Chapter 24 — The Lake of Fire and the Second Death

“The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”¹ If any verse in the Bible closes the door on the hope of final restoration, this is the one. The language is extreme. The imagery is overwhelming. And for many readers, the lake of fire in Revelation is the final word. If you are going to defend the hope of universal reconciliation, you must stand in front of these verses and give a straight answer.

James De Young treats the Revelation texts as precisely that: the strongest case against universalism. His argument is clear and forceful.

McClymond presses a similar point. He notes that the most ambitious recent attempt at a universalist reading of Revelation is Robin Parry’s work in The Evangelical Universalist. McClymond credits Parry as perhaps the most dogged universalist exegete in history. But he finds the results unconvincing. In McClymond’s view, preserving universalism in the face of Revelation requires adding one hypothesis after another, until the reading becomes strained.³

These are serious charges, and I want to grant both critics something at the outset: the language of Revelation is severe. No honest universalist can soften it into a warm bath. The fire is real. The judgment is real. The torment described is real. If you have spent years believing that hell is eternal conscious torment, and you encounter these verses, they seem to settle the question. I respect that response.

But severity is one thing. Duration is another. And the question this chapter asks is whether Revelation’s fire-and-sulfur language teaches endless conscious torment, or whether it describes something equally severe but different in purpose: a purifying fire whose goal is the death of death itself. I believe the text, read in its own genre and within its own narrative arc, points to the second reading. And the most overlooked evidence is what happens after the lake of fire. Two chapters later, the city’s gates stand open, and the kings of the earth walk in.⁴

B. The Full Text in Context

Before we answer anything, we need the texts in front of us. Three passages in Revelation carry the weight of the lake-of-fire argument.

The first is Revelation 14:9–11, the warning about those who worship the beast:

The second is Revelation 20:10, 14–15, the fate of the devil and those not found in the Book of Life:

Read in isolation, these texts seem airtight. Fire. Sulfur. Day and night. Forever and ever. No rest.

But isolation is exactly the problem. These verses sit inside the most symbol-heavy genre in the entire Bible: apocalyptic literature. Its pages are filled with a seven-headed beast, a woman clothed with the sun, and a lamb with seven eyes. No one reads those images as literal zoology. The question is whether the lake of fire should be pressed for literal geography and literal duration when every other image in the same book is read as symbolic.⁸

There is something else most readings miss. The story does not end with the lake of fire. It ends with an open city. Revelation 21:25 says the gates of the New Jerusalem “will never be shut.” The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it (21:24–26). And in 22:17, after the lake of fire, the Spirit and the Bride still say, “Come.”⁹ That invitation changes the reading. The door is not shut.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. Apocalyptic Symbol, Read as Symbol

The first and most basic move is genre. Revelation is not a newspaper report from the future. It is an apocalypse, a visionary text, steeped in symbolic imagery from start to finish. The beast with seven heads and ten horns (13:1) is not a literal animal. The woman clothed with the sun (12:1) is not a literal person. The golden streets and jeweled walls of the New Jerusalem (21:18–21) are not a literal city plan. Everyone agrees on this.

Notice what goes into the lake. Revelation 20:14 says “Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.” Death and Hades are not persons. They do not have bodies. They cannot feel torment. The fact that abstractions are thrown into the fire tells us that this image is doing symbolic work. It is a picture of defeat and destruction, not a description of a physical location where conscious beings suffer without end.¹⁰

De Young objects that the beast and false prophet are cast alive into this fire (Revelation 19:20), and that a thousand years later they are still there (20:10). He takes this as evidence that the occupants are individuals who experience everlasting separation from God.¹¹ That is a fair observation. But it depends on reading the beast and the false prophet as only individuals, when the whole of Revelation presents them as both individual figures and symbolic systems of power. The beast is Rome. The beast is empire. It is both at once. Pressing the “thousand years later” detail as a clock on conscious experience treats apocalyptic numbers as chronology, which the genre does not support.¹²

I am not saying the fire is “just a symbol” in the sense that it means nothing. Symbols in Scripture point to something true and powerful. The lake of fire points to a real and severe judgment. But you cannot extract a precise duration from an apocalyptic image. The genre refuses that kind of reading. The judgment is real. The image is symbolic. And the duration claim requires reading the symbol as if it were a news report.¹³

2. The Fire That Is God’s Presence

Look again at Revelation 14:10. The torment takes place “in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.” That detail is easy to miss, but it changes everything.

The traditional picture of hell places the damned far from God. But this text places them in front of the Lamb. The fire and sulfur are not in some distant corner of the universe. They are in the presence of Jesus Christ himself.

R. Zachary Manis has developed what he calls the divine-presence model of hell, drawing on the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The idea is elegant and scriptural: God’s presence is experienced differently depending on the state of the soul. For the redeemed, God’s unveiled love is heaven. For those still in rebellion, the same holy love is experienced as torment, because they are resisting the very thing that could heal them. The fire is not something other than God. The fire is the holy love of God, and it burns away what refuses to yield.¹⁴ A point worth noting: Manis himself defends a form of eternal conscious torment. He is no universalist. That is precisely what gives his concessions such weight. When a scholar who reaches the traditionalist conclusion still reads the fire as God’s holy presence rather than God’s absence, the exegetical ground has shifted under the standard picture.

This fits Revelation’s own picture. The Lamb is present at the torment. And throughout the rest of Scripture, fire is the way God’s presence appears when it encounters what is unholy. Moses met fire at the bush (Exodus 3:2). Israel met fire at Sinai (Exodus 19:18). Hebrews says, “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). Paul says each person’s work will be tested by fire, and “if anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15).¹⁵

Sharon Baker has argued along similar lines. In her reading, the biblical fire is not fuel for endless torture. It is the purifying holiness of God. The fire does real damage to what is evil in a person. It is severe. It is agonizing. But its purpose is to purify, not to preserve suffering forever. Baker notes that the Greek word for “brimstone” (theion) is spelled the same as the Greek adjective for “divine,” and that the ancient Greeks used sulfur for temple purification. To a first-century reader, she argues, a “lake of fire and brimstone” would conjure a lake of divine purification, not an eternal torture chamber.¹⁶

Thomas Talbott presses the divine-presence reading further in The Inescapable Love of God. He observes that because the lake of fire and the outer darkness are such radically different images, they plausibly signify two very different realities. The lake of fire represents how the rebellious experience the consuming fire of God’s perfecting love. “The misery associated with the lake of fire,” Talbott writes, “is simply the way in which the rebellious and the unrepentant experience God’s holy presence.” He adds that the sufferers “no more choose or even anticipate their purgatorial suffering than a heroin addict typically chooses or even anticipates the suffering associated with his or her addiction.” It is simply not possible for those clinging to selfish delusion to experience God’s unveiled love as anything other than unbearable torment.⁴⁸

Robin Parry, in the third edition of The Evangelical Universalist, traces the threefold biblical pattern: fire as divine presence (the burning bush, the pillar of fire, the flame at Pentecost), fire as divine punishment (Sodom, Nadab and Abihu, the “raging fire” of Hebrews 10:27), and fire as divine purification (1 Peter 4:12; Gregory of Nyssa). Parry argues that these are not three different fires but three aspects of a single reality: the human encounter with God’s holiness. He notes that Hebrews 12:29 identifies God Himself as a consuming fire, and that Revelation 14:10 locates the torment “in the presence of the Lamb.” If God is the fire, and the torment takes place in God’s presence, then what we call “hell” is not where God is absent but where God is overwhelmingly present. Parry quotes Gregory of Nyssa: “Just as those who refine gold from the dross which it contains not only get this base alloy to melt in the fire, but are obliged to melt the pure gold along with the alloy, and then while this last is being consumed the gold remains, so, while evil is being consumed in the purgatorial fire, the soul that is welded to this evil must inevitably be in the fire too, until the spurious material alloy is consumed and annihilated by this fire.”⁴⁹

The Greek words themselves press in the same direction. The word translated “torment” in Revelation 14:10 is basanizō, which did not start as a word for torture. It started as a word for testing: the rubbing of metal against a touchstone to determine whether it was genuine gold. Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament traces the history from “the testing of gold and silver as media of exchange by the proving stone” to its later shift toward pain and suffering. In a passage soaked in refining imagery, the original sense is not accidental.⁴¹ And the word for “brimstone” (theion), as Baker notes, shares its root with theios (“divine”). Homer describes purifying a goblet with fire and brimstone (Iliad 16:228). Hurd argues that when we put these pieces together, the image is not an eternal torture chamber. It is the Refiner’s crucible.⁴²

The difference between the two readings is the difference between a fire that destroys the person and a fire that destroys the sin. The traditional reading says the fire preserves the sinner in conscious agony for eternity. The restorative reading says the fire burns away what is unholy and leaves the person standing, like gold tested in the furnace (1 Peter 1:7). I believe that reading fits the Revelation texts better than the alternative, because it explains why the torment occurs “in the presence of the Lamb” rather than in His absence.¹⁷

3. The Open Gates Change Everything

This is the move that most traditional readings miss. The lake-of-fire passages in Revelation 14 and 20 are usually quoted by themselves. But the story does not end there. Two chapters later, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven. And its gates are never shut.

Parry makes a structural observation that reframes the entire debate. In Revelation, every cycle of judgment is followed by a vision of salvation: the seven seals (6:12–17) are followed by the salvation of the saints (7:9–17); the seven trumpets (11:18a) are followed by the promise of God’s reign (11:18b); the seven visions of judgment (14:6–20) are followed by the victory song of the saints standing beside a “sea of glass mixed with fire” (15:2–4); and the lake-of-fire judgment (20:7–15) is followed by the vision of the New Jerusalem (21:1–22:5). The pattern is consistent: judgment, then salvation. If we isolate the lake of fire from the vision that follows it, we break the very structure John built.⁵⁰

Think about what John’s readers have just seen. The nations were deceived by the beast. The kings of the earth went to war against the Lamb. They were defeated. Now, a few verses later, the nations walk by the city’s light, and the kings bring their glory into it. Are these different kings and different nations? Or is the same group now restored?¹⁹

Robin Parry has argued that the narrative flow of Revelation makes the restorative reading more natural. The same kings who were destroyed in chapter 19 reappear in chapter 21, now bringing their glory into the city. The gates that are never shut are not a decorative detail. They are open for a reason. And the Spirit and the Bride’s invitation in 22:17 still stands, still calling, still offering the water of life “without price.”²⁰

In the ancient world, city gates were shut for one reason: to keep enemies out. A gate that is never shut means there is no remaining threat and no barrier to entry. John is making a statement about the city’s posture toward the world outside it. The posture is welcome, not exclusion. And the invitation in 22:17 comes at the very end of the canon, after the lake of fire. If the door were shut and the verdict final, this invitation would be addressed to no one.

De Young pushes back on this directly. He argues that the open gates admit the nations and kings of the earth (21:24–26), but that the very next verse says, “Nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (21:27). He takes this as final: the wicked are permanently excluded.²¹

That is a fair reading of 21:27 in isolation. But notice what the verse actually says. It says nothing unclean will enter. It does not say nothing formerly unclean. The whole point of the purifying fire is to make clean what was unclean. If the fire does its work, then the formerly rebellious person is no longer unclean, and the gate stands open. The verse bars the unclean; it does not bar the purified.²²

Parry develops this argument in detail in Appendix 3 of The Evangelical Universalist, where he takes up the Lamb’s Book of Life. The traditional reading assumes its contents are fixed before creation: names are either in the book or not, and nothing changes. But Parry observes that Revelation 3:5 warns that names can be blotted out of the book, which implies a list that can change. If names can be removed, they can also be added. The universalist reading does not require rewriting the book; it requires that someone cleansed in the lake of fire, who has now washed their robes “in the blood of the Lamb” (22:14), receives a new name that is written in the book. Talbott makes the same point: in the biblical pattern, a name change signals a new identity. Abram becomes Abraham. Saul becomes Paul. Those purified by the fire receive a new name (Revelation 2:17; 3:12), and that name is their entry into the city.⁵¹

Hurd presses a further point. The word translated “portion” in Revelation 21:8 is the Greek meros, which means a measured part or share. The wicked receive “their part” in the lake of fire, not an infinite sentence but a measured one. Jesus uses similar language elsewhere: the servant who knew his master’s will receives “many stripes,” while the one who did not know receives “few stripes” (Luke 12:47–48). “Many” is not “infinite.” “Few” is not “eternal.” The language of measured correction runs through the judgment texts. And a measured sentence, by definition, has an end.⁴³

De Young also points to Revelation 22:11 and 22:15 as evidence that the wicked remain outside the city, still pursuing evil. He argues that the present tenses in 22:15 describe people who continue to sin even in the lake of fire, and that 22:11 teaches unchanging destinies from that point forward.²³ I take the concern seriously. But 22:11 can also be read as a description of the present moment of decision, not as a metaphysical guarantee about eternity. The verse is a call to urgency, not a prediction that no one will ever change. And the invitation that follows in 22:17 would be strange if the door were already permanently shut.²⁴

4. “Second Death” as the Death of Death

Revelation calls the lake of fire “the second death” (20:14; 21:8). De Young treats this as a final destiny beyond physical death. He writes that on no basis can a universalist say this second death can be reversed, and that the words suggest a final, irrevocable state.²⁵

But look at what else goes into the lake. Revelation 20:14 says “Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.” Death itself is destroyed. The last enemy, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:26, is death, and death is “swallowed up in victory” (15:54).²⁶

If the lake of fire is where Death itself is destroyed, then the second death is not an eternal state of dying. It is the end of death. The old order, the reign of sin and rebellion, is consumed. What dies in the second death is the death that held humanity captive.

The name itself points in this direction. The first death is physical death, the common end of mortal life. It is temporary. Every person who dies in the first death will be raised (John 5:28–29; Revelation 20:12–13). If the first death is temporary and reversible, what makes the second death permanent? The text does not say “this is the death that never ends.” It says “this is the second death, the lake of fire.” And what the fire destroys, most clearly and most visibly, is Death and Hades themselves.

George Sidney Hurd has argued that the destruction language in Revelation points toward restoration, not annihilation. If death is the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26), and the lake of fire is where death is destroyed, then the lake of fire is on the side of life, not against it. The fire is God’s final weapon against death itself. To read it as a place where death reigns forever is to read it backward.⁴⁵

De Young suggests that 1 Corinthians 15:26 refers only to physical death being conquered for believers, not to the second death of Revelation. He argues that the wicked are raised not to life but to another kind of death after judgment.²⁷ But Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 is much larger than that. He is describing a sequence that ends with “God being all in all” (15:28). If God is truly “all in all” at the end, then death’s reign is over for everyone, not just for believers. The second death is the death of death, read across the whole canon.²⁸

Even the word for “lake” carries a clue. The Greek word John uses is limnē, which refers to a pool or pond, not a vast body of water. The Wycliffe Bible of 1382, the first English translation, rendered it as “pool of fire,” not “lake.” In the world of ancient metalworking, sulfur was added to molten gold to draw impurities to the surface as dross. The “pool of fire and sulfur” reads, against that background, like a description of the Refiner’s crucible. Hurd makes this connection in Extermination or Restoration?, and the detail is worth sitting with: the image John chooses is not an ocean of torment. It is a vessel of purification.⁴⁴

5. “Ages of Ages,” Not Philosophical Eternity

The phrase “forever and ever” in Revelation 14:11 and 20:10 translates the Greek phrase eis aiōnas aiōnōn (“unto ages of ages”). In English, “forever and ever” sounds like a settled matter. It sounds like literal, philosophical, never-ending time.

But it is age-language, not clock-language. Chapter 22 of this book lays out the full case that the Greek word aiōn and its adjective aiōnios refer to an age or period whose length is set by its subject, not to a philosophical concept of unending time. I will not repeat that case here. But the takeaway matters: eis aiōnas aiōnōn is an intensive form. It means something like “for age upon age” or “for the ages of the ages.” It is emphatic. It signals intensity and great duration. But it is not a technical claim about literal endlessness.²⁹

De Young treats the phrase as a clear marker of everlasting punishment. He notes that the context of Revelation 14 describes a time of “unprecedented and final judgment” and argues that the smoke rising “forever and ever” can only mean unending torment.³⁰ The judgment is indeed unprecedented and severe. But “severe” and “final” do not require “literally unending.” The Old Testament uses similar language. Isaiah 34:10 says the smoke of Edom “shall go up forever.” Edom is not still burning. The language is prophetic hyperbole. It signals total and devastating judgment, not a fire that literally never goes out.³¹

This does not make the fire trivial. It makes the fire purposeful. The ages-of-ages language tells us the judgment is long and terrible. It does not tell us it is literally infinite. And the open gates, just two chapters later, tell us it is not the last word.

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

De Young’s treatment of the Revelation texts in chapter 11 of Exposing Universalism is thorough and forceful.³² Where he is strongest is in pressing the severity of the language. Any universalist reading that softens the fire into something easy has betrayed the text, and I agree with him there. Where he overreads is in pressing apocalyptic images for literal durations and in treating 22:15 as a description of the eternal state rather than a warning addressed to the present moment.

McClymond engages Parry’s universalist reading of Revelation in detail at volume 2 of The Devil’s Redemption. He credits Parry as “undaunted in reinterpreting the final book of the Christian Bible” but finds the results strained, comparing the process to Ptolemaic astronomy, adding one epicycle after another.³³³⁴ That is a memorable image, and it is partly fair. But the analogy cuts both ways. The traditional reading has its own epicycles: explaining away the open gates, limiting the “nations” of 21:24 to a special group, and treating 22:17 as addressed to no one still outside the city. The question is which reading handles the full narrative better.³⁵

Manis’s divine-presence model provides a theological framework that grounds the purifying reading in the character of God himself. It bears repeating that Manis is no universalist; he reaches an eternal-conscious-torment conclusion. What gives his work such importance for this chapter is that a scholar defending the traditional outcome still reads the fire as God’s holy presence, not as something separate from God. Jerry Walls, another defender of the traditional framework, endorses the same insight. In Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory he writes that “fire in the Bible is a common image for the presence of God, not his absence,” and tentatively connects the lake of fire and the river of the water of life as two experiences of the same divine reality, following Orthodox iconographic tradition. When defenders of ECT read the fire this way, the universalist is not importing a foreign theology. He is drawing a different conclusion from evidence that traditionalists themselves acknowledge.⁵²

Talbott’s contribution is both exegetical and narrative. In The Inescapable Love of God he traces the movement of the “kings of the earth” across Revelation: entangled with Babylon (17:2, 18; 18:3, 9), standing with the beast against the Lamb (19:19), destroyed in judgment (19:21), and then, in 21:24, bringing their glory into the New Jerusalem. Talbott argues that the narrative arc is one of judgment followed by restoration, and that the name-change pattern in Scripture (Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel) explains how someone whose name was not in the Book of Life can later enter the city: they receive a new name through the purifying fire, and that name is written in the book. On his reading, the “second death” is the death of death itself, and it opens the door to a new identity.⁵³

Baker’s work on the biblical fire as God’s holiness rather than punitive torture complements both Manis and Talbott. David Bentley Hart argues that no New Testament term maps neatly onto the word “hell” as traditionally understood, and that the fire language throughout the New Testament is more varied and more purposeful than the tradition admits.³⁶

Among Revelation scholars more broadly, many major commentators note the symbolic character of the lake of fire. G. K. Beale and Grant Osborne both treat the imagery as rooted in Old Testament prophetic judgment language while acknowledging the open-gate tension within the text. Craig Koester notes the contrast between the finality of the judgment scene and the ongoing openness of the city that follows it. None of these commentators is a universalist. But each recognizes that the text is more complex than a simple proof for eternal conscious torment.³⁷

Hurd, in The Triumph of Mercy and Extermination or Restoration?, develops the metallurgical reading at length, arguing that the basanizō, theion, and limnē terminology all point toward purification. Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, draws on Charles Pridgeon to press the same conclusion and highlights the death-of-death theme: if Death itself is destroyed in the fire (Revelation 20:14), then the fire belongs to the story of life, not the story of death.⁴⁶

Coates, in Grace Abounds, notes that the Greek in Revelation 21:25 is emphatic — the gates will never be shut. He connects this to the parallel in Isaiah 60, where the gates of Zion are kept open to allow the nations to enter. The thematic and verbal links suggest that John is drawing on Isaiah’s vision of the nations streaming into God’s city, a vision that is restorative at its core. Burnfield, in Patristic Universalism, pushes the same logic from the other end: if the fire destroys Death and Hades but purifies persons, the difference lies in the nature of what enters the fire. Death is an abstraction that can only be destroyed. A person, made in the image of God, can be refined and restored.⁴⁷

E. Counter-Objections

“The nations entering the city are the saved nations, not the damned.” This is De Young’s move, and it deserves a fair hearing. He argues that 21:24–26 refers to nations that were already saved, not to any movement from the lake of fire to the city.³⁸ James Beilby presses a similar point in Postmortem Opportunity. He argues that the open gates depict safety, not a continuous flow of people passing through. A city whose gates are never shut, Beilby suggests, is a city where the inhabitants have nothing to fear, because all enemies have been defeated. He adds that “the nations” in 21:24 may mean “representatives from the nations,” echoing Revelation 5:9 and 7:9, where the saints are drawn “from every nation, tribe, people and language” but are not identical to the nations as a whole.⁵⁴ These are thoughtful readings. But the difficulty remains: throughout Revelation, “the nations” and “the kings of the earth” are the ones who were deceived by the beast and destroyed in battle (19:19–21). If 21:24 describes a different group entirely, the text gives no signal of the switch. Parry is right that John actually changed “kings” in his Isaiah 60 source text to “kings of the earth” to ensure his readers know exactly whom he means. And the never-shut gates, combined with the standing invitation of 22:17, point in the same direction.⁵⁵

“You are reading a happy ending into a judgment scene.” No. I am reading the whole of Revelation 20–22, not stopping at 20:15. The judgment scene is real. The fire is real. The severity is real. What I am saying is that the story continues past the judgment and into the city, and the story’s own ending includes open gates, entering nations, and a final invitation. I did not write the ending. John did. Revelation 21:5 says, “Behold, I am making all things new.” The question is whether “all things” means all things.

F. Conclusion and Pastoral Application

I am saying that the lake of fire is real. The judgment is real. The suffering is severe. No honest reading of Revelation can soften this into a warm reassurance that everything works out painlessly. The fire burns. It is meant to burn.

But I am also saying that the fire burns for a reason. And the reason is not the eternal preservation of suffering. The reason is the death of death, the purifying of what is unholy, and the making of all things new. The same book that describes the lake of fire also describes a city whose gates are never shut, nations walking into its light, and a final invitation that still says, “Come.”

If you read Revelation 20 by itself, the door looks shut. If you read Revelation 20–22 as a single story, the door stands open. I believe we owe the text the courtesy of reading the whole story.

The link to Chapter 12 matters here. If the fire is purifying, it does not trivialize evil. It takes evil with more seriousness than the traditional reading, because it says evil must be burned out of every soul, no matter how long the fire takes or how severe the process. The link to Chapter 22 matters too. The age-language does not require literal endlessness. It signals severity and great duration, and it leaves room for the open gates to mean what they say.

For the pastor, this is not an invitation to preach easy comfort. It is an invitation to preach fierce hope. The God who makes all things new has lit a fire that no evil can survive. That fire is terrible. But it is the fire of love, and love does not quit.⁴⁰ When the fire has done its work, the gates stand open. The nations walk in. And the Lamb who was slain receives the reward for which He died.

I think of the parent whose child walked away from faith and never came back. The traditional reading tells that parent: your child is in a fire that will never go out, and there is nothing anyone can do. The reading I have offered tells a different story. The fire is real. The suffering may be long. But the fire has a purpose, and the gates stand open, and the Lamb is present even in the fire, and love does not quit. That is not wishful thinking. It is reading the whole of Revelation, not just the judgment scene, and trusting that the God who lit the fire knows what He is doing with it.

The open gates of the New Jerusalem are the most overlooked hope in the whole canon. This chapter, and the book it serves, asks you to look at them again.

Notes

↑ 1. Revelation 14:11 (ESV). All Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

↑ 2. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Lake of Fire.”

↑ 3. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:960–964. McClymond credits Parry as “an exceptionally detailed work of biblical exegesis” and perhaps the most ambitious universalist attempt at a canonical reading of Revelation, but finds the cumulative result exegetically unsuccessful.

↑ 4. Revelation 21:24–26; 22:17.

↑ 5. Revelation 14:9–11 (ESV).

↑ 6. Revelation 20:10, 14–15 (ESV).

↑ 7. Revelation 21:8 (ESV).

↑ 8. On the genre of Revelation as apocalyptic literature, see D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), ch. 26; Grant R. Osborne, Revelation, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002), 12–17.

↑ 9. Revelation 21:25; 22:17 (ESV).

↑ 10. The casting of Death and Hades into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14) is one of the strongest internal indicators that the image is doing symbolic work. Personified abstractions cannot experience “torment” in a literal sense. The image signals the defeat and destruction of the old order, not the conscious suffering of persons.

↑ 11. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Lake of Fire.” He writes that the beast and the false prophet are cast alive into the lake of fire (Revelation 19:20) and that “a thousand years later they are still there” (20:10), suggesting individual, everlasting separation from God.

↑ 12. The “thousand years” of Revelation 20 is itself one of the most debated numbers in all apocalyptic literature. Premillennialists, amillennialists, and postmillennialists differ sharply on whether it is a literal duration. Pressing it as a chronological clock for the beast’s conscious experience assumes the very literalism the genre puts in question.

↑ 13. On the principle that apocalyptic imagery conveys theological truth through symbols rather than through literal description, see G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 50–69, on Revelation’s use of Old Testament imagery and symbolic communication.

↑ 14. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 250–56, develops the divine-presence model drawing on the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The core idea is that God’s unveiled presence is experienced as blessing by those who have been reconciled and as torment by those who resist His love. The fire is not from God as punishment but is God as holy love encountering sin. Manis himself concludes with a form of eternal conscious torment (the fire never stops, and neither does the resistance); this book embraces the divine-presence insight while reaching the universalist conclusion Manis does not. His being no universalist is what gives his concessions such weight. On the patristic roots: Isaac of Nineveh (Ascetical Homilies, homily 84) teaches that the fire of gehenna is God’s love experienced as pain by those who resist it. Gregory of Nyssa develops restorative eschatology in his De anima et resurrectione and Catechetical Oration, chs. 26–35. Both fathers treat divine fire as purposeful and purgative rather than retributive.

↑ 15. Exodus 3:2; 19:18; Hebrews 12:29; 1 Corinthians 3:15 (ESV). The 1 Corinthians 3:13–15 passage is striking: the person whose work is burned up “will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” Paul uses fire as a testing and purifying agent, not as the instrument of permanent destruction.

↑ 16. Sharon Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), chs. 9–10. Baker argues that the biblical fire imagery is consistently about purification and holy-love encounter, not about retributive preservation of suffering. On theion (brimstone), Baker writes: “The Greek noun for it, theion, is spelled the same as the adjective ‘divine.’” She notes that the ancient Greeks used sulfur “in order to purify and dedicate the temple or the people to the gods” and that “the people reading about the lake of fire would interpret it as a lake of divine purification, a lake of cleansing so that the purified object (in our case, a person) can be dedicated and restored to God” (p. 144). Manis classifies Baker’s position as a hybrid of the divine-presence model and annihilationism (Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 309–12).

↑ 17. 1 Peter 1:7 (ESV): “so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

↑ 18. Revelation 21:24–26 (ESV).

↑ 19. The phrase “kings of the earth” appears repeatedly in Revelation. In 17:2, 18 and 18:3, 9 the kings are entangled with Babylon. In 19:19 they gather for war against the Lamb. In 21:24 they bring their glory into the city. If these are the same kings, the narrative arc is one of judgment followed by restoration. If they are different kings, John gives no indication of the switch.

↑ 20. Robin Parry (The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., writing as Gregory MacDonald), pp. 122–25. Parry argues that the structure of Revelation 20–22 supports a restorative reading. The open gates, the entering nations, and the final invitation in 22:17 are, in Parry’s view, not incidental details but integral to John’s vision of the end. He writes: “In John’s visionary geography there are only two places one can be located — within the city enclosed in its walls of salvation or outside the city in the lake of fire. The gates of this new Jerusalem are never closed.” He then asks: “Given that those in the city would have no reason to leave it to enter the lake of fire, why are the doors always open?” McClymond engages Parry’s Revelation exegesis at length (The Devil’s Redemption, 2:960–964).

↑ 21. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Unrighteous Will Never Change.”

↑ 22. The distinction between “nothing unclean” and “nothing formerly unclean” is important. The verse functions as a purity condition for entry, not as a permanent ban on persons. If a person is cleansed by the purifying fire, the condition is met, and the gate is open.

↑ 23. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Unrighteous Will Never Change.” De Young writes that Revelation 22:11 “is a powerful testimony to eternal, unchanging destinies” and “directly opposes the claims of universal reconciliation, including the idea that the ‘open gates’ allow for all to change their destiny.”

↑ 24. Revelation 22:11 uses third-person imperatives in Greek (roughly, “let the one doing wrong still do wrong”). Many commentators read these as ironic or proleptic, not as a divine decree that change is impossible. See Osborne, Revelation, on 22:11; Beale, Revelation, on the same.

↑ 25. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Lake of Fire.” He writes that the second death suggests “a final, irrevocable death that suits the wicked for a realm outside the ‘new heavens and new earth.’”

↑ 26. 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54 (ESV).

↑ 27. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11. He argues that 1 Corinthians 15:26 “probably does not refer to the second death of Revelation” but to “the believers’ hope of resurrection, that natural death is conquered.”

↑ 28. 1 Corinthians 15:28 (ESV): “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.” The “all in all” language resists a reading that excludes large portions of humanity from the final state. George Sidney Hurd (Extermination or Restoration?, 2018) argues that the destruction of Death in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14) is a victory for humanity, not the permanent consignment of humanity to a state of endless dying. If the last enemy destroyed is death, then the fire that destroys it belongs to the narrative of redemption. See further the discussion of the universal-scope texts in Chapter 25.

↑ 29. On the semantics of aiōn and its related forms, see the full discussion in Chapter 22. The superlative construction eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn is intensive and signals great magnitude and duration but does not map onto the philosophical concept of literal infinity. Cf. BDAG, s.v. aiōn, sense 3; TDNT, s.v. aiōn.

↑ 30. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “Smoke Rising Forever.” He writes that “surely the context points to a time of unprecedented and final judgment.”

↑ 31. Isaiah 34:10 (ESV): “Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up forever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it forever and ever.” This describes the judgment on Edom, which is not literally still burning. The language signals total devastation in prophetic idiom, not literal eternity of combustion. See also Jude 7, which describes Sodom and Gomorrah as undergoing “a punishment of eternal [aiōniou] fire,” though those cities were destroyed long ago.

↑ 32. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Lake of Fire” and “The Unrighteous Will Never Change.”

↑ 33. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:960.

↑ 34. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, 2:964. McClymond compares universalist exegesis to the Ptolemaic system’s epicycles, arguing that the universalist reading of Revelation adds hypothesis upon hypothesis to preserve its conclusion. It is a vivid analogy but, as the body text notes, the traditional reading has epicycles of its own when confronted with the open gates and the standing invitation of Revelation 22:17.

↑ 35. The “epicycles” analogy is memorable but reversible. A traditional reader must explain: (a) why the gates are never shut if no one else is coming in; (b) why the “nations” and “kings” of 21:24 are suddenly a different group from the “nations” and “kings” of 19:19; (c) why the Spirit still says “Come” in 22:17 if the opportunity has ended. Each of those requires an interpretive move, too.

↑ 36. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), second meditation. Hart argues that the New Testament afterlife vocabulary is far more diverse and less settled than the traditional “hell” concept assumes, and that the fire-and-judgment imagery serves a restorative rather than retributive function across the biblical witness.

↑ 37. Beale, The Book of Revelation, on Revelation 20–22; Osborne, Revelation, on the same sections; Craig R. Koester, Revelation, Anchor Yale Bible 38A (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), on the tension between judgment and the open city. These commentators do not endorse universalism but recognize the complexity of the Revelation 20–22 narrative.

↑ 38. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 11, “The Unrighteous Will Never Change.”

↑ 39. The juxtaposition of 22:15 (“Outside are the dogs and sorcerers”) and 22:17 (“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’”) is one of the most striking tensions in the closing chapter of the Bible. If the outside group is permanently and irrevocably fixed, the invitation two verses later has no audience. The restorative reading resolves this by treating 22:15 as a present-tense description and 22:17 as a continuing offer.

↑ 40. 1 Corinthians 13:8 (ESV): “Love never ends.” If God is love (1 John 4:8), and love never ends, then the fire that expresses that love does not burn forever without purpose. It burns until the purpose is accomplished, and the purpose is the reconciliation of all things (Colossians 1:20). See the cumulative case in Chapter 40.

↑ 41. On basanizō and the touchstone: Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), s.v. basanos, basanizō. The entry traces the word from “the testing of gold and silver as media of exchange by the proving stone” through its later semantic shift to “torture” and “the rack.” In the New Testament the word-group retains a range of usage: a sick person is “tormented” (Matthew 8:6); a ship is “tossed” (Matthew 14:24); rowers are “toiling” (Mark 6:48); Lot is “vexed” (2 Peter 2:8). The word for outright torture is tumpanizō (Hebrews 11:35). See Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. “Tormented with Fire”; Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. “The Smoke of their Torment”; Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. “Lake of Fire.”

↑ 42. On theion (brimstone/sulfur) and its connection to the divine: Vine, Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, s.v. “brimstone,” notes that theion originally denoted “fire from heaven” and that sulfur was used in pagan purification rites. Strong’s Concordance lists theion (#2303) as derived from theios (#2304), rendered “divine” in Acts 17:29 and 2 Peter 1:3–4. Homer, Iliad 16:228, describes purifying a goblet with fire and brimstone. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (1897 ed.): the verb theioō, derived from theion, means “to hallow, to make divine, or to dedicate to a god.” See Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. “Fire and Sulfur”; Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. “Lake of Fire,” drawing on Charles Pridgeon.

↑ 43. Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, ch. 8, response to De Young on the lake of fire. De Young writes that “the text never says that anyone from the lake of fire ever gets out in order to enter the city” (De Young, Exposing Universalism, p. 60). Hurd responds that the language of “their part” (Greek meros, Revelation 21:8) implies a measured share, and that this, combined with Jesus’s “until” language (Matthew 5:26; 18:30) and “many stripes” / “few stripes” (Luke 12:47–48), rules out both a never-ending sentence and annihilation.

↑ 44. On limnē as “pool” rather than “lake”: Strong’s Concordance defines limnē as “a pond (large or small).” The Wycliffe Bible (1382) consistently renders it “pool” (e.g., Revelation 20:15: “the pool of fier”). The Douay-Rheims reads “the pool of fire and brimstone.” In ancient metallurgy, sulfur was added to molten gold in a crucible or pool to bind with impurities, which floated to the surface as dross and were removed. See Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. “Fire and Sulfur”; Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. “The Smoke of their Torment.”

↑ 45. Hurd, Extermination or Restoration? (2018), develops the argument that Revelation’s destruction language points toward restoration, not annihilation. If the last enemy destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15:26), and Death itself is cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14), then the fire serves life. Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, draws on A. E. Knoch: “No enemy can be last if it has another coming after it. Hence the single word last is all the proof needed to establish the fact that it must be the second death which will be abolished.”

↑ 46. Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, chs. “Tormented with Fire,” “Fire and Sulfur,” and “Her Gates are Always Open.” Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. “Lake of Fire,” draws on Charles Pridgeon (founder of the Pittsburgh Bible Institute): the original idea of basanizō is “to put to the test by rubbing on a touchstone,” and “to any Greek, or any trained in the Greek language, a ‘lake of fire and brimstone’ would mean a ‘lake of divine purification.’”

↑ 47. Coates, Grace Abounds (Resource Publications, 2024), ch. on Revelation 21–22. The parallel to Isaiah 60 is significant: in Isaiah, the gates of the restored Zion are “kept open to allow the nations to enter”; in Revelation, the same language and same theme recur. Burnfield, Patristic Universalism, 2nd ed. (2016), ch. on Revelation 20:14–15, argues that the fire purifies persons (made in God’s image) while destroying abstractions (Death, Hades), just as heat applied to silver removes impurities without destroying the metal itself (cf. Malachi 3:2–3; Zechariah 13:9).

↑ 48. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, ch. “Two Very Different Images: The Lake of Fire and the Outer Darkness.” Talbott writes that “the lake of fire clearly represents God’s holy presence rather than, as sometimes suggested, separation from him; that is, even as God’s holy presence brings ‘refreshing times’ upon the repentant (see Acts 3:19), so it also brings misery, torment, and destruction upon the unrepentant (see 2 Thess 1:9).” His reading aligns with the divine-presence tradition while pressing it toward a universalist conclusion that Manis does not draw.

↑ 49. Robin Parry (The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed.), pp. 168–70. Parry attributes the threefold fire typology to his response to Jerry Walls in Four Views on Hell (ed. Preston Sprinkle; HarperCollins, 2016). The Gregory of Nyssa quotation is from On the Soul and the Resurrection 7. Parry writes: “What if we take all of these pictures as images of the way that humans encounter the holy presence of God? God’s presence is a holy flame, pure and beautiful, but the human experience with that presence will vary depending on the state that one is in when one encounters it.” He notes that a “superb and very readable philosophical-theological defence of this model can be found in Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell,” while adding, “I concur with much of what Manis says, though obviously not with his rejection of universalism.”

↑ 50. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., pp. 116–18, drawing on G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, 108–51, 730. The judgment-followed-by-salvation structure is: 6:12–17 → 7:9–17; 11:18a → 11:18b; 14:6–20 → 15:2–4; 16:17–18:24 → 19:1–10; 20:7–15 → 21:1–22:5. Parry writes: “Any interpretation of the lake of fire in 20:7–15 must be compatible with the vision in 21–22. I shall argue that the salvation climaxes of the two sections are suggestive of universalism and invite a universalist interpretation of the ‘hell’ texts that precede them.”

↑ 51. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., Appendix 3 (“The Lamb’s Book of Life”), p. 257. Parry notes that Revelation 3:5 implies the book’s contents can change, and that “the universalist simply needs to maintain that someone in the lake of fire could wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb and thus be added into the book of life.” On the name-change theme, see Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, ch. “Two Very Different Images”: “In addition to being cleansed in the lake of fire, then, those vile kings of the earth evidently receive a new name, which is their ticket, so to speak, for entering the New Jerusalem.” See also Revelation 2:17 and 3:12.

↑ 52. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 250–56, on the divine-presence model and its roots in Eastern Orthodoxy. Manis quotes Isaac of Nineveh, Symeon the New Theologian, and Martin Luther in support of the core idea. Jerry Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most (Brazos, 2015), 84–86. Walls writes that God’s “glorious love will be experienced like a burning fire rather than ‘the spring of the water of life’” for those who refuse Him, and explicitly acknowledges the “long theological tradition” of this idea in Orthodoxy, quoting David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 399.

↑ 53. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, ch. “Two Very Different Images.” The “kings of the earth” appear in Revelation 17:2, 18; 18:3, 9; 19:19; and 21:24. On the “second death” as the death of death, Talbott writes: “Being cast into the lake of fire is therefore called ‘the second death’ because it represents the death of death, that is, the place where Death itself is finally destroyed forever.”

↑ 54. James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation after Death, pp. 293–95. Beilby argues that the open gates signify safety, not a continuous flow of people from the lake of fire. He reads “the nations” in 21:24 as a metonym for representatives from the nations, echoing Revelation 5:9 and 7:9. Beilby engages Parry’s reading directly, acknowledging its logic while finding the traditional reading of the gates more persuasive. His treatment is fair and worth engaging even for the universalist.

↑ 55. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., pp. 123–25. Parry notes that John changed “kings” in his Isaiah 60 source to “kings of the earth,” the phrase reserved throughout Revelation for the enemies of Christ and the saints, “so as to ensure we understand precisely whom he has in mind.” They come now, as J. P. M. Sweet puts it, “not as captives or second class citizens, but as worshippers on an equal standing with the other redeemed” (Sweet, Revelation, 310). On the hermeneutical reversal: Beale reads the condemnation texts as fixed and re-reads Revelation 21 to fit them; Parry asks why the strategy cannot be reversed, taking the open-gate vision as the starting point and re-reading the condemnation texts accordingly.