Many have noted that the eternal dwelling place for believers in Jesus Christ is not heaven, but the new earth. Revelation 21-22 makes this clear. Heaven is where believers go if they die before the Rapture. But that is not our eternal home.
Many have also noted, though I am just now catching on, that it is not quite right to speak of hell as the place where unbelievers will spend eternity. I’m writing a book on the ten most misunderstood words in the Bible. One of those words is hell. I had intended to write about the wrong views about the nature of the torment. While I do discuss that, I also came to see that the word hell is not normally used of the lake of fire, especially if by hell we mean Sheol (OT) and Hades (NT). Sheol/Hades is the place where the unbelieving dead are being held until the Great White Throne Judgment (Rev 20:11-15). But it is not the place where they will spend eternity. Sheol/Hades is often translated as hell. Thus hell is really the place where unbelievers are now. But hell is not where unbelievers will spend eternity.
Now the situation is a bit complicated because the Greek term Gehenna (used only 12 times in the NT and only once outside of the Synoptic Gospels) is also translated as hell and Gehenna may well be, at least in some passages, a synonym for the lake of fire. I say that because the references to Gehenna are to a place where future torment will occur, not to a place where torment is going on now. However, it may well be, as Dr. Jody Dillow argues, that Gehenna refers, at least at times, to future temporal judgment. In any case, since hell is more commonly used to refer to Sheol/Hades, we probably should not call Gehenna hell, but simply transliterate it as Gehenna.
The suffering of unbelievers now in Sheol/Hades, explained briefly by the Lord in Luke 16:19-31, is not necessarily identical to the torment that will occur in the lake of fire.
It should be noted that we have very little in Scripture that tells us what the torment in Sheol/Hades is like now and even less to tell us what the torment in the lake of fire will be like. If we are to teach the Word and not teach medieval concepts, we should back off from acting like we know precisely what the torment in the lake of fire will be like.
I am not at this point going to walk through various passages on this topic. You’ll need to wait for the book. But I can prove from Scripture that we know there will be torment and that it will be everlasting and conscious. We know the torment will be worse for some than for others. And I can show from Scripture that we do not know precisely how that torment will compare to torments experienced in this life and we do not know exactly what the lake of fire will be (a planet, the center of the new earth, a separate universe, etc.).
Some think that preaching about what the torment will be like in the lake of fire motivates unbelievers to come to faith in Christ; others think it moves people away from Christ. Thus preachers today tend either not to preach about hell and the lake of fire at all, or to preach about them a lot and to say more than the Bible says about them.
Why not limit ourselves to what the Bible says and why not actually teach that? Doesn’t God know best what people should know? We don’t need to hide Bible truth from people. And we also shouldn’t be making things up and declaring our own ideas as though they were what God has revealed in Scripture.*
*Of course, it is appropriate to speculate based on what God has revealed. However, when we do that, we must distinguish clearly between our speculation and what is clearly revealed.
