Yesterday I attempted to answer the objection to annihilationism that it doesn’t satisfy justice. I wanted to move on, but there’s more to say about this.
But this strikes me as a philosophical way of justifying an idea that is otherwise extremely unpalatable: God tortures people that he claims to have once loved. And he does it eternally. But at least he is justified in doing so because he is so holy.
It’s not Romans 6:23 – “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Why doesn’t Paul take the opportunity here to lay out the awful truth in clear terms: “For the wages of sin is eternal torment, but the gift of God is eternal life”?
What does “the wages of sin is death” even mean if everyone – the wicked and the redeemed – live eternally?
If everyone does live eternally, wouldn’t it be clearer if all of the New Testament – starting with Jesus – instead spoke of the two afterlife options in terms of “eternal pleasure or eternal pain”?
As Paul’s wording stands, it sounds like the opposite of eternal life is … death. Did he make a mistake?
Or by “death” does Paul mean what we commonly take “death” to mean?
Here’s a similar question: Why does Jesus soft peddle eternal torment to Nicodemus?
In John chapter 3, the most famous evangelistic passage in all of Scripture, Jesus explains,
But should he have added, “And just so we’re clear, Nicodemus, when I say ‘perish’, I don’t just mean ‘cease to be’. I mean ‘tortured for millions of billions of years’, so I would suggest you believe in me”?
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* I see the same approach among Calvinists who want to argue in favor of Determinism/Predestination. If Determinism is how the universe works, I would expect Scripture to teach it clearly, unapologetically, and repeatedly. Instead, Calvinists put a lot of weight on a handful of verses they interpret as deterministic and then are forced to explain away numerous passages that make it clear that humans actually have free will. But do other passages that don’t line up with their assumptions get acknowledged? No, they get run through the Calvinist filter.
I am starting to think I may have been doing the same thing with my assumptions about Hell throughout my life.
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