CHAPTER 37
Why Scripture Does Not Teach “Hell” as Eternal Torment
Exposing a False Doctrine and Honoring the Father and the Son
Introduction
How the Traditional “Hell” Doctrine Misrepresents the Name of God
Few doctrines have so deeply shaped Christian imagination—and so profoundly distorted the character of God in the minds of His people—as the doctrine commonly called “hell.” In its familiar form, “hell” is imagined as a realm of never-ending conscious torment, where God perpetually sustains the existence of the lost in order to inflict pain without purpose and without end. This picture has been used to frighten multitudes into external conformity, and it has driven others into despair or unbelief, unable to reconcile such a God with the Father revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Such a doctrine is not a neutral misunderstanding. It is, in effect, a slander against the name of the Father and the Son. It portrays God as one whose justice is satisfied only when suffering never ceases, whose mercy fails at the threshold of death, and whose purpose for vast multitudes is not restoration but unending ruin. Yet when we listen carefully to the Torah, the Prophets, the Lord Jesus, and the Apostles, a very different pattern emerges. Scripture speaks with great severity about judgment, wrath, destruction, and the fire of Gehenna. It does not, however, teach a realm of eternal torment as the final destiny of God’s creatures.
In the previous chapter we established the positive biblical doctrine of Gehenna—the earth under judgment in the Day of the Lord, the age-lasting furnace of the Seventh Day in which the Adamic body and soul are destroyed and the spirit is purified in preparation for the Eighth-Day new creation. In this chapter we will expose the false doctrine that has displaced that biblical teaching. We will trace how the traditional doctrine of “hell” arose, why it does not rest on the foundation of Scripture, and how it has been sustained by mistranslations, conflated vocabulary, and an over reliance on apocalyptic imagery rather than the clear witness of Moses, the Prophets, the Lord Jesus, and the Apostles.
We will see that the God of Scripture is indeed a consuming fire, that His judgments are real and terrifying, and that the fires of Gehenna are age-lasting and purifying. We will also see that His purpose from the beginning is restoration, and that His judgments, however severe, are instruments of that purpose, not its denial. Yet we will also see that there is no softening of judgment in this recovery; the fires of the Seventh Day are more, not less, fearful when understood as belonging to a real age on a real earth, rather than as a metaphysical abstraction whose very endlessness renders it paradoxically remote.
The Torah’s Witness: Judgment Without Endless Torment
The doctrine of eternal torment claims to rest on Scripture, yet the Torah—the very foundation of all that the Prophets, the Lord Jesus, and the Apostles teach—knows nothing of such a concept. When we examine the Torah’s own testimony concerning the nature and purpose of divine judgment, we find severity, fire, exclusion, and death, but never a punishment that extends beyond God’s stated purpose of purification and restoration.
At Sinai the Lord descended in fire, cloud, and earthquake, and Moses later gathered the meaning of that theophany into a single declaration: “For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). The fire of Sinai was real and terrifying. Boundaries were set around the mountain, and if man or beast broke through, they were to be put to death (Exodus 19:12–13). The people could not endure the voice of God and begged that He speak through Moses instead (Exodus 20:18–19). Yet Sinai was not a display of purposeless wrath. The God who descended in fire also gave the Torah, established the covenant, erected the tabernacle, and dwelt among His people. The fire served the holiness that made fellowship possible. As the previous chapter has shown, Sinai is a localized, anticipatory Day of the Lord, but even in its severity the fire was purposive: it separated what was holy from what was profane and guarded the means by which Israel could approach God in safety.
The Torah’s covenant curses in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 are among the most severe passages in all of Scripture. Persistent disobedience brings famine, sword, pestilence, confusion, fear, exile, desolation, and the scattering of Israel among the nations. Deuteronomy speaks of corpses left unburied, of disease and madness, of curses that “pursue” the disobedient until they are destroyed (Deuteronomy 28:25–26, 45). The Song of Moses declares that “a fire is kindled in My anger, and shall burn to the lowest Sheol; it shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains” (Deuteronomy 32:22). This language is as fierce as anything found later in the Prophets or in the teaching of the Lord Jesus.
Yet the same Torah that threatens these judgments also promises restoration beyond them. Leviticus 26, after listing the covenant curses in devastating detail, turns a corner: “If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers… then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham I will remember; I will remember the land” (Leviticus 26:40, 42). Even more remarkable, the Lord declares, “Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, nor shall I abhor them, to utterly destroy them and break My covenant with them; for I am the LORD their God” (Leviticus 26:44). Here the Torah explicitly forbids the idea that God’s judgment aims at the utter destruction of the people He has judged. The curses are real and terrible, but they operate within a covenant that survives the punishment and reaches toward restoration.
Deuteronomy 30 completes this arc. After describing the curses that will scatter Israel to the ends of the earth, Moses prophesies their return: “The LORD your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the LORD your God has scattered you” (Deuteronomy 30:3). The Song of Moses itself, after its ferocious description of divine fire, ends with vindication and mercy: “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people; for He will avenge the blood of His servants, and render vengeance to His adversaries; He will provide atonement for His land and His people” (Deuteronomy 32:43). The very song that speaks of fire burning to the lowest Sheol concludes with atonement and rejoicing.
The Torah’s penalties for individual offenses follow the same pattern. As Appendix C of this book has shown, the phrase “that person shall be cut off from his people” appears repeatedly in contexts of severe covenant violation—profaning sacred things, refusing purification, breaking the Sabbath. Yet the same Torah that prescribes “cutting off” also prescribes the means of return: the red heifer for those defiled by death, the sin offering for those who have transgressed, the Day of Atonement for the cleansing of the whole community. Why prescribe the means of return if cutting off is intended to be permanent? The very structure of the Torah’s penal legislation demonstrates that judgment is restorative, not endlessly punitive.
Even the death penalty in the Torah—the most severe earthly judgment—does not reach beyond the body. The Lord Jesus Himself draws the decisive distinction: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matthew 10:28). Israel’s courts could put the body to death, but they could not touch the soul. The executed offender passed out of the jurisdiction of earthly courts and into the hands of the living God, awaiting resurrection and the judgment of the Age to Come. If the Torah’s most extreme penalty was penultimate rather than ultimate, and if its lesser penalties always included the means of restoration, then the Torah itself provides no foundation for a doctrine of endless, purposeless punishment. On the contrary, it reveals a God whose judgments, however severe, are contained within a covenant that moves toward restoration.
The Hebrew noun ʿolam (עוֹלָם), often rendered “eternal” or “everlasting” in English, further confirms this reading. In the Torah, ʿolam describes the duration of a slave’s service (Exodus 21:6), the Aaronic priesthood (Exodus 40:15), and the Passover ordinance (Exodus 12:14). In none of these cases does ʿolam mean “abstract philosophical infinity.” The slave serves for his lifetime; the Aaronic priesthood endures until it is superseded by the priesthood of Christ (Hebrews 7:11–12); the Passover ordinance lasts as long as the covenant economy in which it was given. The root sense of ʿolam is “hidden” or “concealed”—a span whose boundaries are not immediately visible, but which is determined and bounded by God’s larger purpose. The Torah’s own language of duration, therefore, does not support the idea of a punishment that stretches into infinite, purposeless perpetuity. It supports the idea of judgment that lasts as long as God’s purpose requires and then yields to restoration. For a fuller discussion of ʿolam, aiōn, and aiōnios, see Appendix O, “‘Unto the Age’ and ‘Life of the Age.’”
The Torah, then, lays a canonical foundation that makes the doctrine of eternal torment impossible before it is ever proposed. Every judgment in the Torah serves a purpose. Every curse is followed by a promise. Every penalty operates within a covenant that survives the punishment. Every means of exclusion is accompanied by means of return. The God revealed at Sinai is indeed a consuming fire, but His fire burns toward holiness, not toward endless ruin. When the Prophets, the Lord Jesus, and the Apostles speak of judgment, they stand on this Torah foundation and never depart from it.
The Prophets Against Endless Torment: Judgment That Leads to Restoration
The Prophets intensify the severity of divine judgment beyond anything in the Torah, yet they simultaneously expand the promise of restoration beyond anything the Torah explicitly reveals. In no prophet is judgment presented as an end in itself. In every case, the fire that consumes is shown to be the fire that prepares a purified people for the age of renewal.
Isaiah speaks of the Lord washing away the filth of the daughters of Zion “by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning” (Isaiah 4:4). The burning is not aimless destruction; it is the means by which the filth is removed and the city is prepared for the Lord’s glory. The same prophet describes the Lord smelting away dross so that Zion can again be called “the city of righteousness, the faithful city” (Isaiah 1:25–26). Here the refining image is decisive: the purpose of the fire is to produce pure metal, not to maintain a heap of smoldering slag forever. Malachi takes up the same imagery when he describes the Lord as “a refiner’s fire” who will “purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness” (Malachi 3:2–3). The refinement is painful, but its product is an acceptable offering, not an everlasting torment.
Jeremiah is told that the Lord has set him over nations and kingdoms “to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). The rooting out and the pulling down are not the final verbs; they serve the building and the planting that follow. God tears down in order that He may truly build. This order—destruction followed by construction, judgment followed by restoration—is the heartbeat of every prophetic oracle. Even the most devastating national judgments are spoken in this framework.
Ezekiel’s visions of fiery judgment and scattering are consistently followed by promises of return, cleansing, and a new heart and spirit (Ezekiel 36:24–27). The valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1–14) is the most dramatic prophetic picture of restoration after utter destruction: bones that were “very dry,” with no natural hope of recovery, are clothed with flesh and animated by the breath of God. This vision teaches that no degree of judgment places its objects beyond the reach of God’s restorative power.
Most remarkably, the prophets apply the pattern of judgment-then-restoration not only to Israel but to the pagan nations and even to Sodom. In Ezekiel 16, God confronts Jerusalem with her sins and then declares that He will restore the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters along with those of Samaria and Jerusalem (Ezekiel 16:53–55). Sodom, the biblical symbol of utter fiery destruction, the city whose judgment was swift, total, and devastating (Genesis 19:24–25), is nevertheless promised restoration. If Sodom can be restored after her fiery overthrow, then no entity—no city, no nation, no individual—lies outside the reach of divine redemption. The prophetic witness directly contradicts the claim that any judgment is final and irrecoverable.
Jeremiah extends the same pattern to Israel’s historical enemies. Of Moab he declares, “Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab in the latter days” (Jeremiah 48:47). Of Ammon he writes, “Afterward I will restore the fortunes of the people of Ammon” (Jeremiah 49:6). Of Elam he records, “I will set My throne in Elam,” followed by the promise, “Yet in the latter days I will restore the fortunes of Elam” (Jeremiah 49:38–39). In every case the judgment is severe, yet in every case it is bounded and followed by restoration. This is not a peripheral prophetic curiosity; it is the consistent and unanimous pattern: rebellion, judgment, and restoration in the latter days.
Isaiah gives the clearest articulation of the corrective purpose of judgment: “When Your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness” (Isaiah 26:9). This single verse fundamentally undermines the logic of eternal torment, for it teaches that divine judgment produces a result—the learning of righteousness—rather than sustaining a state of permanent, purposeless suffering. If the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness through judgment, then judgment has accomplished its work and need not continue.
Isaiah 24:21–22 applies this pattern even to the rebellious heavenly powers: “It shall come to pass in that day that the LORD will punish on high the host of exalted ones, and on the earth the kings of the earth. They will be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and will be shut up in the prison; after many days they will be visited.” The confinement is severe and the “many days” are long, but the phrase “they will be visited” reveals a horizon beyond the confinement. As Chapter 38 will develop more fully, even the rebellious spiritual powers are not consigned to endless torment but to bounded judgment followed by visitation, a term that in prophetic usage carries the sense of divine intervention and mercy.
The Prophets, then, stand with the Torah in bearing witness against the doctrine of eternal torment. Their language of fire, wrath, and destruction is among the most severe in Scripture, yet every oracle of judgment is set within a larger purpose of purification and restoration. The God who destroys is the God who rebuilds. The God who exiles is the God who gathers. The God who refines with fire is the God who produces pure gold. This prophetic testimony forms the indispensable backdrop against which the Lord Jesus and the Apostles speak of Gehenna, wrath, and the resurrection of judgment.
The Word “Hell” and the Four Realities It Hides
Against this Torah and Prophetic foundation, we can now examine the vocabulary that the traditional doctrine has collapsed into the single English word “hell.” In many English Bibles this word is used to translate several very different Hebrew and Greek terms, creating confusion where Scripture distinguishes sharply. The recovery of these distinctions is essential if the Lord’s own teaching is to be heard on its own terms.
Sheol and Hades: The Unseen Realm of the Dead
The first of these terms is Sheol. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Sheol is the unseen realm of the dead, the place to which all descend at death, righteous and wicked alike. Jacob expects to go down to Sheol mourning for Joseph (Genesis 37:35). Job longs for Sheol as a refuge from suffering (Job 14:13). The Psalmist speaks of God delivering him from Sheol: “God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, for He shall receive me” (Psalm 49:15), and “You will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption” (Psalm 16:10). Even in the darkness of the unseen realm, the Psalmist declares, “If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there” (Psalm 139:8). Sheol is shadowy, downward, associated with the grave, with silence, and with the end of activity in this world. The Torah and the Psalms alike bear witness that Sheol is not a place of permanent torment but a temporary realm from which God Himself promises deliverance.
In the New Testament, the Greek term Hades serves as the counterpart to Sheol. It too is rendered as “hell” in some translations, but its meaning remains the unseen realm of the dead. The Lord’s account of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 sheds important light on this reality. The rich man dies and is buried, “and being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes” and cries, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:23–24). Here several truths must be held together.
First, Hades is a realm of conscious existence and moral awareness. The rich man remembers his life, feels regret, desires relief, and is aware of the righteous condition of Lazarus. Second, there is real torment. The Lord is not teaching a neutral, painless waiting room. Those who have lived in selfishness and hardness of heart can experience anguish of soul in the intermediate state. Third, and this is the critical distinction for the argument of this chapter, this scene is set before the resurrection and before the Day of the Lord. The rich man is in Hades, not yet in the resurrection of judgment or in the Gehenna of the Seventh Day. His torment is a foretaste of judgment, not the final form of it. His brothers are still alive on earth; no universal resurrection has occurred; the Day of the Lord has not yet come. The rich man’s condition in Hades is the intermediate state between death and resurrection, as Chapter 29 has explored more fully.
The flames in this passage therefore belong to the realm of Hades as a place of conscious, anticipatory suffering for the wicked dead. They are not the same as the fires of Gehenna that destroy both soul and body in the Age to Come. To collapse Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna into one undifferentiated “hell” is to erase the very distinctions the Lord Himself makes. Scripture teaches real torment in the intermediate state for the unrepentant, but it does not identify that state with an endless torment that never leads to resurrection, judgment, and eventual restoration. For a fuller treatment of the intermediate state, see Appendix K, “Salvation After Death.”
Gehenna: The Furnace of the Day of the Lord
A second term often rendered “hell” is Gehenna. As the previous chapter has established at length, Gehenna is rooted in the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where Israel practiced abominations and where judgment later fell. In the Lord’s teaching, however, Gehenna is not simply that valley; it is the sphere of divine fire in the Age to Come. He warns that God is able to “destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matthew 10:28). He speaks of the danger of “the fire of Gehenna” (Matthew 5:22), of being cast “into Gehenna” with the whole body (Matthew 5:29–30), and of age-lasting punishment in the coming age (Matthew 25:46).
Gehenna, therefore, is not the intermediate realm of Hades. It is the condition of the earth throughout the Seventh Day, after the appearing of Christ, when the heavens of this creation have passed away and the earth has been laid bare before the unveiled fire of God. In that sabbath age the unfaithful and the ungodly, raised in the resurrection of judgment, suffer the destruction of their Adamic bodies, the punishment and eventual destruction of their corrupt souls, and the purification of their spirits in preparation for the new creation. To translate Gehenna as “hell” and then to read that “hell” as eternal torment is to impose on the Lord’s teaching a meaning that His own words, set within the Torah and the Prophets, do not bear.
Tartarus: The Prison of the Rebellious Angels
A third term, used only once in the New Testament, is the verb tartaroō (ταρταρόω), “to cast into Tartarus” (2 Peter 2:4). It describes the confinement of rebellious angels “in chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment.” Tartarus is not a human realm; it is a prison for celestial rebels awaiting the Day of the Lord. The phrase “reserved for judgment” itself implies that the confinement is temporary and anticipatory, not the final sentence. To render this as “hell” in English is to load a unique and specific reality into the same basket as Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, further obscuring the landscape of judgment. Chapter 38 will develop the destiny of the rebellious angelic powers more fully, showing how even their judgment fits within the larger pattern of bounded confinement followed by visitation (Isaiah 24:21–22).
The Collapse Into “Hell”
When Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus are all translated as “hell,” readers are led to imagine a single monolithic destiny for the wicked, rather than an ordered sequence: Sheol and Hades as the unseen realm of the dead in the intermediate state; Gehenna as the Seventh-Day earth under judgment; Tartarus as the prison of rebellious angels; and, beyond all of these, the Eighth-Day new creation. The English word “hell,” as traditionally used, is not a faithful translation of any one of these terms. It is the product of centuries in which distinct realities were conflated and then read back into Scripture as though the Bible taught a single, timeless realm of unending torment. Once the distinctions are restored, the architecture of judgment becomes visible again: an intermediate state of conscious waiting, an age-long Day of judgment and purification on the earth, a prison for angelic rebels, and a new creation beyond them all in which death is abolished and God is all in all.
The Ages and the Mistranslation of Aiōn and Aiōnios
The false doctrine of eternal torment has been sustained not only by collapsing distinct realms into “hell,” but also by flattening the language of the ages into the language of abstract infinity. As we saw in the Torah section above, the Hebrew noun ʿolam (עוֹלָם) most naturally signifies an age, a long duration, or an age-lasting period rather than an abstract eternity. Its root sense is “hidden” or “concealed,” and in usage it denotes a span whose boundaries are not immediately visible but are determined by God’s purpose. A servant who pledges himself to his master serves leʿolam, “forever,” in the sense of a lifetime (Exodus 21:6). The Aaronic priesthood is called an “everlasting priesthood” (Exodus 40:15), yet the writer of Hebrews reveals that this priesthood has been superseded by the priesthood of Christ (Hebrews 7:11–12). In each case, ʿolam points to an age-long reality whose extent and transformation are determined by the larger purpose of God.
The Greek noun aiōn (αἰών), which translates ʿolam in the Septuagint, carries the same age-structured meaning. It signifies an age, an era, a world-order with a beginning and an end. Scripture speaks of “this present evil age” with its corruption (Galatians 1:4), “the Age to Come” with its resurrection and open judgment (Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30), and “the ages to come” in which God will display the riches of His grace (Ephesians 2:7). The adjective aiōnios (αἰώνιος), derived from aiōn, therefore means “age-lasting,” “of an age,” or “belonging to the age,” not “endless” in a philosophical sense.
When the Lord Jesus speaks of zōē aiōnios (ζωὴ αἰώνιος), He speaks specifically of life in the Age to Come—the life that belongs to that sabbath age and is tasted now through the Holy Spirit. When He warns of kolasis aiōnios (κόλασις αἰώνιος), He warns of punishment in the Age to Come—the punishment that belongs to that age and is experienced on the earth as Gehenna during the Seventh Day. The same word aiōnios describes both life and punishment, not to make them equal in duration in an abstract way, but to locate both within the same coming age.
At this point a common objection arises. In Matthew 25:46, the Lord Jesus says, “And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” The traditional argument is that if the punishment is not endless, then neither is the life, since both are described with aiōnios. The parallel, it is claimed, demands that both be equally without end. The parallelism is indeed important, but it must be read in light of how aiōnios functions. When the Lord speaks of punishment “of the age” and life “of the age,” He is saying that both belong to and characterize the same coming age. Both are equally certain, equally real, and equally weighty within that age. The adjective does not of itself specify what happens beyond that age; it locates both realities within it. Life “of the age,” once entered through the resurrection of life, does not end, because it is participation in the life of the One who is Himself the Life (John 11:25; 14:6). That life continues beyond the Seventh Day into the Eighth, not because the adjective aiōnios guarantees philosophical endlessness, but because death—the only power that could interrupt it—is abolished at the close of the Seventh Day (1 Corinthians 15:26). Punishment “of the age,” by contrast, is not participation in God’s life but the burning away of what is contrary to it. Its duration is determined by what must be purified, and when the last enemy is destroyed and God becomes all in all, no rival kingdom of unreconciled punishment remains; the age of judgment has accomplished its task and yields to the Eighth Day of new creation (1 Corinthians 15:24–28; Acts 3:21). For the full lexical treatment of this question, including the Matthew 25:46 parallelism, see Appendix O, “‘Unto the Age’ and ‘Life of the Age.’”
The Greek word kolasis (κόλασις) in Matthew 25:46 itself carries a distinctive nuance that further undermines the eternal-torment reading. Classical Greek often distinguished kolasis from timōria (τιμωρία): kolasis was corrective punishment aimed at reforming the offender, while timōria was retributive punishment aimed at satisfying the one who punishes. That the Lord chose kolasis rather than timōria is significant. The punishment He describes is corrective pruning, chastening directed toward the eventual good of the one punished—precisely what we would expect within a framework of judgment that serves restoration, not a framework of endless retribution.
The Apostles, when they wish to speak of what is truly beyond all ages, use another term, aidios (ἀΐδιος), as when Paul speaks of God’s “eternal power” (Romans 1:20) or Jude speaks of “everlasting chains” holding rebellious angels until the Day of Judgment (Jude 6). The term aidios denotes what endures by virtue of God’s own sustaining power. That the New Testament writers did not use aidios when describing the punishment of the wicked—but rather used the age-related adjective aiōnios—is a lexical fact of considerable weight. If they had meant to teach a punishment that is eternal in the strict sense, the more precise term was available to them, and they chose not to use it.
The historical chain of mistranslation further illuminates how the error took root. When ʿolam was rendered into Greek as aiōnios, the age-meaning was still intact for native Greek speakers. But when Latin theologians later rendered aiōnios as aeternus—a term that does carry the sense of absolute, unqualified endlessness—the age-structure was lost. Latin aeternus does not distinguish between “belonging to an age” and “without any end whatsoever.” What had been an age-related term in Hebrew and Greek became an abstract infinity in Latin, and from Latin it passed into English as “eternal” and “everlasting.” The careless translation of aiōn and aiōnios as “eternal” or “everlasting” in many contexts has shifted readers’ attention away from the ordered structure of the ages and toward a timeless “eternity” in which all distinctions between ages collapse. Once this happens, “punishment of the age” is easily misheard as “punishment without end,” and the fires of Gehenna in the Seventh Day are mistaken for an everlasting hell that never leads to the Eighth-Day new creation.
What the Lord Jesus Actually Teaches About the Fate of the Wicked
The Lord’s own teaching on judgment, when allowed to stand on its own terms and within the Torah and Prophetic framework He Himself honored, does not support the doctrine of eternal torment. He speaks in the language of destruction, exclusion, outer darkness, stripes, fire, proportional punishment, and bounded confinement. He warns that those who live in anger and contempt are “in danger of the fire of Gehenna” (Matthew 5:22). He insists that it is better to lose an eye or a hand now than to be “cast into Gehenna” with the whole body (Matthew 5:29–30). He commands us to fear God, “who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matthew 10:28).
This destruction is real. It is not mere imagery for discomfort. The Adamic body raised in the resurrection of judgment dies under the revealed fire of the Seventh Day. The corrupt soul, with its entrenched patterns of sin, is punished and finally brought to an end. Yet the Lord nowhere speaks of preserving a corrupt soul in conscious torment without end. He speaks of losing the soul, saving the soul, or having the soul destroyed. His language throughout is the language of termination, not perpetuation. A soul destroyed in Gehenna is not a soul sustained forever in agony; it is a soul whose corrupt Adamic life has been brought to its end so that the spirit may return to God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7), as Chapter 29 has developed more fully.
The Lord’s parables confirm this pattern. In the parable of the unmerciful servant, the master delivers the offender to the tormentors “until he should pay all that was due to him” (Matthew 18:34). The word “until” (heōs, ἕως) implies a terminus—a debt that can be satisfied, not an endless sentence. The Lord then applies this directly to the Father’s dealings: “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses” (Matthew 18:35). If the Father delivers the unfaithful servant to the tormentors until the debt is paid, then the punishment has a goal and a limit set by the measure of the offense.
The same principle appears in the Lord’s warning about the adversary: “Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are on the way with him, lest your adversary deliver you to the judge, the judge hand you over to the officer, and you be thrown into prison. Assuredly, I say to you, you will by no means get out of there till you have paid the last penny” (Matthew 5:25–26). The word “till” again introduces a horizon. The imprisonment is real, the suffering is real, but the confinement lasts until the debt is settled, not into an infinity that no payment can reach.
The Lord teaches proportional judgment, which is incompatible with a flat, undifferentiated eternity of torment. He declares, “That servant who knew his master’s will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required” (Luke 12:47–48). If there are “many stripes” and “few stripes,” then the punishment is measured according to knowledge and responsibility. A measured punishment is by definition a bounded one; it cannot be the same “endless torment for all” that the traditional doctrine requires.
The Lord further confirms degrees of judgment when He warns the cities that rejected His ministry: “It will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you” (Matthew 11:24). If there are degrees of tolerability in the judgment, then the court weighs circumstances, knowledge, and deeds even in its most severe sentences. A graduated judgment is a purposive judgment, not an indiscriminate consignment to identical, endless suffering.
The Lord’s teaching on the unpardonable sin, far from supporting eternal torment, actually constrains it within the structure of the ages. He warns that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit “will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the Age to Come” (Matthew 12:32). As Chapter 34 has shown, the Lord names two ages—and only two—in which this unforgiveness operates. He does not say “forever” in a timeless sense. He uses the language of the ages. If even the most severe sin is described in terms of two ages rather than in terms of abstract infinity, then the Lord’s own framework is the age-structure, not the philosophical “eternity” that later theology imposed.
In John 5 the Lord roots all of this in a single resurrection hour: “The hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment” (John 5:28–29). There is one hour, not two. Within that hour, there are two immediate outcomes: life in the Age to Come for the faithful, judgment in the Age to Come for the unfaithful and the ungodly. That judgment, as we have seen, unfolds on the earth as Gehenna throughout the Seventh Day. It is age-lasting, proportionate, and purifying. It destroys what cannot inherit the kingdom, but it does not create a realm of unending torment outside God’s ultimate purpose of restoration.
When the Lord’s teaching is heard within the Torah and Prophetic tradition He claimed to fulfill, not one word of it requires the doctrine of eternal torment. Every image, every parable, every warning points to judgment that is real, severe, proportional, purposive, and bounded by the structure of the ages.
How Eternal Torment Entered Christian Thought
If Scripture does not teach a “hell” of eternal torment, how did this doctrine become so deeply embedded in Christian tradition? The answer lies in a convergence of factors: the conflation of Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus into one undifferentiated “hell”; the mistranslation of aiōn and aiōnios as “eternal” and “everlasting”; and, above all, the growing tendency to build doctrine on highly symbolic apocalyptic imagery—especially from the book Revelation—rather than on the clear teaching of the Lord Jesus and the Apostles about resurrection, judgment, and restoration.
In the early centuries many Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings circulated, claiming heavenly tours, visions of torment and reward, and detailed descriptions of the afterlife. The churches recognized most of these as fraudulent and excluded them from the canon. In that same literary environment, Revelation appeared: a densely symbolic apocalypse, rich with visions of beasts, thrones, plagues, fire, a lake of fire, and a “second death.” Some believers, especially in Greek-speaking regions, were cautious about using such visions as the foundation for doctrine, and for centuries the book was disputed or marginal in parts of the church. Others, especially in the Latin West, were more willing to receive it and to treat its imagery as a straightforward map of the end.
It is worth noting, as Appendix L (“The Historical Witness to Universal Restoration”) documents more fully, that several prominent early church fathers—particularly those who read Scripture in its original Greek—held positions on judgment and restoration that differed significantly from the eternal-torment doctrine that later prevailed. The shift toward eternal torment as settled orthodoxy was closely tied to the influence of Latin theology and particularly to the formulations of Augustine, whose limited Greek contributed to the hardening of aeternus as the standard rendering of aiōnios. When ʿolam became aiōnios in Greek and then aeternus in Latin, the age-structure was progressively flattened, and by the time these texts were rendered into the vernacular languages of Europe, the idea of a punishment “of the age” had become the idea of a punishment “without end.”
As Latin-speaking theologians came to rely more heavily on apocalyptic visions, several further shifts occurred. The lake of fire, which in its own symbolic context stands within the broader pattern of resurrection and judgment, began to be imagined as a separate, timeless realm of torment. The “second death,” was read as a conscious existence in endless misery. Phrases rendered “forever and ever,” shaped by Latin aeternus and by a weakened sense of the ages, were taken to mean an absolute, unqualified eternity of suffering, rather than age-related judgments within God’s ordered plan. Over time, the vivid scenes of fire, torment, and exclusion that were meant to communicate the seriousness of the Day of the Lord and the destruction of the Adamic nature in the Age to Come were abstracted into a metaphysical “hell” that exists outside the sequence of ages revealed elsewhere in Scripture.
In this way, the earth as Gehenna throughout the Seventh Day was replaced in the imagination by an otherworldly pit beyond history. The single resurrection hour of John 5, with its two outcomes of life and judgment, was overshadowed by a picture of fixed, parallel destinies that never move toward God’s stated goal of reconciliation. The Eighth-Day Restoration of All Things was pushed to the margins, while an eternal kingdom of unending torment was allowed to stand forever alongside the kingdom of God. What began as the misreading of symbolic visions, combined with conflated vocabulary and mistranslated age-language, hardened into a doctrine of “hell” that neither Moses, nor the Prophets, nor the Lord Jesus, nor the Apostles ever taught.
Scripture’s Final Horizon: The Apostolic Witness to Restoration Beyond Judgment
Against this background, the apostolic horizon must be heard afresh. The Apostles do not muse speculatively about a possible restoration; they proclaim it as the certain and necessary outcome of the Father’s purpose in Christ, grounded in the testimony of Moses and the Prophets and confirmed by the Lord’s own resurrection.
Peter, standing in the temple courts in the power of the Spirit, declares that heaven must receive Christ “until the times of restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21). This is not a minor aside; it is Peter’s public proclamation of the scope of the gospel. The “restoration of all things” is not a peculiarity of one apostle’s private theology; it is what “all His holy prophets” have spoken. It is the unanimous prophetic testimony, the destination toward which the entire canonical story moves. A doctrine of eternal torment cannot coexist with a “restoration of all things” spoken by all the prophets. Either the prophets spoke truly and all things are restored, or they exaggerated and some things remain eternally unrestored. The apostolic witness leaves no room for the second option.
Paul proclaims that through the blood of the cross God will reconcile “all things” to Himself, “whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). The scope of reconciliation is cosmic—”all things,” “whether things on earth or things in heaven.” If an eternal realm of unreconciled torment persists alongside the new creation, then “all things” have not been reconciled, the blood of the cross has failed to make peace with a portion of creation, and Paul’s declaration is false. But if Paul speaks truly—and the Spirit who inspired him does not lie—then the reconciliation is complete, and no pocket of unresolved suffering endures beyond the ages appointed for judgment.
Paul sets before us the most detailed sequence of the end in 1 Corinthians 15: Christ the firstfruits, then those who are Christ’s at His coming, then “the end,” when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when all rule and all authority and power are abolished, when “the last enemy that will be destroyed is death,” and when at last “God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:23–28). This passage must be allowed to govern all eschatology. If “the last enemy that will be destroyed is death,” then the condition that makes Gehenna possible—mortal corruption, judgment, and the wages of sin—is itself brought to an end. If “God may be all in all,” then there is no corner of creation where God is absent, no dungeon of eternal torment where His presence is replaced by unmitigated suffering. The phrase “all in all” is absolute: it admits no exception, no excluded realm, no permanently unredeemed sector of the cosmos. The doctrine of eternal hell cannot be reconciled with a creation in which death is abolished, all enemies subdued, and God is all in all.
In Romans 11, Paul wrestles with the mystery of Israel’s partial hardening and the inclusion of the nations, and arrives at a conclusion that gathers the entire theology of judgment and mercy into a single breath: “For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32). He does not say that God allowed some to fall so that He might condemn them forever; he insists that the universal imprisonment under sin serves the larger purpose of universal mercy. The doxology that follows—”Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!… For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory to the ages” (Romans 11:33, 36 literal)—is not the cry of a man who has just described an eternal standoff between mercy and torment. It is the worship of a man who has glimpsed the full sweep of a plan in which mercy encompasses judgment and God’s purpose reaches every creature.
Paul further declares that at the name of the Lord Jesus “every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11). The confession is not extracted under duress from tormented souls in an eternal hell; it is rendered “to the glory of God the Father,” which requires a willing, reconciled acknowledgment, not a forced cry of despair. The day is coming when every creature in every realm—heavenly, earthly, and under the earth—will freely confess the Lordship of Christ as an act of worship that glorifies the Father. This is the apostolic vision of the end, and it leaves no room for the traditional “hell.”
This is not the picture of an everlasting universe divided between endless bliss and endless torment. It is the picture of an ordered series of ages: this present evil age of sowing, the Age to Come as the sabbath Day of resurrection and judgment in which Gehenna does its necessary work, and the Eighth Day as the age of new heavens, new earth, and the reconciliation of all things. The furnace of Gehenna must end when its work is done; the last enemy must be destroyed, not preserved in endless activity; judgment must lead to restoration in the right order, not to an eternal standoff between mercy and wrath.
Pastoral Implications: True Fear Without Slander
To say that Scripture does not teach “hell” as eternal torment is not to soften or dilute the seriousness of judgment. On the contrary, it restores the true sharpness of the biblical warnings. The unfaithful and the ungodly will face a real resurrection of judgment. They will endure wrath, indignation, tribulation, and anguish according to the truth of their deeds and the measure of light they resisted (Romans 2:5–9). They will suffer the destruction of their Adamic bodies, the punishment and eventual destruction of their corrupt souls, and the consuming fire of Gehenna throughout the Seventh Day. They will lose the firstborn inheritance, forfeit the Royal Priesthood, and be excluded from the joy and rest of God in the kingdom in the Age to Come.
What is rejected here is not judgment, not wrath, not destruction, but the notion of endless torment that never reaches God’s stated goal: the Restoration of All Things and the reconciliation of all creation in Christ. The false doctrine of hell portrays God as perpetually sustaining corruption in order to punish it, never bringing it to an end. The biblical doctrine of judgment portrays God as burning away corruption in order to remove it, so that His creatures may, in the right order and measure, be healed, restored, and fitted for His presence.
For the believer, this recovery of biblical judgment has two pastoral applications that must not be separated. First, it addresses the complacent. Many believers who have received the gift of salvation assume that because “hell” in its traditional form does not await them, they face no serious consequences for unfaithfulness. The recovery of the biblical pattern exposes this assumption as false. The distinction between the gift and the prize, which runs through the entire witness of this book, makes clear that the gift of spiritual birth is freely given, but the prize of the firstborn inheritance—participation in the resurrection of life, celestial glory, and the Royal Priesthood in the Age to Come—is conditional upon the salvation of the soul in this present age. The unfaithful believer, though belonging to the household, may be excluded from the joy of the Lord, assigned a portion with the unbelievers, subjected to many or few stripes, and made to pass through the fire of the Seventh Day. Chapter 41 will show, the difference between entering the resurrection of life and entering the resurrection of judgment is not a marginal distinction; it is the difference between reigning with Christ in the Heavenly Jerusalem and enduring the fires of Gehenna on the earth below.
Second, it addresses the terrified. Many sincere believers have been held captive by a fear of “hell” that is not the fear of the Lord but a terror of a capricious deity who might at any moment consign them to endless, purposeless suffering. This fear does not produce holiness; it produces anxiety, legalism, and a distorted picture of the Father’s heart. The recovery of the biblical pattern replaces this groundless terror with the true fear of the Lord—awe before a holy God whose judgments are real, whose fire is searching, and whose severity is not to be trifled with, but whose purpose in all His dealings is restoration, not ruin. The believer who trusts in the Lord Jesus, walks in the Spirit, and cooperates with the Father’s discipline in this age has nothing to fear from a doctrine of endless torment, because no such doctrine is found in Scripture. What the faithful believer rightly fears is the loss of the prize, the forfeiture of the inheritance, and the shame of standing before the Lord with a life of wood, hay, and straw.
The call to repentance, holiness, and the saving of the soul in this age is not less urgent because hell, as traditionally taught, is false. It is more urgent, because the resurrection of judgment and the fires of Gehenna belong to a real Day, a real age, and a real earth upon which every work will be disclosed. The question for every believer is not “Will I avoid an imaginary hell?” but “Will I enter the resurrection of life and share the firstborn inheritance with Christ?”
Conclusion
The Good News of Judgment Without “Hell”
When the vocabulary of Scripture is allowed to stand—Sheol and Hades as the unseen realm of the dead, Gehenna as the Seventh-Day earth under judgment, Tartarus as the prison of rebellious angels, aiōn and aiōnios as age-language rather than abstract infinity—the doctrine of “hell” as eternal torment is revealed to be a foreign intrusion. It is not the voice of Moses, the Prophets, the Lord Jesus, or the Apostles. It is the product of mistranslation, conflation, and imagination. It entered Christian thought through the flattening of Hebrew and Greek age-language into Latin philosophical categories, the conflation of four distinct biblical realities into one undifferentiated “hell,” and the elevation of apocalyptic imagery above the clear teaching of the canonical Scriptures.
At the same time, when the true order of the ages is recovered—this present age of sowing, the Age to Come as the Day of the Lord and the furnace of Gehenna, the Eighth Day as the new creation where death is abolished and God is all in all—the severity of God regains its proper weight. Judgment is not denied; it is honored. The fire that destroys also purifies. The wrath that breaks also prepares for mercy. The destruction of the Adamic soul is not a cruelty but a necessary surgery. The terror of the resurrection of judgment is not diminished, but set in its rightful place within a story that moves from creation, through judgment, to restoration.
In rejecting the false doctrine of hell, we are not making God more lenient than Scripture reveals Him to be. We are refusing to slander His name by attributing to Him a purpose He has never declared. We are honoring the Father as the One who judges in order to save, and the Son as the One whose cross and resurrection will, in the fullness of time, bring all things under His feet and present a purified creation to the Father. We are honoring the Torah, which never teaches a punishment without a horizon. We are honoring the Prophets, who unanimously testify that judgment leads to restoration. We are honoring the Lord Jesus, whose every word of warning is spoken within an age-structure that moves toward reconciliation. And we are honoring the Apostles, who declare that the last enemy will be destroyed, that all things will be reconciled, and that God will be all in all.
If the doctrine of “hell” has defamed the character of God and confused the minds of His people, then the recovery of the biblical pattern of judgment and restoration is an act of reverence. It vindicates His justice, magnifies His mercy, and restores the fear of the Lord to its true place. The God who warns of Gehenna is the same God who promises the Restoration of All Things. The fire that consumes in the Seventh Day clears the way for the light of the Eighth Day. The One who destroys both soul and body in Gehenna is the One who restores all things.
If the false doctrine of hell has twisted the gospel and slandered the character of God, it has done so under the influence of the adversary who delights in fear without hope and judgment without restoration. In the next chapter we will therefore turn to consider Satan and the demonic powers. We will trace their origin, their rebellion, their present activity, and their destiny in the Day of the Lord, and we will see how their defeat and subjection fit within the same ordered pattern of judgment and restoration that we have now applied to humanity. If even the rebellious heavenly powers are “visited” after many days (Isaiah 24:22), then no creature lies outside the reach of the God who is both a consuming fire and a restoring Father.
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