Death, Destruction & Perish...

2026-04-22 by Steve Forkin

When `tradition` constantly demands you redefine terms that are simple to understand in plain English, something could be wrong with your method of interpretation

Death, Destruction & Perish - Do these words really mean that?

The topic of Hell and in particular the view called “Conditionalism” has caused a firestorm on the internet in the recent months. It was sparked off by a video interview between well known Evangelical actor Kirk Cameron & I believe his son. They merely began to question the nature of punishment in hell. They never suggested, there is no hell, or that the Bible is wrong about hell, they simply questioned what the majority of Evangelicals believe about hell today, namely the view that sinners will be tormented in hell for ever and never, never ending torment, as opposed to being destroyed in the fires of hell, after a period of torment, dependent on sins committed.

• It strikes me as odd that especially those in the camp of the various brands of Reformation theology cried out about even the very idea of simply asking a question about an established doctrine.

• The reformation itself was sparked off by Martin Luther simply raising his 95-Thesis’es on what were “well established” so-called Christian doctrines & practices of his day, one of them being the doctrine of purgatory. In those days the Roman Catholic position was “purgatory” was a biblical doctrine & it was wrong & heretical to even question the validity of this doctrine.

• YES the irony is palpable.

• Let’s define the three major views of hell for a moment:

• (a) Universalism – the idea that every person will be saved. The standard evangelical universalist, also believes in hell, but that hell is a place of torture - yes – but that torture has a purifying element and people will eventually get out of hell & enter heaven!

• (b) Eternal Conscious Torment – this is the idea that every human being has an immortal soul, that the saved will spend eternity in heaven but that the lost will spend an eternity in hell –>> They will be tormented forever and ever, never ending into all eternity. “Destruction, perish, die” is somewhat re-defined as eternally perishing & dying but never quite dying or perishing. Of cardinal importance here is that all humans will live forever - some in bliss with God – the others in torment in hell. {also in the presence of God - just his eternal fire}

• (c) Conditional Immortality – also known as “annihilationism”. Not to be confused with the view that you simply cease to exist when you be die {this I believe is the view of the JW’s concerning unrepentant sinners}. No all humans will be raised, & stand before God’s judgment. The saved will enter eternal life with Christ, the damned will face God’s wrath, and be cast into hell – yes – but the casting into hell (the bible calls this the second death) will be an execution – a very painful execution, no doubt there will be differences in the level of pain experienced due to the amount of sins committed, but ultimately every person who ends up in hell will be extinguished, they will DIE.

–>> The point of difference here between the ECT view and the Conditionalist is about the “length” of the punishment “FELT” – the Conditionalist also believes in eternal punishment. Death has eternal consequences. When scripture speaks of eternal death with scorn & shame – it’s important to work out who is the subject & who is the object of that shame.. (more on that later)

• From a Christian history perspective: The Early church had a fairly mixed view on Hell, with all three views presented by some of the well respected early church fathers, all the sources are in public domain – don’t take my word for it – search them yourself to be certain!

• The ECT view was the predominant view ever since Augustine…

A word of caution. By the time of the Reformation in the 15th/16th century, the Roman Catholic views of pretty much every doctrine in Christianity were in the near 100% majority… Luther almost stood alone against this towering might when it comes to the subject of “Justification by Faith alone in Christ alone”… That should at the very least give you pause not to conclude too quickly which side is the most true to scripture!

• A couple of years ago I came accross the work of Chris Date & Rethinking hell, and after watching a few debates on the subject my curiosity was sufficiently “raised”. I simply needed to know for myself. I spent the next year – yes it sounds a bit morbid to study hell for an entire year – studying the Bible on this subject & reading every theological book I could find, the best representatives on both sides of the subject.

• I eventually concluded that scripture demands the conditionalist view – literally every passage that I thought supported the ECT view actually supported the Conditionalist view better, and much more importantly there are many passages that rub solidly against the ECT view;

Ok, back to our subject for today: Death, Destruction and Perish

What do these terms mean in scripture - are we to take them in their plain English sense ?

To start we should return back to the beginning of scripture to see what happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam & Eve were given the death sentence for directly disobeying the only command God gave them.

Notice here that God did not tell them – eat of this tree & you will live forever being tormented in hell. It’s common in theology to claim that the Bible is a gradual unfolding of God’s plan of redemption. This, I believe, every sincere student of scripture will realise by reading the Bible cover to cover. But, the all important question we must ask is this:

• Is the continuing revelation - simply shedding more light on existing truth or a complete redefinition of truth?

• Imagine a murderer being given a “life” sentence, which usually in our day refers to somewhere between 15 and 25 years in jail. Upon arriving at the penitentiary, he is told this sentence is was only part of the story – the sentence is going to be much longer - not just 10 years, not even a 100 years or a 1000 years be he will be in jail forever. The jail staff have the power to keep him alive, he will never die, but never get out of jail, ever. No matter what your thoughts on this analogy relating to justice, set that aside for a moment and consider this analogy in light of the notion of “continuing revelation of scripture”.

• Is this what we mean by “continuing revelation”?

• Somehow, I think that God is consistent, in an ultimate sense. Everything he ever says is true, and therefore cannot be either contradictory, illogical or even inconsistent, yet we cannot escape the thought that “eternal conscious torment” is very much inconsistent with the pronounced judgment on Adam & Eve.

All of the books I have read on Hell, from the ECT stand point have a tendency to sweep over the Old Testament, claiming that very little about the subject of Hell is written there. They usually quote Daniel 12:2 & sometimes Isa 66:24, and leave it there, moving on to the New Testament that has a lot more to say on the subject.

• “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Dan 12:2)

• “And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” (Isa 66:24)

Theologian & author, Denny Burk in a recent round table discussion with Ray Comfort claimed: “The Bible teaches that all people are given a body fit for their destiny, Paul calls this an imperishable body”. Denny then quoted Dan 12:2 in favour of this idea. Using the language of 1 Cor 15 – imperishable bodies – he finally exclaimed “The same thing is going to happen to the damned!”.

Please do yourself the favour and read 1 Cor 15, the whole chapter. Paul at no point claims unbelieving sinners will be raised with imperishable bodies. This, I would suggest is barefooted tradition being imposed on the text of scripture!

Jesus said in John 5:29 “those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment”. Hence, all men will be raised, the saved will, as Paul said in 1 Cor 15, be raised with imperishable bodies to live with Christ forever. The damned will be raised too, but as Jesus said, they are raised to appear before God’s judgment!

Nowhere in any passage of scripture, are we told sinners will be raised imperishable. That is literally the opposite of Jesus warning in Matthew 10:28: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell”. Yes, we are to fear him [God] who not only has the power to kill the body, but also has the power to destroy the soul! Any idea that the soul is unkillable, defacto immortal, is literally the opposite of this passage!

When the demons cry out in Mark 1 “have you come to destroy us?” – the tradition of some is so strong that they re-invent the meaning of destroy as “judge us ahead of time”…. (Yet another claim made by Denny Burk in that round table discussion). If I am sounding a little sarcastic, please forgive me. I am sure Denny has no ulterior motives nor is he being insincere, he is just wrong, and frankly I think the reason for him being so wrong is just that his tradition has been elevated so high, that it overrides the ability to see the woods for all the trees!

• Back to Daniel 12:2. “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. “

Everlasting contempt – nothing in this passage supports the ECT view. To support an ECT rendering of this passage it would need to say, and “some will rise to live forever feeling shame & contempt”. Please notice the use of “subject & object”.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the language of the afterlife in the Old Testament

• To begin, it’s good to get our bearings and have a look some of the amazing language used about the righteous in the Psalms. Talk for example Ps 34:8-22. I am quoting here in full so you get the full picture. This, dear reader is for you, if you believe in Christ!

• “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”

• “Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack!”

• “The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.”

• “Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.”

• “What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good?”

• “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.”

• “Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”

• “The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.”

• “The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth.”

• “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.”

• “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

• “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.”

• “He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.”

• “Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned.”

• “The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.”

In stark contrast, God has much to say about the fate of sinners in the Psalms. Far from Daniel 12 being the only reference for hell and the afterlife in Old Testament language, the Psalms are littered with very graphic language. Some of the Psalms wax quite poetic, and we must not misuse the genre. The important question I have is this: What image are these declarations in the Psalms portraying?

Is it a picture of the afterlife for the sinner, where he or she will be kept alive in a place of torment & pain for ever and ever, quite literally never ending pain. Remember please, one must be alive to experience pain. It is an oxymoron to pretend that one is dead while experiencing pain & suffering. Or, do these statements evoke the picture of an final end, even if a painful end?

• Exerpts from Psalms 37 + 50 + 58 – please read them in full to get the whole picture

  • “cut off”
  • “wicked will be no more”
  • “sword shall enter his own heart”
  • “arms of the wicked broken”
  • “the wicked will perish”
  • “like smoke they vanish away”
  • “transgressors shall altogether be destroyed”
  • “tear you apart, with none to deliver”
  • “vanish like water that runs away”
  • “like the snail who dissolves into slime”
  • “like the stilborn child who never sees the sun”
  • “ablaze.. may he sweep them away”

The OT speaks abundantly about the fate of the wicked and it all sounds very much like Conditionalism to me… isn’t it any wonder that those in the ECT camp never quote these verses ?

The Word Destroy in the New Testament

The all important verse in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 10:28

• “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Mt 10:28

Words often carry a range of meanings, generally known as the term “semantic range”. Regardless of how many different meanings a term has, the number one rule of interpretation is this. The immediate context determines the meaning. We don’t get to import the meaning from a different context into the verse here just because the plain reading of the verse does not say what we want it to say.

Well known, Theoligian DA Carson, in his book “Exegetical Fallacies” draws our attention to this very matter: “Unwarranted adoption an expanded semantic field: The fallacy in this instance lies in the supposition that the meaning of a word in a specific context is much broader than the context itself allows.” Carson calls this the “Illegitimate Totality Transfer” fallacy.

The fallacy basically happens when we import the semantic range of a word into the context in question, where this is unwarranted! That appears to be the position of the ECT camp when they try to explain the meaning of this verse, Mt 10:28

In the roundtable discussion, Denny Burk used the example of “When my son first got his license he destroyed our car”. The car is no longer fit for purpose, but it has not ceased to exist. The problem with this example is that it does not work in favour of the ECT view. Firstly, the conditionalist never claims that humans will simply “cease to exist” whether before or even after God’s judgment. No, sinners will be raised, to be judged by God and then thrown in the lake of fire, where they will experience a tormenting & painful death, no doubt with differing degrees of pain. Nonetheless, in the end they will be “burned up & destroyed” by the fire of God’s just judgment.

If, per Denny’s analogy the punishment of sin is to destroy the human being by rendering him unfit for purpose, surely that would have to mean remove life from the human being, else every human being who is suffering sickness & pain right now would also be “unfit for purpose” which I am sure Denny would deny.

In the ECT view “destroy both body and soul in hell” means: Giving the human a continued life of pain and suffering forever, that entails never to die and never to be destroyed. Please for the purpose of this exercise, set your views on hell aside for the moment. Surely to claim – as the ECT view does – that the sinner will have a “terrible life in hell”, some form of life nonetheless, is the bold faced opppsite of the words of Jesus?

This is why I believe, the Eternal Conscious Torment view is a tradition that has been elevated to the level of scripture, whereby scriptures that don’t fit the view are bent and twisted to make them fit, like trying to force a triangle through a square hole.

Think about it for a moment:

• When a person is in pain – do we have the right to say that person is dead or destroyed?

• When a person is being tortured by criminals – do we say that person is dead or destroyed?

Often in this debate, the term “ruin” which is part of the semantic range of the word translated “destroy” in Mt 10:28, as if to claim that we should rightly interpret it as “fear him who has the power to ruin both body and soul in hell”. Firstly, not a single English version of the New Testament has been translated this way, giving us good reason to reject this notion. Secondly, even if word sometimes leans towards “ruin”, such as Romans 14:15, it does not there mean ruin as an eternally ongoing never ending ruin, either.

Far from that the most common meaning of the word translated “destroy” in Mt 10:28 is just that, of a temporal, death or destroy.

Denny again quoted Romans 14:15 - as evidence that appolumi does not mean what the plain context says it does most of the time, even if Romans in 14 it clearly does not mean “destroy” in the sense of “death”) as we just learned it is wrong to IMPORT that meaning into places where it plainly does not mean that!

The near context, from the Gospel of Matthew alone should suffice to demonstrate the most common use of the word:

• (1) Mt 2:13 “Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him”

• (2) Mt 21:41 “He will put those wretches to a miserable death”

• (3) Mt 22:7 “and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city”

• (4) Mt 27:20 “the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus”

• EVERY single time the term is used in this gospel it does not say what the ECT camp claims!

Then we have also have several uses in the gospel of Mark:

• Mk 1:24 “Have you come to destroy us?” (The demons ask…. Denny Burk again presupposed the knowledge of the book Revelation, that speaks of the fate of the Devil in chapter 20 – and we haven’t even asked what that chapter actually means – but the ECT pre-suppposes the idea that demons will live forever therefore it cannot mean real destruction here in Mark.

• But, who is to say that demons do live forever or that they know they live forever? What the context naturally suggests to us, is that Christ has the power to destroy them and they know it, irrespective of whether he actually will do so in the future. All else is being read into the passage!

• Mk 3:6 “The pharisees… held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him”

• Mk 9:22 “[the demon]… And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him”

• Mk 11:18 “chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him”

Again the gospel of Mark establishes beyond a doubt that the term “destroy” is almost always used in the plain English sense. That’s so far in two gospels. For the sake of time - I will leave you to study the other gospels.

• Before we go, just one amazing example in the Gospel of Luke:

• Lk 6:9 “And Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?””

Here we have a perfect example of the term apolumi where it is even juxtaposed against the term life… There is simply no way to get around this. I would suggest the ECT camp does with this term, what the pharisees did with the Sabbath - they invented a completely new meaning for the term Sabbath & taught their disciples this new meaning - rather than accepting what Moses said about the Sabbath.

I would humbly suggest that the ECT camp has fallen into the trap that Jesus explained like this:

“You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men + thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:13)

I will leave you with a quote from the “New International Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew” by RT France. The quote relates to both Mt 10:28 and Mt 25:46.

On Mt 10:28 he says: “That is all that human opponents can touch [the body], whereas both body and soul are subject to God’s power and therefore also to his judgment. Under that judgment it is not only the body but the true life of the person which is liable to destruction in Hell. In this passage it is spoken of as a place of destruction, not of continuing punishment.”

He further writes, commenting on Mt 25:46:

“This is however, the only time we meet the phrase ‘Eternal Punishment’ in Matthew or indeed the whole NT. (then he quotes several passages) All these passages raise the question whether this fire is regarded as destroying and thuse annihilating those consigned to it or as a continuing agony of conscious punishment. This is usually on the assumption that “eternal” is a synonym for “everlasting”. That assumption depends more on modern English usage than on the meaning of “aionios”, which we have seen to be related to the concept of t rhe two ages. ‘Eternal Punishment’, so understood, is punishment which relates to the age to come rather than punishment which continues forever so that the term does not in itself favour one side or the other, in the annihilationist debate. Insofar as the metaphor of fire many be pressed, however it suggests destruction rather than punishment. We have also noted the use of the verb ‘destroy’ in Mt 10:28. these pointers suggest that an annihilationist theology (sometimes described as ‘Conditional Immortality’) does more justice to Matthew’s language in general, and if so the sense of ‘eternal punishment’ here will not be ‘punishment which goes on forever’ but punishment which has eternal consequences. The loss of eternal life through being destroyed by fire!”