The Misunderstood Hell

Does Hell last forever? Jesus didn't seem to think so.

His parables gave no indication of eternity. And no parable is more clear about that than the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:23-35).

In the parable, a king's servant accrues a massive debt of ten-thousand talents, which is about 20 years worth of work for a day laborer. The king orders him and his family be sold into slavery, as well as all of his belongings sold, to pay the debt. The servant begs for more time and for the king to be patient. The king decides to have mercy on the man and forgives his entire debt.

The man is released, but he and his family have no money, so he goes to someone who owes him a hundred denarii, which is how much a day laborer would make in one-hundred days. When the man cannot pay, he chokes him, demands payment, then has him thrown into debtor's prison.

The king hears of this and throws the man back into prison and says the man will not get out until he pays everything he owes.

As you can see, there is an end point to the imprisonment. The debt was a payable one, but it would take many years to pay it once the man's belongings were sold and he and his family were sold into slavery.

Also, keep in mind that if Israel had kept God's Law, every seven years they had a schmita year in which all debts were forgiven, all slaves were set free, and all land was given back to the original families who owned it. So the servant and his family would've had their debts forgiven and been set free from slavery no more than seven years later. If they entered into slavery only a year before the next schmita year, they would only be in slavery for a year.

Unfortunately, though, Israel didn't keep the Law very well. We have no record of them ever observing the schmita, but that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't observe it at times in their history. I'm guessing they had to have observed it during the forty years in the wilderness in Moses' time when the Law had just been given to them.

So clearly, the parables spell out an end to the suffering. If Jesus knew the suffering were endless, wouldn't it be deceptive and cruel to use the parable to mislead us? That's not His character. So is it He who is misleading us or is it the doctrines of the modern church unintentionally twisting the meaning of His parables? Only one of those answer makes sense.

In the next chapter, we'll look at what the hundreds of thousands of near-death experiences tell us about how Heaven and Hell work. There's surprising insight in them that fits exactly with what the Bible says about the afterlife.

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