Are People Punished In Hell Forever
"How can a loving God send people to hell
forever and ever?" Is hell really everlasting, or will it eventually
"freeze over?"
You'd expect cultists to annihilate the concept
of hell, but today, more and more evangelical Christians are buying
into this idea of annihilation as well. Rather than believe that unbelievers
are going to suffer forever and ever, they claim a just God would never
allow infinite suffering for finite sin. But for this argument to be
consistent, we would be forced to say that God shouldn't extend eternal
bliss to finite creatures. See this argument is self-defeating because
annihilationism teaches that finite wrongdoers will be zapped into unconscious
oblivion for an infinite amount of time.
Let me also add this, if there were no hell,
the atrocity of sins against the very character of God would be minimized.
And in light of crimes committed by Nazi war criminals and things like
that, the horror of eternal, conscious punishment may not be so inconceivable
after all.
Annihilationists try to use Scriptures like
Malachi 4:1 and Matthew 10:28 to argue for extinction rather than everlasting
punishment. But the consummation of evildoers, which is spoken of in
these passages, does not at all infer extinction. Rather, it clearly
means that evildoers will undergo conscious destruction forever (Mark
9:42-48; Luke 16:19-31; 2 Thes. 1:8,9; Jude 7-13; Rev. 14:9-11).
Remember, a text without a context is a pretext.
So let's look at the clear context of Scripture - passages like Matthew
25:41,46 and Rev. 20. Here we see without equivocation that the Bibles
states hell is both conscious and never ending. Like the anti-Christ
and the false prophet, evildoers will be tormented "forever and ever."
The bottom line is this, since the Bible confirms that hell is forever,
we ought to confirm that hell is forever as well.
{ Back To Previous
Page }
