Chapter 24

The Parables of Jesus and Hell

Introduction: Stories That Teach Us About the Fire

Jesus was a storyteller. That is one of the first things we notice about Him in the Gospels. When He wanted to drive a truth deep into the hearts of His listeners, He did not hand them a theology textbook. He told them a story. A woman loses a coin. A farmer scatters seed. A father waits on a road for a son who has gone far from home. These parables are among the most beloved passages in all of Scripture—and among the most misunderstood.

Nowhere is this misunderstanding more damaging than when it comes to hell. For centuries, Christians in the Western tradition have read the parables of Jesus through the lens of eternal conscious torment. The fiery furnace in the parable of the wheat and tares becomes a torture chamber. The outer darkness in the parable of the wedding banquet becomes an eternal dungeon. The suffering of the rich man becomes proof that God keeps sinners alive forever so they can be tormented without end. These readings are so familiar that most Christians have never even considered the possibility that the parables might be saying something very different.

In this chapter, we are going to slow down and look carefully at six of the most important parables that touch on judgment and the afterlife. We will examine them in their original context, paying close attention to the language Jesus uses and the points He is actually making. And we will ask a simple question: Does the divine presence model—the view that hell is not separation from God but the painful experience of God’s inescapable love by those who have hardened their hearts against Him—make better sense of these parables than the traditional reading?

I believe it does. These parables are not about a God who tortures. They are about a God who reveals. They are about what happens when human hearts, in all their stubbornness and self-deception, come face to face with the overwhelming reality of divine love. Some hearts melt. Others shatter. The difference is not in the love. The difference is in the heart.

I want to say at the outset that I approach these parables with deep reverence. Jesus chose His words with extraordinary care. He was not spinning casual illustrations. He was opening windows into the deepest realities of the kingdom of God. When He spoke of fire, He meant something real. When He spoke of weeping and gnashing of teeth, He was describing genuine anguish. The divine presence model does not domesticate these images. It takes them with full seriousness. What it does is ask whether the traditional interpretation—that these images describe a God-operated torture chamber—is truly the best reading of what the master storyteller was saying. I believe a better reading is available, one that honors both the severity of judgment and the goodness of the Judge.

Before we begin, a word of caution. Parables are stories, not systematic theology lectures. Jesus told them to make a point—usually one central point—and we should not press every detail into a doctrinal statement. As Jonathan Kvanvig wisely warns, we should “pay heed to the point and not the details of the story.”¹ At the same time, the images Jesus chose are not random. They reveal something about the reality they point to. Our task is to discern that reality—carefully, humbly, and with an ear tuned to the whole counsel of Scripture.

The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)

No parable has shaped popular ideas about hell more than this one. A rich man lives in luxury while a poor man named Lazarus suffers at his gate. Both die. Lazarus is carried to Abraham’s side. The rich man finds himself in torment, begging for relief. A great chasm separates them, and no one can cross it.

For many Christians, this parable is the definitive picture of hell: conscious suffering, flames, and an unbridgeable gap between the saved and the lost. The traditional reading takes the story as a straightforward description of the afterlife. But is that what Jesus intended?

The first thing we need to notice is the setting. The rich man is in Hades (Greek, the realm of the dead)—not in Gehenna (the final state of judgment) and not in the lake of fire.² This distinction matters enormously. As we discussed in Chapter 21, Hades is the intermediate state—the waiting room between death and the final judgment. The rich man has not yet faced the great white throne. He has not yet been raised from the dead. He is in a temporary condition, not a final one. Even taken at face value, this parable tells us nothing about the ultimate destiny of the lost after the resurrection and final judgment.³

Edward Fudge makes this point forcefully: even if we take every detail of the story literally, it still concerns only the intermediate state of two men who died while Jesus was still teaching on earth. The punch line of the story has nothing to do with the mechanics of final punishment.⁴ And few serious interpreters take all the details literally. As Fudge observes, a literal reading would require us to imagine the saved and lost conversing at close range, physical tongues burning in literal fire, and water that somehow cannot cool them.⁵

So what is the point? The context tells us. Jesus has just been teaching about covetousness and stewardship (Luke 16:1–13). The Pharisees, who loved money, sneered at Him (v. 14). Jesus warns them that God knows their hearts and often detests what people value highly (v. 15). Then He tells this story about two men whose reputations with people were the opposite of their standing with God. The rich man’s sin is not some spectacular crime—it is the quiet, daily neglect of the suffering person at his gate.⁶

But here is what makes this parable so powerful for the divine presence model. Look at the rich man’s behavior in Hades. He is in torment, yes. But does he repent? Not really. He asks Abraham to send Lazarus to bring him water—as if Lazarus were still a servant to do his bidding.⁷ Then he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers. As Jerry Walls perceptively notes, this request may look loving on the surface, but it is actually an indirect attempt at self-justification. The rich man is hinting that he was not properly warned—that if he had known, he would have lived differently.⁸

Abraham’s response is devastating: “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.” When the rich man protests that someone rising from the dead would be more convincing, Abraham replies, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (v. 31). The point is unmistakable. The rich man is not in Hades because he lacked evidence. He had Moses and the Prophets. He had Lazarus lying at his gate every single day. He saw the need and chose to ignore it.⁹

Walls draws an even deeper insight from this parable. The rich man’s misery in Hades does not appear to be unbearable—not in the way that would, on Thomas Talbott’s universalist model, inevitably drive someone to repentance. Instead, the rich man seems more interested in being proved right than in throwing himself on God’s mercy.¹⁰ This is the psychology of self-deception that R. Zachary Manis identifies as central to the problem of hell. Sin does not simply make people do bad things. Sin blinds people to the truth about themselves—and the deeper the self-deception, the harder it becomes to see clearly, even when the evidence is right in front of you.¹¹

Walls, reflecting on the rich man’s posture, suggests that this is what makes a free choice of hell intelligible. Hell is not a place of unbearable agony that no one in their right mind would choose. It is a place of deep misery combined with deep self-justification. The rich man would rather be miserable and right than humble and restored.¹² On the divine presence model, this makes perfect sense. God’s presence reveals the truth. But the self-deceived heart twists even that revelation into a reason to hold its ground.

The traditional ECT reading turns this parable into a blueprint for eternal torture. The divine presence model reads it as a portrait of what happens when a hardened heart encounters truth and love—and refuses to yield. The torment is real. But it comes from within, not from a God who delights in punishment.

There is one more detail that deserves attention. The rich man can see Lazarus and Abraham. He is not in total isolation. He is aware of the feast, aware of the comfort that Lazarus now enjoys, aware of the love that he himself could have given but chose to withhold. And that awareness is part of his torment. He sees what he missed. He sees the person he could have helped but did not. He sees the grace that was available to him all along and realizes, perhaps for the first time, that he threw it away—not in a single dramatic act of rebellion, but in a thousand small daily choices to walk past the suffering man at his gate.

This is the sting of the divine presence model. Hell is not a dungeon where God hides people away. It is a state of terrible awareness—awareness of love, awareness of truth, awareness of what was offered and refused. Gerry Beauchemin, writing from a universalist perspective, suggests that the rich man’s suffering is severe but not necessarily permanent. The chasm prevents him from escaping the consequences of his choices while the chastisement is taking place, but the parable does not explicitly say the chasm will remain forever.⁵¹ Whether one reads this passage through CI or UR lenses, the essential point is the same: the suffering flows from the condition of the heart, not from a vindictive God.

The Pharisees listening to Jesus would have understood exactly what He was doing. He was telling them that their wealth and religious status meant nothing if their hearts were hard. He was warning them that Moses and the Prophets—the very Scriptures they claimed to revere—demanded compassion for the poor. And He was hinting, with devastating irony, that even if someone were to rise from the dead, they would not believe. Within a few months, someone did rise from the dead. And many of the Pharisees still refused to believe. The parable was a mirror held up to their faces. And they did not like what they saw.

The Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 25:1–13)

Ten young women are waiting for the bridegroom to arrive for a wedding feast. Five are wise and bring extra oil for their lamps. Five are foolish and bring none. The bridegroom is delayed. When he finally comes at midnight, the foolish virgins have no oil and rush out to buy some. While they are gone, the door is shut. When they return and knock, the bridegroom says, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you” (v. 12).

The traditional reading focuses on the finality of the shut door. “Too late!” is the message. Once the opportunity is gone, it is gone forever. And in one sense, that reading is correct. Jesus is warning His listeners that readiness matters. You cannot borrow someone else’s relationship with God at the last minute. Preparation is personal.

But notice what happens when we read this parable through the lens of the divine presence model. The foolish virgins are not cast into a torture chamber. They are shut out from a celebration. The bridegroom does not say, “Depart from me into everlasting fire.” He says, “I do not know you.” The Greek word here is oida, which carries the sense of intimate, personal knowledge—not mere acquaintance but deep relational knowing.¹³ The bridegroom is not saying, “I have never heard of you.” He is saying, “There is no relationship between us.”

This fits the divine presence model perfectly. On this model, what makes someone ready for the presence of God is not just right information or right behavior, but a right heart—a heart that has been cultivated through genuine relationship with God and is therefore disposed to receive His love with joy rather than dread. The foolish virgins represent people who had a form of religion but lacked the inner reality. They looked the part. They were in the right place. But they had not cultivated the kind of heart that could endure and enjoy the bridegroom’s presence.¹⁴

The shut door is not a picture of God slamming a gate in someone’s face out of spite. It is the recognition that a person who has not developed the capacity for intimate communion with God cannot simply waltz into that communion at the last second. As Manis argues, character is formed over time, through repeated choices. The wise virgins had been preparing all along. The foolish ones had been coasting.¹⁵

The oil is worth reflecting on for a moment. In Scripture, oil is consistently associated with the Holy Spirit—with the inner reality of a life that has been touched and shaped by God. You can have a lamp without oil. It looks perfectly fine sitting on a shelf. But a lamp without oil cannot do the one thing a lamp is supposed to do: give light. The foolish virgins had the outward form—the lamp, the white dress, the place in the procession—but they lacked the inward substance. They had religion without relationship. They had the container without the contents.⁴⁸

I think about this when I meet people who have grown up in the church but have never really let the gospel sink down below the surface. They know the right answers. They show up on Sundays. They can quote the verses. But there is a hollowness underneath it all. They have been coasting on borrowed faith—the faith of their parents, their pastor, their community. And then the crisis comes. The midnight moment arrives. And they discover that borrowed faith, like borrowed oil, is not enough to carry you into the presence of the bridegroom.

The parable does not tell us what happens to the foolish virgins after the door closes. It does not say they are sent to be tortured forever. It simply says the door is shut and the bridegroom does not recognize them as his own. On the divine presence model, the shut door is not an act of cruelty. It is the natural consequence of unpreparedness. A heart that has not been shaped by genuine love cannot suddenly produce what was never cultivated. The ECT reading would have us believe that these unprepared women are then subjected to infinite torment for their unreadiness. But the parable itself suggests something far simpler and far more sobering: they missed the feast. They stood in darkness while the celebration went on without them—not because God wanted them in darkness, but because they had no oil to receive the light.

The Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22:1–14)

A king throws a wedding feast for his son. The invited guests refuse to come—some because they are too busy, others because they are hostile. The king sends servants to gather anyone they can find from the streets, “both good and bad” (v. 10). The hall fills. But then the king notices one man who is not wearing a wedding garment. He asks, “Friend, how did you get in here without wedding clothes?” The man is speechless. The king orders him bound and thrown into “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (v. 13).

This is one of the more startling parables, and it raises immediate questions. What is the wedding garment? Why is the punishment so severe for a clothing violation?

The key is to understand what the wedding garment represents. In the culture of Jesus’s day, a host would often provide garments for the guests.¹⁶ To refuse the garment was to dishonor the host. It was a deliberate act of defiance—a way of saying, “I will come to your party, but on my terms.” The garment is widely understood by interpreters to represent the righteousness that God provides freely to those who come to Him through Christ.¹⁷ To show up without it is to come before God without having accepted the grace He offers.

Now look at the man’s response when questioned. He is speechless—literally, he is gagged, muzzled, struck silent (Greek: ephimōthē).¹⁸ He has no excuse. He cannot justify himself. This is the moment of transparency that the divine presence model describes—the moment when the truth about a person’s heart is fully revealed and there is nothing left to hide behind. Every defense crumbles. Every excuse dissolves. The man stands exposed before the king, and the silence is deafening.

What follows is expulsion into “outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The traditional reading turns this into eternal torture. But consider what the image actually conveys. The man is removed from the light, the celebration, the warmth of the feast. He is in darkness. And the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” is not necessarily a description of physical torment. As Fudge demonstrates, the biblical image of gnashing teeth consistently describes fury and rage—not pain. In Acts 7:54, Stephen’s enemies gnash their teeth at him in uncontrollable anger.¹⁹ Psalm 112:10 depicts the wicked gnashing their teeth in frustration as they watch the righteous receive their reward—and then wasting away to nothing.

On the divine presence model, the outer darkness represents the subjective experience of someone who has rejected the garment of grace and now stands in the unveiled presence of truth with no covering. The weeping is genuine grief—the realization of what has been lost. The gnashing of teeth is the rage of a heart that would rather be angry than humbled. Baker’s fictional character Otto captures this perfectly: standing in the fire of God’s presence, his teeth gnash together as his sin confronts him face-to-face. The grief is real. The anguish is real. But it is the anguish of revelation, not the anguish of torture.²⁰

This parable teaches that coming into God’s presence without a transformed heart is a devastating experience. But the devastation comes from the encounter with love and truth, not from a wrathful God inflicting pain for its own sake.

There is another layer here that deserves our attention. The king’s invitation goes out to “both good and bad” (v. 10). This is important. The hall is not filled only with the righteous. It is filled with everyone who was willing to come. The king does not screen the guests at the door. He opens the doors wide. The only requirement is that the guests accept the garment he provides. The tragedy of the man without the wedding garment is not that he was uninvited—he was invited, just like everyone else. His tragedy is that he wanted to attend the feast on his own terms, without accepting what the king freely offered.

Manis helps us see the theological significance of this. On the divine presence model, God’s grace is freely offered to all. The “garment” is available. No one is excluded because of who they are or what they have done. The only thing that excludes is the refusal to receive what is given. This is not about earning one’s way in; it is about accepting the gift that makes it possible to survive the encounter with the king’s glory.⁴⁹ Without that garment—without the covering of grace—standing in the full light of God’s presence is not a celebration. It is an exposure. And that exposure is what the man experienced when the king turned his gaze toward him and asked the simple question: “Friend, how did you get in here?”

I find it striking that the king calls him “friend.” The Greek word is hetaire, which is used elsewhere in Matthew only when Jesus addresses Judas in the garden (Matt. 26:50) and the grumbling workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:13). It is not a warm term. It is courteous but distant—the kind of address you use when you know the person before you has no real connection to you, even though they are standing in your house. It is the language of a host who sees through the pretense.⁵⁰

The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43)

A farmer sows good seed in his field. An enemy sows weeds—zizania in the Greek, often identified as darnel, a weed that looks almost exactly like wheat in its early stages.²¹ The servants want to pull up the weeds immediately. The farmer says no—let them grow together until the harvest. Then the reapers will gather the weeds first, bind them in bundles, and burn them. The wheat will be gathered into the barn.

Jesus provides His own interpretation of this parable (vv. 36–43), which is unusual. The field is the world. The good seed are the children of the kingdom. The weeds are the children of the evil one. The harvest is the end of the age. The reapers are the angels. “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (vv. 41–43).

The ECT reading takes the fiery furnace as a description of eternal conscious torment. But does the image itself support that reading? Think about what a furnace does. A furnace consumes what is placed in it. When you throw weeds into a furnace, they do not burn forever. They are destroyed. This is the consistent biblical image: fire consumes, reduces to ash, and eliminates. The prophet Malachi uses exactly this picture: “The day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch” (Mal. 4:1).²²

Fudge makes this connection explicit. The weeds are burned up, not kept alive in endless fire. The promise that “the righteous will shine like the sun” echoes Daniel 12:3 and Malachi 4:1–3, where the righteous enjoy healing rays while the wicked are reduced to ashes under their feet.²³ The fire is destructive, not preservative.

But the divine presence model adds an essential layer. What is this fire? As we argued in Chapter 22, fire in Scripture is consistently connected with God’s presence. Daniel 7:9–10 describes a river of fire flowing from the Ancient of Days. Hebrews 12:29 declares that “our God is a consuming fire.” On the divine presence model, the fiery furnace of this parable is not a separate torture facility built somewhere in the cosmos. It is the overwhelming experience of standing in the unveiled presence of a holy and loving God.

Baker’s reading of 1 Corinthians 3 illuminates this beautifully. In that passage, Paul says that each person’s work will be tested by fire. Gold, silver, and precious stones survive the fire; wood, hay, and straw are consumed. The fire does not change. The material changes. On Baker’s reading, standing in the fire of God’s presence means that everything wicked is burned away, and whatever is pure and righteous remains.²⁴ The fiery furnace in the parable of the wheat and tares is the same fire—the fire of God’s love, which consumes the weeds and leaves the wheat shining like the sun.

We should also notice the patience of the farmer. He does not rip out the weeds immediately. He lets them grow alongside the wheat until the time of harvest. Why? Because in their early stages, weeds and wheat look alike. Only at the harvest does the difference become clear. This is a picture of God’s patience—His willingness to allow the process of soul-making to unfold, even when evil is present in the world alongside good. The judgment is real, and it is coming. But it comes at the right time, and it comes as revelation—the moment when what is truly in the heart is made visible for all to see.²⁵

The Parable of the Net (Matthew 13:47–50)

A great net is cast into the sea and catches all kinds of fish. When it is full, the fishermen haul it ashore, sit down, and sort through the catch. The good fish go into baskets. The bad fish are thrown away. Jesus explains: “This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (vv. 49–50).

The parallels with the wheat and tares are obvious. Once again we have a period of mixture—good and bad together—followed by a separation at the end of the age. Once again the fire is the furnace. Once again there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The conditionalist reading of this parable is straightforward. When fishermen discard bad fish, the fish do not remain alive in endless torment. They perish. The image is one of disposal and destruction, not of ongoing torture.²⁶ Fudge observes that a fiery furnace is designed to consume—as the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego demonstrates. Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace was so hot that it killed the soldiers who threw the three men in. Only divine intervention preserved the faithful; without it, the fire does exactly what fire does—it destroys.²⁷

On the divine presence model, the net parable reinforces a key theme. The judgment is a sorting—a separation based on what is truly inside. The net catches everything indiscriminately. It is only when the catch is brought to shore—when the fish are examined in the light of day—that the difference becomes clear. This is the judgment of transparency that Manis describes: the moment when the books are opened and the truth about every heart is revealed.²⁸

Notice that the parable says nothing about why some fish are “bad.” It simply observes that a sorting happens. The fishermen do not torture the bad fish. They discard them. In the divine presence reading, the fiery furnace is not a place where God keeps the wicked alive to inflict pain. It is the experience of encountering God’s full presence without a heart prepared to receive it. For some, that encounter purifies. For others, it overwhelms. For those who have hardened themselves completely, it destroys.

Baker captures this with her character Otto. Standing in the fiery furnace of God’s presence, Otto’s wickedness is burned away. If something good remains, it is purified and restored. But if nothing good remains—if the heart has been so thoroughly consumed by evil that there is nothing left for the fire to spare—then the person is annihilated.²⁹ The bad fish are discarded. The fire does its work. And what remains is the catch that the Fisherman wanted all along.

Baker describes Otto’s experience in vivid, almost agonizing detail. The moment Otto comes before God, hating God and afraid for his life, he feels the intensity of God’s fire. But the flames consume him not with anger but with love. His anxiety turns to remorse as he sees what his sin has done to others. His teeth gnash. His heart breaks. God’s incomprehensible love faces off with his incomprehensible sin. And the love wins—not by force, but by sheer extravagance. Baker then asks the question that the net parable raises: What if, after the fire has done its work, nothing good remains? In that case, the person is simply gone—annihilated, like a fish that has no use for the fisherman. The fire does not preserve what is evil. It destroys it.⁵⁶

This reading honors the seriousness of the parable while also honoring the character of God. The net catches everything. The sorting is thorough. The fire is real. But the purpose of the fire is not to torment for torment’s sake. It is to separate the good from the bad, the pure from the corrupt, the wheat from the chaff. And in the end, what stands is only what can stand in the presence of a holy God.

The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46)

This is the parable that most people think of when they think of the final judgment. The Son of Man comes in glory, sits on His throne, and separates the nations as a shepherd separates sheep from goats. The sheep inherit the kingdom because they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and visited the prisoners. The goats are sent to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (v. 41) because they failed to do these things.

The phrase “eternal fire” has been used for centuries to support ECT. But we need to look more carefully at the Greek. The word translated “eternal” is aiōnios (from aiōn, meaning “age”). As we discussed in earlier chapters, aiōnios does not always mean “everlasting” in the sense of infinite duration. It can mean “pertaining to the age to come,” “of the quality of the coming age,” or simply “belonging to the age.”³⁰ The Hebrew equivalent, ’olam, is used in the Old Testament for things that clearly have an end—such as Jonah being in the belly of the fish “forever” (Jonah 2:6), which lasted three days. This does not prove that aiōnios means “temporary” in every case. But it does mean we should not automatically assume it means “never-ending.”

The word translated “punishment” is equally important. It is kolasis (correction, pruning) rather than timōria (retributive vengeance). As Baker notes, kolasis carries the connotation of remedial discipline—a punishment aimed at correction, not at inflicting suffering for its own sake.³¹ This is a small but significant detail. If Jesus had wanted to describe pure retribution, timōria was available. He chose the word that implies correction.

But what strikes me most about this parable is its content. Look at the basis of the judgment. It is not about doctrine. It is not about church attendance. It is not about saying the right prayer. It is about compassion. Did you feed the hungry? Did you give water to the thirsty? Did you welcome the stranger? Did you clothe the naked? Did you visit the sick and the imprisoned? “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (v. 40).³²

Baker sees in this parable a message about the character of the heart, not about religious performance. The sheep loved others. The goats did not. And the separation at the judgment reveals which was which. On the divine presence model, this is exactly what we would expect. The fire of God’s love burns away everything that is not love. Those who spent their lives cultivating love—even imperfectly—will find the fire purifying and joyful. Those who spent their lives in selfish indifference will find the same fire excruciating, because it exposes the emptiness of everything they built their lives upon.³³

The fire is “prepared for the devil and his angels.” It was never intended for human beings. But when human beings make themselves into the image of the devil—when they choose cruelty, indifference, and self-worship over love—they find that the fire meant for evil touches them too. Not because God changes His mind about loving them, but because they have made themselves into the kind of material that fire consumes rather than purifies.

Michael Phillips, in What If Hell Is God’s, Not the Devil’s?, makes a profound observation about the nature of the judgment in this parable. The Father does not judge as a courtroom judge handing down a sentence. He judges as a Father—and His judgment reveals whether His children have become like Him or have become strangers to His heart. The sheep are not rewarded for performing religious rituals. They are recognized as people who have absorbed the Father’s character—people who saw the hungry and fed them, who saw the suffering and entered into it. The goats are not condemned for breaking a rule. They are exposed as people who lived in the Father’s world, enjoyed the Father’s blessings, and never once let the Father’s compassion flow through them to others.⁵²

This is the heart of the divine presence model as it applies to judgment. The fire does not change anyone’s character. The fire reveals it. The people who spent their lives cultivating compassion find that the fire feels like coming home. The people who spent their lives in self-centered indifference find that the same fire is unbearable—not because God is adding punishment on top of their sins, but because the gap between who they are and who they were created to be is now laid bare, fully and finally, in the light of God’s presence. That gap is the torment. And on the divine presence model, the only cure for the gap is repentance—the turning of the heart toward love. For those who turn, the fire purifies. For those who refuse to turn, the fire consumes.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32)

I have saved this parable for last because, in many ways, it is the most important of all for understanding the divine presence model. Most readers focus on the younger son—the prodigal who squanders his inheritance, hits rock bottom, and comes home to a father who runs to meet him with open arms. It is one of the most beautiful pictures of grace in all of Scripture. But Jesus did not end the story there. He added a second act. And it is in that second act that we find the most penetrating insight into the nature of hell.

The elder brother is out in the field when the celebration begins. He hears music and dancing. A servant tells him what has happened—his brother has come home, and the father has thrown a party. The elder brother is furious. He refuses to go in. The father comes out to him—just as he ran out to meet the younger son—and pleads with him. The elder brother’s response is bitter: “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!” (vv. 29–30).

The father’s reply is gentle and heartbreaking: “My son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (vv. 31–32).

Now here is what makes this parable explosive for the divine presence model. Where is the elder brother at the end of the story? He is standing outside the door of his father’s house. He is within arm’s reach of the feast. The music is playing. The lights are on. His father is right there, speaking to him, inviting him in. Everything the father has belongs to him. He has never been separated from his father for a single day.

And yet he is in hell.

Alexandre Kalomiros, in The River of Fire, identifies the elder brother as the definitive picture of what hell looks like on the divine presence model.³⁵ The elder brother is not in a dungeon. He is not in a torture chamber. He is not far from home. He is right there—surrounded by his father’s love, standing in the glow of his father’s house, hearing the music of his father’s celebration. And he is miserable. Not because his father is punishing him. Not because he has been cast out. But because his own heart—full of resentment, self-righteousness, and rage—cannot receive what is being offered to him.

Think about the elder brother’s words. “All these years I’ve been slaving for you.” He does not see himself as a beloved son. He sees himself as a slave. He has been in his father’s house his whole life and has never understood his father’s heart. His obedience was not born of love but of obligation. His service was not joyful but grudging. He has been physically present but relationally absent. He has been in paradise and experienced it as a prison.³⁶

This is the insight that the Orthodox Fathers grasped centuries ago. As Isaac the Syrian wrote, those who suffer in hell are “scourged by love.”³⁷ The elder brother is being scourged by his father’s love—not because the love is cruel, but because his heart is so twisted by pride and resentment that love itself feels like an insult. The father’s generosity toward the prodigal does not just make the elder brother angry; it torments him. How dare the father forgive! How dare the father celebrate! How dare the father treat the sinner as though he were a beloved son!

And there it is. The elder brother cannot stand grace. He has built his entire identity on performance, on being the good one, on earning what he has. The prodigal’s restoration threatens that identity because it reveals that the father’s love was never about performance in the first place. It was always, only, about relationship. And the elder brother does not want relationship. He wants reward. He wants recognition. He wants to be right.

This is the portrait of hell that Manis describes in philosophical terms. Self-deception hardens the heart to the point where even the direct experience of love is twisted into something threatening. The elder brother looks at grace and sees injustice. He looks at mercy and sees weakness. He looks at celebration and sees a personal affront. His father’s love has not changed. His father is the same generous, compassionate man he always was. But the elder brother’s heart has made that love unbearable.³⁸

And notice: the story ends without resolution. Jesus does not tell us whether the elder brother went in or stayed out. That silence is deliberate. The question hangs in the air, addressed directly to the Pharisees and scribes who are grumbling about Jesus eating with sinners (Luke 15:1–2). They are the elder brothers. They are in the Father’s house. They have the Law and the Prophets. They are surrounded by God’s love. And they are furious about grace.

Will they go in? That is the question Jesus leaves with them. And it is the question He leaves with us.

The Orthodox tradition has understood this dynamic for centuries. Fr. Thomas Hopko, in The Orthodox Faith, describes the final coming of Christ in language that sounds like a commentary on the elder brother: “For those who love the Lord, His Presence will be infinite joy, paradise and eternal life. For those who hate the Lord, the same Presence will be infinite torture, hell and eternal death. The reality for both the saved and the damned will be exactly the same.”⁵³ The elder brother and the prodigal are standing in the same house, with the same father, at the same celebration. The reality is exactly the same. The experience could not be more different.

This is why I keep coming back to the image of the elder brother when I think about what hell really is. He is not a caricature of wickedness. He is not a mass murderer or a war criminal. He is a regular, respectable, religious person who has done everything right—or so he thinks. He has obeyed the rules. He has worked hard. He has never strayed. And yet he stands outside the door of joy, consumed by bitterness, unable to celebrate the grace that is being poured out right in front of him. If that is not hell, I do not know what is.

Walls captures something crucial about this dynamic. The prodigal son in the far country made terrible choices, but he eventually came to his senses. He remembered his father’s goodness and went home. The universalist argument, as Thomas Talbott presents it, is that everyone will eventually have this kind of awakening—that no one can resist the gravity of love forever.³⁹ But the elder brother complicates this. He is not in the far country. He is already home. He has never left. And yet his heart is farther from his father than the prodigal ever was. The elder brother’s problem is not ignorance or distance. It is pride. And pride can thrive even in the immediate presence of love.

This is why the CI-versus-UR question remains genuinely open. If the elder brother represents the soul that stands in God’s very presence and still refuses to yield, then perhaps some hearts are truly capable of eternal resistance. Or perhaps, as the universalists hope, the father’s patient pleading will eventually break through even the hardest shell. Jesus does not settle the question. Neither will I. What I know is this: the father goes out. The father pleads. The father does not give up. And the door remains open.⁴⁰

Synthesis: What the Parables Tell Us Together

When we step back and look at these six parables as a whole, a consistent picture emerges—and it is not the picture that the Western tradition of ECT has painted for us.

First, the parables consistently portray judgment as revelation, not as retributive torture. The rich man is confronted with the truth about his life. The man without the wedding garment is struck speechless when exposed. The weeds are distinguished from the wheat at the harvest. The bad fish are sorted from the good. The goats are separated from the sheep based on what was in their hearts all along. The elder brother’s bitterness is laid bare by the father’s grace. In every case, the judgment is the moment when what was hidden becomes visible. This is exactly what the divine presence model predicts: the final judgment is the judgment of transparency, the opening of the books of the heart.⁴¹

Second, the parables consistently portray the suffering of the judged as flowing from their own condition, not from external torture imposed by God. The rich man is tormented by his own self-justification. The man without the garment is undone by his own refusal of grace. The weeds are consumed because that is what weeds do in fire. The elder brother is miserable because his own heart cannot receive love. God does not need to torture anyone. As Isaac the Syrian taught, it is not right to say that sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God. They are scourged by it—scourged by the very thing that should have been their greatest joy.⁴²

Third, the parables consistently use fire in a way that suggests consumption and destruction, not eternal preservation in torment. Weeds burn up. Bad fish are discarded. Chaff is consumed by unquenchable fire. These are images of finality, not of ongoing torture. On the divine presence model combined with conditional immortality, the fire of God’s presence ultimately destroys those who cannot bear it. On the universalist reading, the fire purifies and eventually restores. But on neither reading does the fire preserve sinners alive forever for the purpose of inflicting pain. That image simply is not in the parables.⁴³

Fourth, and most profoundly, the parables of the prodigal son and the wedding banquet reveal that the problem is not God’s willingness to receive sinners—the problem is the sinner’s willingness to be received. The father runs to meet the prodigal. The king invites everyone off the streets. God’s arms are open. The door is open. The feast is ready. The only thing that keeps someone out is the refusal to come in on the host’s terms—the refusal to accept grace, to wear the garment of humility, to rejoice in the mercy that others receive.

Manis is right that the apocalyptic imagery of fire and judgment in the parables should not be read as merely symbolic. These visions point to something overwhelmingly real—the experience of standing before the unveiled Christ in the full blaze of His glory.⁴⁴ But they are not descriptions of a medieval torture chamber. They are descriptions of what happens when a heart encounters perfect Love and either opens to it or shatters against it.

It is worth pausing here to acknowledge what the ECT reading gets right. These parables are serious. Deadly serious. The consequences Jesus describes are not trivial. Weeping, gnashing of teeth, outer darkness, furnaces of fire, shut doors—these are images of genuine terror. The divine presence model does not soften them. If anything, it intensifies them. On the ECT reading, hell is something God does to you from the outside. On the divine presence model, hell is something that happens within you when the deepest reality in the universe—the love of God—meets the deepest wound in your soul—the refusal to receive that love. That is more terrifying, not less. Because it means the problem is not an angry God who needs to be appeased. The problem is a broken heart that would rather be broken than healed.⁵⁴

The great Russian Orthodox saint Silouan of Athos reportedly prayed, “Lord, give me the grace to weep for the whole world.” That is the spirit in which I have tried to read these parables. Not as a debater trying to score points against a theological opponent, but as a fellow sinner who stands humbled before the same fire that the parables describe. The elder brother is not someone out there. He is someone in here—inside my own heart, every time I resent the grace God shows to someone I think does not deserve it. The rich man is not a stranger. He is me, every time I walk past a need that I have the power to meet and choose not to. The man without the wedding garment is the part of me that wants to come to God on my own terms, in my own righteousness, without admitting how desperately I need the covering He offers.

Baker summarizes it well: “God’s incomprehensible love faces off with incomprehensible sin. The love, in the sheer extravagance of its force, acts as judgment against the total excessiveness of sin.”⁴⁵ That is the picture the parables paint. Not a God who tortures. A God who loves. And a love so fierce, so pure, so relentless, that it becomes the most terrifying thing in the universe to those who refuse it—and the most glorious thing in the universe to those who embrace it.

Pastoral Implications: Reading the Parables with New Eyes

What difference does all of this make for the church?

For one thing, it changes how we preach these parables. For too long, the parables of judgment have been used as threats—scary stories designed to frighten people into conversion. “Believe, or else!” But the parables are not about a God who is waiting to punish us. They are about a God who is waiting to receive us. The warning in the parables is not “God will hurt you if you do not obey.” The warning is “Your heart is hardening, and if you do not let love in, the day is coming when love itself will be the thing you cannot endure.” That is a far more searching message—and a far more biblical one.⁴⁶

For another thing, it changes how we understand the call to repentance. Repentance is not about appeasing an angry God. Repentance is about allowing the fire of God’s love to do its work in us now, while there is still time—softening us, burning away the dross, opening our hearts to receive what God has always wanted to give us. Every act of repentance is a rehearsal for the final judgment. Every time we choose humility over pride, compassion over indifference, grace over self-righteousness, we are preparing ourselves for the day when we will stand in the full blaze of divine love. The wise virgins brought oil. The sheep fed the hungry. The prodigal came home. What all of them had in common was a heart that was ready—however imperfectly—to receive love.

And finally, it changes how we think about God. The father in the parable of the prodigal son does not lock the door. He does not stand in the doorway with a whip. He runs. He embraces. He celebrates. And when the elder brother refuses to come in, the father goes out again. He pleads. He does not threaten. He does not force. He loves. That is the God we serve. And His fire is that love—relentless, patient, consuming, and aimed always at restoration.

I want to say a word here to those who fear that reading the parables this way somehow makes hell “not real enough.” I understand that concern. I have felt it myself. But consider this: on the traditional reading, the worst thing about hell is physical pain inflicted by an external force. On the divine presence reading, the worst thing about hell is standing before infinite Love with a heart that cannot receive it—seeing everything you were meant to be, everything you were offered, everything you threw away, and being unable to change it because your own choices have made you into the kind of person who would rather burn than bow. Which of those is more terrifying? Which one takes sin more seriously? I will let the reader decide.⁵⁵

The question the parables leave with us is not “Is God angry enough to punish?” The question is this: “Is your heart ready to receive what the fire reveals?” That is the question that matters. And it is the question that Jesus, the master storyteller, has been asking all along.⁴⁷

In our next chapter, we will turn from the parables to the letters of Paul, where the language of fire, judgment, and God’s presence takes on a new and even more explicit form. Paul’s words about the fire that tests every person’s work—and his stunning declaration that all things will be reconciled through Christ—will bring us deeper still into the biblical heart of the divine presence model.