Today’s topic is something that’s hard to talk about, but I think important to talk about. What is the final fate of the wicked? Is it annihilationism? Is it conscious eternal torment? That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. But before we get into the episode, make sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you never miss one of these dangerous conversations. Dad. Wow.
James, I mean, you just you’re diving into the spiritual deep end of the pool, talking about divine wrath. What made you think of this topic? Uh, it was just kind of a topic that came up due to me like reading the Bible and and kind of I think it came from really the the conversation we had about degrees of sin and how it would be worse for some on the day of judgment than others. Right.
Right. Jesus said that kind of snowballed into what is the day of judgment and what does that look like for the wicked? Yeah. And and there’s so many so many stories particularly in the Old Testament with Habach and the Psalms with David talking about how the wicked seem to prosper and how they seem to get away with stuff and they’re healthy and they’re doing all these things.
Where is God? Why are things happen and the good guys seem to suffer and and then when it comes to hell, what kind of punishment do they actually get? And the it’s it’s it’s very it’s very sobering and very very bleak and it brings up so many questions. It’s also a question that people don’t really want to dive into. I know that I really don’t enjoy thinking about hell. Oh. Oh, gee, I wonder why. like the final fate of the wicked.
But I think it’s also equally like important as the good feelood stories in the Bible and good messages of love and peace and forgiveness and joy and those things to understand the personhood of God and the reality of the world that we live in and understanding the truth about the future of where we’re going.
Pastor Francis Chan, um, Southern California, um, friends back in the day, uh, when we were there and when when he was there, wrote a book called Erasing Hell because it is a trend to in churches to not talk about hell. It’s an uncomfortable subject. And in fact, it’s one of the doctrines of the Bible that atheists love to point out as one of the reasons why they could never believe in the God of the Bible.
It’s the God who creates the eternal barbecue for sinners. Yes. And I think that if we want to be good representatives of Christ, we have to know him. And the only way we know him fully is by diving into the scriptures and understanding all of the aspects of it. That’s right. Not perfectly, but like increasingly as time goes on. I like I like to think of it as as uh God writing an autobiography.
It’s it’s about um you Jeremiah and it’s the book about King David and Jesus and others. But this is ultimately God’s word revealing himself to us. Otherwise, we’d have no way of understanding the deeper magic behind the ways of God. So, let’s let’s dive in. What do you got? Yeah.
So, I think the concept that I’ve heard most of my life is that hell is eternal and it’s essentially eternal conscious torment, right? that the wicked will go into the lake of fire and perish and be tortured essentially forever. Right. And I hadn’t really questioned that because I wasn’t all that interested. Yeah. Nobody wants to go there. Let’s just avoid it all together.
