Increasingly these days I am encountering people who profess to be disciples of Christ - Christians - who deny the doctrine of Hell. More specifically, they deny the teaching of Scripture that the unrepentant wicked will suffer eternal conscious torment in Gehenna (as opposed to Hades or Sheol). The most common arguments against this doctrine are as follows:
1. Eternal conscious torment (ECT) is a monstrous, enormously disproportionate, punishment of human sin. Such a heinous punishment makes God a vicious and deeply cruel Being. Such a God is not revealed in Scripture, so ECT cannot be true. God is love and mercy; He is not a gleeful tormentor of the wicked.
2. If God does punish the wicked in Hell (Gehenna), it is only for a set period of time after which He annihilates them. It is the permanency of annihilation that is the "everlasting punishment," the "Second Death," of which Scripture speaks.
3. Hades is the "holding tank" of the dead; the intermediate place between earthly death and the Final Judgment that contains Abraham's Bosom for the saved person, or a place of fiery torment for the unregenerate wicked. Hades will be destroyed in Gehenna (the Lake of Fire) and with it all the wicked who are contained in it.
4. The Bible uses words like "death," "die," "destroyed," and "perish" to describe the experience of the wicked in Hell. These clearly communicate annihilation, not ECT.
These are the four most common arguments I encounter against the doctrine of ECT in Hell. Here are biblical responses to each:
Argument 1. Of all the arguments that are put forward against ECT in Hell this is the most common. It also seems to be, for those who are proponents of it, the most powerful and obvious argument against ECT in Hell. Well, it is certainly the most emotionally engaging one. This is, I suspect, why it is such a popular argument. It resonates strongly with our emotional, negative gut-response toward the idea of Hell. Who wants to think there is a righteous, just and wrathful God who will punish severely and eternally the evil that we do? No one! It is so much more...comfortable to think of God as a divine Fluffy Bunny whose grace and mercy are greater than our sin. It is gratifying and a relief to think we can sin with impunity because God's love and forgiveness covers it all. Love Wins, people! Our sin is no biggie to God. What view of God could be more pleasant to sinners than this?
But is this a truly biblical view of God? Is this a biblical view of our sin and Hell? No, it isn't. It's not even close.
Why do we need to be saved in the first place? Well, the Bible tells us that "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all." (1 Jn. 1:5) This is the way God has always been. Never has darkness had any part or place in Him. There has never been the slightest shadow of darkness in God, not the slightest particle of wickedness in Him. It is, in fact, His utter righteous purity (among other things) that makes Him God.
Deuteronomy 32:3-4
3 For I proclaim the name of the Lord: Ascribe greatness to our God.
4 He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He.
We aren't like God in this regard at all. Quite the opposite, actually.
Jeremiah 17:9
9 "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Romans 3:10-12
10 As it is written: "There is none righteous, no, not one;
11 There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God.
12 They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one."
Romans 3:23
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
It is because we are not like God in His holy perfection that we stand under His judgment and wrath. This is why we require salvation. But it is also why it is impossible for us to properly judge the heinousness of our sin. We are born into sin (Ps. 51:5); sin is our daily companion, our often cherished friend; we live among sinners and witness their sin every day; we see sin played out on t.v., in movies, and described in detail in books; we engage in sin we don't even recognize is sin! How, then, can we properly assess what is a proper punishment of our sin? We will always be too lenient in our judgment of our own wickedness, too soft toward the sin in which we are so thoroughly steeped and with which we are so at ease. Sin is our beloved brother and we cannot imagine him the vile, evil fiend God's punishment of him declares him to be.
So, when some think on the terrible punishment of Hell that God says our sin deserves, they wag their finger at God and declare, "No, this is too monstrous! Too severe! Our sin is finite, it is not so great it deserves the torment of Hell! You do evil in judging so harshly!" They only see their sin from their perspective; it can only be as they see it to be. Surely, God is over-reacting to judge sin with eternal torment in Hell. And in their haste to defend their wickedness, sinners impugn God's character. God must be at fault before Man is. What astonishing hubris! What a perfect example of the deep depravity of human wickedness!
If as a child I stole a cookie from my grandmother's cookie jar, the consequences would be commensurate with the crime: my grandmother would scold and perhaps make me do a chore. If I were to steal a bag of chips from the local grocery store, the theft being more serious, I might be arrested and charged with a misdemeanour. If I robbed a bank with a weapon and was caught, the robbery being very serious indeed, I could expect to be arrested, tried in court, and sentenced to prison for several years. In each instance of theft, the seriousness of the theft is revealed, in part, by the consequences, the punishment, enacted upon it. If, then, the punishment of my sin warrants eternal, conscious torment in Hell, my sin must be far, far more heinous than I'm inclined as a sinner to think it is!
Also, the notion that human sin is finite in scope ignores who our sin is always ultimately against: God Himself (Ps. 51:3, 4). There is no such thing as a finite sin when all sin is against an infinite God.
Not only is the protest sinners make against the severity of God's punishment of their sin an indication of how blind sinners are to the true awfulness of their sin, but it also exposes a low view of God's holiness. If we better understood His incredible purity and uprightness, as our forebears seem to do, we would not be so quick to rail against God's punishment of our sin. You see, the better we understand God's holiness, the better we understand our own moral impurity. And the better we see ourselves (by seeing God more clearly), the less inordinate God's severe but just and holy judgment of our sin seems.
Isaiah 6:5
5 So I said: "Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts."
Job 42:5-6
5 "I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You.
6 Therefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and ashes."
Romans 7:18
18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.
Argument 2. God may judge the wicked with eternal conscious torment - but only for a finite time. Eventually, He will annihilate the wicked. Only the saved possess immortal life.
This is a more subtle argument against the biblical doctrine of ECT in Hell. It doesn't try to do the impossible and deny entirely the plain biblical descriptions of the punishment of the wicked in Hell. It simply suggests the punishment is temporary, ending finally in annihilation. There are some obvious issues with this thinking:
- The Bible indicates that there will be degrees of punishment on Judgment Day (Matt 10:15; 11:21-24; 16:27; Lu. 12:47, 48; Jn. 15:22; Heb. 10:29; Rev. 20:11-15; 22:12). What would be the point of this if the ultimate end of all the wicked is the same: annihilation? This would be like punishing a thief with five lashes and a murderer with a thousand and then hanging them both!
- Annihilation escapes or ends punishment. One cannot be punished when one does not exist. Punishment requires consciousness. A tree, or rock, or broom handle cannot be punished. The torment that is the punishment of Hell, by definition, must be conscious torment. Annihilation, however, ends consciousness and thus ends punishment. Scripture, though, is clear that the punishment of Hell does not end but is eternal:
Matthew 25:46
46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."
Christ here offers a parallelism to his audience, a common device in Jewish philosophy and literature. He parallels the eternal life of the righteous with the everlasting punishment of the wicked. Implicit in the parallel is that the duration of the everlasting punishment of the wicked is as enduring as the eternal life of the righteous. Just as there will never be an end to the eternal life of the righteous, there will never be an end to the everlasting punishment of the wicked.
Argument 3. Hades will be destroyed in Gehenna (the Lake of Fire) and with it all the wicked who are contained in it.
This idea rests upon the following passage:
Revelation 20:14-15
14 Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
15 And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
It is assumed that the "second death" means utter destruction or annihilation. Some argue that "death," by definition, means "annihilation." But is this so? Obviously, if the first death we endure is annihilation, then we can suffer no second death. The Scripture above is very clear, however, that the unrepentant wicked whose names are not found in the Book of Life are cast into Gehenna to suffer a second death. It is evident, therefore, that death does not mean annihilation; for if it did, the first death would preclude the second.
Argument 4. The Bible uses words like "death," "die," "destroyed," and "perish" to describe the experience of the wicked in Hell. These clearly communicate annihilation, not ECT.
It is a favorite tactic of those arguing for annihilation to restrict these terms to just one meaning: annihilation. Sometimes, they use the following verse in support of their contention that annihilation is intended when the Bible speaks of God's punishment of the wicked:
2 Thessalonians 1:9
9 These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,
Consider the following quotation from Ron Rhodes in his book "Reasoning From the Scriptures with Jehovah's Witnesses":
The Bible scholar Adam Clarke comments on 2 Thessalonians 1:9:
Of the same verse the Jamieson, Fawcett and Brown Bible Commentary notes:
Many Bible scholars besides the ones cited above agree that "destruction" does not mean annihilation, particularly in 2 Thessalonians 1:9. Of words like "perish," or "destroy," or "death," we find also in Scripture a range of meaning. Arguing, then, from a single narrow annihilationist definition of these words handles the word of God very poorly and produces a correspondingly poor understanding of its meaning.
I am the first to admit the doctrine of eternal, conscious torment in Hell is a bitter, frightening subject. I take no joy in defending it. That I must do so is a testament to how far and how easily the western evangelical Christian community is, in its intellectually and theologically juvenilized state, drifting into false teaching. Gone are the days when the average Christian knew their Bible and doctrines sufficiently to counter the sorts of falsehoods I have delineated and rebutted in this blog post. It will not be long, I think, if this drift continues, before the western evangelical Church abandons other basic doctrines of the faith and grows increasingly and inevitably apostate.
2 Timothy 4:2-4
2 Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.
3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers;
4 and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.
Selah.
1. Eternal conscious torment (ECT) is a monstrous, enormously disproportionate, punishment of human sin. Such a heinous punishment makes God a vicious and deeply cruel Being. Such a God is not revealed in Scripture, so ECT cannot be true. God is love and mercy; He is not a gleeful tormentor of the wicked.
2. If God does punish the wicked in Hell (Gehenna), it is only for a set period of time after which He annihilates them. It is the permanency of annihilation that is the "everlasting punishment," the "Second Death," of which Scripture speaks.
3. Hades is the "holding tank" of the dead; the intermediate place between earthly death and the Final Judgment that contains Abraham's Bosom for the saved person, or a place of fiery torment for the unregenerate wicked. Hades will be destroyed in Gehenna (the Lake of Fire) and with it all the wicked who are contained in it.
4. The Bible uses words like "death," "die," "destroyed," and "perish" to describe the experience of the wicked in Hell. These clearly communicate annihilation, not ECT.
These are the four most common arguments I encounter against the doctrine of ECT in Hell. Here are biblical responses to each:
Argument 1. Of all the arguments that are put forward against ECT in Hell this is the most common. It also seems to be, for those who are proponents of it, the most powerful and obvious argument against ECT in Hell. Well, it is certainly the most emotionally engaging one. This is, I suspect, why it is such a popular argument. It resonates strongly with our emotional, negative gut-response toward the idea of Hell. Who wants to think there is a righteous, just and wrathful God who will punish severely and eternally the evil that we do? No one! It is so much more...comfortable to think of God as a divine Fluffy Bunny whose grace and mercy are greater than our sin. It is gratifying and a relief to think we can sin with impunity because God's love and forgiveness covers it all. Love Wins, people! Our sin is no biggie to God. What view of God could be more pleasant to sinners than this?
But is this a truly biblical view of God? Is this a biblical view of our sin and Hell? No, it isn't. It's not even close.
Why do we need to be saved in the first place? Well, the Bible tells us that "God is light and in Him is no darkness at all." (1 Jn. 1:5) This is the way God has always been. Never has darkness had any part or place in Him. There has never been the slightest shadow of darkness in God, not the slightest particle of wickedness in Him. It is, in fact, His utter righteous purity (among other things) that makes Him God.
Deuteronomy 32:3-4
3 For I proclaim the name of the Lord: Ascribe greatness to our God.
4 He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He.
We aren't like God in this regard at all. Quite the opposite, actually.
Jeremiah 17:9
9 "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?
Romans 3:10-12
10 As it is written: "There is none righteous, no, not one;
11 There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God.
12 They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one."
Romans 3:23
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
It is because we are not like God in His holy perfection that we stand under His judgment and wrath. This is why we require salvation. But it is also why it is impossible for us to properly judge the heinousness of our sin. We are born into sin (Ps. 51:5); sin is our daily companion, our often cherished friend; we live among sinners and witness their sin every day; we see sin played out on t.v., in movies, and described in detail in books; we engage in sin we don't even recognize is sin! How, then, can we properly assess what is a proper punishment of our sin? We will always be too lenient in our judgment of our own wickedness, too soft toward the sin in which we are so thoroughly steeped and with which we are so at ease. Sin is our beloved brother and we cannot imagine him the vile, evil fiend God's punishment of him declares him to be.
So, when some think on the terrible punishment of Hell that God says our sin deserves, they wag their finger at God and declare, "No, this is too monstrous! Too severe! Our sin is finite, it is not so great it deserves the torment of Hell! You do evil in judging so harshly!" They only see their sin from their perspective; it can only be as they see it to be. Surely, God is over-reacting to judge sin with eternal torment in Hell. And in their haste to defend their wickedness, sinners impugn God's character. God must be at fault before Man is. What astonishing hubris! What a perfect example of the deep depravity of human wickedness!
If as a child I stole a cookie from my grandmother's cookie jar, the consequences would be commensurate with the crime: my grandmother would scold and perhaps make me do a chore. If I were to steal a bag of chips from the local grocery store, the theft being more serious, I might be arrested and charged with a misdemeanour. If I robbed a bank with a weapon and was caught, the robbery being very serious indeed, I could expect to be arrested, tried in court, and sentenced to prison for several years. In each instance of theft, the seriousness of the theft is revealed, in part, by the consequences, the punishment, enacted upon it. If, then, the punishment of my sin warrants eternal, conscious torment in Hell, my sin must be far, far more heinous than I'm inclined as a sinner to think it is!
Also, the notion that human sin is finite in scope ignores who our sin is always ultimately against: God Himself (Ps. 51:3, 4). There is no such thing as a finite sin when all sin is against an infinite God.
Not only is the protest sinners make against the severity of God's punishment of their sin an indication of how blind sinners are to the true awfulness of their sin, but it also exposes a low view of God's holiness. If we better understood His incredible purity and uprightness, as our forebears seem to do, we would not be so quick to rail against God's punishment of our sin. You see, the better we understand God's holiness, the better we understand our own moral impurity. And the better we see ourselves (by seeing God more clearly), the less inordinate God's severe but just and holy judgment of our sin seems.
Isaiah 6:5
5 So I said: "Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts."
Job 42:5-6
5 "I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You.
6 Therefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and ashes."
Romans 7:18
18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.
Argument 2. God may judge the wicked with eternal conscious torment - but only for a finite time. Eventually, He will annihilate the wicked. Only the saved possess immortal life.
This is a more subtle argument against the biblical doctrine of ECT in Hell. It doesn't try to do the impossible and deny entirely the plain biblical descriptions of the punishment of the wicked in Hell. It simply suggests the punishment is temporary, ending finally in annihilation. There are some obvious issues with this thinking:
- The Bible indicates that there will be degrees of punishment on Judgment Day (Matt 10:15; 11:21-24; 16:27; Lu. 12:47, 48; Jn. 15:22; Heb. 10:29; Rev. 20:11-15; 22:12). What would be the point of this if the ultimate end of all the wicked is the same: annihilation? This would be like punishing a thief with five lashes and a murderer with a thousand and then hanging them both!
- Annihilation escapes or ends punishment. One cannot be punished when one does not exist. Punishment requires consciousness. A tree, or rock, or broom handle cannot be punished. The torment that is the punishment of Hell, by definition, must be conscious torment. Annihilation, however, ends consciousness and thus ends punishment. Scripture, though, is clear that the punishment of Hell does not end but is eternal:
Matthew 25:46
46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."
Christ here offers a parallelism to his audience, a common device in Jewish philosophy and literature. He parallels the eternal life of the righteous with the everlasting punishment of the wicked. Implicit in the parallel is that the duration of the everlasting punishment of the wicked is as enduring as the eternal life of the righteous. Just as there will never be an end to the eternal life of the righteous, there will never be an end to the everlasting punishment of the wicked.
Argument 3. Hades will be destroyed in Gehenna (the Lake of Fire) and with it all the wicked who are contained in it.
This idea rests upon the following passage:
Revelation 20:14-15
14 Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
15 And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
It is assumed that the "second death" means utter destruction or annihilation. Some argue that "death," by definition, means "annihilation." But is this so? Obviously, if the first death we endure is annihilation, then we can suffer no second death. The Scripture above is very clear, however, that the unrepentant wicked whose names are not found in the Book of Life are cast into Gehenna to suffer a second death. It is evident, therefore, that death does not mean annihilation; for if it did, the first death would preclude the second.
Argument 4. The Bible uses words like "death," "die," "destroyed," and "perish" to describe the experience of the wicked in Hell. These clearly communicate annihilation, not ECT.
It is a favorite tactic of those arguing for annihilation to restrict these terms to just one meaning: annihilation. Sometimes, they use the following verse in support of their contention that annihilation is intended when the Bible speaks of God's punishment of the wicked:
2 Thessalonians 1:9
9 These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,
Consider the following quotation from Ron Rhodes in his book "Reasoning From the Scriptures with Jehovah's Witnesses":
The Greek word translated "destruction" in this verse is olethros,
and carries the meaning "sudden ruin", or "loss of all that gives worth
to existence." New Testament scholar Robert L. Thomas says that
olethros "does not refer to annihilation...but rather turns on the thought of
separation from God and loss of everything worthwhile in life..." (pg. 334)
The eminent Bible scholar W.E. Vine says of apollumi a Greek word often rendered as "destroy" in Scripture:and carries the meaning "sudden ruin", or "loss of all that gives worth
to existence." New Testament scholar Robert L. Thomas says that
olethros "does not refer to annihilation...but rather turns on the thought of
separation from God and loss of everything worthwhile in life..." (pg. 334)
"The idea is not extinction but ruin, loss, not of being but of well-being."
The Bible scholar Adam Clarke comments on 2 Thessalonians 1:9:
"What this everlasting destruction consists in we cannot tell. It is not annihilation,
for their being continues; and as the destruction is everlasting, it is an eternal
continuance and presence of substantial evil, and absence of all good..."
for their being continues; and as the destruction is everlasting, it is an eternal
continuance and presence of substantial evil, and absence of all good..."
Of the same verse the Jamieson, Fawcett and Brown Bible Commentary notes:
"Cast out from the presence of the Lord is the idea at the root of eternal death,
the law of evil left to its unrestricted working, without one counteracting influence
of the presence of God, who is the source of all light and holiness (Isa 66:24 Mr 9:44)."
the law of evil left to its unrestricted working, without one counteracting influence
of the presence of God, who is the source of all light and holiness (Isa 66:24 Mr 9:44)."
Many Bible scholars besides the ones cited above agree that "destruction" does not mean annihilation, particularly in 2 Thessalonians 1:9. Of words like "perish," or "destroy," or "death," we find also in Scripture a range of meaning. Arguing, then, from a single narrow annihilationist definition of these words handles the word of God very poorly and produces a correspondingly poor understanding of its meaning.
I am the first to admit the doctrine of eternal, conscious torment in Hell is a bitter, frightening subject. I take no joy in defending it. That I must do so is a testament to how far and how easily the western evangelical Christian community is, in its intellectually and theologically juvenilized state, drifting into false teaching. Gone are the days when the average Christian knew their Bible and doctrines sufficiently to counter the sorts of falsehoods I have delineated and rebutted in this blog post. It will not be long, I think, if this drift continues, before the western evangelical Church abandons other basic doctrines of the faith and grows increasingly and inevitably apostate.
2 Timothy 4:2-4
2 Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.
3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers;
4 and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.
Selah.
