What Is the Lake of Fire?

The lake of fire is Revelation's own name for the final end of evil, and it belongs to Revelation alone. It appears at 19:20, 20:10, 20:14, 20:15 and 21:8, and nowhere else in Scripture. Revelation calls it the second death and gives no description at all of what it is like from the inside.

If you have arrived here worried, start with the two things the text is careful about. It is a destination for evil, not a chamber described for effect, and the decisive question in the passage is not the fire but a book of names. Almost everything vivid that people carry about this subject comes from Dante, from medieval painting and from sermons, not from the six verses that mention it.

What the text says, in order

The lake appears three times in the space of two chapters, and the order matters.

These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Revelation 19:20

That is the beast and the false prophet, at the end of the battle scene in chapter 19. Next comes the devil, after the thousand years and the last rebellion.

And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. Revelation 20:10

Then something stranger happens. Two things that are not persons at all are thrown in.

And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. Revelation 20:14

And finally, at the great white throne, the human sentence.

And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15

Revelation 21:8 repeats the point in a different register, listing not names but characteristics, and it ends by attaching the same label: "which is the second death". The great white throne scene itself is a subject of its own, and it is worked through verse by verse elsewhere on this site.

The second death

This is the one piece of interpretation the book hands you rather than leaving you to supply.

The phrase occurs four times in Revelation: at 2:11, where the one who overcomes will not be hurt of it, at 20:6, where it has no power over those in the first resurrection, at 20:14, where it is identified with the lake of fire, and at 21:8. So the image is defined by a phrase, and the phrase is defined by the image.

Outside Revelation the expression appears in one body of literature only: the Aramaic Targums, the synagogue paraphrases of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is there at Deuteronomy 33:6, Isaiah 22:14, 65:6 and 65:15, and Jeremiah 51:39, always for a ruin that lies beyond ordinary dying. John's first readers would have recognised the vocabulary. What "second" carries in every one of those places is finality. There is a death that comes to everyone, and there is a further one that does not.

Why hell and the lake of fire cannot be the same

Two Greek words sit behind the English word hell, and confusing them causes a great deal of unnecessary distress.

Hadēs is the older of the two in Greek usage, the unseen realm of the dead. The Greek Old Testament uses it to translate the Hebrew sheol, the grave, the state of those who have died. It is where the KJV gets "hell" in Revelation 20:13 and 14. In Revelation it is a holding state, not a verdict.

Geenna, Gehenna, is a place name. It transliterates the Aramaic gêhinnām, from the Hebrew gê ben-Hinnōm, the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, a real ravine along the southern edge of Jerusalem. Its reputation is biblical: 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 7:31 record child sacrifice at Topheth in that valley. This is the word Jesus uses in the gospels where English Bibles print hell.

One popular explanation should be handled carefully. The idea that Gehenna was Jerusalem's perpetually burning rubbish tip traces to Rabbi David Kimhi around AD 1200. G. R. Beasley-Murray noted that the claim is not attested in any ancient source, and there is no archaeological support for it. The valley's grim associations are real. The smouldering dump is a medieval explanation that has been repeated ever since.

Now put the words back into the verse. Revelation 20:14 says that death and hadēs are cast into the lake of fire. Whatever the lake is, hell in that sense is not it, because one is thrown into the other. Read plainly, the sentence says that the intermediate state of the dead is itself abolished.

Where the image comes from

Revelation did not invent the picture. Genesis 19:24 rains fire and brimstone on Sodom, and Jude 7 calls that an example of "eternal fire". Isaiah 66:24 ends the book of Isaiah with the corpses of rebels, "their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched", which is the line Jesus quotes in Mark 9:48. Isaiah 30:33 describes Topheth prepared with a stream of brimstone. Daniel 7:10 and 11 has a fiery stream issuing from the throne and the beast's body given to the burning flame.

Between the Testaments the imagery hardens. 1 Enoch describes a fiery abyss prepared for the fallen angels and a valley of fire for the wicked.

Three positions Christians hold

Here the disagreement is real, old, and not reducible to seriousness about the Bible. Each of these is held by people who take the text as authoritative.

Eternal conscious torment is the historic majority view. Its case is that Matthew 25:46 uses one Greek adjective, aiōnios, for both the punishment and the life in a single sentence, so limiting one limits the other; that Revelation 20:10 says the devil is tormented "day and night for ever and ever"; and that Mark 9:48 speaks of a fire not quenched. It is the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which at paragraph 1035 affirms "the existence of hell and its eternity", while paragraph 1033 describes hell as self-exclusion from communion with God and 1037 states that God predestines no one to go there. It is the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox churches and of the Westminster Confession, and of most Reformed, Baptist, Methodist and Anglican confessional statements. Its standing difficulty is proportion, and its defenders answer that the offence is measured by the one offended and that rebellion does not stop.

Annihilationism, also called conditional immortality, holds that the lost are finally and irreversibly destroyed. The name comes from the claim that immortality is a gift given in Christ rather than a property the soul has by nature. Its case is that fire in Scripture consumes rather than preserves, that Matthew 10:28 speaks of God destroying "both soul and body in hell", that 2 Thessalonians 1:9 says "everlasting destruction", and that Malachi 4:1 to 3 leaves ashes. Edward Fudge argued the case at length in The Fire That Consumes in 1982, with a foreword by F. F. Bruce. John Stott raised it in Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue with David Edwards in 1988, writing that annihilation "should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative" and adding, of his own position, "I hold it tentatively". Its standing difficulty is Revelation 20:10 and the parallel in Matthew 25:46.

Universal reconciliation holds that all are eventually restored, the fire being purifying rather than terminal. Its case rests on 1 Corinthians 15:22 and 28, Colossians 1:20, Romans 5:18 and 1 Timothy 2:4. Origen in the third century is the usual starting point for the idea, under the Greek term apokatastasis, restoration. It is a minority position, and it is worth saying clearly that the historic creeds and confessions have not taught it and no major church body holds it as doctrine. A synod at Constantinople in 543 condemned a list of Origenist propositions, and whether the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553 itself formally condemned universal restoration is disputed among historians. Recent defenders include Robin Parry and David Bentley Hart, whose That All Shall Be Saved appeared in 2019. Its standing difficulty is the plain force of Revelation 20:15 and Matthew 25:46.

What the passage does not do

It does not describe the experience. It does not put the reader in the judge's seat over any particular person, living or dead, and the Bible's own posture toward that impulse is Abraham's question in Genesis 18:25: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

What it does emphasise, four times in five verses, is a register of names. That is where Revelation puts the weight, and it is a strange thing to read a passage about fire and come away without noticing the book.

Every one of the three positions above is arguing about the same six verses. Which of them you find persuasive turns on how the chapter as a whole is read: whether Revelation 20 runs in sequence after chapter 19, and whether the thousand years before this scene is a future period or a description of the present age. Settle the shape of the chapter, and the rest of the argument moves.