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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Restoration 2026: If God is Love...

Aron Crews

01 If God is Love... Why Suffering?

02 If God is Love... Why Satan?

03 If God is Love... Why the Bible?

04 If God is Love... Why the Sabbath?

05 If God is Love... Why the Rules

06 If God is Love... Why the Church?

07 If God is Love... Why Death?

08 If God is Love... Why Hell?

We are going to continue our series, If God is Love, and tonight we're covering, ironically enough, 1 of my favorite topics.

And you're like, why would that be your favorite topic?

But before we find out, we're going to have a little bit of a review from this afternoon's presentation, Why Death?

The biblical view of death is that death is the enemy.

In fact, it's going to be the last enemy that is destroyed.

And Jesus really preemptively, in a legitimate way yet to fully be realized, defeated death through the resurrection.

He experienced death and came out of death and out of there, he has the key, Revelation 1 tells us, the keys of death and of the grave.

So for the believer that gets trapped in death, he can unlock the door and get us out too.

There are 2 different kinds of death recorded in the Bible.

There's a second death, which implies a first death that Jesus comments on, the death of the body, which is the first death, what we talked about.

Then there's the death of the soul, which is gonna be, as we're gonna go over tonight, the experience of hell.

But focusing on the first death, in order to understand it, we had to understand the ingredients of life.

And we find these ingredients in Genesis chapter 2, where man is formed of the dust of the ground and God then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and then man became a living soul.

It's important to note that you don't have a soul, but you are a soul.

So the biblical ingredients of life, a living soul, would be the body plus the breath equals a soul.

So therefore, death would simply be the reversal of life.

Removing the breath of life from the body results in death.

Well, God says to Adam, in the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken for dust you are and to dust you shall return." So where does someone go when they die?

But then we ask, well, what is the experience that 1 has immediately after death?

Is there life, immediate life after death?

Well, the Bible is also very clear on that.

It says, the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.

It likens the Bible, likens death, the first death, to a sleep, describing it as such over 50 times.

And the thing about sleep is is that every single time that you've gone to sleep so far in your life, you have woken back up from it.

It's a very hope-filled description of what death is.

Jesus' friend Lazarus died, Martha was like, Jesus, if you were here, you would not have died.

And then Jesus reminded her that, He said, I am the resurrection and the life.

He who believes in me, though he may die, that is the first death, which is asleep, he shall live, that is be resurrected.

And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die, the experience of the second death, aka hell.

He said, Lazarus come out, not Lazarus come down, because where was Lazarus?

Jesus wept at his friend's death and the Jews noted how much he loved him.

You see, if God whisks away those who die to himself in heaven, could he actually feel loss and be able to empathize with us, the ones who have lost our loved ones?

No, because if people immediately go to heaven, then God's like, yay, about time, right?

Took you long enough to die, now we can hang out together in person.

That is not a sympathizing, empathizing God.

No, the truth about death is, is that when someone dies, they're really dead, and yes, we can miss them, but God misses them too.

And he doesn't get to see them or experience them until the resurrection at the end.

So the first death we concluded is a separation of body and breath, a dreamless, sleep-like state, of which 1 is totally unconscious of reality, simply waiting for the resurrection.

Jesus did not say, I go to prepare a place for you so that when you die, I will receive you to myself.

No, he said, I go to prepare a place for you.

And when I come again, I will come again.

And at that point, I will receive you to myself.

God's plan, the biblical plan of life after death in the resurrection is a much better plan when all of us are reunited together as a big family reunion of the saved to meet the Lord in the air, where we will find that there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.

So that's the review about death, but what about hell?

Hell is 1 of those teachings in Christianity that is, I believe, very, very, very, very misunderstood.

And it's 1 of those doctrines, to reference our presentation last night, where the church became hijacked by Satan for over 1000 years, that it was during this period that this particular teaching about the final fate of the lost became grossly perverted.

The popular mainstream so-called traditional view of hell, that is the final place of punishment for the lost, the wicked, is called eternal conscious torment or eternal torment for short.

And this popularly held Christian belief is that those who reject God are going to be kept alive by God forever, eternally, and they will suffer endless torment, not for a day, a year, 10 years, 20 years, 1000 years, 1000000 years, 1000000000 years, for an infinite amount of time.

Many people look at this doctrine, this doctrine of an eternal conscious torment view of hell, and then they look at the declaration that God is love and they see a fundamental incompatibility.

So we want to ask the question as we continue on, what has been the fruit of teaching eternal torment?

So I'm going to go through a number of different quotes that highlight for us what effect that this has had on both Christians and people considering Christianity or theism.

Lauren Anderson, a former president of Pacific Lutheran University, once said, so revolting to my moral nature is the creed of eternal punishment that it, more than any other cause, produces the most widespread unbelief.

Compared with this, all objections to Christianity fade to insignificance.

Nikolai Alexandrov, a Russian politician and Christian religious philosopher, once wrote, I can conceive of no more powerful and irrefutable arguments in favor of atheism than the eternal torments of hell.

If hell is eternal, then I am an atheist.

Randall Rauser, a Christian apologist, says, when I talk to atheists and people who have left the church, eternal torment is probably the number 1 theological issue that gets raised in terms of an objection to Christianity.

Robert Ingerstol, a 19th century agnostic, once said, nothing could add to the horror of hell except the presence of its creator, God.

While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my strength and hate with every drop of my blood this infinite lie." I mean, people have quite the strong opinion about this view of hell.

In fact, the famous Charles Darwin, did you know that he grew up as a Christian, a Orthodox, you know, traditional Christian?

However, he writes in his autobiography that during 2 years of his life, I was led to think much about religion.

Whilst on board the Beagle, I was quite orthodox, you know, solid Christian.

And I remember being heartily laughed at by several of my officers for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.

I was very unwilling to give up my belief.

Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.

The rate was so slow that I felt no distress and have never since doubted, even for a single second, that my conclusion was correct.

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true, for if so, what he views as a plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my friends, will be everlastingly punished.

You could say that the final nail in Darwin's coffin of Christianity was the so-called Christian belief that God would endlessly torture those who reject him.

But not only for the skeptic, the unbeliever, is the doctrine of eternal torment something that disgusts them, limiting them, barring them from joining Christianity, but for many people who are Christian who believe in this, this belief, this doctrine of eternal torment has been like a ball in chain that they have to drag around.

In my estimation, and there are thousands, millions, billions of Christians that believe that God is love, yet they also believe that God has locked up in his basement, if you will, his children who reject him endlessly to torture them.

To me, this is radically incompatible and I believe that people who hold to these 2 beliefs probably compartmentalize the 2 and don't spend too much time dwelling upon the eternal torment belief that they hold.

Randy Alcorn in a well-received, over 1 million copies in print, book on heaven wrote, it will be a place of conscious punishment for sins with no hope of relief.

If I had a choice, he says, that is if scripture were not so clear and conclusive, I would certainly not believe in hell.

Trust me when I say, I do not want to believe in hell, meaning hell as eternal torment.

Even people who believe in it don't wanna believe in it.

Lewis wrestled with this and actually concluded, but I noticed that our Lord, while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity, usually emphasizes the idea, not of duration, but of finality.

Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story, not as the beginning.

And praise God that many people have come to a place that they, these are a list of a number of Christian pastors, theologians, and professors outside of my faith tradition have come to a conclusion that as a matter of fact, the Bible does not teach eternal torment, but rather something else.

Terence Tisian, a systematic theologian says, It is now my firm conviction that if people were not previously taught, as many of us were, from childhood that hell is being consciously tormented forever by God, no 1 would reach that conclusion from their own careful reading of Scripture itself.

Now, let's now, that's sort of the introduction to put this belief into perspective of different people, how they view it, and what the impact it has on apologetics and other things.

But let's now begin to look back at the biblical text.

There are 2, the popular view of course of hell is eternal torment.

And the foundation for this belief of eternal torment is in natural immortality.

Basically, if you believe in the immortality of the soul, that humans are innately, naturally immortal, this is a foundational belief of, that fuels the fire, pun intended, of eternal torment.

Because if you as a human cannot, can never die, and then you're thrown into a fire, is that fire ever gonna fully, completely consume you?

No, you're gonna be kept alive eternally and thus eternally suffer torment.

However, The other view of hell, which I'm gonna argue for this evening, is often called annihilation, meaning that hell is a place, yes, of final punishment for the lost, but the ultimate punishment for sin is death or annihilation.

And this view is based upon the presupposition of conditional immortality, meaning immortality is not inherent to our natures, but it is given to us as a gift from God.

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Series

Restoration 2026: If God is Love...

08 If God is Love... Why Hell?

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Gospel of Ashley Madison

30m

The Ultimate Vaccine

56m

Handling Hell Well

What Jesus Said

58m

The Book of Romans

Bad News, Good News

42m

Cory Reeves Weekend

The Gift

39m

ASI 2014 Plenary Sessions

End Time Hope

1h 54m

The God Who Stepped Down

28m

Flip the Script

02 How Bible “Buts” Change Trials Into Triumph

53m

The Darkest Hour

50m

Star Wars

5. The Battle for You

29m

Sabbath School 3rd Quarter: The Book of Mark

12 Taken and Tried

23m

Sound Doctrine