BIBLE STUDY

Hell (Eternal Torment)

Also: hellfire, eternal torment, lake of fire, Gehenna, Sheol, Hades, is hell real, what happens when you die

The teaching that the wicked are conscious and tormented forever after death. It contradicts the creation account, the seventh day of rest, the Bible's description of death, and God's own sentence in Eden, which was death, not torment. The dead know nothing at all.

The problem of the seventh day

(Ge 1:31) After that God saw everything he had made and, look! it was very good.

After the sixth day Jehovah rested, and he is resting still (Genesis 2:2, 3). Nothing has been created since. If hell exists, it was created before the seventh day, while everything was "very good," and before Adam and Eve had sinned. That would mean God prepared a place of eternal torment for a test he already knew would fail, which makes the test rigged and the God who set it unjust. The doctrine of hell requires that contradiction from the first pages of the Bible.

What God actually said

(Ge 2:17) But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will positively die.

The first sin was the worst sin ever committed, by perfect people, with consequences for every human born since. If anyone deserved worse than death, it was Adam and Eve. God said they would die. He did not say they would die and then be tormented. Romans 6:23 gives the same sentence: "the wages sin pays is death."

What the dead know

(Ec 9:5, 10) For the living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all... there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in Sheol, the place to which you are going.

Torment requires consciousness. Scripture says the dead have none. The breath of life returns to God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7), and the person no longer exists except in God's memory, awaiting the resurrection through Christ.

Whose words hell believes

God said, "you will positively die." Satan said, "You positively will not die" (Genesis 3:4). The teaching that "you" go on living after the body dies, in torment or in bliss, is Satan's sentence, not God's. It works because Jehovah "put eternity in their heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11): mankind was made to live forever, and the lie plays on that longing. It is the same lie Babylon the Great preserves in every religion she has mothered.

What that leaves

Hell contradicts God's justice, his love, his statement that all was very good, his day of rest, his sentence in Eden and his description of death. A truth never contradicts itself. The Bible's hope for the dead, righteous and unrighteous, is not survival in another realm but resurrection through Jesus Christ.

SCRIPTURES CITED