These shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. –Matthew 25:46 (KJV)

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The Jesus Trip, “The Sheep and the Goats: The Consuming Fire Episode 5 of 10.”

William G. T. Shedd, The Doctrine of Endless Punishment (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), p. 79ff. Addresses the universalists’ “Greek word translation” objection about aeons and for ever. AUDIO RECORDING.

Christopher Morgan and Robert Peterson, Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment (Zondervan, 2004).

—. Is Hell for Real or Does Everyone Go to Heaven? (Zondervan, 2011).

Robert Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (P&R Publishing, 1995).

Harry Buis, The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment (P&R Publishing, 1957).

Denny Burk, “Eternal Conscious Torment,” in Four Views on Hell (Zondervan, 2016).

John Walvoord, “The Literal View,” in Four Views on Hell (Zondervan, 1996).

Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Church and the Last Things, Volume 4, ch. 39.

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Correction (1:27:25): The Harrowing of Hell comes from 1 Peter 3:19-20: “After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.” So I was wrong, whatever this means, it doesn’t mean that Jesus was simply filling in the Old Testament saints about the Gospel. It definitely says that Jesus was speaking to a specific class of people: all those who were judged in the Flood and perhaps placed into hellish prison cells for about four thousand years. It may be that Jesus laid out the whole scheme of Old Testament and New Testament salvation history to this class of people; and gave them all an opportunity to repent and be saved out of Hell. If there is anything that comes close to a Purgatory experience in the whole Bible, then I suppose this would be the closest thing to it. But this can’t safely be used as a general principle for all people in all time. The NIV Study Bible offers three views: 1. Jesus “preached” through Noah to these people when Noah was alive, but that doesn’t make sense because the context says this was going on between the death and resurrection of Jesus. 2. Jesus preached the Gospel to the fathers of the Nephilim–the fallen angels who apparently had sex with women in Genesis 6:4, but that doesn’t make sense, because the Gospel is meant for human beings. 3. “Still others say that between death and resurrection Christ went to the place of the dead and preached to the spirits of Noah’s contemporaries. What he proclaimed may have been the Gospel, or it may have been a declaration of victory for Christ and doom for his hearers.” I think this third view is the most likely to come from a natural reading of the chapter in its context. But the open question remains: what exactly was the content of the message that Jesus preached to those spirits in Hell’s prison? We don’t know. We also don’t have any vision of those spirits being released from prison either.