Van Vlastuin about hell

Originally posted on December 07, 2009 – by Andre Piet

Last Saturday, the Reformatorisch Dagblad carried an article by dr. W. van Vlastuin on the question, “does a good God send people to hell?” With a smiling face pictured, the Katwijk minister answers this question with an emphatic yes. But what is there to laugh about in such a sad article? It is shocking how van Vlastuin, with fallacious reasoning, presents uninformed people with a caricature of GOD. Instead of demonstrating matters from the Scripture, he philosophizes away by the misleading light of tradition. Van Vlastuin defends the idea of “God’s infinite wrath” with the argument that God cannot let injustice go unpunished. A non-argument, because it is not God’s wrath or judging that is under discussion, but its infinitude. God’s judgments can be extraordinarily severe (think of the deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah), but never infinite. “For a moment is His anger, A lifetime is His goodwill” (Psalm 30:5). Those are the Biblical proportions and relationships.

And then this argument:

Let us realize that no one spoke as much about hell as Jesus. The doctrine of hell was not proclaimed by Paul, by Peter, or John, but by none less than the Savior Himself.

The truth is that Jesus NEVER spoke about hell. He spoke about Gehenna, that is the valley of Hinnom near Jerusalem. Van Vlastuin knows that too, only he does not tell it. According to the prophet Isaiah (66:24), during the kingdom of peace the corpses of those struck by God’s judgment will lie there. Without burial, they will openly be consumed there by fire or by worms. A confronting spectacle, certainly. But it has NOTHING to do with the idea of a hell in which souls in the hereafter are endlessly tortured.

At the close of his article, van Vlastuin writes:

The doctrine of hell is connected with the core of the doctrine of God, the doctrine of sin, and the doctrine of Christ.

This is correct. But the other way around from what the writer means. The doctrine of hell is “a teaching of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1). What else should a doctrine be called that portrays the GOD Who locks up all together in stubbornness, that He should be merciful to all (Rom. 11:32; 5:18), as a being Who is wrathful and tortures into infinitude? In the Bible, GOD is the One Who seeks and finds the lost. That is what makes Him GOD. If He would indeed seek, but not be able to find, then He is a sinner, that is, a miss-er of the mark. The same applies to Christ Jesus, “Who is giving Himself a correspondent Ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:6) and came for the salvation of the world (John 3:17; John 4:42).

What van Vlastuin is proclaiming here is not Evangel. This message demonizes GOD, it distorts the Biblical truth, it insults the universal significance of Christ’s redemptive work, and it drives people to despair.
All the more reason to let a truly GOOD MESSAGE sound forth with power over against this!

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