Sermon: God's Wrath and Hell

#1440
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 30-Jun-18; 76 minutes

Most people are not keen on talking about or even thinking about the wrath of God. Most Christians, especially certain Protestant denominations, are much more likely to dwell on God's love, love, love, and wax saccharine about His breathtaking love for us to the point that it sounds like puppy love. Or maybe we could call it the divine teen romance novel or something like that. It just sounds so sugary and saccharine so that it does not even have any semblance of what is the holy and the unfathomable love of the God of the universe. It is just this care for you that is just overwhelming, which it is, but they make it out to be so sappy. And they do not really focus on any other part of His character.

That He promises in the Bible wrath upon the wicked and the unrepentant and displays His righteous indignation and destructive anger on those who sin unrelentingly against Him, well, that is discomforting to most people. So they avoid the subject. It is not a pleasant thought, and so they avoid it.

But the wrath of God is real. God's wrath is an integral part of His holy and righteous character. If we go through the Bible, we find it written plainly throughout Scripture. It comes out quite a bit in the writings of the prophets and in the Psalms, you know, those songs that are supposed to be so comforting, a lot of them are about the wrath of God. And of course in the book of Revelation in the New Testament and believe it or not, there is quite a bit of it in the Gospels and in the epistles too.

As a man, when He was here, Jesus both spoke about and expressed divine wrath on a couple of occasions. Remember when He looked on the Pharisees in anger when they would not allow Him to heal on the Sabbath? That is a little bit of divine wrath. And how about when He made a whip of cords and chased the money changers and all their filthy lucre out of the Temple. That also is a bit of divine wrath. Mild displays, I would say, compared to what happened to Sodom. And what about what happened to Samaria, to Israel? They got pretty much wiped off the map and sent into exile and nobody's heard of them since. At least that is what the world thinks. And what happened at Jerusalem when Nebuchadnezzar came and pretty much wiped them out too.

Those are all bits of God's wrath, and of course we cannot forget what He has prophesied to happen to this world when its fullness of sin has come up as a great stench before God and He decides to take matters into His own hands.

So we are going to, as we begin here, take a survey of some of the representative passages from both testaments, Old and New. And what I want to show by this is that God's wrath is consistent. The Bible's teaching about God's wrath is consistent in both testaments, how He deals with wicked people. These verses tend to speak for themselves, so I am not going to make much comment, but I do want you to see them. This is actually a fair amount of scriptures, so we are just going to go read them and move on so we do not spend too much time on them.

Now, I could have started in Genesis 3 because God's wrath is shown there. What did He do when Adam and Eve sinned? He cursed them, told them what they would have done with their lives, and then He kicked them right out of the Garden and sent them away from Himself. We could have gone to Genesis 19 to start, which is when He rained fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah and all those cities of the plain and showed how powerful and destructive He can be when He is angry and when people have sinned.

But we are going to start in Deuteronomy the 28th chapter, in the blessings and curses chapter there in Deuteronomy and we are going to go to the end of that chapter, and we will read about five or six verses here.

Deuteronomy 28:58-63 "If you do not carefully observe all the words of this law that are written in this book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, THE Lord YOUR GOD, then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary plagues—great and prolonged plagues—and serious and prolonged sicknesses. Moreover He will bring back to you all the diseases of Egypt, of which you are afraid, and they shall cling to you. Also every sickness and every plague which is not written in this Book of the Law, will the Lord bring upon you until you are destroyed. You shall be left few in number, whereas you were as the stars of heaven in multitude, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God. And it shall be that just as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good and multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you and bring you to nothing; and you shall be plucked from off the land which you go to possess."

Not a very happy God when He reaches that point.

Let us move on and go to the book of Psalms into Psalm 7. And we are going to read verses 11 through 16.

Psalm 7:11-16 God is a just judge, and God is angry with the wicked every day. If He does not turn back, He will sharpen His sword; He bends His bow and makes it ready. He also prepares for Himself instruments of death; He makes His arrows into fiery shafts. Behold, the wicked travails with iniquity; conceives trouble, and brings forth falsehood. He made a pit and dug it out, and has fallen into the ditch which he made. His trouble shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down on his own crown.

Let us move to chapter 145, and we will read verse 20.

Psalm 145:20 The Lord preserves all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy.

Let us move into the prophets. Jeremiah 30, and we will read verses 23 and 24.

Jeremiah 30:23-24 Behold, the whirlwind of the Lord goes forth with fury, a continuing whirlwind; it will fall violently on the head of the wicked. The fierce anger of the Lord will not return until He has done it, and until He has performed the intents of His heart. In the latter days you will consider it.

And that is what we are doing today.

Let us go to the book of Nahum, the first chapter, verses 2 and 3.

Nahum 1:2-3 God is jealous, and the Lord avenges; the Lord avenges and is furious. The Lord will take vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserves wrath for His enemies; the Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked.

For the last verses here in the Old Testament, we will go to Zephaniah the first chapter. Just like last time as we were in Nahum, verses 2 and 3.

Zephaniah 1:2-3 "I will utterly consume all things from the face of the land," says the Lord; "I will consume man and beast; I will consume the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, and the stumbling blocks along with the wicked. I will cut off man from the face of the land," says the Lord.

Zephaniah 1:14-17 The great day of the Lord is near; it is near and hastens quickly, the noise of the day of the Lord is bitter; there the mighty men shall cry out. That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of devastation and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet and alarm against the fortified cities and against the high towers. "I will bring distress upon them, and they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord; their blood shall be poured out like dust and their flesh like refuse."

God's wrath is not pretty. We see what can happen there when you cross God and you continue to cross God. The end is not going to be nice. His wrath is going to come, and it comes as destruction. Destruction of things, destruction of the land, destructions of beasts, destructions of fish in the sea, we saw there, and of course, the destruction of the person who sins.

Let us go into Matthew, into the New Testament. It should be just a few pages over. Matthew 3 and we are going to read verses 8 through 10. Now, these are the words of the greatest prophet, according to Jesus, John the Baptist.

Matthew 3:8-10 [He says] "Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly purge His threshing floor, and gather His wheat into the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."

Pretty grim.

Let us go to the book of John. John the 3rd chapter, verses 17 and 18. This is right after the most famous scripture in all the world, it seems like, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." They do not read 17 and 18.

John 3:17-18 "For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but He who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."

John 3:36 "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life [mark those words], but the wrath of God abides on him."

Let us go to the epistles of Paul. We will go to Romans the first chapter, verse 18. Seems like we should know this one by heart.

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Romans 1:32 who [talking about these people who have a debased mind], knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

Let us move on to chapter 2, verse 5. Paul writes here,

Romans 2:5 But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.

Romans 2:8-9 But to those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness—upon them will come indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, on every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek.

That sounds a lot like the Old Testament.

Let us go to II Thessalonians, chapter 1. We will read verses 6 through 10, and try to keep this verse in your mind. It will come up later in the sermon.

II Thessalonians 1:6-10 Since it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you, and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power, when He comes, in that Day, to be glorified in His saints and to be admired among those who believe, because our testimony among you was believed.

Finally, let us go to the book of Revelation, chapter 19, verse 15. Jesus is returning here in the prophecy. And it says,

Revelation 19:15 Now out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should strike the nations. And He Himself will rule them with a rod of iron. He Himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

So, little Jesus, meek and mild, is actually the treader of the winepress of the wrath of God. They do not look on that side of Him very often, do they?

What we have seen here in this quick survey of both testaments, is that God's just anger against sin has always been a part of His character. The God of the Old Testament is no more fierce and angry and wrathful as the God of the New Testament. It is the same God, and He has had a consistent attitude, if you will, toward sin. He hates it. And He does not, will not abide it for long. His wrath is always focused on sin. Continued sin, unrepented sin. His wrath is never capricious, never unwarranted, never overkill. God is not a God of a lack of control. He always gives what is due, what is deserved, and in measure. It is always well deserved when God punishes in wrath for sin. It is always in proportion to the crime, as we might say.

Now God may bestow mercy and grant pardon when He sees humility and a change of heart. But even this is actually part of His justice since in His love, as it says in II Peter 3:9, "He is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." He holds off His wrath for as long as He could, as long as He sees that there is a chance that somebody is going to change. So His justice always has room for mercy if repentance is shown. But if it is not shown, it is quick, it is decisive, it is forever.

A theologian named Michael Wittmer, in his book Don't Stop Believing, considers the relationship of God's love to His wrath. It seems difficult to reconcile. How can God both love and hate? Now he writes the following to explain how we can reconcile these two parts of His character, His love with His wrath.

Scripture says that God is love and that He has wrath. This means that love lies deeper than wrath in the character of God. Love is His essential perfection, without which He would not be who He is. Wrath is love's response to sin. It is God's involuntary gag reflex at anything that destroys His good creation. God is against sin because He is for us. And He will vent His fury on everything that damages us.

This non-scholarly explanation is good as far as it goes. Because God knows that sin of any kind mars what is good and holy and righteous. Sin mars perfection and God's wrath is His intense hatred of sin. And His perfect sense of justice demands that sin be either forgiven upon repentance and belief in Christ and His sacrifice for us, or it must be punished through divine wrath. So out of love for humanity, out of love for each of us and for all of us, He punishes those who continue to sin against Him and thereby mar with their corruption what He has created. Ultimately this means that He will destroy forever those who refuse to repent. Those who refuse to comply with His way, just as it was said there in II Thessalonians 1.

To this point, the church of God does not have much to say against the conventional doctrine of God's wrath. That is, what is being preached out there in supposedly Christian churches. And the reason why we do not have anything against what they say on that particular doctrine is because it is so very plain in Scripture. You just do like I did and make a nice survey of the Scriptures and it is very clear that God punishes sin with His wrath. However, where our teaching and nominal Christianity's teaching veer from each other is when it leads to their ideas [sound cut out] ... contrary to our teachings on the Lake of Fire.

So, all of this has been an introduction to my real subject because today I want to show where they go off the track in terms of hell and God's wrath and how ours fits Scripture and God's character more completely. By the way, they believe in hell, obviously. They call us annihilationists. And I think you could figure out why they do. It is not that we annihilate ourselves, but that God annihilates those who are unrepentant and incorrigible.

I want to give you a definition that somebody out there in churchianity has come up with. A rather famous man in Calvinistic circles. His name is Wayne Grudem. And he wrote a systematic theology a few years ago, and he defines hell in this way. Now, I just find this to be incredible since I have never believed in hell. But it is a very interesting definition. It is very short. "Hell is a place of eternal conscious punishment for the wicked." That is the Protestant and I guess Catholic idea of hell. So you have in your mind this idea of demons with their pitchforks and they are prodding people into the fire and they are doing all kinds of things, ala the book, Dante's Inferno. There was another one, The Divine Comedy. Go read those if you want to know what they think.

In other words, if I can expand upon Wayne Grudem's definition here of hell, those who reject God and refuse to repent will live forever. That is what he said. It is eternal conscious punishment for the wicked. Those who reject God and refuse to repent will live forever and will always be conscious of themselves, their sin, and their punishment, that is, their torture and torment, forever, into infinity. I do not know about you, but I find that to be excessive and cruel. And certainly unworthy of a holy, just, and loving God. And why would God, who desires purity and righteousness throughout the universe, want to torment people forever and have them to be conscious of their sin? And for everyone else in the world, in the universe, to be conscious of sin?

As a foundation for our study as we go forward here, we must acknowledge the fact that the Bible does speak of hell. It is in there. You can find that four-letter word in many places in the Bible. But we need to explain what the Bible writers mean when that term comes up. Now that term is an English term, but the Bible writers used four different words for hell, one in Hebrew and three in Greek. Now if we understand these four words as Scripture uses them (that is the big thing), rather than interpreting them from any kind of extrabiblical pagan or philosophical sources, then they paint a far different picture than the traditional fire and brimstone place of eternal torment that most people think of when they hear the word hell.

Now some of you may recall what I am going to go into here from a Bible study I gave when I was doing church visits a few years ago. I gave a Bible study on hell. So this will be somewhat of a review for all of you and new for other people. I want to go into these four words so that everybody is on the same page about them.

First the Hebrew word, sheol. It is used 66 times in the Old Testament. And if you go into a lexicon, you will find that if they are honest, whoever the lexicographer is, the book will say that it means a hole, a void. When you dig in the ground, you create a void, which is your hole. Or if you dig enough, it becomes a pit and it becomes a grave. And so sheol then becomes the place of the dead; and that is what it means. A hole, a void, a pit, a grave, the place of the dead, where the dead are. Simply put, sheol is the destination of our physical bodies when we die. And if we would go through all of these 66 occurrences of sheol in the Old Testament, we would find that it often simply means death. You go to sheol. That is what it means. We will go through a few of these, back into the book of Psalms chapter 16. By the way, this is a Messianic psalm about Jesus here. David writes here,

Psalm 16:8-10 I have set the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad; and my glory rejoices; my flesh also will rest in hope [meaning the hope of the resurrection]. For you will not leave my soul in Sheol [the pit, the grave, the void, where the dead lie], nor will you allow Your Holy One to see corruption.

And we do not need to go any further there. I think it is very plain. He was put in a tomb and he was raised from the dead. God did not allow Him to see corruption. He was raised from sheol, as it were.

Let us go to chapter 30. Look at how it is used here.

Psalm 30:2-3 O Lord my God, I cried out to You, and You have healed me. O Lord, You have brought my soul up from sheol [the grave]; You have kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.

So here is a place where sheol is used to mean death. You have brought my soul up from death, meaning He did not allow him to get to that point because it says very clearly that he was healed. He thought he was going to die, but God healed him and kept him from going into the grave, in the pit and to death. I think that one is pretty clear.

Let us go to chapter 55. An interesting one. David writing about those who had taken over his throne under Absalom. Now notice this, this is a parallel form here in verse 15. The first phrase is parallel to the second. He says,

Psalm 55:15 Let death seize them [and this is parallel to]; let them go down alive into hell [sheol, the pit].

Probably a reference to Korah going down alive into the pit with all his family and his co-conspirators. But the idea there is that they would die. That God would cause them to die. It is not that they are going to any place where the souls of the dead gather and they wait there for men in the future, which is Greek thought. But here it just says that they will die. David is asking God to kill his enemies for their rebellion against him.

Here is a great one. Let us go to Jonah the second chapter. We will read verses 1 and 2.

Jonah 2:1-2 Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the fish's belly. And he said, "I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction, and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice."

So where was the pit, the grave, the place of the dead for Jonah? It was in the belly of the great fish. Notice verse 6.

Jonah 2:6 I went down to the moorings of the mountains; the earth with its bars closed behind me forever; yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God.

So here it was not even a hole in the ground. The grave for Jonah would have been the stomach of that fish that swallowed him. But God brought him up from that, regurgitating him upon the beach, and he lived. So the place of the dead is a fish's belly? Well, it was for Jonah. Probably for very few others. But this gives you an idea of how the Hebrews used it. Any place could be sheol when your dead body was there.

Let us go on to the New Testament. I do not want to dwell too much on these words. The New Testament word that we are going to look at first is the word hades, which is found 11 times in the New Testament. And if I just wanted to be done with this word, I would say sheol because hades basically is the Greek equivalent of Hebrew sheol. And it simply means the state or abode of the dead, the grave, just like sheol does. Biblical Greek, now notice I said biblical Greek. I am not talking about Greek in other sources. Biblical Greek makes no indication of any state of purgatory or even consciousness in hades. Let us see a few of these.

Acts 2, verse 27 in the well-known Peter on the day of Pentecost. We are going to pick up just verses 27 and 29. Now what he does here in verse 27 is he quotes Psalm 16:8-10 (where we were before). I will just pick out verse 27.

Acts 2:27 Because you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor will you allow Your Holy One to see corruption.

Now verse 29. He now is explaining.

Acts 2:29 "Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David [who is the one who penned the psalm], that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day."

So in interpreting and explaining verse 27 and what was meant by hades there or sheol, he is saying that the writer of the psalm who was expressing this hope was dead and buried. And he was still dead and buried. That is how the New Testament uses hades.

Let us go to Revelation 1. We are going to look at several verses here in Revelation, and I want you to see how hades is used here.

Revelation 1:18 [This is Jesus Christ Himself speaking.] "I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death."

Let us just move on to chapter 6, verse 8. This is the pale horse.

Revelation 6:8 So I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him.

Now we will go to chapter 20, verses 13 and 14.

Revelation 20:13-14 The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. Then Death and Hades were cast into the Lake of Fire. This is the second death.

Did you notice that in each one of these that we saw in this book of Revelation, death and hades are mentioned together? That is because they go together! One dies, and one is buried. One goes to a place where his dead body is. That is all it means. In a way you could say they are parallel, and he is equating them, death and hades. That is all it means.

As we see here, hades and sheol are pretty much the same even though they are from two different languages.

The next word we are going to look into is in II Peter 2:4, where Peter writes,

II Peter 2:4 For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment.

This is the word tartaroo, and it is only used in this one verse throughout the entire New Testament. It is the phrase that is translated here "cast down to hell." Now notice that it is a verb phrase, cast down to hell, because tartaroo is a verb. I think that the translators were persuaded by their beliefs about hell to use the word hell here rather than the word "prison." Because tartarus (the noun) means the place or condition of restraint. When you are put into prison, you are restrained. Your freedom is restrained. In Greek myth, tartarus is a deep abyss. It is even below hades. And it is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked. Probably its most famous use was when Zeus overthrew the Titans, and where did he cast them? He cast them into Tartarus where they were restrained from having any influence on the world anymore.

Now I want you to notice here what the subject of this verb is. Well, it is obviously God did it, but it was the angels who sinned who were cast. The angels were cast down to hell into a prison. And this is, like I said, the only place in the entire New Testament where this verb is found, tartaroo. So tartaroo has only to do with sinful angels, not with people. Not with people at all, not with humans. As a matter of fact, if we were going to say how this links with anything that we understand about times prophesized and times in the distant past, we would connect it with the abyss or the bottomless pit that is in Revelation. If you want verses there, Revelation 11:7; Revelation 17:8; and Revelation 20:1. Those are all places where the bottomless pit is mentioned.

One more word and maybe the most important word for what we are talking about today, and that is the word gehenna. It is used 12 times. Literally, this is the Valley of Hinnom. It is the Aramaic gehenna, which they left basically untranslated. The Valley of Hinnom, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, as it is called in the Old Testament, lies just outside Jerusalem. And throughout the Gospels, Jesus uses the Hinnom Valley as an illustration or as a metaphor, you could even say a kind of a parable of God's judgment of the wicked. And He says in some of these places or implies that the wicked will be completely burned up in gehenna fire just like garbage, refuse, and bodies of the wicked, of the condemned criminals, were completely burned in the Jerusalem City dump. Because that is what it was. The Valley of the Son of Hinnom over time became Jerusalem's dump. And they kept fires burning there. Actually, they did not have to keep them burning because Jerusalemites, just like any other major city, people in a major city, they produced a lot of trash and they just kept throwing it into the Hinnom Valley and kept burning. Lots of organic matter and such was thrown in there. And so it became an illustration in Jesus' sermons and such, His comments, illustration of God's judgment of the wicked.

Now, if you want to go back and look at what is said about the Valley of the Son of Hinnom in Jeremiah 7:28-34, you will find a history there of that particular valley and it answers the question of why it became Jerusalem's city dump. It is this valley was where Tophet was, where they had human sacrifices during some of the worst reigns of the kings of Judah, like Manasseh. And so the valley itself became associated with child sacrifice and therefore, it became associated with extreme wickedness and perversion. And God there in Jeremiah 7 says that He is going to make the Valley of the Son of Hinnom as a graveyard. And it was the graveyard of those who died in the siege and sack of Jerusalem as punishment, God's wrath on the people of Judah for their sinful ways.

And so Jesus then takes this known history and makes a metaphor, if you will "out of the Valley of Hinnom" to show what was going to happen to the wicked when God judged them, ultimately. I think I mentioned this a little bit before, but I will mention again. Gehenna was the place where the bodies of condemned executed criminals, whom people judged to be the wicked of the land, would be thrown. So they did not get a burial of any kind of honor. They were just simply cast into the Valley of Hinnom, where the fires were burning, and their bodies would eventually burn up with the trash. And so it makes a very good metaphor. Not for hell, but for the Lake of Fire.

We need to understand this because most of the Protestant and Catholic idea of hell is based on Jesus' comments about gehenna. We need to understand this one maybe the best of all. If you look in commentaries, these scholars who believe in hell will acknowledge that Jesus made reference to the actual Valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem, But then they proceed to take those comparisons to His metaphors too far. They take them literally and combine them with their preconceived notions of hell and you get all kinds of strange notions. This is what happens when we mistake the metaphor for the reality. We get the cart before the horse.

So Jesus is not saying that gehenna is hell. Or even that gehenna is like hell. Because He is not speaking about hell at all. He is speaking about the Lake of Fire. He is saying that certain aspects of gehenna have parallels in God's judgment of the wicked, which we know in Revelation God calls the Lake of Fire and the second death. But He is merely using gehenna as an illustration.

Now, we do need to go into this a little bit more. Please turn with me to Mark the 9th chapter, where Jesus uses this term gehenna three times. And He repeats certain phrases that get Protestants and Catholics all atwitter of excitement about hell because they make a lot over them that is really not necessarily warranted. Let us just read verses 43 to 48.

Mark 9:43-48 "If your hand makes you sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched—where 'Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.' And if your foot makes you sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, than having two feet, to be cast into hell [gehenna], into the fire that shall never be quenched—where 'Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.' And if your eye makes you sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire [gehenna fire]—where 'Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'"

It seems like a bit of overkill here with the repetition of that one verse there verses 44, 46, and 48. I will just mention this kind of offhandedly that there is some evidence that these repetitions are not original. There are some earlier versions, manuscripts of the Bible, of the New Testament, that do not have these repetitions in it. It is in there one time, not three times. They think there was an overzealous hell-believing scribe. I will just leave it at that.

Now, what Jesus says here is easily explained if we look at these things without preconceptions, and that is hard to do. But we will do our best here. You notice here Jesus said go to hell. That is what we are going to look at here first. In Greek, go to hell in verse 43 is literally go to gehenna. Or you could say be cast into gehenna. And in verse 47 where it talks about hellfire, that is gehenna fire. I think I mentioned that as we were going through. He is illustrating that God will deal with the condemned or the incorrigibly wicked in a similar way that condemned criminals were dealt with in His day. I mentioned this earlier. Romans would execute somebody and instead of them being buried, they would normally be thrown into gehenna to be burned. And that is what would happen. They would be burned, and that would be the end of the story. Nothing more. That was it.

One thing I want to mention here is that criminals were not tormented once they were thrown into gehenna. They were already dead and their bodies just burn up. That is the reality of what Jesus was describing there in first century Jerusalem. Now the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man suggests that the wicked will be thrown alive into the Lake of Fire. Remember, Lazarus is in the fire and he is asking questions, and saying send somebody to my brothers. So there is that possibility, and I am pretty sure that is the way it will be. He says the flames will there in Lazarus and the Rich Man. Flames will indeed torment them. I think it says that caused them torment or caused them agony, and that will happen until they die. Revelation 19:20 says that the beast and the false prophet will be "cast alive into the Lake of Fire."

So it looks to me as if the Lake of Fire, when God finally gives judgment on these people, they will be cast alive into the Lake of Fire, unlike what happened in the Valley of Hinnom where they were already dead.

Now, depending on the intensity of the flames and the amount of smoke that is being produced, a human being burned alive will die within a few minutes or a few hours. It just depends on how long, how intense the fire is. I guess some of the people who were burned at the stake during the Middle Ages would last a while. If they did not, well, they usually fainted first, lost consciousness, and then they were burned up. But we see that in this judgment of the Lake of Fire there will be pain. There will be torment, if you will, from the flames of the fire. That is very clear in the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. But it is a fairly quick death when all is said and done. It is certainly not eternal torment. It does not go on forever. They get a just punishment—pain and death. But it is very quick and over with very soon.

Let us look at another phrase here. Jesus says a couple of times that the fire shall never be quenched. And we could probably say, if we trust the Greek scholars, that this is better translated as "unquenchable" or cannot be quenched. They make an assumption here when they say shall never be quenched, when the Greek actually says simply cannot be quenched. Quenched means extinguished. You would throw a bucket of water over it or maybe some sand or what have you to make the flames die out.

Now Jesus, when He says this in Mark 9, is playing on the fact that the fire in gehenna never went out because of the constant supply of trash being dumped there. If you could get the Jerusalemites to stop dumping in the trash, the fire would indeed eventually go out because it would run out of fuel. So what Jesus says here does not necessarily suggest an eternal fire or an eternal flame, but one that will blaze until its fuel supply is extinguished. Then it has nothing to burn and it goes out on its own, so indeed no one quenches it. It just goes out. So no one will quench or extinguish it, but it will go out once it has accomplished God's purpose, meaning there are no more of the wicked to fuel it.

The real meaning of His words then is that the wicked will be completely burned up, not that they will burn forever in torment. We are going to be coming back to Mark 9, but look at Matthew the 10th chapter, verse 28 just quickly here. I think this just undermines both the doctrine of the immortal soul and an ever-burning hell when Jesus says,

Matthew 10:28 "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]."

He means when He says destroyed, that means completely. Completely kill, completely destroy. It means damage irreparably so that it no longer works, whatever it is that is being killed here. So, it means it is dead, and dead is dead. Dead does not mean alive. I think we have all figured that out since we were probably about six or something like that, maybe even before. We see bugs that are dead on the sill, we know they are dead. They are not going to come back. Just a simple truth of life. Or death.

So Jesus says here that God can destroy or completely kill a soul and a body in gehenna, which is His illustration of the Lake of Fire.

Back to Mark 9. We have this repeated thing about their worm does not die. I think you have probably all heard the explanation here. What He is talking about is maggots. You put out organic matter and before you know it, it is crawling with worms. Because flies come and they lay their eggs, and once the eggs hatch, then these worms, these maggots have something to eat and to grow on and then they change and they become flies, and then they come back and they lay their eggs, and the next generation goes through the same process, and the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation, and it seems as if these worms, these maggots, never die. It is not the same maggots, it is just there is a continual process of life going on here where there is always maggots, always flies; always maggots, always flies; always maggots, always flies as long as there is enough organic matter for them to live on.

And that is all He is talking about there. Why would God make eternal worms? That has just always made me wonder, do the people who study this stuff ever think about that? That is enough there.

Let us go to Matthew the 25th chapter, where there is another phrase that Jesus uses. Verse 41. This is in the middle of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. I just want this one verse.

Matthew 25:41 "Then He [the King] will say to those on the left hand [where the goats are], 'Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

Here we have everlasting fire, fire that never goes out. Is that really what He means? So we have to ask the question, does everlasting or eternal always mean never-ending? Does it mean that it goes on forever? Now again, the translations that we have in our laps are biased in favor of the prevailing doctrine of hell among Catholics and Protestants, which insists that hell is eternal, that there will always be the wicked there getting their lashes and whatnot in the fires of hell.

The word here that we are looking at, the word everlasting in Matthew 25:41, is aionion. It is the word eon as it has come down to us, and it is from the word aionios. Same thing. And what we find when we go through the words that are used in the Bible or the times that it is used in the Bible, we find that it does not necessarily mean everlasting or eternal as we think of it. It can mean or imply lifelong. Or age lasting. That is, that it lasts a long time, it lasts a whole age. Or one that you have probably heard many times, it can mean as long as conditions exist. W. E. Vine in his famous dictionary comments on it in this context, Matthew 25:41, and his comment comes after affirming that aionios does mean eternal when it is applied to divine things. Because God lasts forever, and God's love lasts forever, and God the things of God last forever. But not necessarily everything.

"Aionios is also used of the judgment of God from which there is no appeal." [And he refers to Hebrews 6:2, where it is talking about the doctrine of eternal judgment, which Paul or the author of Hebrews there says that we need to go on from and go on to perfection is what he says.] "And of the fire, which is one of its instruments." [He refers to Matthew 18:8, this verse here, Matthew 25:41, and Jude 7, and he goes on, talking about the fire.] "Which is elsewhere said to be unquenchable." [and he refers to Mark 9:43, which we just saw. He continues] "The use of aionios here shows that the punishment referred to in II Thessalonians 1:9 [remember, he said that those who reject the gospel will be punished with everlasting destruction. We read that earlier.] is not temporary but final. And accordingly, the phraseology shows that its purpose is not remedial, that is, it is not trying to make any changes in a person, but retributive."

That is, what Vine is saying here is that the punishment is a just punishment for sin and its accomplishment seals God's judgment forever. It is final. So eternal punishment means final unchanging punishment. Eternal judgment means final unchanging judgment. In this case, meaning the consequences are eternal. When the death penalty is carried out, there is no going back. It is done. The judgment is final or complete. It is, we could say, set in stone.

So we cannot just think that it means forever or eternal, that is, this aionios, when it is used. We have to put a little bit of thought into what it is implying. And this applies in other places too, like in Revelation where the word "forever" or the phrase "forever and ever" are used. That is aionios again. The context determines whether it should be understood as eternal. That is, as with the things of God, those are eternal things, or whether it should be a period that will end once conditions have been met or a thing is accomplished. So it is not a simple term at all. We cannot just say that this means that it will happen forever. We have to think it through and apply the rest of the Bible to it to understand what is actually going on.

Let us go to Jude 7, which Vine mentioned. Now notice this, think about the context here. He says, we are breaking in,

Jude 7 as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Interesting. Jude helps us a lot here. Here, aionois describes the destroying fire God sent upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and he says it is an example of what God will do in the future to the incorrigibly wicked. My question to you is, are the fires still burning in Sodom and Gomorrah? No, obviously they went out about 4,000 years ago. Are the people it targeted, those perverse people in Sodom and Gomorrah, are they still alive and suffering torment? No, obviously not. They died in the fire and brimstone that came upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Is God's wrath still burning hot against them? No, it is done. He sent His fire and it did the job and He moved on.

But the results of the fire and brimstone sent in retribution or vengeance or punishment for their perverse sins are lasting. They are pretty final because they are dead. They are irrevocable, another word we could use here. You cannot take them back and they are complete. Now, because they did not know the truth, had no calling, no chance to understand it, then they will likely rise in the second resurrection and have in their time to do what is right and good. But that will not be the case for the incorrigibly wicked at the end. Then, which this is just an example of, just a type of, that will be complete and final. And they will not be able to rise again and change.

So here again, we have an example of the Lake of Fire. It gives us a better understanding of what it will entail.

Let us go to Revelation 20, verse 13 as we wrap up here. We will have a few more verses, but we are getting toward the end. Here we get into the nuts and bolts of this second death as Jesus gives these prophecies.

Revelation 20:13-14 The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged each one according to his works. Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

Let us go to chapter 21, verse 8.

Revelation 21:8 But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

Notice the wording here. Two different times in these three scriptures that we just read it is called, that is, the Lake of Fire, the second death. How can death mean eternal life? That just does not make any sense. No. Death means death, no longer alive. The fate of the wicked is a real death, not eternal torment, not living forever being punished for one's sins.

We will not go there, but you all know Romans 6:23. "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." What is he saying there? Very clear. Only the righteous have eternal life, and they have to have it as a gift from God. There is no immortal soul. People do not have this when they are born and then just continue with it. No, it has to be given because of one's belief in Jesus Christ. And then he says "the wages of sin is death." The wages of sin is not torture. It is not torment. It is not physical punishment. The wages of sin is death, a cessation of life.

So God's wrath may burn hot as we saw in some of those scriptures that we read earlier, but with death His wrath is quickly satisfied as justice served. The offending party or parties are dealt with and it ends. It is over with.

We are here in Revelation 21. Let us go back to the first few verses here, starting with verse 1.

Revelation 21:1-4 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away."

Let us just quickly go to II Peter 3, verse 13, which says,

II Peter 3:13 Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

A new heaven that is described here in Revelation 21 and this new earth is a place where only righteousness dwells. Not sin, not torment, not pain, not crying. Can you imagine in a holy place, in a righteous universe where eternal torment sits side by side all that is good? How can we reconcile Jesus' saying here, no tears, no death, no sorrow, no crying, no pain with perhaps hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people suffering endless torture? It does not compute. It makes no sense.

Let us go back to Isaiah 10, verses 24 and 25. We will finish here. We are pulling this somewhat out of context, but if we take it as a principle, I think it works very well. This is God predicting, prophesying, the downfall of Israel at the hand of the Assyrians. So he says here,

Isaiah 10:24-25 Therefore thus says the Lord God of hosts: "O My people, who dwell in Zion, do not be afraid of the Assyrian. He shall strike you with a rod and lift up his staff against you, in the manner of Egypt. For yet a very little while and the indignation will cease, as will My anger in their destruction."

Now, if you will, I would suggest you go and read Charles Whitaker's series of articles on the "Goodness and Severity of God." It begins in the Forerunner of May and June, 2016, where he talks about this principle. And that is, what we see here is characteristic of the wrath of God. His indignation, His anger, His fury at sin is slow to build. I mean, how long did it take for Him to get to the point where He wiped Israel off the map and then another 150 years or so it took to wipe Judah off the map. He was very slow and patient in building His anger. But how furious and destructive and awesome was His anger when it descended upon them when they would not change. That is what Charles is talking about in those articles. And then Charles mentions, and that is what verse 25 says here, that God's anger, His fury lasts only for a little while, and then it ceases. It is over. It is spent. [audio cut out] it though is thorough and complete. He needs to do no more.

The wrath of God does not last forever, as Psalm 103:9 says. And it will not last forever, even against the incorrigibly wicked. It does not need to. He can just assign them the second death and be done with it. The incorrigibly wicked will be judged, sentenced, and executed. God's anger will cease and the Kingdom of God will move forward, never looking back.

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