Is Jeffrey Epstein in Hell?

Why Hell Isn’t Enough—and What God’s Justice Might Actually Look Like

I’ll never forget when I was first cursed with the knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein. It was the first weekend of Advent 2018. The Miami Herald had just published its blockbuster investigation, Perversion of Justice, detailing his crimes against underage girls and the grotesquely lenient deal he received from prosecutors despite overwhelming evidence.

By then, I had already deconstructed my belief in Eternal Conscious Torment—the idea that God punishes unbelievers in hell forever. But with my blood boiling from the immense injustice I had just witnessed, I preached on God’s judgment that Sunday.

It was the first Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Hope. But the hope burning in my chest wasn’t hope in a soft, sentimental God of vague comfort and spiritual platitudes. It was the hope of judgment. At the time, Epstein was still a free man.

I ended the sermon with a verse I hadn’t used in a sermon before, because I tended to avoid the extreme judgment passages—but that Sunday it seemed necessary:

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.” (Malachi 4:1)

The miscarriage of justice enraged me, and it made me long for a God who would set things right—and set Jeffrey Epstein and his cast of fellow perpetrators and enablers ablaze.

But here’s the question I still can’t escape: how does that very real, very holy desire for justice square with a God of unconditional love—a God who endures violence rather than perpetrating it, a God who will reconcile all things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, uniting all things in love?

I wrote a book about deconstructing hell, and how God’s love is universally reconciling. That’s where I still believe everything is headed. But could Jeffrey Epstein really be a part of that reconciliation? And if so, do I even want to be there? Would his victims?

Our longing for justice is deeply human and deeply spiritual. It connects us to the suffering of others, and it reflects the heart of God. In a time when too many pastors and politicians refuse to speak about abuse, choosing comfort, silence, or tribal loyalty instead of truth, we want to know: is God like that too? Will God also look away?

No. In fact, I think that silent scream rising in your chest is God’s scream. Our anger at the lack of accountability is the righteous anger of God.

Many of us happily deconstructed hell—but it’s possible we did so from a position of privilege.

Miroslav Volf famously writes in Exclusion and Embrace about imagining yourself giving a lecture on nonviolence and divine love to people in a war zone—people whose villages have been burned, whose daughters have been raped, whose families have been slaughtered. He concludes:

“It takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that God refuses to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die.”

He’s right. When you step outside a charmed life and actually glimpse the violence and brutality that mark the daily existence of so many people, a God of judgment begins to make a lot more sense.

So here’s my thesis: our longing for justice is good and real—but hell is not the answer that fulfills it. Purely punitive solutions do not heal what is truly broken. For many of us, this gut-level desire stops at the sense that “something bad should happen to this guy.” That instinct is human and real, but God’s love and justice go much further—She does not lack our imagination and is not content to merely add violence on top of violence to balance the scorecard.

God will relentlessly restore and do what we cannot do—hold together perfect justice with a commitment to actually heal the root of every broken thing, person, and relationship. God is not content to freeze Epstein and his clients in endless evil and pain forever—that would be an eternal victory for the logic of death. In God’s severe mercy, She will root out the evil from every last one of us so that we will all be made whole.

But that’s God’s job. The longing for justice we feel is a summons for us to do our job—to act right here, right now, not deferring judgment to the afterlife. To build a world where powerful men don’t get to act with impunity, and victims are believed and protected. Our hope that God cares about these things is an indictment of our systems—and an indictment of us—for failing to do God’s will on earth as in heaven.

So no, I don’t believe Jeffrey Epstein is burning in hell right now. But I do believe God’s desire to reconcile all things and all people can still address our need for justice, in ways that are both more just and more emotionally satisfying than eternal hell.

Here are a few reasons why.

1. He will be remembered in contempt.
That may not seem like a big deal to us, but the ancient world placed enormous weight on honor and shame. Your name, your legacy, your remembrance mattered. In fact, although the Hebrew Bible does not speak about hell, the only verse that suggests a kind of hell describes it as “everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). Adolf was once a popular name. Judas was once just another disciple. Epstein’s name will likely join that list—eternally a byword, a name spoken with revulsion. To be remembered this way is a moral verdict written into history—the ultimate evidence of a failed life.

2. He missed out on what life is actually about.
Sin means missing the mark—which means missing the whole point of life. Richard Rohr says God doesn’t punish sin because sin is its own punishment. When you dehumanize others, you first dehumanize yourself. The essence of being human is connection—love, mutuality, communion. He knew none of this. A life given to exploitation and domination becomes smaller, colder, meaner, and less real. Whatever pleasure it extracts is thin, hollow, and rooted in self-hatred. Nobody truly “gets away with it.” A wasted life is a hell of a thing—and Epstein’s life, for all its wealth, was spent in a joyless nightmare. In the ways that matter most, I believe you reap the life that you sow.

3. True reconciliation will demand full exposure, recognition, and reckoning.
There is no reconciliation without truth, no healing without accountability. If Epstein is ever to return to love, he will see what he did—he will know the depth of the pain he caused in a way so complete we don’t even have language for it—and he will weep.

Zechariah imagines a moment when people “look upon the one they have pierced, and mourn.”

They are not saved by punishment, but when they fully see what they have done and experience a collective awakening. Denial collapses, and there is no way around it. This language is actually picked up in Revelation, for a universal reckoning:

“every eye will see him, even those who pierced him…”

The ones who pierced him are the systems and people complicit in violence and domination. Every eye will see—that is an essential part of universal reconciliation.

Perfect reconciliation must mean perfect honesty which leads to perfect empathy—we will fully know and be fully known. This knowledge will be beautiful, but it will also be painful.

The pain of others will become our pain, because we will finally see the truth that our separateness was an illusion. We are all, in John Steinbecks words, “one big soul.” This means, in order to return to love, Jeffery Epstein will not only know what he did, but he will feel it as his own pain.

4. Only the true self will enter God’s love—the ego will be destroyed.
Paul speaks of someone who “will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor. 3:15). The soul will return to love, but their words and deeds are burned up, unfit for eternity. We all have a true self, a God-self—but many of us spend our lives constructing false identities out of domination rather than love. For some who have devoted their whole lives to cruelty and dehumanization, their souls have shrunk so small there is barely a sliver of humanity left. Most of what they call “themselves” is pure ego, there’s nothing human about it, and every bit of it will be burned up and destroyed—there is no place for it in God’s future. The part of them that is returned to love may have almost no resemblance to the inhuman personality that walked the earth.

But I believe there is a part of all of us that can be saved. Before anyone became a monster, they were a child who wanted to be loved. Even if there is only a buried flicker of God-likeness, a smoldering wick of humanity is enough for God to refuse to give up.

Conclusion

Hell tickles our sense of justice in moments like this, but only because we’ve been formed in a retributive world, a world shaped by the logic of redemptive violence, where we’re trained to believe punishment is justice. We settle for the small pleasure of watching a bad man burn and call it redemption—only because we lack God’s imagination.

Hell wouldn’t solve the problem. It wouldn’t give stolen childhoods back. It wouldn’t restore shattered bodies or re-knit broken lives. It wouldn’t heal the open wounds abuse leaves behind. All it would do is take pain and cement it into eternity.

I hold onto the hope that the restoration God wants—for all of us—will not balance evil with more evil, but overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21).

And seeing what God is like shows us what we must be like too.

The Epstein files reveal more than injustice—they reveal an entire world build by pedophilic billionaires that empowers their evil—this world, and the institutions protecting this evil, must be turned upside-down completely.

God’s justice doesn’t mean waiting for heaven to fix what we keep excusing—it means tearing down the systems that protect abusers and building a world that finally protects the vulnerable.