And you'll live happily ever after in your eternal life, knowing that good people will burn in agony forever?
How nice.
No, not true. God is not that cruel. Consider this, too. When we die, our flesh body is replaced with our spiritual body. Spiritual bodies feel no pain, right?
This eternal torment view is a critique of the "everlasting burning inferno" popularized by writers like Dante, where the unrepentant suffer eternal agony while saints watch from above.
The Bible repeatedly describes the fate of the wicked as
perishing or experiencing the "
second death," which is the complete
destruction of the soul. This is supported by the words of Christ:
Matthew 10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
These claims of eternal torment are based on a translation error. They compare this to translating an English idiom like "cold feet" literally into another language, which changes the meaning from "losing nerve" to the actual temperature of the feet. In this case, the Greek root
basanos (the origin of "basis") suggests a process of being consumed or debased. Therefore, the phrase indicates that Satan, for example, will be completely gone for eternity, rather than existing in a state of perpetual pain.
A second witness to this is found in Ezekiel, which describes Satan's death by fire:
Ezekiel 28:18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.
Since God is described in Hebrews 12 as a consuming fire, He will reduce Satan to ashes. This does not mean an eternal process of burning, but a final result of non-existence:
[19] All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.
Satan will simply cease to exist. This is reflected in his Greek name, "Apollyon," meaning "
perish," and his title, the "Son of
Perdition." The author concludes that this same fate applies to anyone not part of the first or second resurrections.
@Marvelloustime suggests a few mistranslated verses to establish a doctrine of eternal torture so cruel that it contradicts the very nature of love and exceeds the cruelty of human laws against torture.