WELCOME and THANKS for joining us.
RECAP of our last meeting (Part 4 of the video series) …
The featured video, Hell’s Illusion: Part 4, continued the series by challenging the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment (ECT) … through a closer look at gehenna fire (hellfire), destruction, and free will. Don argued that many common assumptions about hell have been shaped by translation choices, inherited theological systems, and fear-based interpretations rather than by the restorative character of God revealed in Scripture.
The first focus was on gehenna fire. Rather than presenting Gehenna as a place of endless torture, the video explained that Jesus used the image of a real valley outside Jerusalem associated with judgment, refuse, and shame. In Matthew 5, gehenna fire appears in the context of anger, insult, broken relationships, and reconciliation. Don emphasized that Jesus’ warning points to painful and purifying consequences, not eternal torment.
The second focus was on destruction, especially the Greek word apollumi. Don argued that biblical destruction should not automatically be understood as annihilation, endless separation, or irreversible ruin. Instead, destruction often describes the removal of what is broken … so that restoration can take place. Through passages such as Acts 3:21, 2Corinthians 5:19, Colossians 1:19–21, John 12:24 and 1 Corinthians 15:36, Don presented destruction as part of God’s redemptive process toward renewal and life.
The third focus was free will. Don questioned the idea that human (free) will can ultimately overpower God’s purpose to save and restore. While affirming that people make real choices, Don emphasized that human choices are shaped by influence, limitation, and divine drawing. Scriptures such as John 6:44, Romans 9:16, Romans 11:32, and 1 Timothy 2:4 are used to show that salvation depends on God’s mercy and active love … rather than on unaided human ability.
Overall, Don concluded that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment is weakened when its supporting assumptions are examined carefully. By reconsidering aion, gehenna fire, destruction, and free will through the lens of God’s love and restorative purpose, Don’s message is that judgment is corrective and purifying … rather than endless and punitive.
Don then added that Part 5 of the series would move from translation and theology into common sense, logic, and further questions surrounding the doctrine of hell.
In this session … Hell’s Illusion, Part 5 … during which Don Keathley looks at seven absurdities of the doctrine of HELL.
FEATURED VIDEO
Program Transcript (modified)
All right, here we go once again, guys. I have been so excited to get over to church this morning and talk to you about part five of Hell’s Illusion. Thank you for being with me wherever you’re watching this morning on the Digital Cathedral, from around the country and around the world.
This has been a phenomenal series for me, and it is probably the most watched series I have ever done on YouTube. I’m getting a lot of responses and a lot of messages. Honestly, I’m blown away by how positive the responses have been. I expected a ton of pushback. I expected people to tell me I was a false teacher, a heretic, and that I was leading people to the hell I am saying is an illusion. I’ve had my share of that, but it has not been overpowering like I thought it would be. It has been very positive.
Here is the phenomenal thing: a lot of you have said, “You know what? I have suspected this all my life. Something was wrong. Something was a myth. This didn’t make sense, but nobody talked about it.” Well, I have kind of crashed the barrier. And if you are on Facebook, since I started this series, I don’t know if you’ve noticed how many posts from some really good people are starting to come out against this terrible illusion called hell.
We have spent four weeks on this. We have shown that not only is this doctrine of hell unbiblical, it is absurd, illogical, and totally nonsensical. We have demonstrated that all of the references to hell in Scripture have come one of two ways: either they are mistranslations … or they are misinterpretations.
We have shown that there was no word “hell” in Hebrew or Greek. It was Saint Jerome, translating into the Latin Vulgate from the Greek Septuagint, who took liberty and pulled a word out of mythology called “hell” and plugged it into the Old Testament word Sheol, which simply means grave or pit. The New Testament corresponding word is Hades, meaning grave or pit, and Gehenna, which refers to a garbage dump.
We looked at those and showed how this is an illusion. It was not designed by God. It was man-made. It was brought into the Latin Vulgate, which became the standard Bible by which everything else was measured. In fact, the King James Version was heavily influenced by the Latin Vulgate, which was written by Saint Jerome. Then Augustine took what Jerome said was hell for the wicked and stretched it out. He said not only is hell for the wicked, it is for everybody who is not a Christian. That is when the door was really opened, and hell became a tool of evangelism, a tool for keeping converts, and a tool of suppression, fear, manipulation, and control.
We have gone through all of that. The first four or five centuries, the New Testament church did not teach this. There was no concept of it in the Old Testament at all. The first four or five centuries, it was not taught by the New Testament church. In fact, that is when the church grew by leaps and bounds, and the good news spread all over the world like wildfire. People by the multitudes were drawn to Jesus.
So, here is what I want to do today. We have spent four weeks on words, concepts, and mistranslations. In the last two sessions — this week and next week — I want to highlight, apart from mistranslations and words that never appear in Hebrew or Greek, seven absurdities of the doctrine of hell. These are things that make absolutely no sense if you just stop and think about them.
A man told me last week, and this was such a good testimony, “The only reason people believe in this is because they haven’t thought it through.” They haven’t considered it. And we haven’t considered it because the only alternatives we have been given are Calvinism and Arminianism, both of which have hell — eternal conscious torment — as the centerpiece of the message and theology.
Absurdity #1: Hell Contradicts the Loving, Merciful, Forgiving, and Gracious Nature of God
The first absurdity is this: hell completely contradicts the loving, merciful, forgiving, and gracious nature of God. If you are going to believe in hell, you are going to believe in something that totally contradicts the nature of the Father.
Let me give you one background Scripture on this: Psalm 136. I’m going to read the first nine verses. The whole concept of hell contradicts the loving, merciful, forgiving, and gracious nature of God. You are going to have to deny that nature. You are going to have to set it aside and believe something totally irrational about God.
Psalm 136 says, “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy endures forever.” It says, “Give thanks to the God of gods, for His mercy endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of lords, for His mercy endures forever.” It goes on and on. In the first nine verses alone, this phrase is repeated again and again. In the whole psalm, twenty-six times David says, “His mercy endures forever.”
Think about that. Jesus used Gehenna, the only word He ever used that was translated hell, twelve times. But in one chapter, David says “His mercy endures forever” twenty-six times. I think Scripture is trying to get a message across to us.
The Bible says God is love. That is the definition of God. David says twenty-six times that His mercy endures forever. Paul says wherever sin abounds, grace superabounds. Since God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, it is simply illogical to think that when you die, His nature and character suddenly change.
We have had this concept that when you die, you stand before God and He judges you … and you had better hope you catch Him on a good day. But it would take a severe personality disorder for God to move from love, mercy, and grace that goes beyond sin, to an annihilator of humans.
That would be the cosmic definition of bipolar. You would have to believe that God has these wide mood swings: over here He is love, mercy, goodness, and grace; then when you die, His personality swings over here and He is ready to throw you into a customized torture chamber of flames … because you didn’t say the prayer quite right … didn’t repent hard enough … or your heart wasn’t pure enough to be in God’s presence.
If you believe in hell, it totally contradicts the merciful, loving, gracious nature of God. God’s character and hell are irreconcilable. You cannot balance them out.
It was Augustine who tried to take the Father’s nature and twist it into something contrary to what Jesus reflected. Jesus said, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” So whenever you hear someone teaching about a God or Father who does not look like Jesus, you can write it down: they are not talking about your Father. They may be talking about a Molech-type god or a Zeus-type god, but they are not talking about the Father.
To try to make God’s justice oppose His love is convoluted reasoning beyond comprehension. I have had people tell me, “You teach grace and love, and that is good, but you have to remember that God is justice,” as though His justice is contrary to His love. But every trait of God flows out of one source: the nature of love.
Justice is about making things right. Justice is about setting things right. It is not about torture. When you say God is a God of justice, you are saying He is the God who sets things right, who brings things back into order, who reconciles and restores. Yes, there can be correction. Yes, there can be discipline from the Father. But the end game is to bring us back and set things right, not to destroy us or punish us forever.
Absurdity #2: Hell Portrays God as Unjust and Unlike Jesus
The second absurdity is this: if you believe in hell, you also have to believe in a God who is fiendishly unjust, full of wrath, and nothing like Jesus. That is absurd.
If hell were a true doctrine … if hell were a biblical truth … it would be the strangest and most cruel type of justice you could ever imagine. I posted on Facebook this week and asked, “What crime could any human ever commit that would deserve eternal torture in flames of fire?”
People usually bring up names like Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer because we do not think of our own self-righteousness, attitudes, lies, or the way we live our lives. We teach that every sin is the same to God, but we do not really believe it. Even if Hitler killed six million people, does that equate to justice being eternal conscious torture? At some point, justice has to be served.
Even in our justice system, we do not sentence a person to eternal prison. The longest sentence is life, and justice is considered served. So what crime could possibly fit the punishment of eternal torment? No crime fits that punishment. At some point, it has to be resolved.
If an all-knowing, all-powerful God knowingly created billions of people while knowing ahead of time that they would suffer eternally as payback for seventy, eighty, or ninety years on earth, then that is not justice … by any standard I can imagine. How could seventy years of bad choices deserve eternal torture?
Justice is fair-mindedness. Justice is balanced and equal. The thrust of justice is to make things right. So, ultimately, justice would hope, plan, and make provision — no matter how many ages it required — until every unbeliever changed their mind … and responded to the revelation of everything that has been provided by grace through love.
Jesus started that process. Jesus set things right for all humanity. If you think the justice of God needed to be served, Jesus served it. Jesus set all humanity right with God. He did what had to be done to make things just and right.
Look at Philippians chapter 2, beginning with verse 5. “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” Jesus, being in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself of no reputation. He took the form of a bondservant and came in the likeness of men.
Jesus brought God and humanity together in Himself. The One who was equal with God came and took on flesh. He brought everything together and made everything right in Himself. He represented both sides. He was fully God and fully man. Everything was met in one person, Jesus, in what is called the hypostatic union.
He “humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Justice was served. Therefore, God highly exalted Him and gave Him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow — in heaven, on earth, and under the earth — and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
There is a recognition coming because Jesus has set the record straight. Above the earth, on the earth, and under the earth — all will come to recognize that Jesus is Savior and Lord because He has set things right for all people. Justice in Jesus has been fully served.
Absurdity #3: Hell Denies the Sovereignty of God
The third absurdity is this: if you believe in hell, you have to deny the sovereignty of God. Sovereignty means supreme power and authority. There can only be one supreme authority and power.
Scripture states emphatically that it is God’s express will to save all people. First Timothy chapter 2 says, “This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” 1 Timothy 2:4
Those verses make hell a slap in the face of the Father, who through the Son has not only been seeking us but also saving us. He has been saving us even when we did not realize He was saving us. He had been seeking us even when we did not realize He was seeking us.
If you are going to believe in hell, you have to deny the sovereignty of God’s will … and believe in the sovereignty of man’s will.
But nothing can withstand the sovereign will of God. When God says, “This is My will,” you can take it to the bank: at some point, His will will be done.
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- It is God’s will that none perish, but that all come to repentance.
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- If that is God’s will, then God’s will will be done.
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- God desires that all people be saved.
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- If that is His will and His plan, it will be done.
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- It is God’s will that none perish, but that all come to repentance.
Through this doctrine of hell, we have made God into a weak, powerless, impotent being who cannot fulfill His own will with His own creation. We have made creation greater than the Creator. But there is only one who is totally sovereign, and it is not us. We have a measure of choice within parameters, but He is the sovereign will of the universe, and His will will be done.
Absurdity #4: Hell Negates the Gospel of Jesus
The fourth absurdity is that hell negates the gospel of Jesus.
What is the gospel?
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- First John 4:14 says, “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as the Savior of the world.” That is the gospel. Jesus is the Savior of the entire world.
- John had such a revelation of this that it was mind-blowing. In John chapter 4 … many of the Samaritans believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony. Then they came to Him, urged Him to stay, and He stayed two days. Many more believed because of His word. They said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and know that He is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”
- That is the good news. It is glad tidings. When the angels announced the coming of Jesus, they said the Savior was coming, and it would be good news to all people. It embraces everybody.
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It does not make sense for Jesus to be called the Savior of the world if He is going to lose most of the world. Religion has downplayed the gospel and magnified a nonexistent, mythological word translated as hell, using it to retain people and evangelize people. This doctrine fully negates the pure gospel good news. It is one of the biggest detractors from good news that people could have invented.
Absurdity #5: Hell Explains Away Scriptures of Hope for All People
The fifth absurdity is this: hell ignores, twists, and explains away all of the Scriptures that give eternal hope for all people. The Bible is full of Scriptures that are full of hope for everybody, yet this doctrine makes us read those verses and say, “Yes, but only if,” or “Yes, but you must first.”
Religion teaches us to read the Bible as a behavior manual. Many Christians read it to find out what to do and what not to do. It becomes a guide for behavior modification because we do not want to go to hell. But that overlooks the verses written to give us hope. The Bible becomes a manual for behavior modification instead of a book of grace, a letter of love from a Father to His family.
Let me give you one passage that contains eight alls. Colossians chapter 1, verses 15 through 20 says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. By Him all things were created. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He might have preeminence. It pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.
If you believe in hell, you have to explain those verses away. In my background, we would explain them away by saying, “That only applies to Christians.” But there is nothing in those verses about what you did, what you believed, or your part. It is all about what He did, and it includes everybody.
If you have the choice between believing in a word and concept that does not exist in Scripture, or believing in a passage that contains inclusive language again and again, I would go with the passage that includes everybody.
John 1:29 says, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Did He or didn’t He?
- First John 2:2 says He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the entire world.
- First Timothy 4:10 says He is the Savior of all people, especially those who believe.
Is there an advantage to believing? Absolutely. Believing is a response to revelation. Believing walks us into the abundant life Jesus came to bring us. But it has nothing to do with making Him Savior. He is the Savior of all people, especially those who believe. Those who believe recognize it, enjoy it, and revel in it.
First Corinthians 15:22 says, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” We were universalists when it came to Adam, willing to put everybody into the first Adam. But when it comes to Jesus, we become selective because that is what we were taught.
Romans 5 says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son. Much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. God got rid of all His enemies by making us all sons.
Revelation 5:13 says that every creature in heaven, on the earth, under the earth, and in the sea will praise and worship God. Is anyone outside those categories? No. That includes everybody.
Absurdity #6: Hell Encourages Fear, Unforgiveness, Prejudice, and Revenge
The sixth absurdity is this: hell encourages fear, unforgiveness, prejudice, and revenge toward other people. If you believe in hell, you can begin to look at other people and think they are not forgiven because they have not come through the same hoops you came through.
Do you know the root of doctrinal disputes? Why do we have thousands of denominations? Division comes from fear: “We are in, you are out. We are right, you are wrong. We are saved, you are lost.” It comes from the fear that we must get it exactly right … or risk being eternally tormented for our error.
So we defend to the death ideas, concepts, and doctrines that are contrary to the life of Jesus and the Father He revealed. We judge others as wrong because it reinforces how right we are. Many people go to church every Sunday to get a reaffirmation of what they already believe. They want a message that makes them feel secure and right while everyone else is wrong.
That is what the doctrine of hell does. It creates fear-driven certainty and division.
Absurdity #7: Hell Leaves Believers Without Answers to Three Questions
The seventh absurdity is that people who believe in hell have no satisfying answers for three questions.
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- Question #1: How could a just God cast billions of people into hell who died without hearing the gospel? I have heard explanations such as, “Just before everyone dies, they get a flash of revelation and can make a choice,” or, “Romans says God’s handiwork is visible in nature, so everyone is without excuse.” But those are not satisfying answers. The truth is, God cannot send multitudes to a hell they never heard how to escape because that fiery torture chamber does not exist.
- Question #2: How could God cast a twelve-year-old girl into hell who heard the gospel at Vacation Bible School, understood it, but did not respond, and then died in a car wreck on the way home? Some would say she reached the age of accountability. But the age of accountability, as commonly taught, brings fear to children at the earliest possible age and forces emotional decisions to escape eternal fire. Are we really saying that a seven- or eight-year-old child who understood only a simple version of the gospel would be tortured forever for not praying the right prayer?
- Question #3: How could we ever enjoy heaven knowing that our children or grandchildren were being tortured forever? I have heard people say, “When you get to heaven, you will not remember them,” while also saying, “When we get to heaven, we will see Grandma and Aunt Sally.” Others say, “God’s ways are not our ways,” or, “We will understand it better by and by.” But those answers do not resolve the moral problem.
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If you are a hell believer, you not only have to believe in a mythology and a mistranslation, but you also have to cling to absurd ideas that make no sense, especially in light of Love Himself.
Closing
I am glad today to be part of a generation that does not mind being out on the end of the spear, challenging and replacing traditions and doctrines of bad news and false doctrine that have pervaded the church.
Let me say it again: there is no bad news in the good news. How could it be good news if someone is going to burn in flames forever? There is no part of that that is good. The doctrine of hell is not only unbiblical; it is absurd, illogical, nonsensical, and an invented doctrine that needs to be removed from churches everywhere.
Do not miss the next session, because we are going to answer the question many have asked: What about the unpardonable sin? We will talk about that on Wednesday night.
God bless you. I hope you got something out of this. That is six and a half down, one more to go, and we are going to hit it from another angle next Sunday morning as we wrap up this series on Hell’s Illusion. Share the teaching. You may get some pushback, but if this resonates with you, be bold and share it. We need to let people know they are free from the flames and torment of a false doctrine.
God bless you. See you Wednesday night and next Sunday on the Digital Cathedral.
What are your takeaways? What did you find noteworthy?
For me … apart from the fact that this doctrine of hell unbiblical, it is absurd, illogical, and totally nonsensical. … my concern is what it says about God … as in the character of God … and I think Don touches on that in the 7 aburdities ….