bibles were somewhat unique in that they added a where to find help index in the front to direct readers to specific passages to comfort them in their current situations. For example, if someone was feeling lonely or fearful, the index suggested reading Psalm twenty three. If someone was feeling discouraged, reading specific passages in Romans or Corinthians would provide comfort. Now I want you to fast forward nearly one hundred years to the nineteen eighties. I was on a business trip in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I opened a drawer on the nightstand in the holiday inn I was staying at. There was a copy of a Gideon's Bible. I opened it to that very same where to find help page, and was instantly drawn to how helpful such an index could be. I took out a couple of sheets of hotel stationery and copied down all of the categories and help passages listed on those pages. I still have those sheets of stationery in my Bible today, and I refer to them whenever I'm feeling discouraged or lonely, or I'm in need of a pick me up from God's Word. Now why do I tell you this story? Well, last week I was unable to prepare a podcast because we were visiting our grandkids. In its place I published several short five minutes podcasts where I read passages of scripture from that where to find help index in the Gideon's Bible. You can find those podcasts in your email inbox from last week, or you can download them from my fifteen minutes with Fritz channel on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or iHeartRadio. So whenever you're feeling downhearted or anxious or even just thankful for what God has done for you, listening to five minutes of scripture will be sure to help. I guarantee it. Okay, let's turn our attention to the one hundred most asked questions about heaven, hell and the afterlife. We've been looking at what the Bible says about hell, and today I decided to answer the question are there levels of punishment in hell? In other words, do really evil people suffer more in hell than people who aren't so bad. This concept of levels of punishment found its origins in a secular work titled Dante's Inferno. This lengthy poem was written in the fourteenth century, and it describes hell as a funnel shaped structure with nine levels of punishment. The first level called limbo is where virtuous non Christians are kept. They experience no physical pain but live with eternal longings to escape. A few levels deeper is the greed level, where hoarders and squanderers push massive weights against each other forever. According to this poem, hell culminates in level nine called treachery, where betrayers are frozen in a lake of ice alongside a three headed Satan chewing on history's worst traitors, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, and Brutus and Cassius, who led the revolt against Julius Caesar. Now this funnel shaped hell has no basis in fact, it is a purely fictional work written by a man with a vivid imagination. But it did influence common beliefs about what hell is like. Interestingly, other religions have similar concepts. Islam believes there are seven layers in hell. Buddhism teaches that there are eight hot hells and eight cold hells. Hinduism has twenty eight realms of punishment, and Chinese Taoism has eighteen levels of hell. I also found it interesting that each religion defines what behaviors place you in the deepest level of their hell. Islam reserves that place for hypocrites who fake their faith and they will end up in the deepest part of hell. Buddhists tell us that those who kill their parents will spend time in the lowest regions of hell. Murderers and criminals who cause mass suffering will end up in the worst part of hell, according to Hinduism and Taoism. Only Islam believes that hell is eternal. Nearly all other religions teach that hell is a temporary place of suffering that you can escape from once you've suffered for a while. Well, these are nice stories, but to be truthful the only reliable source of information about hell is in the Bible. Since God created hell, only he can give us accurate information about whether there are different levels of punishment in hell. So let's turn to his word and find out some real facts. Surprisingly, the Bible is relatively silent about this topic. There are only a few passages that even allude to punishment in hell. In Luke's gospel, Jesus sent seventy two men to go ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He instructed each of them to stay at one house in each town they visited while they carried out their evangelistical evangelical missions. But he also warned them that if they were not welcomed in a particular town, they were to leave and warn the inhabitants that the kingdom of God is near. He then added these ominous words I tell you it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Sodom than for that town. It seems as though he is implying that some towns will face more severe punishment for rejecting the gospel, more even than the wicked city of Sodom. In the book of Revelation near the very end of the Bible we find a passage that describes the final judgment for unbelievers. It's called the Great White Throne Judgment, and it takes place when God has carried out his wrath against Satan and his horde of demons. We pick up the story in chapter twenty eleven. John writes Then I saw a great white throne in him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Notice what it says the dead were judged according to what they had done. This phrase is repeated twice for emphasis, to make sure we don't miss the significance of the words. When we are judged according to what we have done, no matter how hard we try to be good, we are always found to fall short of the righteousness needed to enter heaven. Why? Because no one is righteous, not even one, and all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Even though we keep most of the easier commandments like do not murder or do not worship idols, James tells us very clearly that whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. Therefore, because we can't truly achieve God's standard for living, the Ten Commandments, we are doomed to spend eternity in hell. Thankfully the Bible is just as clear about how to avoid this horrible place of suffering. Yet to all who received Jesus, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, and the gates of heaven are open to us. Now before I close, I want to share with you that I found myself wondering this week why the Bible would be so vague on a relatively straightforward topic like are there different levels of punishment in hell? I mean it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Shouldn't mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin suffer more than someone who slipped up just a couple of times on the less significant of the commandments? Just because I used the Lord's name in vain a couple of times in a fit of anger, does that mean I deserve to suffer like Hitler and Stalin? Shouldn't there be a level in hell where I just suffer a little bit compared to these really evil men? Well, therein lies the problem. If God chose to reveal the different levels of punishment in hell, I might look at the lighter punishments and decide they're not too bad, and therefore I would make the conscious choice to turn my back on Christ and choose the lighter punishment rather than yielding to Jesus. Remember what I said a couple weeks ago? I made the statement that Hitler and Stalin were in hell not because they murdered millions of people. No, they were in hell because they turned their backs on Jesus Christ. They ignored God's free gift of salvation and chose their own path, which put them on the road to hell. They did not bend their knee to the Savior of the world, and therefore they will be judged according to what they had done. You see, as humans we have the tendency to grade ourselves on a curve. We analyze our sins, grade them, and compare them with others who we know are much worse than we are, and we expect to be treated accordingly. But God looks at us differently. We are either covered in Christ's righteousness or we are not. We are either perfectly sinless or we are not. We are either on the broad road that leads to destruction, or we are on the narrow road that leads to life. Jesus made it very clear for us I am the way, the truth, and the life, he said. No one comes to the Father except through me. So in closing, are there different levels of punishment in hell? I really don't know. What I do know is that I don't have to worry about the answer if I choose the narrow path prepared for me by Christ Jesus. There are only two options. I pray that you choose life, not judgment. Let's pray. Our Father who art in heaven, I confess to you today that I am frail and weak, that I have stumbled and fallen short of your standard for righteous living, and as such I deserve to be cast out of your presence. But thanks be to God, you prepared another path for us, one that we don't deserve. We can be bathed in the righteousness of Christ to be viewed in his righteousness, his glory, his perfection, therefore opening the gates of heaven for us. We certainly don't deserve this, Lord, but because you love us so much, you sent your Son to die for us, the righteous for the unrighteous, to cleanse us from the filthy rags of our behaviors. Thank you, Lord. In Jesus' name. Amen.

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To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve as God and Father. To him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.

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This is the end of our podcast, but it's not the end of our story. Thank you for listening.