Eternal Conscious Torment

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. With me are Michael Durham, David Gasson, Andrew Hudson, and I'm Dylan Hamilton.

Tonight we will be discussing eternal conscience, conscious formant.

It has been a topic of discussion in the church recently. You are hearing this about early to mid -December, or we're recording it early to mid -December, and Kirk Cameron has been in social media news, if you will, over his discussion with his son on the topic.

And Michael, if you would, start us off on eternal conscience formant. Right, or ECT for short, because as theologians like to do, let's abbreviate this, and it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing.

No one really wants to talk about hell, and you know, it's kind of hard to blame them. And doing a little bit of research for this particular podcast,

I came across a, I don't know, like a 12 -minute clip of James White answering a question about annihilationism and trying to give a very brief answer to his caller about the matter.

And he said, first of all, I don't want to be the apologist for hell. Like, who wants that job?

And no one really wants to delve deep into the particulars, so it's a hard thing to look at.

But given that, there are ramifications of what we believe and how we are receiving the testimony of the

Scriptures. So, although this is a recent hot topic in regards to Kirk Cameron's video with his son, and the amount of material that came out of that as everyone begins to respond and try to answer these objections.

And then you read the comments below the videos as the debates start sparking between those who call themselves annihilationists, or those who are called traditionalists, or ECT, eternal conscious torment, versus those who call themselves conditionalists.

So, on the one side, the annihilationists or the conditionalists are, it's a way of saying it negatively and positively.

Say it negatively, they say the wicked will not continue to endure in torment, but they will be annihilated.

Now, I can understand them wanting to get a different term, because if you're walking around saying, I'm an annihilationist, who are you trying to annihilate, right?

It's kind of a negative term. So, they have another term, conditionalist. And what they mean by that is, the eternality of the soul is conditional upon belief in Jesus Christ, upon salvation.

Only the saved, only the redeemed are those who will live eternally.

But those who do not believe in Christ and are not saved, they will not live eternally. So, eternal life or eternality of the soul is conditional.

And so, that's a more, I think, more positive way of trying to state their position. And the dividing line regarding this particular debate will fall along three axes.

First of all is the testimony of Scripture. So, there are some passages of Scripture which sound like the wicked after death will be annihilated.

For example, Jesus says, do not fear man who can only destroy the body, but fear God who can destroy both the body and soul in hell.

And then we have to, what does the word destroy mean? How is it used in other contexts? And so on. But on first reading, it sounds like you get annihilated.

And I can understand somebody walking away with that point of view. However, there are other passages in Scripture which indicate eternal, ongoing punishment.

So, that in, you know, Math 25, the righteous have an eternal reward and the wicked have an eternal punishment, right?

So, they're going to be eternally punished. And the descriptions of that in Revelation are pretty clear.

The lake of fire that burns forever and the

Satan and the dragon, you know, the beast and the false prophet are tortured forever, tormented forever without rest, and also the wicked with them.

They have no rest. Smoke goes up forever and ever. Revelation 14, Revelation 20, so on.

So, the fire prepared for the devil and his angels, into this the wicked go, and they also have the same experience there.

And so, the conditionalist is going to read those things and say, this is what these terms mean.

Yes, the fire is eternal, but not the suffering. It'll burn forever, but that doesn't mean you're gonna experience it forever. Yes, it's a forever judgment, but because it's so final.

And so, they have a sense in which they have a way of reading it, and they say, we think we can be consistent in reading it this way, internally with the

Scriptures. And the ECT, eternal conscious torment, or the traditionalist is going to say, no,

I think we're consistent in the way that we read the Scriptures, because when you point out passages that say, the destroy the body and soul in hell, we can show you that that word destroyed doesn't mean a non -existence, and you can see it being used in these various contexts of just ruination.

And it doesn't mean that this goes out of existence, but that it's just totally ruined.

So, back and forth on the Scriptures, that's one axis of disagreement. And I think the most important one is that we got to read the

Scriptures and see what the Scriptures say, one way or the other. And like James White said,

I would like to be an annihilationist. I think I would like to have that position, and for him, yes, the

Scriptures matter, but also there is the theological axis. CS Lewis actually said something very similar.

He said that there was one doctrine that I could take out, it'd be this doctrine of hell, but I can't escape it because the

Scriptures are pretty clear on it. Yes, and so that has to be examined.

And now, you could probably study the position for a good 30 minutes or an hour and walk away as an annihilationist, but I don't think it would hold up under a lot more extensive study.

For some people, it does, and there are some theological concerns. The theological concerns are about the nature of God.

For the traditionalist, God is proven as wholly good and just and right because of eternal conscious torment.

It only makes sense, being that the eternality of God, the immensity of God, the infinite nature of God being offended, that the fitting punishment for the crime is eternal punishment.

For the other side of it, they say this would make God unjust, and they don't want to have an unjust

God, and I think they'll be inconsistent with the Bible. And we would say, well, if God was proven to be unjust, then you've done something wrong with your theology, obviously.

And so they would say, well, it's a lifetime of sin, so there should be an appropriate amount of punishment, not an infinite, you know, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, or it should be an appropriate amount of punishment for this sin, not infinity.

And so they're concerned about what does this say about justice? What does this say about God, that if we believe in eternal conscious torment?

And then I would say that the, so there's doctrinal concerns, and they can go broader than that.

But there's the particular texts that both sides would look at and say, no, this proves my position, no, this proves my position.

And then there's the doctrinal concerns about what does it say about God. And then the third part is more of the emotional slash pastoral disagreement.

So on the one side, it says, you know, this is an awful thing for us to dream up, you know, eternal conscious torment, this wickedness and being punished, but with immense cruelty forever and ever,

I can't fathom it, imagine it. This is a horrific thing to ponder, it's a terrible thing to believe in, and it's seeing that I say it's not biblical, and it makes

God be out a monster, I don't think we should hold to this, because it's a terrible thing, and it disturbs me, disturbs others, and it doesn't say anything about love, so on.

And the other side, saying, well, you're making light of sin, you're all of a sudden treating sin as not as important, because you don't think there's an infinite punishment in hell.

And what are we doing out there, preaching the gospel and saying, if you don't turn to Christ, you'll cease to exist and not suffer anymore, after a while.

You know, pretty good deal, you know, for some people. Yeah, atheists are already good with not existing, right?

Yeah, exactly. And so we're just protracting a little bit, but other than that, not much different from the atheists.

And the other side said, you know, you're basically trying to bolster your evangelism by this heinous idea of eternal conscious torment, trying to scare people into Christendom, or Christianity.

And so that's the third axis of the emotional pastoral side of it, you know, what are you doing to people, you know, what is it doing to us?

And so I think that those are basically the three areas where the disagreements usually are discussed. There may be others, what do y 'all think?

Why? We said, so those three aren't necessarily the origins of annihilationism, but that's the support that current annihilationists or conditional immortalityists,

I don't know what you would call them, those who believe in conditional immortality. Yeah, does it make sense biblically, does it make sense doctrinally, does it make sense emotionally?

So I know the impetus of our discussion is because it just happens to be in the news and people are discussing it, but this is not a new topic.

This is something that's been around for a while. What are the origins surrounding it? I mean, I did a little bit of research,

I know that some early church fathers may or may not have taught it, depending on who you read, but this is something that has come up before, and even some prominent leaders in the past, in the 20th century, 21st century, have espoused this.

So this is not just some dark corner of the interwebs, this is something that seems to creep up every so often.

What's the history behind this? So, as usual, the church fathers may always be called upon to support any position.

Oh, the tug of war. Yeah, you can always find something said to try to support your position from the church fathers.

But yeah, this is not a recent thing, it's been visited again and again.

For example, John Stott was a very important theologian, pastor...

Knowing God, great book. Well, that's J .I. Packer. I'm sorry, that's J .I. Packer. But John Stott wrote...

Oh, it's another... The Cross of Christ, I think. Thank you.

I think it's the Cross of Christ. So, huge defender of the substitutionary atonement.

Huge defender, and yet, also proponent of annihilationism.

And this was greatly disturbing to those who were like, you're supposed to be a solid guy as far as to lean on, you know.

But later on, so... But J .I. Packer, who wrote Knowing God, and John Stott, who wrote The Cross of Christ, both of them fell onto the wrong side of the

ECT, Evangelicals and Catholics together. So, they had some late -game compromises that were issues.

I blame that on their Anglicanism. Yeah. Speaking as a former

Anglican myself, I can make those jokes. Yeah. So, well, I mean... I'm looking at you suspiciously.

I like the 39 articles, I do. So, annihilationism was an issue.

Even back, I was referencing James P. Boyce's abstract of theology.

And his final pages in his abstract are dealing with those issues about what you would say the final state of the righteous and the wicked, one's personal eschatology.

Not meaning I have an eschatology that I made up all myself, okay. But no, it's the question of what happens to me when

I die. And even as there is a lot of discussion about cosmic eschatology, how does everything end up, this touches on where do

I end up? How do I end up? What happens to me when I die? What happens to me at the resurrection?

What happens to me after the great day of judgment? These are very personal questions. And trying to understand that, there's a lot of confusion that is tied up to that.

And so, people are looking for answers. And it would seem to be kind of refreshing to come across a video where the friendly face and chipper voice of Kirk Cameron is explaining that this whole eternal conscious torment thing that he used to talk about on the streets doing way of the master of angelism, turns out that he says, it's not really biblical, it was influenced by Greek philosophy, and it's not the real teaching of Jesus.

And so, we don't have to hold it anymore. Or at least, that's the position that it sounded like on the video.

And I think it could be received by people as, oh, thank goodness.

Yeah, this is an attempt to make Christianity a little bit more palatable.

If maybe we explained it this way, then we're no longer the hellfire brimstone preachers that we know.

That should be relegated to the dustbin of history. I don't know what else is offensive.

I think we're about to reach... The sending of one's son to take upon the sins of the world.

A lot of people would call that cosmic child abuse. Yeah, many people have. So, if we open up our theological aperture to accept those things which are only palatable to our sensibilities, even if our sensibilities change over time, it's capricious, it's arbitrary.

So, that's why sticking to the text is very important. Yeah, so I'd say to address the issue, we've got to think about the key passages in Scripture, talk about the key issues in doctrine, and I don't think it matters how we feel.

I think it does matter how we would engage with people in the name of Christ regarding the doctrine of hell, and that there is an appropriate pastoral way to do that.

But that shouldn't be the primary concern. We shouldn't say, this doesn't make sense that God would be this way or do that.

Therefore, that can't work. We shouldn't begin there. And I'm not saying that Kirk Cameron and others have, and they're willing to say that there is a hell.

They're willing to say that there is only one way of salvation, and at least he's willing to say that.

Now, I don't know about the other sources he's relying on. When I read papers written for annihilationism, they quote guys like Pinnock and Fudge.

Now, Pinnock is an open theist, and he's denied the faith, and Fudge is just a really unfortunate name for a theologian who departs from orthodoxy.

Or perhaps it's providential. I think he talked about a sermon with regard to God -giving names specifically for reason.

So you can... Nominal determinism is what it's called. Nominal determinism, I love it.

Yeah, that was your Isaiah study. Yeah, that's right. Thank God showing that he knows the future, and then naming people that God is actually in control.

And we get doctrines like that by reading the text and drawing our knowledge from it.

So I think that we can refute the emotional arguments just by reading the text.

Like, how you feel is important but largely irrelevant for what isn't and is not true.

And then you talk about some of the theological and doctrinal concerns. God defines what justice is. I think that the people who come to an annihilationist perspective, so that the proper punishment for sin is this kind of torment or you're passed out of existence.

You know, that the righteous go into heaven and they're fully connected to God. Those who are not with God, well, obviously, you know, they just will go away.

But they're reading the same text that we are. So when you come to a text, and I just...

So it is 2 Thessalonians 1 .9. So 2

Thessalonians 1 .9, talking about those who do not know God, those who do not obey the gospel of our

Lord Jesus, they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the

Lord and from the glory of his might. So we read that, and I come away with the conclusion that they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of God in the glory of his might.

I mean, it seems pretty clear. How would someone who believes in conditional immortality or annihilationism read that verse and come away with something totally different?

Yeah, very easily, in fact. The idea of everlasting destruction, everlasting being taken in the sense of forever and there's no recourse, no coming back, and then the destruction meaning, you know, you go out of existence is their idea of that destruction from the presence of the

Lord is the most robust part of that verse for their position to say, since God is omnipresent, the only way you can be away from his presence is to be non -existent.

So for them reading through it, this is gonna be one of their main verses. They're gonna be like, oh yeah, that totally supports annihilationism.

Which is interesting, because you're never away from the presence of the Lord. They're in the presence of his wrath.

They're not in the presence of his love and fellowship, but you are in the presence of his wrath.

But all they have right here is just presence of the Lord. You said away from the presence of the

Lord, but the text... It's got from, so it's in the in the Greek, it's the ablative, it's away from.

That's the idea. So punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the

Lord. So that's not the everlasting destruction flowing from the presence of the Lord. They wouldn't be reading that.

They'd be reading it that the everlasting destruction is apart from the presence of the

Lord. So how could you possibly be apart from the presence of him who is omnipresent if you don't exist anymore?

And it's final, therefore it's everlasting. There's no recourse. So that's how an annihilationist would read that and come away with like, man, it's common sense right there in the text.

So I mean, especially if they start with Jesus' words, do not fear those who can kill the body, fear

God who can kill the body and soul, destroy the body and the soul in hell. So they're just gonna go boom, boom, like, man, this is easy.

I mean, I'm changing my position. Yeah, exactly. Boom, boom.

How would they respond to Jesus' own words when he says, you know, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, he says it three times. Now, you may laugh at this for the semantics that it is, but they point out we're not talking about whether or not the worm dies, we're not talking about whether the fire goes out.

We're saying that God, being eternal, yes, of course, his holiness, yes, of course, his goodness, his righteousness goes on and on and on.

There's nothing here that says that we go on and on and on, which you kind of look at that, well, it doesn't make any sense for Jesus to bring up the never -ending torment part of it and to emphasize the eternality of the punishment only to sneak in the back door and say, but you're not gonna feel it the whole time.

That seems a little silly, but they don't see any necessary contradiction from those passages, you see.

So they're saying we're not inconsistent here. In fact, Jesus himself is the one who says that we get destroyed, the body and the soul get destroyed.

What are the means by which God destroys them? Well, he uses these means. He uses these, we're not saying that hell is pleasant, we're not saying that hell is a wonderful place to be, okay.

And they're gonna point to passages in the Old Testament that talk about the smoke coming up from Edom forever and ever without ceasing, and they're gonna say, pretty sure it's not smoking still now, in fact, you check the satellite, still not smoking.

The Levitical priesthood was called everlasting. Right, so they're gonna look at some language like that, they're gonna say, okay, what does this mean?

And they're gonna, because we're gonna be doing the same thing with the language of destroy the body and soul in hell, apollumi in the

Greek. What does that mean? What context is it used? And they're gonna do the same thing and say, hey, look, we've got to be careful with what lexical definition we're allowing here and see the flexibility of the term where we find it.

And so, to me, the issue is that those key passages, I think, are usually in Revelation, okay, wherein it very clearly states, whether we're in Revelation 14,

Revelation 20, so on and so forth, that the fire was prepared for the devil and his angels, that it is an eternal fire, that the serpent of the beast and the false prophet are tormented forever and ever, and that there's no end to that.

Now, depending on how you interpret Revelation, okay, right, well, these mythical metaphors will suffer forever, but that's not human beings.

Okay, well, depending on how you interpret Revelation, that's a big question mark, but it also says that the wicked enter that very same fire and that they have no rest, and they have no rest day or night, and that the smoke of their torment goes up before the face of God, before the

Lamb, before the angels, forever and ever. Okay, so how do they how do they read those?

And they will be the first to say, these are very tough passages for us. Nevertheless, given the weight of what we read elsewhere, we're going to interpret it this way and say, yes, as they are being punished, they have no rest.

Yes, the fires of God's holiness is forever, but the eternality of it is the finality of it.

It's not that they're consciously being tormented forever without end, because once again, they go back to this same bastion, shall we say, the doctrinal bastion of that would be unjust of God.

God defines his justice in the Bible for us, right? It's a fitting punishment for the crime.

And of course, someone who believes in eternal conscious torment is going to say, yeah, a crime against an infinite

God means an eternality of judgment.

And they're going to immediately say that that's not the one -to -one ratio here.

It's our sins against God as a human. We're not infinite beings sinning against an infinite

God. We are limited beings sinning against an infinite God. And this infinite God will judge us for our limited sinfulness.

So are they using the standard of the Old Testament law in order to come up with the standard of punishment and the eternal state?

They would say that the Old Testament law reveals the principle of justice that God reveals.

It reveals God's justice in principle, not to say that we're under Old Testament law in hell, but to say that it reveals something about the justice of God that should be, that God would be consistent, wouldn't he?

He would be consistent in everything he does. He wouldn't contradict himself. But that law was for earthly leaders to exact upon earthly creatures and bear the sword against them.

Yeah, it's not the same analogy, correct? Like that'd be a little different, wouldn't it?

Yeah, I would say it would be different in terms of like, here's how the magistrates ought to treat their, but they would also, but they would say look, yeah, we agree, but it's also a principle.

So here's, so I would say that that would be for man though, right? Like it, that's really that, yeah, they're trying to bring

God down to the creaturely, it seems like, in that situation rather than... It does smell like theology from below.

Okay, so what I mean by that is that when you, where I say when you do theology, we're supposed to do theology from above, from the

God's point of view, how does he see things and say things, and we have to be careful about theology from below where we begin to import an analogy from our point of view to try to impose something upon God.

I know what love is, and since God is love, therefore my understanding of love defines who

God is. And you hear Kirk Cameron do this, you hear him do this inadvertently, he's not meaning to, but he did it inadvertently, where he said, you know, in our justice system,

I mean, when we have a death penalty, I mean, we have, you know, lethal injection, and we have this process that we go through, and we're saying that God is going to, you know, eternally, consciously torment people forever?

I mean, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, what is he doing there? He's doing a theology from below. Like, it can't be possible that we are more just and merciful than God, so he must be more merciful and just than we are, but that little do -si -do, that little judo move, it doesn't compute biblically for a number of reasons.

So, does this generally just boil down to a question of duration, duration of torment?

I would say in some ways it does, yes. I think possibly some versions of it are that way, but there are other versions they just pass out of existence.

The worst thing that it'd be is to be separated from God, and all these people go into heaven, and those people who warred against him, they're no longer an issue, they'll never be a problem.

Justice, the death penalty, has been done, and they've been wiped from existence.

But to them, that is a fitting punishment for their crime. Yes, and they also focus...

So, it's interesting, there is a... I noticed when I was reading annihilationist positions, from what

I've read, and these are the ones that people are like, you know, we're back to the Bible, we're depending on the

Scriptures for this. They tended to read certain things the way that dispensationalists read things.

They would even talk about the Bema Seat, they're bringing up things that are pretty unique to futurist, freemill type of readings of the

Scripture. And also, that hermeneutic that is so telling and classic for a dispensationalist, that the first time you encounter a word, the definition is fixed.

Right. So, some of that comes into play as well, and there seems to be a selective literalistic hermeneutic, where sometimes destroy...

where destroy has to mean, you know, completely utter non -existence, but eternal might mean something less concrete than...

Right. So, there's the selective literalistic hermeneutic that also happens, that is very similar to dispensationalism.

So, I would say that it hinges around what is the definition of death. In the day that you eat of the fruit, you will surely die.

God says to Adam and Eve, what happens? In the day that they ate of it, they did die. But did they go out of existence?

No. What happened? Did God lie? No, Satan was a liar.

Were they really living? Yeah. Right. They didn't cease to live on the earth, they ceased to live on the earth.

They were there, but something tragic happened, something awful happened in their exile from God, separation from God.

And this is... So, in the very beginning, in the fall, Satan says, you will not surely die.

And God says, you will die. Well, who was the liar? Satan's a liar. So, God was true.

In what way did Adam and Eve die? All of a sudden, they're full of shame, they're blaming each other, the relationship is ruined towards each other and to God, to the creation around them.

Made in God's image, they were to love God supremely, love each other rightly, steward the creation faithfully, and all three of those relationships were in tatters because of sin.

So, in this sense, they died. There was a ruining that occurs.

It's a ruination. That's a ruination. And this is the way that the word apollo me gets used.

It's the ruination of a horse, the ruination of a body in battle. Homer would use that.

The term in Greek is some sort of ruination. And if we can imagine a wretched creature who was made to be full of the glory of God unto great happiness, the opposite of that would be its ruination and that's hell.

Full of the wrath of God and in utter misery, that would be ruination. And so, yeah, how many people do we know whose body is in ruination but their soul is bright and they are full of the joy of the

Lord? Jesus says, don't fear those who could ruin the body. Fear God who could ruin the body and the soul in hell.

We even use the term, like, colloquially for careers, like, my job's dead or his career is dead.

Yeah. You know, we use that all the time. It just means it's ruined. And so, non -existence is not the biblical meaning of death.

Jesus talks about death in terms of sleep for the saints, but also says that the righteous and the unrighteous will be raised from the dead by his voice.

He's going to raise them both from the dead. And we have the idea of, of course, separation with the idea of death.

To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord for the saint. So, death is when the soul is absent from the body.

Hey, look, there's a separation. There wasn't a non -existence. We were just talking about this before we got on, but what group in the

Bible thought there was nothing after death? The Sadducees. The Sadducees, right. And Jesus... They're sad, you see.

Yeah, exactly. And Jesus corrected the Sadducees on that matter. Now, the annihilationists would say, well, he's talking about the saints, that there is life after death for the saints.

So, the point, I think, that needs to be made against the annihilationist position is not that, hey, you bunch of annihilationists, we're against you, we want to annihilate the annihilationists.

No. It's that you need to be biblically consistent. Where in the scriptures do we see that sinners go on existing after death?

After their body is laid in the ground, they turn back to dust, they've experienced death, and death is indeed the wages of sin, but they die.

What passages in the Bible tell us that they keep existing after they die, and they keep existing after they die in a form of punishment by a holy

God awaiting a day for a resurrection in which they will stand before God in resurrected bodies that have been prepared for the lake of fire.

Okay, well, this is the testimony of the scriptures. Now, that last part, of course, of Revelation 20, but we also have it in Matthew 25, we also have it in John 5, that God will raise the wicked and the righteous at the very same time.

They all stand before God. They all stand before God to give an answer. They all have to give an answer. And so, it's very consistent. So, that's

John 5, it's the parables of Jesus in Matthew 13, it's Matthew 25, it's Revelation 20. It's everywhere.

It's everywhere. And so, we have the resurrection of the wicked and the righteous at the same time before God.

So, man is liable for everything done in the body even after death.

And what is the resurrection but the bringing together both of the spirit that had been separated from the body back to the body?

That's the resurrection. So, the body is raised and the spirit is reunited with the body as is intended, the body and soul together.

So, the spirits were there. They didn't go out of existence. So, to the

God who gave it. Yeah. So, to these annihilationists, a sinner dies in their sins.

Their body goes in the ground. Where is their spirit? Well, Luke 16 talks about that.

Yeah. Jesus tells a parable about Lazarus and the rich man in Hades. The rich man in Hades is conscious and he's in torment.

Yeah. I mean, he doesn't want his brothers to come there. That's right. Now, we don't have anything in the text that necessarily says this is going to be for infinity, for eternality.

But he is conscious and he is in torment. So, we have that. Downstrikes. Yeah. There is some out of three, it's not bad.

There's some absolute character to it being that the righteous are not able to go to them.

Yeah. And there is no sense of relief in the parable that Jesus tells that the rich man will, you know...

It uses the word torment. Yeah. And there's nothing in the text that says, okay, this is only for a little while.

There's nothing. Just a little bit of relief is all he's looking for and it's not there. So, both duration claims would be an argument from silence.

So far, we don't have anything in that. If I was an annihilationist, I would not be convinced by it. I would say, yes, of course,

I believe in hell. You're acting like I don't believe in hell by reading me the story. I do believe in hell. Right. As annihilationists, that's how

I would respond. Now, further, of course, this is just to emphasize, this is also

Old Testament doctrine, Isaiah's cartoon in Isaiah 14 of the king of Babylon dying and going down to punishment.

Yeah, going down to punishment, finding all the other world leaders down there also as like, yeah, welcome to the party.

Right. This is where Gary Larson got all his Farsight cartoons. So, we have also...

So, we have that description, but also... And this is the third point, but this is going to be important to come back to their main doctrinal concern.

So, 1 Peter chapter 3. And I read a 26 -page paper on annihilationism and this passage never came up.

It's 1 Peter 3, verse 18, says, "...for Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive by the

Spirit. By whom also he went and preached the spirits in prison, who formerly were disobedient, when once the divine long suffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few of his eight souls were saved through water."

Now, if you're a dispensationalist, if you're a futurist, you usually interpret this as Jesus died on the cross, and before he was raised from the dead, he went and preached to those who were in hell.

So, the Apostles Creed, like the idea descended into hell. This is what he was doing right here. Yeah, exactly.

So, this is where the Apostles Creed gets that line from. And he's... So, if you read it that way, then what is it saying?

It's saying that they are in conscious torment, and even back from the days of Noah. Now, I gotta tell you guys,

I know people live longer during the days of Noah, but a lifetime of sin, even if it was 900 years, that's not 3 ,000 years.

All right. If you want to start into this discussion about duration... Okay. Well, that's the thing. It's like, if you're saying eye for eye, tooth for tooth, lex talionis is the justice that God reveals in the

Scriptures, and you're saying that eternity is unjust because it's too much punishment for too little sin.

Okay. I hear what you're saying. Well, how about 3 ,000 years of punishment for maybe 800, 900 years of sin?

Is that disproportionate? Is that unjust? It's like, no, no, no. Well, he can punish you more. He can punish you more than the years you lived because he's

God. Then why not an eternity? What? Three life sentences for running a crypto exchange?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean... Consecutively. Yeah. Because the point is, there is conscious torment, and if there's conscious torment and these spirits are in prison, okay, then they're being kept there until when?

Until the resurrection, until the last day, until the resurrection. Then they're going to be raised, and then they're going to be judged, and then they're sent to the lake of fire.

Very clear language in Revelation 20 about how this happens. So, the spirits are in prison.

The spirits are in torment. The spirits, like Lazarus and the rich man, the same story.

So, that's what's happening here. Now, somebody's going to read 1 Peter 3 and say, that's not what that means. It means that Christ, through his

Spirit, the Holy Spirit, was in Noah preaching, preaching to those who were living in his day.

Of course, they rebelled, and now they are spirits in prison. Well, it's the same thing. They're spirits in prison. Okay.

So, you still have this issue of people dying in their sins, and conscious torment is being described in the

Bible, and that they're being reserved for the Day of Judgment. We don't know when the Day of Judgment is going to be, but for the vast majority of sinners, the wicked who have died in their sins, they're going to be in conscious torment for far longer than they ever lived.

And if the question is God's justice, because he's punishing you too much for too little life lived in wickedness, then your issue is still there in the text, and you're just saying, okay, fine.

It's okay if you get punished for, let's say, 6 ,000 years for 60 years of sin, but it's not okay to have an eternity of punishment for 60 years of sin.

Eternity less one. Right. They're just saying that that punishment doesn't fit the crime.

They have defined the crime as being so big, when it is

God who defines that crime. It is God who defines the sin.

Well, that's your answer right there. God defines the sinfulness of this sin, and so if they say, well, it's okay for God to judge you tenfold for your lifetime of sin, because he's

God, that's... Isn't his pottery? Isn't it his pottery? That's the whole reason why it's just for him to punish you for eternity.

It's the same God that says that if you have one jot, one tittle, one point in the law, you fail there, you're guilty of the whole law.

How is that fair? I did all of this stuff correct, and you're getting me on one little point?

Yeah. That's not fair. You got a 99 .99 % you fail. Right, you failed.

Yeah, exactly. So, as soon as we recognize that, as soon as we hold to the doctrine of a consciousness after death, and for the wicked, conscious torment after death awaiting the great day of the resurrection, the theological objection about the justice of God is no longer there, because he can punish you for far longer than you ever lived.

So, that's already there, and this is why some annihilationists begin to talk about soul sleep, and they begin to bring this doctrine from...

Like the dead know nothing. Right. So, it's like, as soon as you die, so you don't have...

The wicked die, and they have no conscious understanding of anything that happens until they are raised on the day for judgment, and then they get their 60 years of hell, for the 60 years of sin, or however much it is.

The problem with that, of course, is in the scripture we have conscious torment of the spirits.

Yeah, do they try to like hand wipe away the idea of like the... Let's just say the Luke 16 parable of rich man and Lazarus.

Is this always the idea is that this isn't actually about what happens after death, it's a story about story comeuppance, and what you should be doing, you should be charitable, and those types of things.

It's just a story, right? It's not... You shouldn't be deriving your theology from parable. I think you should be deriving your theology from parables.

I think it'd be a very good idea to do that. So, that would be the theological objection, and I don't think it stands, because if you hold to resurrection from the dead, and a great day of judgment, and you just read the scriptures, and you have eternal conscious...

You have conscious torment, at least, then your whole theological objection goes out the window.

Then the question becomes, is it really eternal? And then when you read the scriptures about the smoke of the torment going up forever and ever, and they have no rest day or night, there's a lot of scriptures that point that direction.

So, if you're going to draw into question eternal punishment, then I would have to draw into question eternal life.

Exactly. Eventually, yeah. Yeah. Eventually, you reach that point. Now, I'm sure they could equivocate and get at this as, well, those who are in eternal life, those are the ones who are connected to God.

But see, these who are not connected to God, that's why they're going to fade out of existence, because they're away from God.

Come on. I mean, in the end, the words mean what they mean, and if you're going to have everlasting punishment or everlasting life,

Matthew 25, one or the other is a binary choice. And so, when we look at the eternal life, eternal punishment in Matthew 25, we, as those who are traditionalist or ECT, we lay those on the side and say, look, if eternal life is eternal, we're going to live with God forever, then that means that the punishment is eternal.

Doesn't that make sense? And they would say, well, that's the wrong correlation. You're looking at the correlation wrong.

The correlation is not one of they're so much the same, it's the fact that they're total opposites.

Doesn't it make sense that those going to heaven are going to the total opposite of what hell is? And they would say that the finality of hell is the eternality of that.

And eternal life is only ever promised to the saved.

And so, they're going to, because they say, because they're going to, again, focus on the language and other passages that say the destruction and death, they're going to emphasize those terms greatly for their literalistic sense.

OK, so I can understand why someone's going to be reading the text and someone's going to say to them, look, this was something that came from Greek philosophy.

This was something that was invented in the church and I got it wrong. And people are making it way worse than it sounds and there's no need to.

Yes, there's hell. Yes, there's punishment. But could God really be just if for a lifetime of sin, he judges you for an eternity?

Now, what's wrong with that perspective? There's something missing, isn't there? What's missing is the fact that after one's death in the spirit, you don't stop sinning.

Right. And after your resurrection from the dead as a wicked person and you're condemned to death, the second death, like a fire, and you go to hell forever and ever and ever, you don't stop sinning there either.

So then the question is not so much is God really just for judging you for an eternity, for 60 years of sin?

The question is, would God be unjust to punish you for only what you lived during your life before your death, and then totally ignore all of the profanities that you commit after you die?

So, yes, he's actually forever just in forever judging the wicked.

Yeah, that was the only part of the video that I watched with Justin Peters that I had an issue with because I brought up the, he made an analogy to like, interest on debt.

And you don't have to, it doesn't have to be interest and you don't have to pay the principal. It's just that you keep racking up debt that you can't pay any form of.

Yeah. Right? Like, it isn't like there's like a compounding interest there. It's just literally, you're just, you just keep racking up debt.

So the last little bit I would say about something that the annihilationists will bring up, and I think it's important to deal with, is they'll talk about the timelessness of God.

Then they'll talk about, you know, when you're trying to talk about eternal life and talking about hell and punishment and so on, you've got to understand that God being timeless, when he punishes the wicked in hell for that limited amount of time, he is able to judge them in a limited amount of time, all the infinity that needs to be expended.

Okay. So what they're saying is that you don't have to have eternity to have eternity because of the nature of God.

We're thinking in terms of time, we're thinking about the moment by moment progression of time, and they'll start bringing it in and everyone kind of walks away like, somehow that probably makes sense.

Well, it, well, as soon as you bring it, that's you, we talked about soul sleep in a different night and that's the question

I had. I said, what do they do that? Are they talking about like God's timelessness? And I guess that makes sense.

If you bring in soul sleep and you have that same concept, it's easy to just bring it over to eternal punishment.

So my response to that, I think, are we not importing assumptions of temporality to God's eternal punishment, eternal reward, right?

So if we're not going to be marking time in heaven, are we going to be marking time in heaven, am I going to be, you know, well, there's the dawn and then there's the dusk and there's the dawn and there's the how that works.

Am I going to be washing my, I'm going to do my watch. My kids are doing countdown to Christmas right now. Right. Going to the advent, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, countdown.

We're not going to be counting down to anything right in heaven, right? So if we're not going to be marking time in heaven, what makes us think that sinners are going to be marking time in hell, right?

Okay. Because here's the thing, the objection is it's unimaginably cruel for God to judge these sinners forever and ever and ever, and they have no relief and you're there for a thousand years and a thousand more years and there's just no, yes, it is a horrible thought, but let's be honest, when speaking of eternality with regards to punishment, isn't it all at once final and forever, both endless and the end,

I mean, there's going to be, oh, the terminal state is eternal punishment.

It's almost, if the danger is doing theology from below and then thus accusing

God of not, of being less just than the American justice system, because we have got it so well done, you know,

God doesn't measure up to the American justice system as we know it today. And so that just doesn't fit, that doesn't compute.

If that's the danger, isn't there a danger in our limitedness of going past those warning signs of where mystery begins and saying,

God, we think this is a rather unjust thing for you to give all the sinners in hell watches to keep time for how long they're being punished.

Don't think that's going to happen, right? That's in what passages do we have that, that tell us that if there's, if there's anything that, if there's anything that I have an issue with regarding eternal conscious torment position is the types of sermons in which infuse a hyper awareness of time into eternity.

Okay. So, so I understand it is, it is forever and ever eternal life.

Okay. And we, when we've been there 10 ,000 years, we've got no less days to sing

God's praise than when we first begun. But are we actually going to be keeping track?

Right? No, we're actually, we're not. So, I mean, to me, it's like, if we're, if we're going to be concerned about not,

I mean, are we in heaven going to be marking days? No. Then are we going to be marking days in hell? Now, a lot of old timey preachers would say yes, because they're really trying to drive home how bad hell is, which

I can appreciate the effort. Oh, you're like a prisoner and you're just making marks. But, but if we're, if we're going to be consistent with eternal conscious torment position and talking about the analogy is eternal life and eternal punishment, and we're on the one hand saying we're going to, we're going to lose all track of time in heaven.

We won't even care about time anymore, but you're going to care about it in hell. Yeah. So it's, to me, that's, it's above to below on the heaven side.

And it's below to above on the hell side. Yeah. I'm like, if we're going to be consistent in how we talk about it, then let's be consistent.

Because to me, that's, that would be something to be aware of. Like, how are we talking about eternity? I mean, granted everybody at the, at this table is on the same age regarding eternal conscious torment.

And we all have read the passages. You know, we had just a smattering of them tonight and we didn't go through all of them.

But for us, they're all very clear. And it seems like every counter argument was a minimization, an equivocation, a, some kind of roundabout way to, to get to the conclusion that they had already decided was true.

And now they just have to figure out how to deal with some of these verses. But I think anyone who reads the scriptures plainly come away with the conclusion that those in Christ live forever with him and those outside of Christ die forever.

Ruination forever. Yeah. I think the, the garden analogy was very, very appropriate to the idea of is the idea that they actually didn't die here, right?

And now you have the separation motif that's continued on into eternity, the separation that if the newness that's brought forth is like the garden of Eden again, then the idea would be the very same things happening with the place that you're separated from.

Well, so isn't, isn't God holy? Isn't the idea that he's, he's apart from something isn't, isn't there an evil that's a part that he's going to be separated from eternally, right?

Like there's, that's what holy means. Yeah. So there's, he has no, so God is too holy to look upon sin, to, to approve of sin, to give his favorable gaze to it.

And, and I think is right. The, the eternal conscious form in side of it, the like, like Justin Peters and others who pointed out, it's like,

Hey, look, the reason, the reason why heaven is heaven is God is there. The reason why hell is hell is because God is there, but we have a mediator in heaven.

Okay. So away from the presence means away from the prosopon, the face of God.

So he, Christ on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? God turned his face away.

Okay. It wasn't that, that there was now a hole in God's omnipresence where he was no longer, that's not what that means.

It means it's away from, so what Jesus was just, was experiencing on the cross was not simply a physical death, but he was experiencing spiritual death in the judgment of God, the separation of God, the wrath of a holy

God upon his son. Truly what being on that tree meant. Yes. And, and this is, this is what remains for those who remain outside of Christ.

Christ is born, is born this, this death for us on the cross. It wasn't only a physical, yes, yes, physical death.

Yes, indeed. But also the wrath of God he bore for us. He drank the cup of God's wrath for us.

And because of that, yes, indeed, we have eternal life in his resurrection and we will not taste the wrath of God nor the second death because we belong to the first resurrection in Christ.

We belong to the first resurrection. Therefore we have no taste of the second death to those who have no taste of the first resurrection for them, the second death remains.

And the second death is this eternal separation from God cast into the lake of fire where there is no, there's no end.

And so the, I would say that there are those who hold put annihilation as position because they've, they've seen some of these scriptures and they think it just makes more sense and perhaps they haven't tested it to its necessary lengths.

This is not a new issue. This is not a new discovery. This has been talked about for centuries and time and again, the church must rise to the occasion and clarify what it means and then be settled in what we believe and disciple the next generation to remember what this means and then move forward.

And I think there's a lot of Christians out there who are going to be annihilationists and still Christians, but there's a lot of people out there that use this particular issue, annihilationism as a means by which to bring all manner of other more pernicious ideas along.

Things that would deny the substitutionary atonement of Christ, things that would even deny the resurrection of the dead, things that would deny all manner of other more critical first order issues.

You just called annihilationism a gateway drug. Yeah. Yeah, it can be. And I, I understand the attractions of it.

I don't think the, and I think anytime an annihilationist tries to make an argument, like ECT makes

God look mean, is the weakest, most detrimental thing you can do in trying to argue for annihilationism, just point to the scriptures that you have, that you're like, this tells me annihilationism and like, all right, but you and I can both agree that the scripture is not going to contradict itself and there's going to be harmony.

There's going to be an agreement in the scriptures, but let's make sure we read all of it and, and figure out what it says together.

All right. Why don't we move on to recommendations? Michael, what do you got for us this week? I'm going to recommend

James P. Boyce's abstract of systematic theology. This is a, a, a brief expression of theology from a

Baptist perspective and one that holds to doctrines of grace.

You know, you're going to find tulip ball through here. No dispensationalism either. Right. Which is not, and it would, it's not natively

Baptist. I know that's kind of shocking, but it's true. Dispensationalism is not native to Baptist. It's native to the

Plymouth Brethren. And what is the best of this is this is very well outlined.

It's, you can, you can follow along the outline. You can recreate the outline. It is very organized in its thinking.

And there are a lot of cross -references and scriptures that you can go look up.

I would recommend getting an, getting access to an online version with a hyper links so that as you read along, you can quickly move your mouse over and see the scriptures to see if these things are so wise

Bereans reading through it. But if you need a, if you need a, a far more robust and helpful theological statement, other than the

Baptist faith and message recommended. Yeah. He's the, uh, one of the founders of Southern Seminary.

Correct. He's a Southern Baptist. That's great. I've, uh, I don't remember who it was.

I don't know if it was ask all or who was handing out copies of voices, abstract to all the new students at Southern, which is, which is, which is really, really neat.

So this is, this is your heritage. This is where you come from. Right. Yeah. And I can, can highly recommend the one with like hyperlinks and stuff that's been helpful.

I recently finished a book by Joe Rigney called The Sin of Empathy. It's, it's a new book written within the last year.

I think published by Canon. I think Canon Press did it. There's a follow on book.

It's not a reprint. It's called The Leadership, Leadership and the Sin of Empathy. This is the first one.

I appreciate the way he writes. He writes as a, he writes as a pastor because that's what he is.

But he, he does make an admission very early that it's not an academic work. So you're not going to find a pinpoint definitions of empathy, sympathy, compassion, you're just not, it's going to be a little bit squishy and you're going to get different definitions for who you talk to, but from his perspective, what he means is that empathy, when someone is hurting, someone is really, really hurting, just taking the flaming arrows of life.

Empathy steps into their life and feels what they feel.

And you lose all objectivity. Having compassion, which is a biblical virtue, which he, he extols.

That is, it can actually help someone. Yes, you can feel some of what they're feeling.

Yes, you can have great sympathy for them, great compassion for that, the death of a child, death of a spouse, you know, they're, they're, they're facing terminal cancer.

This is not someone who just says, you know, God loves you. And then, you know, goes about their day.

You know, that's, that's someone absolutely lacking in compassion, but the person that has compassion has to be anchored, has to be rooted in, in something good so that they can maintain objectivity.

The pastor, the counselor, the Christian friend, your Christian brother does not enter into everything that you're feeling and feels what you're feeling.

Because you lose the ability to actually help. The analogy is, is entering into the quicksand with them.

You've got to keep your hand on the shore. You got to keep your hand on something real so that you can look at this, their situation with a big picture.

And then that doesn't mean that, that you immediately start talking to them and you start sharing scripture and everything and tell them, you know,

God's in control and everything happens, you know, for, you know, for a good reason to, and for those who love

God are called according to his purpose, you know, that can be really harsh when someone has just lost their child, you know, they have, you know, there's, there's, there's some timing involved.

But this, what he calls it, the sin of, of empathy is that you are starting to see that's what everyone does to everyone else outside of the church can see it in, in, in society to have empathy for these, you know, for these criminals, they're stepping into their world and they lose a sense of justice.

You see judges who feel what the criminal is feeling and they have lost their handle on the rule of law.

You see this in leadership when people get so involved in, in their, in their flock that they're unable to continue to lead them, they've become one of them.

And the quintessential example that you have mothers whose child has done something just awful, and all they can do is defend them because that's their child.

It takes someone who's outside that situation to say, actually, this is right and this is wrong.

You lose the ability to define right and wrong. You lose the ability to actually help the person when you trade compassion for empathy, where you're actually stepping into their shoes and feeling what they're feeling.

His, his social commentary was amazing. And it really helps us to understand what's going on around us.

Joe Rigney, The Sin of Empathy, highly recommend. I read it very quickly.

I had to go back and look at some of my highlights because I read that, I read the Kindle version. So it was easy for me to go back and see some of those.

And it was, it was reading it like reading a brush. So I, I will probably do the next one.

Leadership, Incentive, Empathy. Awesome. Andrew. All right. Well, I'm going to recommend a treatise which was written during a time of revolution for a time of revolution.

There are many political changes happening abroad and domestically.

The directionality of a nation. These are things which lead to revolutions generally.

And the resting of a nation away from its rightful authority. We see that happening in history as well as nations who go a different way because of the tyranny of the previous authority.

Kingdoms come and go, but the word of our Lord lasts forever. And he's the one who sets up kingdoms and causes them to pass away, to be replaced.

I'm going to recommend the Vindicator Contra Tyrannos, which is the defense of liberty against tyrants.

And then I love older titles because it continues or the lawful power of the prince over the people and of the people over the prince.

It's short for Puritans. Well, these are the Huguenots, right? Yeah. This is a work, pseudonymous work of the

French attributed to the author, Junius Brutus. Yeah.

It was translated into English in the 1600s, late 1600s. What I'm reading from is a 1920s rewrite or update, if you will, of the language, which was helpful.

But it was very helpful for me to read faithful men from the past and how they viewed what it means to be a good subject.

And I'm talking about the prince being a good subject of their Lord, as well as of the nation being good subjects to their

Lord and to their Lord. And it talks about, you know, there are occasions to rise up, reasons for doing so, the responsibilities of subjects, the responsibilities of princes to their own nations, to other nations, to those who claim the name of Christ to defend them, even if they're in a different nation.

It's, it's a very thorough treatment of this topic and I would highly recommend it.

Amen. Well, we are in Advent season and for, well, since last year, we as a family have used the

Advent devotional, As the Darkness Clears Away by Tom Askell.

I don't remember if that's Dr. Tom Askell or if it's just Pastor Tom Askell, but it is Tom Askell that I'm sure many in the audience know.

And it, it's a short little small page, 1 .5

space text, two pages per night read. I don't usually use his questions that he has at the end of it because they're a little, they're a little beyond what

I want my kids to get out of the chapter. So I'll give them something maybe a little more similar to the catechism questions that we're going through with them at this time, or maybe like a neck down main point to the two pages we just read or the text that, that he was focusing on.

But it's been a nice, as someone who didn't celebrate Advent as a child, or even up until I started implementing it with my children, it has been a very nice entry into that celebration of a, of a season or, you know, liturgical holiday mapped out.

So, and we're going to, we plan to continue to add things that we view as God honoring and traditionally

Christian as celebrating holy days. But I recommend As the

Darkness Clears Away by Tom Askell. What are we thankful for, Michael? I am thankful for just,

I guess this is Lord's providence in general, but thankful for the continued help of the

Lord in watching my family get older. I've got four teenagers in my house now.

So that's not like it used to be. So, and thankful for what the

Lord's doing in the life of my children. It is, it's a whole different thing. So trying to see how

I can do that and still be a good father and be good husband, and how do

I, how do I engage with my teenagers and still have fun with my three -year -old?

So, and my 10, he's almost, he's nine, you know, I've got to be 10. So anyway, just thankful, thankful for that.

My life is full and it's good. Amen. Dave? I'm thankful for really good friends.

As Elizabeth has been gone, I have had a number of her friends come up to me and just ask how she's doing, your daughter, your daughter, and it just,

I saw it again, Wednesday night as I had announced that they're going to be coming back, back into town for Christmas break.

And I saw her friends here get excited. And it was just, it just kind of warmed my heart.

I'm, I have an opportunity to have dinner with some friends of mine from high school, some, some

I have known since sixth grade and they're all in Dallas.

So I'll be able to reconnect with those guys, really great

Christian guys. I mean, they really are. They were Christian when I was not. They befriended me in high school and it took me a while to, to catch up.

I'm thankful for you guys. I have been away from podcasts for a bit, been out of the studio and it's always a really refreshing and warming time to be here.

So I'm, I'm, I'm thankful for good friends. Amen. Andrew? Well, I'm thankful to the

Lord for the work of the Holy Spirit here at Sunnyside. All the different ways in which the saints serve one another, the one anothering that's happening here.

I think, I thank the Lord for it. Amen. I'm thankful for the seasons that he takes us through in this life.

We talked about earlier that we're not going to be worried about timing and the eternal state. We're probably not going to be worried about years, days, seasons.

But while we're here, I do enjoy the seasons that he brings us through and into, and now that we're moving into a season that is full of holidays, feasting, and celebration for the birth of our

Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. This is my family's, one of my family's favorite seasons, but all of them that we get to enjoy are from his hand and for our good, we just need to figure out why and how, how we love it.

Just like any, any type of weather. If you gripe about any type of weather, you're doing it wrong.

It's all good. And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read.