To put it plainly, it is nonsensical that a God who is love would set up a mechanism in which a physical body could be burned in a physical fire and survive for eternity. Fire “destroys” living matter. (Yes, matter cannot be created or destroyed but is converted, but the result is essentially the accelerated entropy of the living being.) A person’s flesh and other vital organs will, naturally, turn to ash when set on fire. If hot enough, a physical fire will instantly kill or even vaporize a body. But even a small flame will destroy flesh and eventually be deadly unless there is medical intervention. This is the physical reality that God created for humans.
If true, then, for a person being immolated to continue living forever, God would need to engage in an ongoing, never-ending miracle that works against His own established physical laws. Therefore, when Christians embrace the idea of eternal hellfire as a form of God’s justice while simultaneously believing that God’s universe is orderly and constantly upheld by Him, but that He would then reverse the natural order to keep someone alive in hellfire forever, they could be said to be in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Furthermore, it would need to be a highly specific miracle if pain were the purpose of the fire—the atoms and cells in the nerve-endings would have to be sustained by God continuously, or God would have to establish immortality (not to mention other superhuman traits—such as accelerated self-healing) in beings whom He plainly says will not ever possess it. God alone, the Bible says, has immortality, and the apostle Paul says that immortal bodies will be given to the righteous only at the Second Coming.
And what is the natural purpose of pain? Why did God program pain into our nervous systems? It seems apparent that pain is designed to warn the body of danger so that what is causing the pain will be ceased—which, in turn, will help end the pain itself. That is, pain is designed to prevent further harm and pain.
Therefore, we could say that pain’s nature is disciplinary and not punitive. For pain to continue after healing has occurred would be, from an engineering perspective, pointless.
Anyone who has experienced even the briefest exposure to flames will tell you that the pain is overwhelming and that one cannot simultaneously experience being on fire and still act in a thoughtful manner. After a time, no one would understand or even care why they were on fire. The natural response for such a person would be to focus entirely on the fact they are on fire. They would have one goal—to end their suffering. Constant torture would also create an entirely new personality—one that is thoughtless and incapable of analyzing their past or future. There would be no thought of God, Satan, sin, or righteousness—only suffering and pain. Thus, God would also have to uphold an eternally immolating person’s psyche and sanity for eternity for them to understand and process what’s happening to them.
Interestingly, in terms of known physical laws and consequences that God designed into the creation, the end of pain would be the natural result of an act of immolation—the pain would end because fire destroys nerve-endings and the brain’s pain receptors (and eventually the vital organs, etc.), and eventually cause death. In order to cause eternal pain, God would have to sustain miracle upon miracle to defy the natural order of His own creation at all times. Wouldn’t only something evil exploit the body’s natural use of pain in order to inflict unending pain? Such an abuse of God’s clear natural order by a human is rightly regarded as exploitative and, thus, evil. So what would it say about God for Him to design into a perfect universe the capacity for endless suffering by fire when fire, in fact, would, purely by well-understood natural consequences, cause the end of suffering?
Some could suggest, then, that maybe our “eternal, ethereal souls” have some capacity to experience pain so that our bodies don’t have to be sustained by God—but most Christians’ understanding of pain and suffering in hellfire is physically based. The premise of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is based on the physicality of the carbon-based human body. But let’s say for the moment that the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus is the cosmic reality and that the soul can experience thirst and pain and suffering. But this also doesn’t make sense. If an ethereal soul can experience thirst, hunger, and pain, what is the purpose of the physical body? There is indeed no purpose for the physical body if the ethereal soul can do all the same things a physical body does. Furthermore, what is the mechanism of pain in an ethereal, non-physical body?
As seen in Eden, God established a physical reality for human existence. We were designed to be flesh and blood and to produce offspring after our own kind. He set forth physical laws that would govern human existence. A part of those laws is that fire “destroys” organized living matter. The implication would be that God created a universe in which He would have to arbitrarily reverse the laws of nature for the sole purpose of burning someone alive forever. This is regarded as God’s justice and that His ways are mysterious because such behavior by a human would be rightly regarded as evil. Indeed, the Hebrews were commanded to put sinners to death—not to torture them, then heal them, and then continue to torture them. Thus, in light of everything the Bible says about justice, saying that eternal hellfire is a quality of God’s justice could be regarded only as the response of someone in a state cognitive dissonance.
Many Bible texts can be used to justify the belief that there is a place in which human beings will be burned by hellfire forever (day and night, forever and ever). At the same time, many Bible’s texts can be used to justify the belief that eternal death is the actual end of unrepentant sinners (the wages of sin is death, everlasting life vs. perishing, with death and perishing both meaning to fall into an eternally unconscious state). When faced with such a discrepancy, it is useful to turn to God’s universe to understand His nature and how it speaks to human reality; that is, God’s design can help us understand His Word. In this case, the best conclusion is that hellfire is meant to cause death, not eternal pain, and that interpretations of texts that seem to indicate literal eternal torture should be regarded as incorrect and inappropriate, as symbols or hyperbole, or otherwise reconsidered by the Christian church.
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