The concept of eternal torment is vividly portrayed through the imagery of the Lake of Fire, a place of final punishment described in Revelation 19:20 and 20:10, 14-15. This burning lake, where the Beast and the False Prophet are cast at Christ's return, is later the destination for the Devil, who is thrown into it after a thousand years to be tormented forever and ever. The flames of this lake will utterly consume mortal beings like the Beast and False Prophet, as the elements themselves will melt with fervent heat, burning up the earth and all its works. Regarding who is tormented, Revelation 20:10 indicates a plural subject with the phrase "they will be tormented." If this includes the Devil and the demons, they too will endure the torture and excruciating pain of the Lake of Fire's fervent heat. Being composed of spirit, their suffering might last for a longer, though still indeterminate, time before they expire. The duration of their torment, described as day and night forever and ever, suggests an unstinting thoroughness in the punishment God will administer, ensuring it is most painful and complete as they rightfully deserve.

Some interpret Jesus' words as indicating that sinners are like worms destined to endure unending agonizing torment. However, He refers not to the people themselves as worms but to their worm, using the Greek term for a grub or maggot. This imagery draws from the local practice of disposing of garbage, refuse, animal carcasses, and the bodies of despised criminals in the valley of Gehenna outside Jerusalem, where fires burned continually on the valley floor. Any matter that escaped the flames on the ledges would instead be consumed by maggots. The essential point is that nothing thrown into Gehenna ever emerged again, being totally destroyed either by fire or by worms. This illustrates the irreversible fate decreed for unrepentant sinners, which is death in the lake of fire. The same principle appears in Isaiah 66:24, where the unquenched fire and undying worms do not signify that sinners or worms live forever. Rather, an unquenched fire continues only while fuel remains, and worms consume flesh until none is left, after which the process ends through the natural cycle of pupation and egg-laying. Thus the passage conveys the absolute and permanent result of unrepented sin as eternal oblivion.

Many ministers have long promoted a religion of fear by teaching that the unsaved face an eternity of torture in a fiery hell where sinners are continually roasted. This teaching usually conjures visions of an ever-burning hellfire and a devil with horns and a tail tormenting captives, yet such a picture raises the question of whether a loving God would consign millions or billions of people to indescribable suffering forever. Scripture states that the wages of sin is death rather than eternal conscious torment, and the dead know nothing because all mental and physical processes cease at death. Both the righteous and the wicked return to dust and possess no capacity to experience joy or pain after dying, so no one enters heaven or hell immediately upon death. Jesus Christ indicated that a future resurrection will bring both groups back to life for judgment, at which time the unrepentant will be cast into Gehenna, a fire that cannot be quenched. This fire is not an unending blaze but one that continues only until everything flammable is consumed, as illustrated by the historical burning of Jerusalem's gates and the refuse fires in the Valley of Hinnom. The incorrigible will therefore undergo the second death in a lake of burning fire and brimstone, resulting in total annihilation in which body, mind, and spirit are utterly destroyed. Only ashes will remain of the wicked, after which the righteous alone will live forever.