In this morning’s Bible reading, the phrase “the day of wrath” stood
out to me. It is from this verse:
Because of your hardened and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for
yourself in the day of wrath, when God's
righteous judgment is revealed. (Romans 2:5 CSB17)
Anger is a very unpleasant emotion. Most human anger is unrighteous
anger, which is why the Bible tells us to get rid of it (Ephesians 4:31). But even in the rare cases when I think my
anger towards some injustice or evil was truly righteous anger, the emotion was
not pleasant. I wouldn’t want to stay angry forever.
Although God’s anger in entirely righteous, I don’t think anger feels
pleasant to God. God says, “I take no pleasure in the death of
the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11 CSB17). Jeremiah witnessed God’s wrath on Jerusalem.
In his lamentation, Jeremiah says about God, “. . . he does not
enjoy bringing affliction or suffering on mankind” (Lam. 3:33 CSB17).
We often think of how terrible eternal
torment would be for the unrighteous. But have you thought about how it would make
God feel to inflict such a punishment? A terrible consequence of interpreting the
Bible to teach eternal torment is that it results in a view where God is experiencing
anger forever. In this view, God is eternally engaged in an activity which
brings Him no pleasure and which He does not enjoy.
We all occasionally have to perform
unpleasant tasks. This will continue as long as we live in a fallen, imperfect
world. Because God loves us, it is not surprising that He reserves the most unpleasant
task of all for Himself. God wants everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter
3:9). But God must either allow evil to continue forever or eventually He must
destroy those who refuse to love His truth and repent. It makes sense to me
that God will carry out this unpleasant task in order to maintain justice and
cleanse the world from all evil. It does not make any sense to me that God
would want this necessary, but unpleasant, task of destroying the unrighteous
to involve a process that goes on forever.
I realize that sometimes the Bible uses the
word “day” in a non-literal way to refer to a period of time. And I understand
that with the Lord, a thousand years can be like a day. But I don’t think “the
day of wrath” refers to an eternity of wrath. Romans 2:5 is not the only verse
that indicates that God’s wrath is limited to a “day”:
Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth
will shake from its foundations at the wrath of the LORD of Armies, on the day of his burning anger. (Isaiah 13:13 CSB17)
Their silver and their gold will be unable to rescue them
on the day of the LORD 's wrath. The whole earth
will be consumed by the fire of his jealousy, for he will make a complete, yes,
a horrifying end of all the inhabitants of the earth. (Zephaniah 1:18 CSB17)
By the same word, the present heavens and earth are
stored up for fire, being kept for the day of judgment
and destruction of the ungodly. (2 Pet. 3:7 CSB17)
In the last verse quoted, notice that the “day of judgment” is
also the day of “destruction of the ungodly”. Due to the incorrect doctrine of
eternal torment, I think we often imagine that when the Bible speaks of “the
day of judgment” it is only referring to the act of declaring the unrighteous
guilty and of proclaiming their sentence. The execution of the sentence is then
thought to go on forever. However, based on 2 Peter 3:7 (and I think the Bible
in general supports this), it seems more accurate to view the “day of judgment”
as referring to the time when God both declares judgment and carries out the
sentence. This sentence ends in “the destruction of the ungodly.”
Let’s consider one more passage which teaches this same truth. The
most natural way to interpret “eternal destruction” is that it refers to destroying
the unrighteous in such a way that they will never again exist as conscious,
living people. It cannot refer to a process of destruction which goes on
forever because Paul tells us when
they will be destroyed:
They will pay the penalty of eternal destruction from the Lord's presence
and from his glorious strength on that day when
he comes to be glorified by his saints and to be marveled at by all those who
have believed, because our testimony among you was believed. (2 Thess. 1:9-10
CSB17)
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, and about
the brotherly debate between annihilationism (also called conditional
immortality) and eternal conscious torment, you may find these posts helpful:
Also, you may want to check out the very helpful Rethinking Hell website.
I do allow comments with views contrary to mine, but I expect such comments to interact with what I have written.
ReplyDeleteI have removed a comment which provided links to documents. The first of these documents is over 600 pages long. I don't have time to read it in depth. But skimming over it, it appears to promote some views which:
1. Have nothing directly to do with my post above.
2. I don't agree with at all.
The long paper does include some sections on hell. If the author of this paper wants to interact with my post above by making comments, rather he agrees with me or not, I'm open to that. But please refrain from posting links to documents promoting views contrary to this sight without at least seriously interacting with what I wrote.