In brief#

Revelation 20 contains the one sentence in Scripture that says torment continues day and night for ever and ever. Everything turns on where that sentence sits.

It is in verse 10, at a point in the narrative where only three figures are in the lake of fire: the devil, the beast and the false prophet. Five verses later the unrighteous are thrown in, and the text does not repeat the clause. It names the outcome differently. It calls the lake of fire the second death.

Eternal conscious torment (ECT), the view that the lost suffer consciously without end, holds that those thrown into the same lake share the fate the passage has just described. Conditional immortality (CI), the view that unending life is given rather than innate, holds that the placement of the clause is deliberate. This page sets out that argument and is candid about how much weight it can carry, which is less than the argument's popularity sometimes suggests.

The primary passage#

The devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet are also. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever. I saw a great white throne, and him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away. There was found no place for them. I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and they opened books. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works. The sea gave up the dead who were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them. They were judged, each one according to his works. Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. If anyone was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire.
Revelation 20:10-15WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Two other passages are needed to read it. The first names who the fire was prepared for:

Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels;
Matthew 25:41WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

The second describes a fire called eternal whose burning is long over:

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them, having, in the same way as these, given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are shown as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.
Jude 7WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

Why ECT interpreters cite this passage#

This is the passage where the traditional view is on its strongest ground, and the case for it is straightforward.

The lake of fire is one place. Verse 10 says what happens in it: torment day and night for ever and ever. Verse 15 then throws everyone whose name is not in the book of life into that same lake. The text does not describe a second lake, or a lake that behaves differently for different occupants. On the ordinary way of reading a narrative, when the same destination is named twice the reader carries forward what has been said about it.

The argument from placement is an argument from silence, and silence is weak evidence. Verse 15 does not say the unrighteous are not tormented for ever; it says nothing on the point. Reading a deliberate exclusion into that silence assumes John was writing with the precision of a legal drafter.

The phrase "second death" does not settle the matter either. Whatever the second death is, the beast and the false prophet are in it, and the passage says they are tormented for ever. If being in the lake is compatible with continuing torment for them, "second death" cannot by itself mean cessation of existence. Revelation 21:8 uses the same language of categories of people without suggesting a different effect.

There is also a reading of Matthew 25:41 available to the traditional view that does not make human beings an afterthought in a fire built for someone else. By naming the devil, the worst evildoer there is, Jesus may be underlining that those on his left will share the devil's fate. The author of the source document notes this reading and says he does not hold it, but it is a natural sense of the verse and many defenders of the traditional view take it.

Finally, Revelation 14:11 applies comparable imagery to human beings who worship the beast, so a reader taking the two passages together does not need verse 15 to repeat the clause.

The conditionalist reading#

The lake was prepared for the devil and his angels#

Matthew 25:41 says the eternal fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. It does not say it was prepared for human beings. On the source's reading, this is part of a wider pattern in which the righteous have a place prepared for them and the unrighteous have none, so that being thrown into the fire is a way of being thrown away rather than of being housed.

If the fire was prepared with the devil and his angels in view, it is not unreasonable to expect that it does something to them that it does not do to everything else put into it. The devil and his angels are spiritual beings of a different order from human beings, who are not inherently immortal. A fire may affect two different kinds of creature differently without any strain.

That reading is an inference, and the reasons the source gives for treating the devil and his angels as deserving a more severe punishment are set out separately in S32.

Eternal fire in Jude describes a permanent effect#

Jude says Sodom and Gomorrah serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. The fire that fell on Sodom is not still burning. By the next morning there was smoke over the plain and the cities were gone. What is eternal about that fire is what it did, not how long it burned.

The eternal conscious torment reading

A person sent into the eternal fire will burn for ever and never be burned up. The fire is eternal because the burning never ends.

The conditionalist reading

A person sent into the eternal fire will be burned up completely and will never return from it. The fire is eternal because its effect is irreversible.

Cities destroyed by ordinary fire get rebuilt. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by what Jude calls eternal fire and were never rebuilt. The parallel passage in 2 Peter names what the example consists of:

and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly;
2 Peter 2:6WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

And Genesis records what the site looked like the following morning:

Then Yahweh rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of the sky. He overthrew those cities, all the plain, all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew on the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt. Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he had stood before Yahweh. He looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and looked, and saw that the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace.
Genesis 19:24-28WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

A further observation follows from ordinary experience. The only situation in which we think of fire primarily as something that causes pain rather than as something that destroys is a brief encounter from which we are then removed. Nothing is removed from the lake of fire, so the consuming is inescapable and complete.

None of this requires the fire to stop burning. A perpetually burning fire makes sense on the conditionalist view as well, since the devil and his angels are said to be tormented there for ever and ever.

The placement of the torment clause#

Here is the central argument.

Consider what a reader would assume if verse 10 had not included the clause about torment. Fire destroys. A reader coming to this passage without it would naturally conclude that the devil, the beast, the false prophet, Death, Hades and those not found in the book of life were all destroyed by the lake of fire. The clause is inserted precisely because something atypical is happening: these three are not destroyed.

The question is then whether the atypical effect covers everything thrown in afterwards, or only the three named where the clause appears.

If the answer were everything, the clause could have been placed at the end of verse 15, after the full list, and the point would have been unmistakable. It is placed instead in verse 10, at the moment when only three figures are in the lake.

What the text says instead when the others are thrown in#

When Death and Hades are thrown into the lake, the passage does not repeat the clause about torment. It gives a different description: this is the second death, the lake of fire. On the source's reading, the narrative has moved on from the atypical effect and is now describing what the lake does in the ordinary case.

That reading gains support from the promise a chapter later:

He will wipe away from them every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more. The first things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:4WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

If death shall be no more, and if the lake of fire is where Death and Hades were thrown, then the lake destroyed them. This is the observation that carries the most weight on this page. The lake of fire is not a place that preserves whatever is put into it. Something was destroyed there. A place that destroys Death itself is not naturally described as a place that keeps everything in existence for ever.

Revelation 21:8 then lists categories of people whose part is in the lake, and names it, again, the second death:

But for the cowardly, unbelieving, sinners, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their part is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
Revelation 21:8WEB, World English Bible, which is in the public domain

One further observation#

The rich man in Luke 16 is in torment before the last judgment. On the traditional view, the lake of fire appears to reapply an experience he was already having. The author's question is why the wicked would be raised and judged only to be returned to the condition they were in before the resurrection. That is a question rather than a demonstration, and the passage it depends on is treated in S05.

How much this argument can carry#

An argument from placement is an argument from silence. It observes what the text does not say at a point where it could have said it. That kind of argument is suggestive and it is not decisive, and this page presents it as suggestive. It shows that the traditional reading is not required by Revelation 20. It does not show that the traditional reading is excluded by Revelation 20.

There is a further reason for caution. Revelation is full of symbolic images, and the lake of fire may well be one of them. Death is thrown into it, and Death is not a physical object that can be thrown anywhere. If the scene is symbolic, then arguments that depend on the precise arrangement of who is in the lake at which verse are working with material that may not be built to bear that kind of weight. The author accepts this and notes that if the lake is symbolic, it is also less likely that there is a physical or spiritual location where people continue to exist.

What this argument establishes#

  • The clause about torment day and night for ever and ever is stated in verse 10, of three figures, before the unrighteous are thrown in.
  • The lake of fire is described in Matthew 25:41 as prepared for the devil and his angels.
  • Eternal fire in Jude 7 describes a fire whose effect is permanent, not one that is still burning.
  • The lake of fire is named as the second death, and Death itself is destroyed there, so the lake is not a place that preserves what is put into it.

What it does not establish by itself#

  • That the beast and the false prophet are certainly non-human figures. That is the author's own reading and other conditionalists reject it.
  • That the lake of fire is a literal place rather than a symbolic image.
  • The duration or intensity of what the unrighteous consciously experience there.
  • That the traditional reading of verse 15 is impossible. An argument from placement cannot reach that conclusion.

The smoke of their torment in Revelation 14 is S02. What fire does throughout Scripture is S13. Sodom and Gomorrah as Peter's worked example is S14. The argument that the unrighteous have no place prepared for them is S20, and the reasons for a more severe punishment for the devil and his angels are in S32.

Sources and notes#

The principal conditionalist treatment behind this page, including the reading of Revelation 20:10 that differs from the author's own, is [Dear]. A speculative aside in the source document about angels and the experience of time is not reproduced here, because it is offered without scriptural support and cannot function as evidence. It is recorded in the migration ledger.