Where is hell located?

Question 10168.

The location of hell is one of those questions that sounds like idle curiosity and usually is not. People ask it because they want to know whether hell is a real place with a real address, or a state of mind, or a metaphor that preachers use to frighten congregations into behaving.

Scripture answers more carefully than either the fire and brimstone tradition or the modern embarrassment would suggest, and the answer depends on which stage of the story you are asking about.

Two different places, one English word

Much of the confusion about the location of hell comes from translation. The Old Testament word sheol and its Greek counterpart hades describe the realm of the dead between death and resurrection. The word gehenna, which Jesus uses most often, describes the final place of punishment after the judgement.

Older English versions rendered all of these as hell, which flattened a real distinction. Ask where hell is and you may be asking about the present holding place of the unbelieving dead, or about the lake of fire which does not receive its occupants until after the great white throne. Those are different questions with different answers.

So before we can talk about the location of hell we have to decide which one we mean. I deal with the terms individually when asking what Hades is and what Gehenna is, and the distinction is worth getting straight before going further.

The downward language of Scripture

The Bible consistently speaks of the realm of the dead as below. Jacob expects to go down to Sheol mourning. Korah and his household go down alive into the pit. Jesus tells Capernaum it will be brought down to Hades. The rich man in Luke 16 lifts up his eyes in torment and sees Abraham far off (Luke 16:23), which again implies a relative position.

Some have taken this to mean the location of hell is literally beneath our feet, in the interior of the earth, and a few writers have built elaborate cases from seismology and volcanic activity. I do not follow them. Scripture uses spatial language for spiritual realities all the time, speaking of God being on high without meaning he is a fixed distance above Manchester.

At the same time I would not dismiss the language as pure metaphor. The consistency of the downward imagery suggests something real about the place, even if it is not a location our instruments could reach. Below in Scripture carries the sense of separation and diminishment, of being under rather than over, and that is exactly what the realm of the dead is.

Is the location of hell a place at all?

Yes, and this matters. Modern preaching often reduces hell to a state of alienation, a way of describing what a soul does to itself. Jesus does not speak that way. He speaks of being cast into it, of a place where their worm does not die, of outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth. Those are the words of somebody describing somewhere.

It is also a place with occupants who are aware, in a body after the resurrection, and in conscious continuity with who they were. Whatever difficulty that raises for us, and it raises plenty, we cannot resolve it by turning the location of hell into a figure of speech. Jesus warned about it more than anyone else in the Bible, and he was not given to exaggeration.

What Scripture does not do is give coordinates. There is no chapter that tells us where hell is in the way Genesis tells us where Eden was. That silence is instructive, because the Bible’s interest is never in mapping the place but in keeping people out of it.

The lake of fire and the new creation

After the great white throne judgement, death and Hades are themselves thrown into the lake of fire. That is a striking image. The intermediate holding place is emptied and then disposed of, and the final state begins. From that point the location of hell is the lake of fire, which is described as prepared for the devil and his angels.

Where is it? Revelation 21 and 22 give us a new heaven and a new earth, with the New Jerusalem coming down and God dwelling with his people. The lake of fire is not shown as part of that landscape. It is outside, and the language of outside is the nearest thing to an address that Scripture gives us.

Outside is the language Jesus used too, in his phrase outer darkness. Not a region on a map, but exclusion from the presence of God and from the new creation which is life itself. If you want to pursue this further, my article on the lake of fire takes up the final state in detail.

Why the question of location is the wrong question

I have never met anyone whose life was changed by settling the location of hell. I have met a good many whose lives were changed by facing the fact of it. The Bible spends its energy on who goes there, why, and how anyone escapes, and it spends almost none on cartography.

Notice also who did the warning. It was not the fierce prophets of the Old Testament who spoke most about final judgement. It was Jesus, the one who welcomed children and wept at a grave. The gentlest voice in Scripture is the one that speaks most plainly about hell, and that combination ought to stop us treating the doctrine as a weapon.

Sentimentality is no kinder. If hell is real, refusing to mention it is not compassion but negligence, in the way that a doctor who cannot bring himself to name a diagnosis is not being kind to his patient.

The way out that Scripture presses

The gospel does not offer a way of making hell less serious. It offers a substitute who bore what we deserved. On the cross Jesus endured the wrath that our sin had earned, and the darkness over Golgotha was the nearest thing this world has seen to the outer darkness he was saving us from.

That is why the invitation is so open. Whoever believes in him is not condemned. Not condemned is a legal verdict, not a hopeful feeling, and it settles the question of destination for anyone who will have it. My article on what hell is deals with the nature of the punishment itself.

The location of hell will not be your problem if you belong to the one who took the judgement in your place. That is the only piece of information about hell that anyone urgently needs.

What Jesus taught about the place

If we are asking about the location of hell we should notice who supplies most of the information. It is not Paul, and it is not John the Baptist. It is Jesus, and his teaching about the place is more detailed and more frequent than anyone else’s in Scripture. He speaks of it in the Sermon on the Mount, in parables, in warnings to his own disciples and in judgement on cities that had seen his miracles.

His descriptions consistently involve exclusion. Cast out, shut out, sent away, outside where there is weeping. Whatever the location of hell may be, its defining feature in his teaching is being away from where the Master is. That is why I think the geography question, though understandable, keeps missing what he was actually pressing.

He also insists on its permanence. In the same sentence he uses the same word for eternal punishment and eternal life, which makes it impossible to hold that one lasts for ever while the other quietly finishes. I have set out the case at more length when asking whether hell is eternal.

So the answer to the location of hell that Jesus gives, if we can call it an answer, is relational rather than geographical. It is wherever God’s favour is not. That is a definition which travels well, because it works equally for the intermediate state now and for the lake of fire afterwards, and it explains why the Bible never felt the need to tell us anything more precise.

It is worth adding that the Bible never treats the subject as an abstraction. Every warning about the place is attached to a person being addressed, usually with an offer of escape in the same passage. That is how Scripture handles the doctrine, and it is how any preacher who loves people will handle it too.

So, now what?

If you have been asking where hell is out of curiosity, let the question turn into a better one. Not where is it, but who is going there, and what am I doing about the people around me who are on that road?

And if you have been asking because you are afraid, take the fear to the only one who has authority over both death and Hades and who says he holds the keys. He did not come to frighten you. He came to fetch you. Have you ever actually asked him to?

and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.

Luke 16:23, ESV