Answer
By raining down fire and brimstone upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God not only demonstrated how He felt about overt sin, but He also launched an enduring metaphor. After the events of Genesis 19:24, the mere mention of fire, brimstone, or Sodom and Gomorrah conjures up images of God’s judgment. A “fire and brimstone preacher,” also called a “hellfire preacher,” is one who emphasizes God’s fiery judgment, often with lurid descriptions and over-the-top presentations.
Fire and brimstone is an emotionally potent symbol, however, and has trouble escaping its own gravity. This fiery metaphor can impede, rather than advance, its purpose. A symbol should show a similarity between two dissimilar entities. Fire and brimstone describes some of what hell is like—but not all of what hell is.
The word the Bible uses to describe a burning hell—Gehenna—comes from an actual place, the valley of Gehenna adjacent to Jerusalem on the south. Gehenna is an English transliteration of the Greek form of an Aramaic word, which is derived from the Hebrew phrase “the Valley of (the son[s] of) Hinnom.” In one of their greatest apostasies, the Jews (especially under kings Ahaz and Manasseh) burned their children in sacrifice to the god Molech in that very valley (2 Kings 16:3; 2 Chronicles 33:6; Jeremiah 32:35). Later, King Josiah desecrated the pagan altar there to prevent it from ever being used again for abominable sacrifices (2 Kings 23:10). So, in Jesus’ day Gehenna had a history of uncleanness, demonic activity, and grotesque rituals—a fitting metaphor for hell.
In Mark 9:43 Jesus used another powerful image to illustrate the seriousness of hell: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire” (NASB). For most readers, this image does escape its own gravity—in spite of the goriness! Few believe that Jesus wants us to literally cut off our own hands. He would rather that we do whatever is necessary to avoid going to hell, and that is the purpose of such language—to polarize, to set up an either/or dynamic, to compare. Since the first part of the verse (about amputation) uses hyperbolic imagery, it could be that the second part (about fire) does also. In any case, we should probably not take Mark 9:43 as an encyclopedic description of hell.
In addition to a place of fire, the New Testament describes hell as a bottomless pit or abyss (Revelation 20:3), a lake (Revelation 20:14), darkness (Matthew 25:30), death (Revelation 2:11), destruction (2 Thessalonians 1:9), everlasting torment (Revelation 20:10), a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 25:30), and a place of gradated punishment (Matthew 11:20–24; Luke 12:47––48; Revelation 20:12–13). The very variety of hell’s descriptors argues against applying a literal interpretation to any particular one. The variety and symbolic nature of descriptors do not lessen hell, however—just the opposite. Their combined effect is to present a hell that is worse than death, darker than darkness, and deeper than any abyss. Hell is a place with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than any single descriptor could portray. Its symbolic descriptors bring us to a place beyond the limits of our language—to a place far worse than we could ever imagine.
