How can heaven be joyful if loved ones are in hell?

Question 10128.

How there can be joy in heaven while someone we loved is not there is, to my mind, the hardest question in the whole field of last things, and I have never once been asked it as an abstract puzzle. It comes from people with a name and a face in mind.

So I want to answer it carefully, without the brisk cheerfulness that sometimes passes for orthodoxy, and without pretending to know things God has not told us.

Take the question seriously

The first thing I want to say is that the difficulty is real. Anyone who waves it away has either not loved anybody very much or has not thought about it. Paul himself said he had great sorrow and unceasing anguish in his heart over his unbelieving kinsmen, and he was writing as an apostle in full possession of his doctrine.

Jesus wept at a graveside He was about to empty. He wept over Jerusalem knowing exactly what was coming. Sorrow over the lost is not a failure of faith; it is evidence of a heart shaped by God’s own.

So if you are asking this question with a lump in your throat, you are in good company, and nothing in this article is meant to hurry you past that.

What we can be sure about

Three things are certain. God is perfectly just and will do nothing unjust. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and says so through Ezekiel more than once. And God promises to wipe away every tear from the eyes of His people.

Hold those three together and you already have a framework. Joy in heaven is not the joy of people who have stopped caring. Joy in heaven is the gladness of people standing in the presence of a God who cared more than they did and who acted more than they did.

Notice also the order in Revelation 21:4. He wipes tears away, which implies there were tears to wipe. God does not say His people will never have felt grief. He says He will personally deal with it.

We will see what we cannot see now

At present we know in part. We see through a glass darkly. Our judgements about who deserved what are formed with almost no information, and coloured by affection, which is right and proper but not the same as clear sight.

In the presence of God we will understand the full weight of what sin is, the full extent of what was offered, and the full deliberateness of what was refused. Every mouth will be stopped, Paul says, and nobody at the last judgement will argue that they were treated harshly.

That does not mean joy in heaven requires us to feel nothing. It means we will no longer be labouring under a false picture, and a great deal of our present distress comes from the false picture rather than from the facts.

Two answers I refuse

The first is the suggestion that God will simply erase our memory of the person. That solves the problem by damaging us, and it makes the redeemed less than they were. I have set out why I think memory continues in my article on whether we will remember our earthly life.

The second is the older Puritan suggestion, found in a few writers I otherwise admire, that the redeemed will positively rejoice in the torments of the damned. I understand what they were reaching for, but I cannot square it with the character of a God who says He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

Joy in heaven will be joy in God and in His justice, which is not at all the same thing as satisfaction at anyone’s suffering. The difference matters, and blurring it has driven people away from the faith.

Universalism is not the answer either

The temptation, when a question hurts this much, is to solve it by removing one of its terms. If nobody is finally lost, the problem evaporates. That is the appeal of universalism, and it is an appeal to the heart rather than to the text.

Jesus spoke of a narrow gate and few who find it, of outer darkness, of a fixed gulf, and of eternal punishment set in parallel with eternal life. I cannot preach a gospel that is kinder than He was, because it would also be less true. I go into the reasons in my article on universalism.

An answer bought by discarding Scripture is not comfort; it is sedation. It will not hold at three in the morning and it will not hold at a graveside.

Do not close a door God has not closed

Something I say often to grieving families is this. You do not know what passed between your father and God in the last hours of his life, and neither do I. Deathbed repentance is rare, and it is real, and the thief on the cross had a very short theology course indeed.

Unless you have clear knowledge of a settled and final rejection, you are not required to conclude the worst. Committing someone into the hands of a just and merciful God is not evasion. It is the only honest position for a creature with partial information.

Abraham’s question stands: shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? It was asked as a genuine appeal, and the God who answered it has not changed.

Where joy in heaven actually comes from

Here is the deepest answer I can give. Joy in heaven does not depend on the arithmetic of who is present. It depends on God being all in all, on seeing Him as He is, and on being finally free from the self-centredness that presently makes our love so possessive.

Our loves here are real but disordered. We love people partly because of what they give us. In glory we will love without any of that, and we will love God more than we love anyone, which is not a reduction but the healing of everything.

A person who has come to that place will know joy in heaven and will not be tormented by what God has done. They will trust the God who did it, because they will finally know Him properly.

The honest gap

I have to be truthful and say that Scripture does not spell out the mechanism. It tells us the outcome, that joy in heaven is complete and there will be no more mourning or crying or pain, and it leaves the working to God.

That is not a dodge. There are things a small child cannot be told, not because the parent is hiding something shabby but because the child lacks the categories. We are in that position, and the promise is given precisely so that we can wait without an explanation.

Justice and mercy are not rivals

Part of our difficulty is that we imagine God balancing two competing instincts, wanting to save and being obliged to punish. Scripture never presents Him that way. At the cross, justice and mercy arrive at the same moment and in the same act.

Paul says God put Jesus forward so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith. Look up Romans 3:26 and read it slowly. Joy in heaven rests on that sentence, because the God who is being enjoyed there is one who did not compromise either quality to rescue us.

Once that is clear, the objection changes shape. The question is no longer how a loving God could let anyone be lost, but why He went to such lengths for anyone at all.

The gladness we already know in part

There is a kind of joy available in this life that survives real sorrow. A widow can laugh at her husband’s funeral and mean it. A believer can lose everything and still say that the Lord is good. That joy is not denial, and it is not distraction.

Jesus described His own path in those terms, enduring the cross for the joy set before Him. He did not enjoy the cross. He was sustained by something larger than it. Joy in heaven will work the same way, only without any of the fog we currently see through.

The Greek word for that gladness, chara, is used repeatedly of believers in the middle of affliction. Scripture simply does not treat joy as the absence of grief, so we should stop assuming that joy in heaven requires the absence of every hard memory.

Rest in what God is

When I have taken this question as far as I can, I come back to the character of God rather than to a diagram. He loved the world enough to give His only Son. He is not indifferent to the person you are worried about, and He never was.

Joy in heaven will be the settled gladness of people who have seen that God got everything right, including the parts that once looked unbearable from where we were standing.

So, now what?

Two things, and both are urgent. Pray for the people you love while there is still time, and speak to them. The best answer to this question is to make it hypothetical.

And if you are grieving already, do not let this doctrine crush you. Bring the person you are afraid for to God honestly, tell Him you cannot carry it, and leave it with the Judge who is also the one who bled for sinners. Whose name has been on your heart while you read this, and when did you last say anything to them?

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4)