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Seventh-day Adventists do not teach the
biblical doctrine of hell. They, like
Jehovah’s Witnesses, teach that unbelievers
will be annihilated and that hell is only
a temporary punishment.
Ellen G. White
said:
“How repugnant to
every emotion of love and mercy, and even to
our sense of justice, is the doctrine that
the wicked dead are tormented with fire and
brimstone in an eternally burning hell; that
for the sins of a brief, earthly life they
are to suffer torture as long as God shall
live.” — The Great Controversy, page 535.
“There is not one Place of Scripture
that occurs to me, where the word Death, as
it was first threatned in the Law of
Innocency, necessarily signifies a certain
miserable Immortality of the Soul, either to
Adam, the actual sinner, or to his
posterity.” — The Ruin and Recovery of
Mankind, page 228, (as quoted in Froom,
Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, Vol. 2,
page 220).
The following is
an article from the Holman Bible Dictionary
on Hell.
The New Testament
has three words used to describe hell.
“The three Greek words often translated
“hell” are hades, gehenna, and
tartaroo.
Hades was the name of the Greek god of the
underworld and the name of the underworld
itself. The Septuagint—the earliest Greek
translation of the Old Testament—used hades
to translate the Hebrew word Sheol. Whereas
in the Old Testament, the distinction in the
fates of the righteous and the wicked was
not always clear, in the New Testament hades
refers to a place of torment opposed to
heaven as the place of Abraham’s bosom
(Luke 16:23; Acts 2:27, 31). In Matt. 16:18
hades
is not simply a place of the dead but
represents the power of the underworld.
Jesus said the gates of hades would not
prevail against His church.
Gehenna
is the Greek form of two Hebrew words ge
hinnom meaning “valley of Hinnom.” The term
originally referred to a ravine on the south
side of Jerusalem where pagan deities were
worshiped (2 Kings 23:10; Jer. 7:32;
2 Chron. 28:3; 33:6). It became a garbage dump
and a place of abomination where fire burned
continuously (2 Kings 23:10; compare Matt. 18:9;
Mark 9:43, 45, 47; James 3:6). Gehenna
became synonymous with “a place of burning.”
One time the Greek word tartaroo “cast
into hell” appears in the New Testament
(2 Pet. 2:4). The word appears in classical
Greek to refer to a subterranean region,
doleful and dark, regarded by the ancient
Greeks as the abode of the wicked dead. It
was thought of as a place of punishment. In
the sole use of the word in the New
Testament it refers to the place of
punishment for rebellious angels.
Punishment for sin is taught in the Old
Testament, but it is mainly punishment in
this life. The New Testament teaches the
idea of punishment for sin before and after
death. The expressions “the lake of fire”
and “second death” indicate the awfulness of
the fate of the impenitent. Some insist that
the fire spoken of must be literal fire, so
to interpret the language as figurative
means to do away with the reality of future
punishment. One can, however, maintain this
position only if they see no reality
expressed by a figure of speech. Jesus spoke
of a place of punishment as “outer darkness”
(Matt. 8:12; 22:13; 25:30). Can a place have
both literal fire and literal darkness? What
reason does one have for taking one
expression as literal and not taking the
other as literal? Literal fire would destroy
a body cast into it.
Language about
hell seeks to describe for humans the most
awful punishment human language can describe
to warn unbelievers before it is too late.
Earthly experience would lead us to believe
that the nature of punishment will fit the
nature of the sin. Certainly, no one wants
to suffer the punishment of hell, and
through God’s grace the way for all is open
to avoid hell and know the blessings of
eternal life through Christ.” By Ralph L.
Smith.
Note:
Regarding hell, it should be noted that many
good, Bible believing Christians throughout
the ages have believed that the duration of
hell is not eternal, but only its
consequences. We may not understand
everything about how the end will play out,
but we do know this, however God deals with
the lost it will be fair and loving because
God’s desire is for everyone to be saved and
come to a knowledge of the truth, and He
takes no pleasure is the death of the wicked
(1 Tim. 2:3-4; Ezek. 33:11).
(Further reading: Rev. 14:11; 21:1;
Matt. 25:41-46; Mark 9:43-48; Luke 16:19-26;
2 Thess. 1:7-9).
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