The second death and the end of death

Two resurrections

We have seen that Jesus spoke of a resurrection of life and a resurrection of condemnation. John sets them a thousand years apart.

But the rest of the dead did not live again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years.

The righteous rise at the first resurrection, when Christ comes. “The rest of the dead”, the wicked, “did not live again until the thousand years were finished”. Notice the phrase: they did not live. They were not alive anywhere, in torment or otherwise. They were dead, and then, at the second resurrection, they lived again, to face judgment.

The second death

Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.

The Bible calls the final fate of the lost “the second death”. The phrase only makes sense if the first death was a real death and the second one is too. The lost die once, as everyone does, sleep until the second resurrection, stand before God, and then die a second time, a death from which there is no waking. Over the saved “the second death has no power”; they have put on immortality. The lost have not, and the wages of sin, finally and fully, are paid.

What happens to the wicked

The idea that the lost burn consciously forever rests on the same foundation as every other error we have met: the belief that the soul cannot die. Remove that foundation and the plain texts about the fate of the wicked say something different.

“For behold, the day is coming, Burning like an oven, And all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly will be stubble. And the day which is coming shall burn them up,” Says the Lord of hosts, “That will leave them neither root nor branch. But to you who fear My name The Sun of Righteousness shall arise With healing in His wings; And you shall go out And grow fat like stall-fed calves. You shall trample the wicked, For they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet On the day that I do this,” Says the Lord of hosts.

Stubble. Burned up. Neither root nor branch. Ashes. The fire is real and the judgment is terrible, but the result is destruction, not endless life in pain. Peter says God turned Sodom and Gomorrah “into ashes” and made them “an example” of what awaits the ungodly (2 Peter 2:6). Jude says those cities suffered “the vengeance of eternal fire” (Jude 7), and Sodom is not burning today. Eternal fire is fire whose results are eternal. John sees the final fire fall: it “came down from God out of heaven and devoured them” (Revelation 20:9). Devoured. The psalmist says of the wicked, “Into smoke they shall vanish away” (Psalm 37:20), and “yet a little while and the wicked shall be no more” (Psalm 37:10). Obadiah says they “shall be as though they had never been” (Obadiah 16).

Jesus said the lost “will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). The contrast is between punishment and life. The punishment is everlasting because it is final: everlasting destruction, as Paul calls it (2 Thessalonians 1:9), not everlasting punishing. The alternative to eternal life is not eternal life somewhere else. It is death, the second death, from which there is no return.

Why this matters for the character of God

A God who would keep billions of people alive for the sole purpose of tormenting them forever is not the God of John 3:16. He is not the God who is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9), who says, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11), who wept over Jerusalem. The doctrine of eternal torment has driven more people from the gospel than almost any other, and it is not in the Bible. What is in the Bible is sober enough: a real judgment, a real fire, a real and final death. God will not force anyone to live forever who has refused the only source of life. But He will not torture them either. He will let them go, and then He will end the sorrow.

The last enemy

The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.

Death is an enemy. It is not a doorway, a friend, or a natural part of God’s good creation. It entered through sin, it has reigned over every generation, and it will be destroyed. In Revelation’s final picture, death itself is thrown into the fire, and then:

And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

No more death. No more of the thing that took your mother, your friend, your child. No cemetery in the new earth. No funeral. Death is not managed in the kingdom of God; it is abolished. That is the end of the story, and only a God who gives life as a gift, and takes the second death with total seriousness, could write it.