Chapter 26
Revelation 14:9–11; 20:10–15; 21:8
"The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night." If any verse in the Bible seems to slam the door on the larger hope, it is this one. And it does not stand alone. In the same book, the devil, the beast, and the false prophet are "tormented day and night forever and ever" in a lake of fire. Everyone whose name is not in the book of life is thrown in after them. The lake of fire, Revelation says, "is the second death."
I have sat with these words for years. They are the hardest apocalyptic texts the universalist faces. I will not pretend they are easy. I will not wave them away with a quick appeal to genre and move on. They deserve better than that, and so does the reader who finds them terrifying.
On the traditional reading, these passages are the Bible's most explicit statements of endless conscious torment. James De Young, in Exposing Universalism, treats them as just that. He argues in chapter 13 of that work that Revelation's language is as plain as language can be. The worshipers of the beast face torment "with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb" (14:10). The smoke of that torment "goes up forever and ever" (14:11). The demonic trinity is "tormented day and night forever and ever" in the lake of fire (20:10). And all whose names are not found in the book of life are thrown there (20:15). De Young insists that even if one grants the symbolic nature of apocalyptic literature, the symbols still signify an unending conscious punishment. The lake of fire, on his reading, is the final destination, and nobody comes out.1
The Traditional Reading in Its Own Words
De Young argues in chapter 13 of Exposing Universalism that the lake of fire is a final destiny, not a place of cleansing. He insists that the beast and the false prophet are cast alive into the fire (Rev 19:20), and that a thousand years later they are still there (20:10). The wicked are then thrown in after them. The second death, De Young contends, is not a process of purification. It is an irreversible state. He writes: "Nowhere does the text even hint that the lake of fire has a cleansing, chastising, disciplining function." The lake of fire, he adds, "validates the enormity of sin. It is a final destiny beyond natural death." He presses the point further: the lake of fire still exists after God makes all things new (21:5, 8), and those outside the city continue to practice evil (22:15). On this reading, there is no exit.2
James B. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 13, "The Apostles on Judgment and Hell"
That is the case. It deserves to be heard at full strength. And yet these same texts stand in the same book as the open gates of the New Jerusalem. The same book shows leaves that heal the nations and kings of the earth who walk by the city's light. Revelation holds both. So the question this chapter answers is: can the lake of fire be real and terrible and still serve a God whose purpose is the restoration of all things?
I believe it can. Here is why.
Three passages carry the weight. The first is the third angel's warning in chapter 14:
"If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name." (Revelation 14:9–11, ESV)
The second is the final judgment scene in chapter 20:
"And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever. . . . Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire." (Revelation 20:10, 14–15, ESV)
The third is the list in chapter 21:
"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death." (Revelation 21:8, ESV)
Several things stand out immediately. First, the word "tormented" (Greek basanizō, "to test, to torment") appears in both 14:10 and 20:10. It describes conscious suffering. I will not soften that. But the word carries a backstory worth knowing. Gerry Beauchemin notes that basanizō comes from the world of the refiner. It originally meant "to test with a touchstone," the stone used to rub gold and check its purity. Andrew Hronich, citing Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, confirms: "the testing of gold and silver as media of exchange by the proving stone" is the original sense. The word later shifted to mean torture, but its roots sit in the refiner's workshop.3
Second, the phrase "forever and ever" (Greek eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn, literally "unto the ages of the ages") appears in 14:11 for the rising smoke. It appears again in 20:10 for the torment of the devil, the beast, and the false prophet. The question is what this phrase means in an apocalyptic context. I have argued elsewhere that the age-words do not settle the question of duration on their own (see Chapter 18). But here the phrase sits inside the most vivid judgment imagery in all of Scripture. So we need to look more closely.4
Third, notice what else gets thrown into the lake of fire: "Death and Hades" (20:14). These are not persons. They cannot be "tormented" in a personal sense. They are thrown in to be destroyed. That tells us something about what the lake of fire does. It is the place where God unmakes the things that stand against His good creation.5
Fourth, the lake of fire is identified as "the second death" (20:14; 21:8). The phrase points to a death that is beyond ordinary death, a death of something other than the body. If Death itself is thrown there and destroyed, then the second death is the place where death dies. I want to hold that phrase up and ask: what does it mean for death itself to be put to death?6
Fifth, and this matters as much as anything: all of this sits inside the book of Revelation, which is apocalyptic literature. The book is filled with beasts with seven heads, a woman clothed with the sun, a dragon chained for a thousand years, a city descending from heaven. To read the lake of fire as if it were a plain-prose description of an actual lake of literal fire is to misread the genre of the book. Nobody reads the seven-headed beast that way. The lake of fire speaks in the same symbolic register. The question is not whether the symbol is real. Of course it points to something real, something terrible. The question is what the reality is that it signifies.7
Plain Words
Basanizō (Greek): to test or torment; used of conscious suffering. Eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn (Greek): literally "unto the ages of the ages," a phrase often translated "forever and ever." Apocalyptic: a type of biblical writing that uses vivid symbols, visions, and dramatic imagery to reveal hidden truths about God's purposes. The book of Revelation is the Bible's most fully apocalyptic book.
Everything in this chapter depends on reading Revelation the way it asks to be read. And Revelation asks to be read as apocalyptic prophecy, not as a documentary transcript of future events.8
Consider what sits alongside the lake of fire in this book. A lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. A woman standing on the moon. A dragon sweeping a third of the stars from the sky with its tail. A city 1,400 miles on each side descending from heaven. No serious interpreter reads any of these as literal descriptions. They are images, powerful and true, pointing to realities deeper than the images themselves.
The lake of fire belongs to this same world of images. It is not less real for being symbolic. But pressing it into a literal geography (an actual lake of literal fire in which literal bodies burn without being consumed) would prove too much. It would also prove that literal smoke rises literally forever, which is an image, not a physics report. Robin Parry makes the point well. He argues that John was "adopting stereotypical descriptions of the post-mortem life of the damned" and giving "traditional language a new twist by putting it within a universalist context." Given how apocalyptic language works, and how John reworks that language throughout Revelation, Parry calls this "a live possibility."9
David Bentley Hart makes a sharper version of this point. He observes that the threat-texts of the New Testament are "all allegorical, pictorial, vague, and metaphorical in form," while the texts that promise the final salvation of all are "invariably straightforward doctrinal statements." He calls it "surpassingly strange" that the church has read the metaphorical class as literal and the literal class as metaphor. The ovens, the wheat and chaff, the barred doors, the debtors' prisons: everyone grants these are figures. Why not also the deathless worm and the lake of fire?9b
N. T. Wright has made the same warning from the other side of the debate. Apocalyptic passages, he notes, are among "the most difficult" in Scripture to read rightly, and most people interpret them too literally. Andrew Hronich puts the question plainly: we do not take the seven-headed beast literally, or the woman clothed with the sun, or the dragon sweeping stars with its tail. Is the lake of fire really the one exception?9c
The genre does not make the judgment less real. It means we must ask what the symbol points to, not simply read the symbol as if it were its own literal referent. And once we ask that question, the text opens up.
The language of Revelation 14:10–11 is not invented from scratch. It draws heavily on Isaiah 34, the oracle against Edom. Compare the two:
"Its streams shall be turned into pitch, and its dust into sulfur; its land shall become burning pitch. Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up forever." (Isaiah 34:9–10, ESV)
The parallels are unmistakable: fire, sulfur, smoke going up "forever," no quenching. John is using Isaiah's judgment language to describe the fate of those who side with the beast. But here is the critical point. Edom is not still burning today. The smoke did not literally rise forever. The land is not still pitch. Isaiah's language described a complete and decisive judgment, not a literally unending combustion.10
Parry notes that the Hebrew word behind "forever" in Isaiah 34:10 is le'olam. It literally means "for an age," not "for all eternity." The Septuagint renders it eis geneas, "unto generations." Neither requires the idea of a duration that never ends. The commentator G. K. Beale agrees that "in context the phrase refers to an uninterrupted memorial of Edom's judgment, which lasts for a long time."11
This matters because John's audience knew Isaiah. When they heard "the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever," they heard an echo of the Edom oracle. And they knew that Edom's fires had gone out long ago. The idiom signals a judgment that is complete, total, and decisive. It does not, by itself, require a judgment that never stops.
There is more. Ezekiel 16:53–55 promises the restoration of Sodom. The city whose destruction became the very image of God's fiery judgment is promised a return to what it was before. If Sodom can be restored after the fire, then even the fiercest prophetic rhetoric of wrath does not close the door on redemption.12
The Edom Precedent
Isaiah 34 describes Edom's judgment with the same language Revelation uses for the lake of fire: burning sulfur, smoke rising "forever," flames that are not quenched. But Edom is not still burning. The language signals complete and decisive judgment, not literally unending combustion. When John borrows this language, he is writing in the same prophetic idiom. The symbol speaks of God's total victory over evil, not of an eternal torture chamber.
Revelation 20:14 offers one of the most striking images in all of Scripture: "Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire." Death and Hades are not people. They are not conscious beings who can be tormented. They are thrown into the lake of fire to be destroyed. And the text names this destruction "the second death."13
Now hold that next to Paul's great declaration in 1 Corinthians 15:26: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." Paul says death will be destroyed. Revelation shows us how: death is thrown into the lake of fire and unmade. The lake of fire is the place where God destroys the last enemy (see Chapter 5).14
Thomas Talbott presses this logic with real force. In Paul's theology, death is more than a physical process. It is also "a spiritual condition and includes everything that separates us from union with God." So if the lake of fire destroys Death, it must also destroy everything that separates us from God. The final destruction of death includes the final destruction of all separation. The lake of fire, on this reading, is the place where God puts death to death. The "second death" is the death of death itself.15
This is not a trick of words. It follows from the logic of the text. If Death is an enemy, and the lake of fire is where that enemy is destroyed, then the lake of fire serves God's purpose: to unmake every power that opposes His good creation. The question is whether human beings thrown into the same fire are kept there forever, or whether the fire destroys the death in them so that life remains.
R. Zachary Manis, who is not himself a universalist, reads the passage in a way that is compatible with this hope. He notes that "death and Hades will be destroyed, and more specifically, destroyed by the presence of God." The lake of fire, on his model, is the divine presence experienced as consuming fire. Being thrown into it is called "the second death" because it is "the death of death itself." If death is a separation from God, then the second death is the end of that separation.16
David Burnfield sharpens the point by pressing a question the traditional reading cannot easily answer. Revelation 21:4 promises that "there shall be no more death." Paul says the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor 15:26). Can we really say there is no more death while the majority of the human race endures an unending state of death? Burnfield calls this "an eternal paradox" and argues that Christ's reign must continue "until both the first and the last death have been forever destroyed." The lake of fire, on this reading, cannot be the final state. It must itself be undone.16b
Beauchemin agrees: "Death cast into fire is the death of death; the last enemy destroyed!" He reads the second death as God's consuming fire burning away the dross. Those who pass through it "come forth in newness of life, a new creation."16c
Here is the fact that should keep every interpreter honest: Revelation holds the lake of fire and the open gates of the New Jerusalem in the same book, within two chapters of each other.
In chapter 20, the lost are thrown into the lake of fire. In chapter 21, the New Jerusalem descends, its gates are never shut (21:25), the nations walk by its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it (21:24). In chapter 22, the tree of life stands by the river of the water of life, and its leaves are "for the healing of the nations" (22:2). Outside the city are those who practice falsehood and wickedness (22:15). But the gates are never shut. And the invitation still stands: "Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price" (22:17).17
I have treated the open gates and the healing of the nations in full in Chapter 14. I will not repeat that argument here. But notice what it means for the lake of fire. If the gates of the New Jerusalem are never shut, and if those outside are being healed and invited in, then the lake of fire cannot be the final word. The fire and the open gates exist in the same story. The fire judges; the gates welcome. The fire destroys evil; the healing restores what is left.
Talbott presses the point directly. The kings of the earth, "those most vile of all men who had stood with the beast and the false prophet (Rev 19:19)," are seen entering the New Jerusalem. Where do they come from? "Outside are the . . . fornicators and murderers and idolaters" (22:15); outside is the lake of fire, "the only reality left apart from the New Jerusalem itself." Those kings must come through the fire and enter the city cleansed. The lake of fire, then, represents a purgatorial suffering: "something like that must happen in the lake of fire to enable the kings of the earth and others to enter the city."18
Two Chapters Apart
Revelation 20 shows the lost thrown into the lake of fire. Revelation 21–22 shows the New Jerusalem with its gates that are never shut, nations walking by its light, and leaves for "the healing of the nations." These sit two chapters apart in the same book. Any reading of the lake of fire must account for both. The fire judges. The gates welcome. Revelation holds them together, and so must we.
The phrase "forever and ever" (Greek eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn) is used throughout Revelation. In most of its other uses, it does point to things that last without end. God lives "forever and ever" (4:9–10). The Lamb reigns "forever and ever" (11:15). The redeemed reign "forever and ever" (22:5). So the phrase carries genuine weight.19
Parry handles this honestly. He acknowledges that "the strong impression given is of never ending duration." But he notes that "strictly speaking," the phrase literally means "unto the ages of ages." It "is compatible with a limited, though very long, duration." Not everything in Revelation described as lasting "forever and ever" is strictly unending in the same way. The smoke of Babylon "goes up forever and ever" (19:3), but nobody thinks the smoke from that symbolic city is still rising. The phrase signals finality, totality, and the complete triumph of God's judgment.20
I do not want to rest too much weight on the age-words alone. I have argued in Chapter 18 that the meaning of "eternal" (Greek aiōnios, "pertaining to an age") does not settle the question of duration by itself. The same is true here. The duration question is answered not by a single phrase but by the whole witness of Revelation. Revelation holds the fire and the open gates together. And the whole counsel of Scripture promises that the last enemy will be destroyed (1 Cor 15:26) and that God will be "all in all" (1 Cor 15:28).21
One further observation: in Revelation 14:11, it is the smoke that "goes up forever and ever." The text does not say that the torment lasts forever. The smoke is a memorial to God's decisive judgment, just as the smoke of Edom was. And in 20:10, it is the devil, the beast, and the false prophet who are "tormented day and night forever and ever." David Powys has noted something important here. Revelation 20:14–15 and 21:8 make no mention of such eternal suffering for the human beings who are thrown into the lake of fire. The "forever and ever" phrase applies only to the demonic trinity, not to humans.22
There is one more set of clues in the text itself. Revelation 21:8 says the wicked will have "their part" (Greek meros, "portion") in the lake of fire. George Hurd notes that the phrases "according to their works" and "their part" point to a measured judgment, not an infinite one. "How can what is infinite be 'part' of something greater?" he asks. And Jesus twice uses the word "until" (Greek heōs) when speaking of the fire of judgment: "You will not get out until you have paid the last penny" (Matt 5:26). "Until" rules out a punishment that never ends. These qualifying words sit inside the same biblical witness as the lake of fire, and they all point the same direction: the fire has a limit, set by the justice of God.22b
Let me now gather the threads and say plainly what I believe this means.
The lake of fire is real. I do not mean that a literal lake of literal fire exists somewhere in the cosmos. I mean that the judgment it symbolizes is real, terrible, and unavoidable for everyone who clings to sin and rebellion. The fire is the consuming, purifying presence of God Himself, experienced by the unrepentant as unbearable torment. I have argued this at length in Chapter 17, where the purifying-fire and divine-presence models are developed. The same God whose presence is heaven to the redeemed is fire to those who resist Him.23
Sharon Baker, whose Razing Hell explores this model with care, puts it sharply: "Fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God." She traces the biblical testimony from the burning bush to the pillar of fire to Ezekiel's vision of God as a flashing flame. To stand in God's presence is to stand in the fire. The fire "burns up whatever is evil, wicked, or sinful" and "cleanses and purifies what remains."24
On this reading, the lake of fire is not a chamber of eternal torture standing apart from God. It is the presence of God experienced as judgment. It is the fire that destroys evil and destroys death. The second death is the death of death itself, the place where the last enemy is finally unmade. And when death is destroyed, what remains is life.
Baker adds a striking observation about the Greek word for "brimstone" (Greek theion, sulfur) in Revelation 19:20, 20:10, and 21:8. This word is spelled the same as the Greek adjective for "divine." Brimstone is not just fire. It is fire from heaven, fire from God. Ancient Greeks used sulfur as a purifier, a cleanser, and a substance for dedicating offerings to the gods. First-century readers hearing "a lake of fire and theion" could hear "a lake of divine fire." They could hear purification.25
Hronich adds another layer. The word translated "lake" in our Bibles is the Greek limnē. Its more common meaning is not a large body of water but a "pool" or "pond." Strong's Concordance defines it as "a pond (large or small)." The first English Bible, the Wycliffe translation of 1382, rendered it as "pool" every time it appears in Revelation. In the context of fire and sulfur, the image is not a vast burning sea. It is something closer to the refiner's crucible. From ancient times, refiners added sulfur to molten gold. The impurities bonded with the sulfur and rose to the surface as dross, to be skimmed off. The gold was left pure. Any ancient reader familiar with this craft would recognize "the pool of fire and sulfur" as an image of divine purification, not endless torture.25b
This is the reading I hold. The lake of fire is the real, dreadful, age-to-come judgment on all evil. It is God's consuming presence, experienced as torment by the rebellious, as purification by the repentant. It destroys the evil, it destroys the death, and it leaves what is good and clean. The second death is the death of death. And when death dies, all that remains is life in God.
The Fire Is God's Presence
The lake of fire is not a torture chamber standing apart from God. It is the consuming presence of God experienced as judgment by the unrepentant. "God is a consuming fire" (Heb 12:29). The same presence that is heaven to the redeemed is fire to those who resist Him. The fire destroys sin, destroys death, and leaves life. That is the second death: the death of death itself.
Robin Parry's reading of Revelation in The Evangelical Universalist is the most sustained evangelical attempt to hold the lake of fire and the open gates together. He draws careful attention to the structure of the book, noting that Revelation's judgment scenes follow a consistent pattern: judgment is always followed by salvation. Chapter 14's judgment (14:6–20) is followed by the victory song of the saints (15:2–4). Chapter 20's final judgment (20:7–15) is followed by the vision of the new creation (21:1–22:5). Parry argues that this pattern is itself hermeneutically significant. It means Revelation never lets judgment be the last word.26
Parry also explores several possible universalist readings of the "forever and ever" texts. He suggests that the beast and the false prophet are not individual persons but personified systems. The beast is "a totalitarian political kingdom." The false prophet is "a false religious/propaganda system." Their "eternal torment" is the utter and permanent defeat of those systems, not the conscious suffering of any individual human being. Edward Fudge, whom Parry cites, argues the same. He says that "the language is symbolic, and a literal interpretation is impossible."27
Thomas Talbott, in The Inescapable Love of God, brings a striking theological lens to the passage. He argues that the lake of fire and the New Jerusalem represent the same reality seen from two perspectives. The lake of fire is "how the wicked experience the consuming fire of God's perfecting love." In God's presence, everything false in us burns. Everything true is purified. The process is agony for those who cling to their sin, but it is the same presence that the redeemed experience as joy and life.28
Manis, though he does not affirm universalism, develops the divine-presence model with philosophical precision. He argues that fire in Scripture is consistently connected with God's presence, not with a place of separation from God. The torment of the wicked is not that God is absent but that God is "all-too-present." Manis reads Daniel's "river of fire" flowing from God's throne and Revelation's "sea of glass glowing with fire" as references to the divine presence. He notes a "striking connection" between the river of fire in Daniel 7 and the river of the water of life in Revelation 22. Both flow from the same throne.29
De Young, for his part, counters that even granting the symbolic nature of the imagery, the symbol must signify something real. And the natural reading of "tormented day and night forever and ever" is endless conscious punishment. I take his point seriously. He is right that a symbol signifies a reality, and that the reality is often greater than the symbol, not less. He also presses a sobering argument from within Revelation itself. He notes that in the book's own sequence, the wicked respond to each round of judgment not by repenting but by hardening. After the trumpet judgments they "do not repent" of their evil deeds (9:20–21). After the bowl judgments they "blaspheme God" and still "would not repent" (16:9, 11, 21). De Young asks pointedly: does this not show that suffering alone does not produce repentance? The question is fair, and I will answer it below. But the question remains: is the reality behind the symbol an endless torture chamber, or the total, decisive, purifying victory of God over every form of evil? The Old Testament background and the wider witness of Revelation itself point toward the latter.30
Michael McClymond, in The Devil's Redemption, offers a different critique. He takes aim at Parry's reading of the book of Revelation directly. McClymond argues that Parry "misses the representative universalism of the book of Revelation." Revelation never says God saves "every nation." It says He saves people "from every nation" (Rev 7:9; 5:9). Not all nations, McClymond insists, but some persons from all nations. He also objects that Parry's approach to the "forever and ever" texts preserves universalism only by adding what McClymond calls "ancillary hypotheses." When Parry suggests the smoke rises as a memorial after the punishment has ceased, McClymond replies that this produces "two different kinds of smoke: punishment smoke and memorial smoke." It is a sharp objection, and it deserves an answer. I think the answer lies in how prophetic imagery works. Isaiah's smoke over Edom works the same way (Isa 34:10), and nobody charges Isaiah with inventing two kinds of smoke. John borrows Isaiah's idiom. The memorial reading fits the idiom. But I grant McClymond that the reading is not obvious on its face. It requires attention to the genre and to the Old Testament allusion.30e
Several other voices deserve a hearing here. David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved, cautions against extracting any single "clear and unarguable doctrine" from Revelation at all. The book is built from "farraginous allegory" and "esoteric symbolisms" whose key vanished with the community that produced it. Hart does not dismiss the book, but he insists that reading its images as literal reports of the world to come is "a supremely foolish enterprise." His point reinforces the genre move: if no image in Revelation is strictly literal, neither is the lake of fire.30b
Beauchemin, Hronich, and George Hurd all read the lake of fire through the lens of the refiner's craft. Beauchemin traces the Greek basanizō back to its original meaning as the refiner's touchstone. He also traces the Greek theion (brimstone) to its overlap with the Greek word for "divine." His conclusion is striking: "To any Greek, or any trained in the Greek language, a 'lake of fire and brimstone' would mean a 'lake of divine purification.'" Hronich develops the same case at length. He traces the refiner's process of adding sulfur to molten gold to draw impurities to the surface. Hurd presses the theological conclusion: the fire and sulfur point to "the divine crucible which will serve to refine the hearts of even His most obstinate enemies, bringing about the restoration of all."30c
Burnfield responds to De Young directly. De Young argues that "the lake of fire continues to exist (21:8) after God makes all things new (21:5). It continues on forever." Burnfield replies that Revelation is not written in strict chronological order. He notes that "making all things new" (21:5) is stated in the present tense, pointing to a process still underway. And the lake of fire is called the "second death," which is itself the last enemy that Christ must destroy (1 Cor 15:26). "Could we logically say that there is no more death at the same time that 90% of mankind, plus a third of the angels are in an unending state of death?" The logic of the new creation, Burnfield argues, requires the lake of fire to end.30d
This is the strongest form of the objection, and I want to give it its full weight. The words do sound as plain as words can be. "They have no rest, day or night" (14:11). "Tormented day and night forever and ever" (20:10). How can anyone read this as anything less than unending conscious torment?
The Plainness Objection
"No rest day or night, forever and ever" sounds as clear as language can be. The most natural reading is endless torment. Is the universalist simply refusing to take the text at face value?
I answer with two observations. First, the genre. Revelation is not prose narrative or epistolary instruction. It is apocalyptic symbolism, and it borrows heavily from the Old Testament's own symbolic judgment language. The same words, "its smoke goes up forever," appear in Isaiah 34 about Edom, and Edom is not still burning. Nobody reads Isaiah 34 as teaching that a literal patch of land is producing literal smoke for all of eternity. The idiom signals decisive, total judgment. John uses it to signal the same thing. We must weigh the apocalyptic genre and the Isaiah allusion before pressing the phrase into a literal-duration reading.31
Second, read the phrase in its own book. The same Revelation that says "tormented forever and ever" also says the gates of the New Jerusalem "will never be shut" (21:25). It says the leaves of the tree of life are "for the healing of the nations" (22:2). If we take "forever and ever" as the final and complete word, then we have a Bible whose last book contradicts itself within two chapters. I think Revelation is more coherent than that. The fire is real and dreadful. The gates are open and healing. Both are true. The judgment is not the end of the story. It is the terrible passage through which God brings about the end. And the end is restoration.32
I concede freely that this is the hardest apocalyptic text for my position. The reading I offer depends on taking the genre, the Old Testament allusions, and the wider context of Revelation seriously. If someone reads the phrase as strictly literal, unending duration, I understand why. But I believe the weight of the evidence, inside and outside Revelation, points another way.
This is De Young's deeper argument. He grants that the imagery is symbolic, but insists that the reality behind the symbol must be at least as severe as the image. If the symbol is an eternally burning lake, the reality it points to cannot be less than an eternal punishment. He strengthens this by pointing to Revelation 22:11, 15. The righteous continue to be righteous, and those who do wrong continue to do wrong. The wicked are "outside" the city, still practicing evil. De Young calls this "a powerful testimony to eternal, unchanging destinies" and argues that it "directly opposes the claims of universal reconciliation, including the idea that the 'open gates' allow for all to change their destiny."33
I take this point. The symbol does signify something real and terrible. But "at least as severe" does not mean "identical in kind." The symbol of a seven-headed beast signifies something terrible, but nobody insists that the reality must be a literal multi-headed monster. The question is what the kind of severity is. I argue that the severity is total, decisive, and absolute: God's victory over evil is complete and final. Every form of rebellion, every system of oppression, every structure of death is utterly destroyed. That is severe. That is more terrible, not less, than the symbol of a burning lake. But it is a severity that serves a purpose: it destroys evil, not persons.
As for 22:11, the verse describes the present state, not a decree that it can never change. A snapshot is not a prophecy. And the very next verses offer the invitation: "Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price" (22:17). De Young reads 22:11 as finality. But John follows it immediately with an open invitation. The text holds both. So must we. (For the full treatment of the open gates, see Chapter 14.)
The language of the lake of fire is matched by the language of the destruction texts treated in Chapter 27. These use the vocabulary of destruction (Greek apollumi, "to destroy, to ruin") and of death. The fire destroys. The question is whether it destroys the person or the evil in the person. The purifying-fire model (see Chapter 17) says it destroys the evil, the death, the rebellion, and leaves the person, purified and free, to enter the city whose gates are never shut.34
Baker summarizes the logic: "If death is destroyed, what's left? Life, eternally, in God, the only eternal one. As such, the lake of fire annihilates death and evil, restoring life as it burns away the wickedness and purifies the soul."35
Which Universalism Is This?
The reading in this chapter does not make sin safe. It does not deny judgment or soften the terrible reality of the lake of fire. It does not say that the fire is a metaphor for nothing, or that the lost simply walk through unscathed. The fire is real. The judgment is severe. The torment is conscious and agonizing. What changes is the purpose of the fire. On the traditional reading, the fire punishes endlessly without redemption. On the reading this book defends, the fire destroys evil, destroys death, and purifies the sinner, so that what remains can enter the city. This is not sentimental universalism. It is the consuming-fire God of Hebrews 12:29, whose judgment is real precisely because His love is real. For the full boundary between the hope this book defends and the counterfeits it refuses, see Chapter 1 and Appendix B.
The lake of fire is the Bible's most terrifying image. I have not tried to make it comfortable. The judgment it represents is real, and no sane person would choose the long road through that fire over the short road of repentance in this life.
But the same book that shows us the fire also shows us the open gates. The same book that names the "second death" also shows us death and Hades thrown into the fire and destroyed. The same book that lists the sins of those thrown into the lake (21:8) also shows the nations healed and the kings of the earth walking into the city by its light (21:24). Revelation does not end on the lake of fire. It ends on the tree of life, the river of the water of life, and the voice that says, "Come."
I believe the fire serves the gates. The judgment serves the healing. The second death is the death of death, not the death of hope. And when death is finally destroyed, when the last enemy is put under Christ's feet, God will be all in all (1 Cor 15:26–28; see Chapter 5). The city with its open gates and its healing leaves will welcome every soul that the fire has set free.
That is the hope. It stands on the whole witness of Revelation, read alongside the whole counsel of Scripture. The God who is a consuming fire is also the God who is love. His character is the only key that unlocks both the fire and the gates at once (see Chapter 2). The fire is not the contradiction of His love. It is, in the end, the means by which His love finishes what it started.36
The cumulative case grows. We will carry it forward in Chapter 30.
↑ 1. James B. De Young, Exposing Universalism: A Comprehensive Guide to the Faulty Appeals Made by Universalists (Gresham, OR: Credo House, 2014), ch. 13, "The Apostles on Judgment and Hell," pp. 208–35. De Young treats Revelation 14:9–11 and 20:10–15 as the Bible's clearest statements of eternal conscious torment. He argues that universalists "deny that endless suffering is involved because this judgment only applies, it is claimed, to death (hades), the beast, and the false prophet," and that their reading of the lake of fire as purification is "directly opposed by the context."
↑ 2. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 13, "The Apostles on Judgment and Hell," pp. 208–35. The quotations in the Source callout are from De Young's section on the lake of fire within that chapter. He argues that the beast and the false prophet are cast alive into the lake of fire (Rev 19:20), "suggest[ing], along with the rest of Revelation, that these two are both individuals and systems they lead. As individuals they experience everlasting separation from God, because a thousand years later they are still there (20:10)." He concludes: "The wicked enter a state of existence qualitatively different from the righteous, and Scripture offers no hope of escape." McClymond similarly critiques the universalist reading of Revelation in The Devil's Redemption, V 2, pp. 963–64; see note 30e below.
↑ 3. The Greek verb basanizō (βασανίζω) is used in the New Testament of conscious suffering: the torment of demons (Matt 8:29), the tossing of a boat by waves (Matt 14:24), and the torment of Lot's soul (2 Pet 2:8). In Revelation, it appears in 9:5; 11:10; 12:2; 14:10; 18:7, 10, 15; 20:10. G. K. Beale notes that the term "is generally used of conscious suffering"; see G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 762. However, the word's original sense is revealing. As Gerry Beauchemin notes, basanizō derives from basanos, the touchstone used to test the purity of gold; see Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God's Judgment (Olmito, TX: Malista, 2007), ch. 5. Andrew Hronich cites Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT): "The basanos originally belongs to the calling of the inspector of coins. It is linked with the Heb. root ('to test') and the Egyptian bhn ('basalt') . . . the testing of gold and silver as media of exchange by the proving stone." See Andrew Hronich, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, ch. "Tormented with Fire."
↑ 4. For the full argument on the meaning of aiōnios and the age-words, see Chapter 18 and Appendix C.
↑ 5. Beale notes that "death and Hades are not personified" in the same way as the Satanic trinity, and their casting into the lake of fire signals destruction, not torment. See Beale, The Book of Revelation, 1036–38.
↑ 6. The phrase "the second death" (ho thanatos ho deuteros) appears four times in Revelation: 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8. In 20:14, it is explicitly equated with the lake of fire. It is distinct from physical death and signals the final, eschatological judgment.
↑ 7. On the genre of Revelation as apocalyptic prophecy, see Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 1; and Beale, The Book of Revelation, 37–43. The principle is basic: symbolic imagery in an apocalyptic text must be interpreted as symbolic, not pressed into literal prose.
↑ 8. Revelation 1:1 uses the verb esēmanen (from sēmainō, "to signify, to communicate by signs"), suggesting from the outset that the content is communicated through signs and symbols. See Beale, The Book of Revelation, 50–52.
↑ 9. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2024), 137. Parry presents this as the first of several possible universalist readings.
↑ 9b. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), Part II. Hart writes: "It is surpassingly strange that, down the centuries, most Christians have come to believe that one class of claims—all of which are allegorical, pictorial, vague, and metaphorical in form—must be regarded as providing the 'literal' content of the New Testament's teaching regarding the world to come, while another class—all of which are invariably straightforward doctrinal statements—must be regarded as mere hyperbole." He adds: "Why do we not also recognize that the deathless worm and the inextinguishable fire and all other such images . . . are themselves mere figural devices within the embrace of an extravagant apocalyptic imagery that, in itself, has no strictly literal elements?"
↑ 9c. On the difficulty of interpreting apocalyptic literature, see N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), 336; and The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), 280–99. Wright emphasizes that apocalyptic language is "notoriously difficult to understand" and that most people interpret it too literally. The specific observation that Revelation's symbolism rules out reading the lake of fire as a unique literal exception is made in Andrew Hronich, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ, ch. "Fire and Sulfur"; and in Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: The Case for Christian Universal Reconciliation, ch. "The Unquenchable Fire," who identifies three uses of fire in Scripture: God's presence, God's punishment, and God's purification. See also the Patristic tradition preserved by Thomas Allin, Universalism Asserted: As the Hope of the Gospel, on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture, 4th ed. (London: 1891), 279–80: "He who perverts Scripture is not the man who reduces this sacred poetry to its true meaning. Nay, that man perverts the Bible who hardens into dogmas the glowing metaphors of Eastern poetry."
↑ 10. Isaiah 34:5–17 describes the judgment of Edom as representative of all the nations. The language of burning pitch, sulfur, and smoke rising "forever" (Hebrew le'ōlam) is among the most vivid judgment rhetoric in the Old Testament. But Edom as a geopolitical entity eventually disappeared, and no smoke rises from its territory today. The language communicates totality and decisiveness, not literal unending combustion.
↑ 11. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 137, citing Beale, Revelation, 763. The Hebrew le'ōlam literally means "for an age," and the LXX renders Isaiah 34:10 with eis geneas ("unto generations"), neither of which requires endless duration. Parry notes that "a restoration would not, strictly speaking, contradict anything here."
↑ 12. Ezekiel 16:53–55. The passage promises the restoration of Sodom and Samaria alongside Jerusalem. If Sodom, the paradigmatic city of fiery judgment (Gen 19:24–28; Jude 7), can be restored, then the fiercest prophetic rhetoric of wrath does not rule out redemption. See Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 135–36, on the significance of this for reading Revelation.
↑ 13. Beale argues that "death and Hades are not said to be tormented, while the Satanic trinity are," taking this to indicate that the latter include conscious beings while the former do not. Parry responds that "all that it need indicate is that death and Hades are not personified whilst Babylon, the beast, the false prophet (and the devil?) are." See Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 139n51.
↑ 14. 1 Corinthians 15:26: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death." For the full treatment of this text and its implications, see Chapter 5. De Young (ch. 13, pp. 208–35) objects that the "death" destroyed in 1 Cor 15:26 "probably does not refer to the second death of Revelation (as universalism would have it), but speaks to the believers' hope of resurrection, that natural death is conquered." But Paul does not limit which kind of death he means. He says "the last enemy to be destroyed is death" and then declares that God will be "all in all" (15:28). If a second death continues, then death is not finally destroyed, and God is not yet "all in all." See Burnfield's argument in note 16b below.
↑ 15. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 187. Talbott argues: "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."
↑ 16. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 384–85. Manis notes that "the most plausible interpretation" is that "the lake of fire will consume and thus destroy the death in us." He and Talbott agree on this point, though Manis does not follow Talbott to the universalist conclusion.
↑ 16b. David Burnfield, A Defense of Biblical Universalism: A Biblical Response to James B. De Young's Book "Exposing Universalism", ch. "The Lake of Fire." Burnfield asks: "Are we to believe that somehow there will be no more death while the majority are suffering an unending death? Would that not be an eternal paradox?" He notes that Paul states "all who died in Adam (which includes all without exception) will be made alive in Christ, the Last Adam, thereby destroying death forever" (1 Cor 15:22, 26). The lake of fire, as the "second death," must therefore itself be destroyed, since "the last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor 15:26; Rev 21:4).
↑ 16c. Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. 6. Beauchemin writes: "Re. 20:14 defines the 'lake of fire' as both the 'second death' and 'death and Hades cast into it.' Death cast into fire is the death of death; the last enemy destroyed!" He draws on Romans 6:4 and 2 Corinthians 5:17 to argue that the fire consumes the dross and brings about new life and new creation.
↑ 17. Revelation 21:24–27; 22:1–2, 17. For the full treatment of the open gates, the healing of the nations, and the still-open invitation, see Chapter 14.
↑ 18. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 186–87. Talbott reasons that "outside" the city is only the lake of fire, so the kings of the earth who enter the New Jerusalem must come from the lake, having been cleansed. "Something like that must happen in the lake of fire to enable the kings of the earth and others to enter the city from the only possible position outside its gates, and that something is surely repentance and a thorough cleansing."
↑ 19. The phrase eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn appears in Revelation 1:6, 18; 4:9–10; 5:13; 7:12; 10:6; 11:15; 15:7; 22:5 in addition to 14:11 and 20:10. Most of these clearly refer to things that endure without end (God's life, God's reign). See Beale, The Book of Revelation, 762–63.
↑ 20. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 137. Parry's honesty here is worth noting: he concedes the "strong impression" of endless duration, but argues that the phrase is "compatible with a limited, though very long, duration" and must be read in the context of Revelation's own internal logic.
↑ 21. On the meaning of aiōnios and the age-words, see Chapter 18. On the promise that God will be "all in all," see Chapter 5.
↑ 22. David Powys, 'Hell': A Hard Look at a Hard Question (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 372, cited in Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 137. Powys observes that 20:14–15 and 21:8 say nothing about the humans in the lake being "tormented day and night forever and ever"; that phrase applies only to the devil, the beast, and the false prophet in 20:10.
↑ 22b. On the significance of "their part" (meros) and "according to their works" as indicators of measured judgment, see Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. 5: "These are having their 'part' which harmonizes perfectly with 'according to works,' but is totally inconsistent with infinite penalty. For how can what is infinite be 'part' of something greater?" On the "until" language, see Burnfield, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, ch. "The Lake of Fire": "On two occasions, when speaking of Gehenna fire, Jesus said that they would not get out of there 'until' they had paid their debt (Matt 5:26; 18:34). By saying 'until,' He rules out any concept of unending fiery torment or extermination." George Sidney Hurd makes the same observation in Extermination or Restoration? A Restorationist's Response to Annihilationism, ch. "The Lake of Fire and Brimstone," noting that "their part" speaks of a measured judgment, while "forever and ever" as commonly translated would speak of an unmeasured one, creating an internal contradiction that the age-language (eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn = "into the ages of the ages") resolves.
↑ 23. For the full development of the purifying-fire and divine-presence models of judgment, see Chapter 17. The model draws on Parry, Baker, Manis, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition.
↑ 24. Sharon Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You've Been Taught about God's Wrath and Judgment (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 112–13. Baker traces the biblical connections between fire and God's presence through Deuteronomy 4:24, Exodus 3:2–3, Daniel 7:9–11, Ezekiel 1:4, Hebrews 12:29, and others.
↑ 25. Baker, Razing Hell, 143–44. Baker notes the overlap between the Greek noun theion (sulfur/brimstone) and the adjective theion (divine), and the ancient Greek use of sulfur for purification and temple dedication.
↑ 25b. Hronich, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. "Fire and Sulfur." On limnē as "pool" or "pond" rather than "lake," see Strong's Concordance, s.v. limnē (G3041); and Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. limnē. The Wycliffe Bible of 1382 renders limnē as "pool" in all six occurrences in Revelation (e.g., "the pool of fier," Rev 20:15), as does the Douay-Rheims Bible. The more common New Testament word for a large body of water is thalassa. On the ancient refining process, Hronich explains: "From antiquity sulfur was added to the impure gold upon reaching the molten state. In the fire the impurities and most other baser metals unite with the sulfur, being converted into sulfides which float to the surface as dross and are then removed." See also Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. "The Lake of Fire and Brimstone," who develops the same point and argues that "the apocalyptic lake of fire and sulfur is the divine crucible which will serve to refine the hearts of even His most obstinate enemies."
↑ 26. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 117. Parry presents a table showing Revelation's consistent pattern of judgment followed by salvation: 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. He calls this "of considerable hermeneutical significance."
↑ 27. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 137–38, citing Edward W. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 193. On the beast as a non-individual symbol, see the Danielic background in Daniel 7:17 and Revelation 17:7–12. John Stott concurs: see David L. Edwards and John R. W. Stott, Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 318.
↑ 28. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 186. Talbott links the "lake of fire" with God's "holy presence" and notes that Revelation 14:10 says the torment is "in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb," not in a place of separation from God.
↑ 29. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, 385–88. Manis notes the "striking connection" between Daniel 7:10 (a river of fire flowing from the throne) and Revelation 22:1 (the river of the water of life flowing from the throne). Both proceed from the same source. On the "sea of glass glowing with fire" (Rev 15:2), see Manis, 388.
↑ 30. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 13, "The Apostles on Judgment and Hell," pp. 208–35. The principle that a symbol's reality is at least as severe as the symbol is valid, but it does not determine the kind of severity. The severity may be the total and decisive destruction of evil rather than the endless torment of persons. De Young's argument about the successive judgments not leading to repentance comes from his reading of Revelation 9:20–21 and 16:9, 11, 21, in which he notes that "the refusal to repent is even more entrenched and mentioned more frequently than ever" as the judgments escalate. He asks: "Does this not suggest that the wicked are placed in a frame of thinking and doing which becomes more and more hardened age after age after age?" The question is powerful. But it rests on the assumption that the judgments within the present order reveal what happens in the final, eschatological judgment, when God is unveiled and death itself is destroyed. The church's own theology of the final judgment (the beatific vision, the full unveiling of Christ) distinguishes the final encounter from every penultimate one.
↑ 30b. Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Part II. Hart writes: "I really do not think one can make sense of [Revelation] according to any simple division between history and eternity, or between time and time's ending, despite all its extravagant apocalyptic imagery. . . . The whole book is to my mind an intricate and impenetrable puzzle, one whose key vanished long ago along with the particular local community of Christians who produced it." He adds: "We delude ourselves if we imagine that—across a distance of two millennia—we could hope to grasp even a shadow of a fragment of its intended message." Hart does not dismiss Revelation's theological import; he warns against the confidence with which any party claims to extract a single clear doctrine from it.
↑ 30c. On the refiner's reading of the lake of fire, see Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, ch. 5. Beauchemin cites Charles Pridgeon, president and founder of the Pittsburgh Bible Institute: "The original idea of basanizo is 'to put to the test by rubbing on a touchstone,' to test some metal that looked like gold to find whether it was real or not. . . . Sulphur [brimstone] was sacred to the deity among the ancient Greeks; and was used to fumigate, to purify, to cleanse and consecrate to the deity. . . . To any Greek, or any trained in the Greek language, a 'lake of fire and brimstone' would mean a 'lake of divine purification.'" See also Hronich, The Triumph of Mercy, ch. "Fire and Sulfur," who develops the case from TDNT and traces the refiner's process; and Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. "The Lake of Fire and Brimstone," who argues that "the apocalyptic lake of fire and sulfur is the divine crucible which will serve to refine the hearts of even His most obstinate enemies, bringing about the restoration of all in the coming ages, to the praise of the glory of His grace."
↑ 30d. Burnfield, A Defense of Biblical Universalism, ch. "The Lake of Fire," responding to De Young, Exposing Universalism, 59–60. De Young argues: "The lake of fire continues to exist (21:8) after God makes all things new (21:5). It continues on forever." Burnfield replies: (1) "The book of Revelation is not written in chronological order so it cannot be determined whether or not any event is prior to another just because it was mentioned first"; (2) Jesus declared "He was making all things new (present tense). The new creation is a process which began with the resurrection and continues until absolutely all has been made new—not all except for the Lake of Fire and the majority of mankind"; and (3) "The Lake of Fire is called the 'second death.' The last enemy to be destroyed by Christ is death. (1 Cor 15:26) Therefore, Christ's reign in which He makes all new must continue until both the first and the last death have been forever destroyed."
↑ 30e. Michael J. McClymond, The Devil's Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), V 2, pp. 963–64. McClymond critiques Parry's Revelation interpretation at length. He argues that Parry "misses the representative universalism of the book of Revelation, where we never read that God saves 'every nation' but saves people 'from every nation' (Rev. 7:9; cf. 5:9)." On the "forever and ever" texts, McClymond notes that Parry "proposes another novel idea to the effect that 'the smoke will rise forever as a memorial long after the punishment itself has ceased,'" and objects: "We end up then with two different kinds of smoke: punishment smoke and memorial smoke." McClymond's broader charge is that universalist exegesis of Revelation "preserves universalism by adding ancillary hypotheses to the reading of the texts," like Ptolemaic epicycles. The comparison is memorable but ultimately cuts both ways. The traditional reading adds its own ancillary hypothesis when it insists that the same "nations" and "kings of the earth" shown under judgment earlier in Revelation are, at 21:24–26, suddenly a different group of already-redeemed people with the same name.
↑ 31. On the use of Isaiah 34 in Revelation 14, see Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 131–37; and Beale, The Book of Revelation, 759–63. Beale notes the direct allusions to Isaiah 34:9–10 in Revelation 14:10–11.
↑ 32. On the internal coherence of Revelation's judgment and restoration visions, see Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 115–46. For the open gates and the healing of the nations, see Chapter 14.
↑ 33. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 13, pp. 208–35. De Young argues that Rev 22:11 "probably means that people will never change from this time forward. It asserts that the righteous and holy continue to be such, and those who do wrong continue to do wrong and the filthy continue to be such. This verse is a powerful testimony to eternal, unchanging destinies." He adds that "the very last picture that John gives us of the new heavens and new earth and the holy city reveals that the wicked are still outside (22:15)." The principle that a symbol's reality is at least as severe as the symbol is his, and it is valid; the dispute is whether that severity is punitive (endless torment of persons) or purgative (total destruction of evil). Compare the seven-headed beast (Rev 13:1), which symbolizes a terrible political reality without being a literal multi-headed creature. The lake of fire, in the same symbolic register, symbolizes a terrible judgment without being a literal, geographically located lake of fire.
↑ 34. On the destruction vocabulary and the question of whether destruction targets the person or the evil in the person, see Chapter 27.
↑ 35. Baker, Razing Hell, 143. Baker's full argument: "If death is destroyed, what's left? Life—eternally, in God—the only eternal one. As such, the lake of fire annihilates death and evil, restoring life as it burns away the wickedness and purifies the soul."
↑ 36. For the character of God as both consuming fire and perfect love, see Chapter 2. For the cumulative case and the conclusion, see Chapter 30. Baker's phrase captures the logic: "our alternative view of hell speaks of God's love as the most grueling judgment—judgment that brings repentance and reconciliation" (Razing Hell, 119).