But the big question is this – whose side is Scripture on? In order to defend eternal conscious punishment we will look at each of those three words.
Punishment
First, let’s ask, in relation to the fate of the lost, is there punishment for sin?
The idea of punishment has fallen on hard times. This is to be expected given popular cultural worldviews. On an atheistic worldview, the removal of God from people’s thinking has removed a foundation for affirming the objective reality of evil. That makes the idea of punishment hard to sustain.
Thinking like this has made a big difference to how those in authority view crime. Away back in 1981 the Chairman of Britain’s Police Federation said, “Long ago people in power stopped talking about the punishment of crime and began to talk of treatment, as if every young thug was sick and in need of a prescription from the chemist.”[1] So it seems like these notions of vengeance and punishment are outdated and we’ve all moved on. But have we really?
When people aren’t defending turf their attitudes and actions betray the fact that they do believe punishment is appropriate for evil. In 2015 there was the trial of Oskar Gröning, the so-called Accountant of Auschwitz. This man was responsible for crimes committed over seventy years before; he was an old man who hadn’t done any one any harm in all those years and was a danger to no one. He didn’t need locked away to keep society safe or as a deterrent. He didn’t need rehabilitated; he wasn’t going to commit those crimes again, yet every right-thinking person recognised that justice demanded this man be punished – he deserved it.
How often people complain about those who committed heinous crimes and never faced justice. Think of the outcry over Jimmy Saville. People aren’t saying, “He never went to prison to be rehabilitated”; they are complaining that he did those things and was never punished.
People are made in God’s image and, as Romans 2:15 tells us, they have the work of the law written on their hearts – they know that there is punishment for sin. Romans 1:32 tells us that those who commit the sins listed there know “the righteous judgment of God, that those who commit such things are worthy of death”. Conscience tells evil should be punished.
Scripture explicitly affirms what we intuitively recognise – there is punishment for sin. There is a Day of Judgement coming when people are going to be judged according to their works and punished accordingly:
“But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who ‘will render to each one according to his deeds’” (Romans 2:5,6).
“Anyone who has rejected Moses’ law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10:28,29).
“These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).
“And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).
Scripture is clear and unanimous – people in hell are undergoing punishment for their sins. What they are experiencing is not aimed at their repentance, and is not acting as a deterrent. It is the righteous retribution for the evil they have committed.
This affirms the dignity of humanity: what we do really matters. We are made in God’s image, made to represent Him, so when we do evil, we are guilty of serious crime. When God punishes people for sin, He is showing that He is not like that – these people who were made to represent Him have misrepresented Him, and He is condemning their behaviour.
Punishment is also an affirmation of God’s love. Some might think it is precisely the opposite, but think about this – if someone harms you, and nothing is done about it, what does that say about what God thinks about you?
The fact that there is punishment proclaims that you matter and what you do matters.
We should be glad that there is punishment. It would be an awful thing to think that God looks on all the evil, injustice and oppression in the world with indifference and is going to do nothing about it. But we should also be concerned that there is punishment. God isn’t going to overlook the evil in our own lives. This is why all of us need the salvation God has provided through Christ.
So, there is punishment. The next question to consider is this: Is there conscious punishment? That will be the subject of the next article.
[1] Quoted by John Blanchard in Whatever Happened to Hell?, Evangelical Press, 1993, p.147.
