There may be some very uninformed folks who speak that way
While I wholeheartedly subscribe to the standards, the bulk of my ministry involves engaging with those who do not (either non-Christians or broadly evangelical ones). Thus it has been my experience that there are many, many uninformed folks out there who are nevertheless familiar with the idea that hell is where God isn't. This was the motivation for my original comment that the phrase "hell is eternal separation from God" is problematic without qualification. I did not alter my original position; rather I responded to Pastor King who himself introduced new elements that further brought out the problems I have with that terminology. I appreciate the language of the Confession and of Watson (quoted above). That is not, however, the language that I typically encounter. The phrase as it stands, and as it is "popularly" understood is incomplete. Further, my making this case is hardly original - quotes from Sproul and Washer have been mentioned, and Gill has this to say with regard to Psalm 139:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there; which, if understood of the place of the damned, is a place of torment, and a very unfit one to make a bed in, being a lake burning with fire and brimstone; and where the smoke of their torment ascends for ever, and they have no rest day nor night; their worm never dies, and their fire is not quenched; and even here God is: hell is not only naked before him, and all its inhabitants in his view; but he is here in his powerful presence, keeping the devils in chains of darkness; turning wicked men daily into it, pouring out his wrath upon them, placing and continuing an unpassable gulf between them and happy souls: though rather this is to be understood of the grave, in which sense the
And Spurgeon:
“If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” Descending into the lowest imaginable depths among the dead, there should we find the Lord. Thou! says the Psalmist, as if he felt that God was the one great Existence in all places. Whatever Hades may be, or whoever may be there, one thing is certain, Thou, O Jehovah, art there.
They all seem to be saying far more than that God is “in” hell only in a way consistent with His omnipresence, but that He is actively there, in a way most odious to its inhabitants.
I am trying to disengage from this discussion (really, I am!), but it seems that it keeps returning to the idea of saying “hell is eternal separation from God” when in reality we mean (and I think we all mean) that there is more to it than what those words alone convey. At any rate, those aren’t the words of the Confession. And Matthew’s language must be understood in harmony with that of John mentioned earlier, where it is said that the damned will be tormented “in the presence of” (ἐνώπιον: “in the face of”) the holy angels and the Lamb. Of this, Gill says:
in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; the latter will be their Judge, and will condemn them to everlasting burnings, and pronounce the sentence on them; and the former will be the executioners of it; they will gather them out, and sever them from the righteous, and cast them into the furnace of fire, and will be spectators of their punishment, and rejoice at it; and the sight of their power and glory will increase the torment of the sufferers. The emphasis is mine, pointing to his implication that the sufferers will be acutely aware of the presence of God.
In all, I am simply trying to promote the idea that we would better serve those aforementioned uninformed folks by speaking more clearly, sticking to the language of the Confession, and avoiding “short-cuts” that can lead weaker ones to incorrect conclusions.
