The Second Death
One of the hardest things people have with Calvinism is that it means there are some people that go to Hell and suffer forever and that there is simply no hope for them. Let me tell you right now that this is simply not true.
Despite your church experience, the Bible doesn’t tell us a lot about Hell. One of the clearest places is in Revelation.
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. 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: 11-15
The Second Death
Firstly, if you notice, going to Hell is referred to as “the second death.” The first death is the ending of the body. Doesn’t it make sense that the second death is the ending of the soul? So this, to me, indicates that this is a termination and not an ongoing torture.
History of the Bible
Before I take on the second part of this, I need to explain a little history of the Bible.
When it was decided that the King James Version would be translated from the original texts, Ancient Hebrew (the language of the Old Testament) and Koine Greek (the language of the New Testament) had gone through a period where no one, even scholars, spoke them. For this reason, don’t ever let anyone talk down to you for mispronouncing a Greek or Hebrew word from the Bible. The fact is, no one knows how to pronounce these words. There are some learned opinions on this that people argue with each other.
In addition, there were some Greek words that they just didn’t know when they translated the King James Version. They guessed at these words as best they could.
Around the time of the US Civil War, a document dump called “The Papyri” was discovered outside of Alexandria, Egypt. These were business letters, love letters, and other forms of day-to-day communications. Up until then, the only documents in Greek that had survived were highly educated essays.
So the Greek used in the writings of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle were High Greek–think about the language used in doctoral dissertations and other college level reading. They discovered that the dialect of Koine Greek, or street Greek was what the Bible was written in.
Eternal vs. Everlasting
Two of these words were the Greek words aidios and aionios. Aidios should be translated everlasting, meaning time without end, Aionios should be translated “eternal,” meaning outside of time. In fact, all of the translations I’ve seen since then have translated these words in this way.
During the translation of the KJV, they used these words interchangeably, which is why these words in English are used interchangeably in English. Doctrines were created based on this translation are, therefore, flawed.
If you carefully study a modern translation of the Bible, you will see that the word everlasting is always used to refer to the fire itself, to the suffering of the devil and his angels. The word eternal is always used to describe the suffering of human sinners.
Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. … And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Matthew 25:41,46
The conclusion that I draw from this is that the devil will suffer punishment forever in a hell that burns forever. Sinners will be sent to this place in a place outside of time and will be destroyed as a kind of “soul incinerator.”
This is supported by all major modern translations of the Bible, but no one has ever gone back and revisited their doctrines when we found this stuff out.