Bible_Gazer said:
If the fiery Hell pit exist in the earth, does it last forever ?
Rev.21 Seem to read that God and the Holy City will be coming down on Earth at end of the next 1,000 years dispensation.
Then will this Holy condition and hell co-exist on the same planet ?
good people on top - bad people below, we are all together just a few feet away from each other - forever ?
It's an interesting question because I believe the Bible gives is many, many images of hell. Many people teach it to be a spiritual place, but it's very physical because every man will be physically raised from the dead unto the judgment. It's still very popular to teach hell as a furnace where people are burning up, but this isn't true either, and it goes to show many people still fail to recognize when Jesus was speaking metaphorically. If the tale of Lazareth and the Rich Man is any indicator, the rich man is not burning up and is able to carry a coherent conversation, even amidst relentless torment. He certainly isn't writhing and screaming in pitched agony as somebody burning alive would be. "Torment, not torture" is the phrase used by those promoting a more Biblical view of hell.
The "flames" Jesus refers to are the utter absence of God's presence, a loss so grievous as to suck the air out of one's lungs. For the goodness and grace that even the unregenerate show is nothing more than a borrowed resource, for apart from the goodness of God, men are incapable of love, compassion, moral rectitude, or any good deed. It's why atheists are so laughable in their claim that they can be moral without God, for God is the author of all goodness.
And without God's presence, we are left to our nasty, depraved, wretched selves, the memories of our sins not diminished through false optimism, drugs or alcohol, or the lies we tell ourselves so we can live with what we've done. Imagine eternity as a place where all lies have been silenced once and for all and people have to live eternally in unmitigated awareness of their cruelty.
King David paints for us a vivid portrait of the condemned when fearing the death of his son and living in full knowledge of his sin that caused him to murder in order to slake his lust. He cannot be comforted, cannot sleep, and his eyes waste away with grief. Day and night he contemplates his just punishment, horrified at how poorly he chose. The restlessness that David alludes to is also mentioned repeatedly in Hebrews 3, that the just shall enter God's rest, but the unjust shall be cursed with eternal restlessness. The 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert paints yet another picture of this restlessness of the condemned. Like I said, the Bible is rich in imagery of what hell will be like.
So where will hell exist when God creates a new heavens and new earth? Oddly enough, according to Revelation 14, it will be in God's presence:
they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night
And there it is again, restlessness, and the sentence being carried out not in some far away place set in reserve but shut away from God, but rather right in the presence of heaven. I don't know how that translates into a GPS location, but it gives us a better picture of the proximity of hell to heaven.
