| The
Bible Describes Hell
There are three words translated
“Hell” in Scripture:
Gehenna (Greek): The place of punishment (Matthew
5:22,29; 10:28; and James
3:6)
Hades (Greek): The abode of the dead (Matthew
11:23; 16:18; Luke
16:23; Acts
2:27)
Sheol (Hebrew): The grave (Psalm
9:17; 16:10)
There are those who accept that
Hell is a place of punishment, but believe that
the punishment is to be annihilated—to cease
conscious existence. They can’t conceive
that the punishment of the wicked will be conscious
and eternal. If they are correct, then a man like
Adolph Hitler, who was responsible for the deaths
of millions, is being “punished” merely
with eternal sleep. His fate is simply to return
to the non-existent state he was in before he
was born, where he doesn’t even know that
he is being punished.
However, Scripture paints a different
story. The rich man who found himself in Hell
(Luke
16:19-31) was conscious. He was able to feel
pain, to thirst, and to experience remorse. He
wasn’t asleep in the grave; he was in a
place of “torment.” If Hell is a place
of knowing nothing or a reference to the grave
into which we go at death, Jesus’ statements
about Hell make no sense. He said that if your
hand, foot, or eye causes you to sin, it would
be better to remove it than to “go into
Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:
where their worm dies not, and the fire is not
quenched” (Mark
9:43-48).
The Bible refers to the fate of
the unsaved with such fearful words as the following:
Revelation
14:10,11 tells us the final, eternal destiny
of the sinner: “He shall be tormented with
fire and brimstone...the smoke of their torment
ascended up for ever and ever: and they have no
rest day or night."
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