To you. I believe Gods original design for man, was to live forever and choose to Love Him and be with Him forever. Yet, the freewill thingy....just wasn’t a choice many men have chosen.
see, this being the case -- that God's intention and will for man is that he be an eternal being -- it is hard to make the argument that He utterly annihilates any of them. that would be God defeated.
my God is invincible.
((and no -- am not arguing univeralism. am arguing eternal
existence of personhood, not universal eternal life or eternal death. life and death pivot on faith in Christ; existence pivots on God's intent in creation & ability/faithfulness to carry out His intent. we exist because He wills us to. because He conceives of us. because, in a quantum-mechanical sense, He observes us. He will do all His will, and nothing escapes His sight. what may be known of Him is made clear by what is made, and the universe He made happens to be a QM universe in which existence appears to be effected by conscious observation. that is no accident; that is His purpose.))
because what you have said here is equal to what you said earlier about the angels. man is not a merely physical being; he is bipartite physical/non-physical, having a spiritual component.
to the angels, who are not even partially made from dust, this must be amazing. even the creation of dust to them, is a new thing, an amazing thing, that they give glory to God over.
imagine you are an angel, before the creation of the world. satan falls; he deceives at least 1/3 of your brethren, taking fully 1/3 into his wickedness with him. he is cast out, and what is the response of the Ancient of Days? He creates time; He creates dust, He creates living souls comprised of spirits inhabiting bodies of dust. what is He doing? thousands of years later, His answer to The Lie is revealed, He Himself, The Son, takes on this dust-flesh and redeems this strange creature "man" who fell into sin, by a thing called faith. this is the solution to sin, which the devil has accused is unsolvable.
is this a paradigm in which God annihilates anyone?
is annihilation anything less than God tacitly admitting He made a mistake?
He does not annihilate Satan. He spends millenia, creating an entire universe, giving it freedom to hang itself, then resurrects it, accounting faith as righteousness, destroying the perceived power of death by offering Himself to death, conquering it by indestructible life. all this is proving to the angelic host a truth, condemning The Evil, The Lie, and justifying Himself, The Justifier of the just.
if He does not annihilate Satan, i have a very hard time thinking He does so to the living souls of animals like us. certainly not the other living souls apart from man, who have no sin, but were subject to futility for our sake, waiting eagerly for the revealing of the children of God.
to me this whole question pivots on human beings believing they have a better idea of what 'justice is' than the Living God. so they sentimentally judge that God 'must do so and so else God is evil' -- instead of humbly watching what God does, believing what He says, and glorying in His works with amazement. they are no different than the atheist who says God must be evil because He allows wickedness to exist -- in fact, we see the worst of them preaching exactly the same worldview of atheists: physical monism with universal cessation of existence at the demise of the flesh. and doing so under the false guise of 'christianity!'