The following excerpt is taken from What Every Christian Should Know About Satan. Order your copy in print, Kindle, or Audible versions here.

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When we consider the final destiny of Satan, demons, and the unrepentant wicked, at least two questions often arise. In this post, we briefly address both of them: Is hellfire literal? And, Is hell forever?

Is hellfire literal? 

We might ask: When Jesus and the New Testament writers depict hell, are we to take the lake of fire literally or figuratively? Godly scholars stand on both sides of the debate. Charles Spurgeon, for example, spoke of hell’s fire as real:

Now, do not begin telling me that that is metaphorical fire: who cares for that? If a man were to threaten to give me a metaphorical blow on the head, I should care very little about it; he would be welcome to give me as many as he pleased. And what say the wicked? “We do not care about metaphorical fires.” But they are real, sir – yes, as real as yourself. There is a real fire in hell, as truly as you have now a real body – a fire exactly like that which we have on earth in everything except this – that it will not consume, though it will torture you. You have seen the asbestos lying in the fire red hot, but when you take it out it is unconsumed. So your body will be prepared by God in such a way that it will burn forever without being consumed; it will lie, not as you consider, in metaphorical fire, but in actual flame.

William Crockett expresses a different view, one shared by such theologians as John Calvin and J. I. Packer:

Christians should never be faced with this kind of embarrassment – the Bible does not support a literal view of a burning abyss. Hellfire and brimstone are not literal depictions of hell’s fictions, but figurative expressions warning the wicked of impending doom.

Theologian Charles Hodge adds: 

There seems no more reason for supposing that the fire spoken of in Scripture is to be a literal fire, than that the worm that never dies is literally a worm. The devil and his angels who are to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, and whose doom the finally impenitent are to share, have no material bodies to be acted upon by elemental fire.

Wicked humans, however, do possess material bodies following their resurrection. So the fires of hell, whether literal or figurative, are designed to inflict torment on the whole person. 

It may help to remember that the Bible uses fire metaphorically many times. Daniel sees the throne of God in heaven as “flaming fire; its wheels were blazing fire” (Dan. 7:9). James describes the tongue as an appendage that “sets the course of life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell” (Jas. 3:6).

So, it may be that the Bible’s depiction of hell in such graphic terms is God’s way of explaining an indescribable place in language we can understand. Whether literal or metaphorical, the fires of hell are to be avoided at all costs, and the blood of Jesus is to be pleaded for forgiveness of sins while there is yet time.

Is hell forever?

Do hell’s inhabitants experience suffering without end? 

Anglican cleric John Stott, who wrote the influential book Basic Christianity, found the idea of eternal suffering in hell so repugnant that he rejected it in favor of annihilationism.

Those who embrace the idea of body and soul ceasing to exist after a time of punishment in hell point out that the “fire” and “worms” to which Jesus refers in Matthew 10:28 are indeed everlasting, but the body and soul are destroyed: “Don’t fear those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (emphasis added). 

Consider two observations. First, the rabbinic understanding of these terms is that the bodies and souls of the wicked are everlasting, not just the fires and worms.

Second, the term “destroy” in Matthew 10:28 does not mean annihilated. As Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon defines the word apollumi, it means “to be delivered up to eternal misery.” In every instance where the word apollumi is found in the New Testament, something other than annihilation is described. For example, people do not pass into nonexistence when they are “dying of hunger” (Luke 15:17), and wineskins don’t vanish into thin air when they burst and “are ruined” (Matt. 9:17). In each of these instances, New Testament writers use the term apollumi.

While rejecting annihilationism, other Christian leaders favor the idea of suffering in the afterlife as a prerequisite for heaven. This may be in hell, or in an intermediate state such as purgatory. Augustine, sometimes wrongly called “the father of purgatory,” was never completely convinced of the need for purging sins after death. Nevertheless, he conceded the possibility. He once wrote:

Of those who suffer temporary punishments after death, all are not doomed to those everlasting pains which are to follow that judgment; for to some … what is not remitted in this world is remitted in the next, that is, they are not punished with the eternal punishment of the world to come.

Put another way, Augustine seemed to believe there may be real, but temporary, punishment for those destined for heaven. Meanwhile, eternal punishment is reserved for the unsaved. 

Even so, Jesus’ teachings on “outer darkness,” “eternal fire,” and “eternal punishment” seem to support the concept of gehenna as a place of conscious, everlasting separation from God. There is no scriptural provision for temporal post-mortem punishment to pay off the debt owed an eternally holy God. Nor does there appear to be a temporary state of suffering for the adopted sons and daughters of God. 

The apostle Paul describes heaven – not purgatory, nor time in hell followed by heaven – as the intermediate state between death and resurrection for the follower of Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul describes two mutually exclusive states for Christians. While we are here on earth in our bodies, we are absent from the Lord. And when we are “away from the body,” we are “at home with the Lord” (5:8).

If there is an interim step between death and heaven, the Bible makes no mention of it, and we would do well to rest in the plainly stated promises of God’s Word. For those who die in the Lord, heaven can’t wait, nor should it. At the same time, Scripture offers no false hope for the unbeliever – no second chance. As the writer of Hebrews makes clear, “it is appointed for people to die once ​— ​and after this, judgment” (Heb. 9:27).

Next: The Goodness of Hell