Chapter 29
Imagine you are standing at the edge of a great river. Behind you lies everything you have ever known—your life, your choices, your joys, your failures. Ahead, the river stretches toward a horizon flooded with light so brilliant you cannot quite look at it directly. You know, deep in your bones, that the light is not some distant star. It is a Person. And that Person is coming closer.
This is the picture Scripture paints of the end of all things. Not a courtroom drama with a gavel and a cold verdict. Not a bureaucratic sorting of files into two bins. Something far more intimate, far more terrifying, and far more beautiful than any of that. The end of the story is a face-to-face encounter with the living God—an encounter in which every heart is laid bare, every secret revealed, and every soul finally sees Love without any veil between them.
In the previous two chapters, we explored the conscious intermediate state and the postmortem opportunity. We saw that when a person dies, the soul continues to exist consciously—the saved in paradise with the Lord, the unsaved in Hades, a state of conscious waiting. We saw that God, in His love and justice, provides a genuine opportunity for salvation even beyond the grave, especially for those who never had a real chance to hear the gospel during their earthly lives. But none of that is the final word. The intermediate state is, by definition, intermediate. It is the waiting room, not the destination.
Now we come to the destination itself. What happens at the final judgment? What is the final state of the saved? What becomes of the lost? And how does the divine presence model bring all of this together into a coherent, biblical, and deeply hopeful picture of the end?
That is what this chapter is about. We are going to walk through the entire eschatological sequence—from bodily resurrection to the great white throne to the new heavens and the new earth—and we are going to see how the divine presence model illuminates each step. Along the way, we will draw on Manis’s powerful framework of the “three unveilings,” Baker’s vivid account of what happens when a soul encounters God’s fire, and the stunning vision of the Church Fathers who saw paradise and hell not as two places but as two experiences of the same overwhelming reality: the unveiled presence of God.
Before we dive into the details, it helps to see the whole map laid out. The Bible presents a clear sequence of events that stretches from the moment of death to the eternal state. Here is the basic timeline as I understand it from Scripture:
First, death. The body returns to the dust. The soul—the immaterial, conscious self—separates from the body and enters the intermediate state. For the saved, this means being “with Christ” (Phil. 1:23), which Paul says is “far better.” For the unsaved, this means Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not yet the final judgment, not the lake of fire.1 We discussed this at length in Chapter 27.
Second, the bodily resurrection. At the end of the age, when Christ returns, all the dead are raised—both the righteous and the unrighteous. This is not a metaphor. It is the central hope of the Christian faith. “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21–22). Everyone who has ever lived will be raised in a body.2
Third, the final judgment. The great white throne. The books are opened. Every person stands before God. This is what Jesus described in Matthew 25:31–46, what Daniel saw in his vision of the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9–10), and what John witnessed in Revelation 20:11–15. It is the moment when all pretense ends, all masks fall away, and the truth about every human heart is laid bare in the blazing light of God’s presence.3
Fourth, the final state. After the judgment, there are only two outcomes. For the saved—those who love God and have been transformed by His grace—there is eternal life in the full, unveiled joy of God’s presence. For the finally unrepentant—those who have hardened their hearts beyond all remedy—there is the second death, the consuming fire of divine love experienced as torment and, ultimately, as destruction.4
And fifth, the new heavens and new earth. The renewal of all creation. God dwelling among His people. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
That is the map. Now let us walk through each stage and see what the divine presence model reveals about it.
The resurrection of the body is not a footnote to the Christian hope. It is the Christian hope. The Apostles’ Creed confesses it: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The Nicene Creed proclaims it: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” Without the resurrection, Paul says bluntly, our faith is useless (1 Cor. 15:14).
What matters for our purposes is this: the resurrection is universal. It is not only the saved who are raised. Jesus Himself says, “A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned” (John 5:28–29). Daniel had prophesied the same thing centuries earlier: “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2).5
On the divine presence model, the universal resurrection is deeply significant. As Manis explains, the parousia (a Greek word meaning “arrival” or “presence”)—the second coming of Christ—is the event that brings divine hiddenness to a definitive end.6 During this present life, God’s presence is partially veiled. We experience God through faith, through the Spirit, through prayer and worship, but we do not see Him face to face. That changes at the resurrection. When Christ returns in glory, the veil comes off. God’s presence fills the earth. Every person who has ever lived is raised into that presence—whether they want to be or not.
Think about what that means. In this life, it is possible to avoid God. You can distract yourself. You can fill your life with noise and busyness and refuse to think about Him. You can construct elaborate intellectual defenses against the idea that He even exists. But at the resurrection, all of that ends. The glorified Christ appears, and there is no looking away. The light of His presence penetrates every corner of creation. As Kalomiros put it, drawing on the Orthodox tradition, “In the New Creation of the Resurrection, God will be everywhere and in everything. His light and love will embrace all. There will be no place hidden from God.”7
This is the end of divine hiddenness. And it is the beginning of the final judgment.
I want to pause here and let the weight of this sink in. We live in a world where it is possible—easy, even—to ignore God. Millions of people go through their entire lives without ever seriously confronting the reality of the Creator who made them and sustains them every moment. The philosopher Manis calls this condition “divine hiddenness,” and it is one of the most puzzling features of human existence.64 Why does God remain hidden? Why does He allow His creatures to wander through life as if He does not exist?
The divine presence model provides a profound answer. God remains hidden because His unveiled presence would be overwhelming—and because He wants our response to be genuinely free, not coerced by the sheer force of His glory. During this life, the veil serves as a mercy. It gives us space to choose. Space to seek. Space to grow. But at the resurrection, the purpose of the veil has been fulfilled. The time for choosing is over. The time for seeing has come. And when that moment arrives, every human being who has ever drawn breath will stand in the unshielded presence of the God who made them.
When most people think of the final judgment, they picture a courtroom. God is the judge behind the bench. The defendant stands before Him, trembling, while the charges are read. The verdict is handed down. Case closed.
That picture is not entirely wrong, but it misses the heart of what the Bible actually describes. The final judgment is not primarily a legal proceeding. It is, as Manis calls it, a “judgment of transparency.”8 It is the moment when every hidden thing is brought into the light—not because God needs to discover the truth about us (He already knows), but because we need to see it. And everyone else needs to see it, too.
Consider the imagery John uses in Revelation 20:11–12: “Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.”
What are these “books”? Kalomiros, drawing on the Church Fathers, gives us a profound answer: “Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in these hearts will be revealed.”9 The books that are opened are not file folders in some heavenly archive. They are our hearts. Our consciences. The full truth of who we are and what we have become—laid bare before the all-seeing gaze of the One who is Truth itself.
Jesus Himself repeatedly taught this. “There is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open” (Luke 8:17). “What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:2–3). And notice what Jesus says immediately after that warning: “Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into Gehenna” (Luke 12:5). The disclosure of the truth and the reality of hell are directly connected.10
This is why Jesus calls Himself “the light of the world” (John 8:12). It is not just a spiritual metaphor. In the final judgment, the light of Christ literally exposes everything. The glory of God that was veiled during this life—the glory that Moses saw only from behind, the glory that knocked Saul to the ground on the Damascus road, the glory that Peter, James, and John glimpsed on the Mount of Transfiguration—that glory is fully unveiled at the end of the age. And in that light, there is nowhere to hide.12
Manis puts it this way: the apocalypse—a word that literally means “unveiling”—is a double reveal. It is the unveiling of Christ in glory, and at the same time, the unveiling of every hidden truth about every person. The light of Christ reveals who He is and who we are, all at once.13 For those who have been walking in the light during this life, whose hearts have been gradually transformed by the Holy Spirit, this is the moment they have been longing for. It is the fulfillment of every hope, the satisfaction of every ache. For those who have been hiding in the darkness, building walls of self-deception, clinging to sin and calling it freedom—this is the most terrifying moment imaginable. Not because God is cruel. Because Truth is inescapable.
To understand the final judgment fully, we need to step back and see how it fits into the larger framework that Manis builds in his work on the divine presence model. He identifies three distinct “unveilings” that are woven throughout the New Testament. Each one reveals something different, and together they form the backbone of the eschatological picture on this model.14
The first unveiling is the unveiling of the human heart. This happens during this present life, when the Holy Spirit convicts a person of sin and draws them toward God. Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 3:16–18: “Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. . . . And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.” This is the unveiling that happens at conversion. It is an act of the human will, freely chosen in response to the Spirit’s prompting. A person voluntarily opens their heart to God, allows the light in, and begins the long process of sanctification.15
The second unveiling is the unveiling of Christ in glory at the end of the age. This is what Paul describes in 2 Thessalonians 1:7–10: “when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels.” Unlike the first unveiling, this one is not voluntary. It is not initiated by a human choice. It happens to everyone, whether they are ready or not. Christ appears. The veil of divine hiddenness is torn away. The presence of God floods the new creation. And every person—saint and sinner, believer and unbeliever—finds themselves standing in the blazing light of the glorified Son of God.16
Here is a crucial point that Manis brings out from the text of 2 Thessalonians. Paul says the wicked “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thess. 1:9, ESV). Notice the word “from.” The destruction does not come because the wicked are sent away from God’s presence. The destruction comes from God’s presence. It flows out of the encounter with the glorified Christ. Jesus’s unveiling in glory is the punishment of the wicked.17 Paul even uses a striking metaphor elsewhere: “the aroma of Christ” is, for some, “an aroma that brings death” (2 Cor. 2:15–16). The same Christ, the same presence, the same love—experienced as life by some and as death by others.
The third unveiling is the judgment of transparency we just discussed—the moment when the deepest truths about every person are revealed to everyone. This is connected to but distinct from the second unveiling. The second unveiling is the revealing of Christ. The third is the revealing of us. When God’s light fills the world, it does not just illuminate His glory; it illuminates our hearts. Every secret thought, every hidden motive, every act of love and every act of cruelty—all of it comes into the open. As Jesus said, “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed” (Luke 12:2).18
Put these three unveilings together, and you get the full picture. In this life, God invites us to voluntarily unveil our hearts to Him in repentance and faith. At the end of the age, Christ is involuntarily unveiled to the whole world in blazing glory. And in that same moment, every person’s true character is involuntarily unveiled before God and before one another. The first unveiling is an invitation. The second and third are a reckoning.
For those who love God—for those whose hearts have been softened and transformed by grace, who have opened themselves to the first unveiling during this life—the final judgment is not a moment of terror. It is a homecoming.
Think about it. The entire Christian life is a process of being prepared for this moment. Paul says we are being “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). The Holy Spirit is gradually shaping us, purifying us, making us more and more capable of receiving and reflecting the love of God. The first unveiling—the moment we turned to God and the veil was removed—was just the beginning. Every act of obedience, every prayer, every time we chose love over selfishness, every time we repented and came back to God after falling—all of it was preparation. All of it was training our hearts to bear the full weight of glory.19
And now that glory arrives. Christ appears. The veil drops. And what the saved experience is what the theologians call the beatific vision—the direct, unmediated encounter with the living God. As Manis describes it, this is “an experience of unimaginable and unsurpassable joy . . . the satisfaction of their deepest longings, the fulfillment of their very nature, a consummation of their union with the divine, the source of a perfect and everlasting happiness.”20
Fr. Thomas Hopko, speaking from the Orthodox tradition, puts it beautifully: “For those who love the Lord, His Presence will be infinite joy, paradise and eternal life.”21 The same love that the saved tasted partially during this life—in prayer, in worship, in moments of deep communion with God—they now experience fully and permanently. No more doubt. No more struggle. No more seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV). Now it is face to face.
And what about those who respond to the postmortem opportunity? Those who, in the intermediate state, encountered God’s love for the first time and yielded to it? Those who never heard the gospel during their earthly lives but, when the light finally reached them, opened their hearts and said yes? On the divine presence model, they receive the same gift. Their experience at the final judgment is the same as any other believer’s: the overwhelming, joyful, life-giving encounter with the God who loved them before they knew His name. The timing of their repentance was different. The grace is the same.22
Paul gives us a glimpse of what this looks like in 1 Corinthians 15, the great resurrection chapter. He says the dead will be raised “imperishable” (v. 42). Bodies sown in dishonor are raised in glory. Bodies sown in weakness are raised in power. The natural body becomes a spiritual body—not in the sense that it is immaterial, but in the sense that it is fully animated and governed by the Holy Spirit (vv. 42–44). The resurrection body is a body designed for eternity in God’s presence. It is a body fit for glory.23
Manis adds an intriguing observation here. Paul speaks of the saints in the new creation as “a radiant church” (Eph. 5:27), and Jesus says “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt. 13:43). On the divine presence model, this is not just poetic language. Those who have been gradually transformed by the first unveiling—who have been “beholding the glory of the Lord” and thereby “reflecting” it (2 Cor. 3:18)—will literally shine with the reflected glory of God. They become, in a sense, bearers of His light.24 What a stunning picture. The saved do not merely observe God’s glory from a distance. They participate in it. They radiate it.
And then there are those who refuse. Those who have hardened their hearts so thoroughly—through a lifetime of rebellion, self-deception, and the progressive calcification of the conscience—that when the light finally comes, they cannot bear it. Not because the light is harsh. Because the light is love, and they have made themselves into people who hate love.
This is the hardest part of the story. I wish I could skip it. But I cannot, because the Bible does not skip it, and we must be honest about what Scripture teaches even when it makes us uncomfortable.
On the divine presence model, the experience of the finally unrepentant at the judgment is not an experience of being sent away from God to some distant torture chamber. It is the opposite. It is the experience of being inescapably, overwhelmingly in God’s presence—and finding that presence unbearable.
Remember the analogy we have used throughout this book. A healthy eye delights in sunlight. A diseased eye finds the same light excruciating. The sun has not changed. The eye has. In the same way, a heart that has been softened by grace experiences God’s unveiled love as the greatest joy imaginable. A heart that has been hardened by sin, crusted over with layers of self-deception, twisted by a lifetime of choosing self over God and others—that heart experiences the very same love as torment.25
Kalomiros captures this with vivid clarity: “The Light of Truth, God’s Energy, God’s grace which will fall on men unhindered by corrupt conditions in the Day of Judgment, will be the same to all men. There will be no distinction whatever. All the difference lies in those who receive, not in Him Who gives.”26
This is an absolutely critical point. God does not treat the saved and the lost differently at the judgment. He does not smile at one group and frown at the other. He does not unleash love on His friends and wrath on His enemies, as if love and wrath were two different things coming from two different sources. No. The fire is one fire. The love is one love. The presence is one presence. What differs is the human heart that receives it.
Baker’s character Otto gives us a powerful illustration of what this looks like up close. Otto is a fictional mass murderer who dies and stands before God. He expects punishment, vengeance, fury. Instead, he encounters unconditional love. God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love. But look at your life; what have you done?” The fire of that love burns away every excuse, every rationalization, every wall Otto has built around his conscience. He sees his victims. He feels their pain. He is undone—not by wrath, but by the sheer, extravagant weight of a love he does not deserve.28
In Baker’s telling, Otto repents. He yields to the fire and is restored. But Baker is honest enough to acknowledge that not every Otto will respond that way. “The possibility exists,” she writes, “that Otto does not accept God’s offer of restoration, or that after the testing by fire nothing remains of him at all. Nothing.”29 The fire does not eliminate human freedom. Some may stand in the full blaze of God’s love and still say no.
What happens then? Here is where the question of conditional immortality and universal reconciliation becomes most acute, and we will explore that in depth in the next chapter. But for now, let me lay out the two possibilities as the divine presence model allows for them.
If conditional immortality is correct—and I lean in this direction, though I hold it with open hands—then the fate of the finally unrepentant is the second death. They are destroyed, body and soul, in the consuming fire of God’s love.
Jesus Himself said it plainly: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28). The word “destroy” here is apollumi (a Greek word meaning “to ruin, to bring to nothing, to utterly destroy”). It is the same word used in Matthew 2:13 when Herod sought to “destroy” the child Jesus—meaning to kill Him, not to torment Him forever. God has the authority to destroy both the body and the soul. On CI, He exercises that authority for those who finally refuse Him.30
Revelation 20:14 calls this “the second death.” Notice: it is a death, not a life of torment. “Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.” Death itself is destroyed. Hades—the intermediate waiting room—is emptied and abolished. And those whose names are not in the book of life share in this second death: they are consumed by the very fire that destroys death itself.31
On the divine presence model, this is not a punitive act of divine vengeance. God does not take pleasure in the destruction of the wicked. It is the inevitable result of a sinful heart encountering perfect Love without any capacity to receive it. Remember Kalomiros’s image: “The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love.”32 The fire does not change. The material does.
Baker draws on the imagery of brimstone—the sulfur fire of Revelation’s lake of fire—to make a similar point. In the ancient world, sulfur was used not only as a destructive agent but also as a purifier and cleanser. The Greek word for brimstone, theion, is spelled identically to the adjective meaning “divine.” Baker suggests that the “fire and brimstone” of Revelation is not the Devil’s torture chamber. It is the divine fire—the fire of God’s own presence—that purifies what can be purified and consumes what cannot.33
This is what CI looks like within the divine presence model. The wicked are not tortured for eternity by a God who has lost His patience. They are consumed by Love itself—a Love so fierce, so holy, so unrelenting that no rebellion can survive its full, unveiled force. For those whose hearts have become nothing but rebellion, the fire leaves nothing behind. The second death is the death of death, the end of everything that set itself against God. And it is, in a terrible and solemn way, an act of mercy. God does not sustain a soul in endless agony. He lets the fire do its work. And when the fire has finished, what remains is not torment but absence.34
Manis offers a philosophical framework for why annihilation happens this way rather than through a divine withdrawal of life. He argues that God’s presence is inherently life-giving. “To the degree that God is present, death is absent,” he writes. But the experience of being fully in God’s presence while hardened against Him is, in a sense, a living death—a “second death” that is the natural consequence of a soul’s radical unfitness for the environment in which it now permanently exists.35 On the hybrid view that combines the divine presence model with CI, the intensity of this encounter simply overwhelms the unredeemed soul. The fire that warms the willing burns up the resistant until nothing is left.
But there is another possibility. And I want to present it honestly, because I believe in following the truth wherever it leads, even when the destination is not entirely clear to me yet.
If universal reconciliation is correct, then the fire of God’s presence at the judgment is not the end of the story for the lost. It is the beginning of a process—an agonizing, purgatorial process—that eventually breaks through even the hardest heart and brings every soul into willing, joyful communion with God.
Manis acknowledges that the divine presence model is flexible enough to accommodate this possibility. He writes that “the divine presence model is flexible enough that, should one decide that the notion of final destiny is not essential to orthodoxy, the model can be developed so as to accommodate the possibility of salvation beyond the Day of Judgment.”36 On this version of the model, the fire of God’s presence is still painful to the unrepentant. But it is redemptively painful. It is the kind of pain that a surgeon inflicts—not to harm, but to heal.
Those who remain in rebellion construe their suffering as punishment inflicted by a cruel God, and they gain no benefit from it. But perhaps, Manis suggests, there are others “for whom the revelation of Christ is a convicting experience, and one that elicits a response of sincere contrition.” These individuals recognize their suffering as just. They become “convinced of God’s goodness and love” and begin to construe their painful experience not as punishment but as purgatorial cleansing—“something directed at their highest good.”37
On this view, the fire of God’s love eventually achieves what it was always aimed at: the restoration of every soul that was ever created. The universalist hope is that no amount of human stubbornness can hold out forever against infinite love. As Baker puts it, “God never forsakes or abandons those God loves—ever.”38
The universal-scope texts of the New Testament give this hope considerable biblical support. Paul writes that God desires “all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). He declares that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). He proclaims that at the name of Jesus, “every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10–11). And he announces the breathtaking hope that God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).39
Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, presses this point powerfully. He asks: if “all” die in Adam, and “all” are made alive in Christ, how can the second “all” be smaller than the first? The grammatical structure demands that the two groups are the same. If the whole human race fell in Adam, then the whole human race is raised in Christ.40 And if God will truly be “all in all,” how can any pocket of His creation remain in permanent rebellion?
I find these arguments powerful. I will not pretend otherwise. But I also find the biblical language of finality sobering—the “second death” of Revelation, the “eternal destruction” of 2 Thessalonians, the sheep and goats going to “eternal punishment” and “eternal life” in Matthew 25:46. We will wrestle with this tension at length in Chapter 30. For now, I simply want to be clear: the divine presence model works with either outcome. It does not require you to choose between CI and UR before you can accept its central claim. Whether the fire eventually consumes the resistant or eventually redeems them, the fire is the same fire: the love of God.41
Now we come to the part of the story that makes everything else worthwhile. Whatever happens to the lost—whether they are consumed or eventually restored—the Bible is absolutely clear about what happens to creation itself: it is renewed. Healed. Restored. Made gloriously, permanently, achingly beautiful.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Rev. 21:1). “He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’” (Rev. 21:5). This is not the destruction of the world and the creation of some different world. The Greek word kainos (meaning “new”) in these passages means “new in quality”—renewed, refreshed, restored—not “new in the sense of never having existed before.”42 God does not scrap His creation and start over. He redeems it. The same earth we live on now, healed and renewed, becomes the eternal dwelling place of God with His people.
On the divine presence model, this is profoundly significant. The new creation is not a place where God visits. It is a place where God dwells—fully, permanently, and without any veil. “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God” (Rev. 21:3). The new creation is paradise not because of its scenery (though the scenery will be breathtaking) but because of God’s presence. It is the full, unveiled, unhindered presence of the living God that makes the new earth paradise.43
And here is one of the most remarkable connections in all of Scripture. In Daniel 7:9–10, the prophet sees a vision of the Ancient of Days seated on a throne, and “a river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him.” In Revelation 22:1–2, John sees something strikingly similar: “the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life.”
A river of fire from Daniel. A river of life from Revelation. Both flowing from the throne. On the divine presence model, these two rivers are one and the same reality.44 The presence of God is experienced as fire by those who resist it and as living water by those who receive it. The same God. The same love. The same river. Fire for the resistant. Life for the willing.
Kalomiros recognized this in the Orthodox iconographic tradition. In the icon of the Last Judgment, a river of fire flows from Christ’s throne. On His right stand the blessed, bathed in the river’s light. On His left stand the condemned, engulfed in its flames. But the river is one river. It is not a river of punishment and a separate river of blessing. It is the single, undivided outpouring of God’s love for His creatures.45
I want you to sit with that image for a moment. A single river flowing from the throne of God. Fire and water, judgment and mercy, wrath and love—not in tension with each other, but as facets of the same unbreakable reality. That is the God of the Bible. That is the consuming love.
Paul gives us one of the most staggering phrases in all of Scripture when he writes about the end: “When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
What does it mean for God to be “all in all”? It means that there is no corner of creation where God is absent. No pocket of existence where His presence does not penetrate. No place left to hide from His love. The divine hiddenness that characterizes this present age is over. The curse of sin that kept God’s creatures at arm’s length from their Creator is lifted. God is everywhere, in everything, filling all things with Himself.46
Gregory of Nyssa, the great fourth-century Church Father, meditated deeply on what this means. In his work On the Soul and the Resurrection, he describes the new creation as a state in which God becomes everything to His creatures—their dwelling place, their food, their clothing, their light, their everything. There is nothing left that is not pervaded by the divine presence.47 For those who love God, this is the description of paradise: to be so saturated with God’s presence that every moment, every breath, every sight, every thought is flooded with divine love.
On the divine presence model, this is exactly what the new creation looks like. Heaven is not a gated community in the clouds. It is this earth, renewed and healed, with God’s presence filling every atom. Revelation 21:22–23 says there is no temple in the new Jerusalem “because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple,” and “the city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.” The very presence of God replaces every artificial source of light and every constructed place of worship. He is the temple. He is the light. There is nothing left but God and those who delight in Him.48
And there is no more death. No more crying. No more pain. “The old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4). On conditional immortality, the wicked have been consumed. On universal reconciliation, even the last holdout has finally yielded. Either way, the result is the same: a creation that is fully, permanently, radiantly at peace with its Creator. A creation where every knee has bowed and every tongue has confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:10–11)—whether through the joyful worship of the redeemed or through the merciful destruction of those who could not be redeemed.49
Try to imagine, for just a moment, what this would feel like. You wake up in a body that does not ache, does not age, does not tire. You look around and see a world more vivid, more beautiful, more real than anything you have ever experienced. Colors are deeper. Sounds are richer. The air itself seems alive with joy. And then you realize why. It is not the scenery that has changed most profoundly. It is the presence. God is here. Not as a concept, not as a feeling in a worship service, not as a faint whisper in prayer. He is here the way the sun is here on a cloudless day—unmistakable, undeniable, filling everything with warmth and light. And your heart, the heart He has been preparing for this moment your whole life, opens wide and drinks it in like a desert traveler reaching a spring of cool water.
That is the hope. That is what we are made for. And that is where the divine presence model leads: not to a grim theology of punishment and fear, but to a breathtaking theology of homecoming and joy.
One question remains that we should address before we consider objections. If heaven and hell are not two different geographical locations but two different experiences of the same divine presence, does the divine presence model require us to believe that the saved and the lost are in the same physical place?
Not necessarily. Manis addresses this carefully. In one sense, yes: everyone exists in the new creation. But Manis offers several reasons to think that the righteous and the wicked are physically separated even on this model.50
For one thing, the Bible itself suggests separation. The final chapters of Revelation describe the enemies of God as “outside the gates” of the holy city (Rev. 22:15). Jesus’s parables repeatedly describe the wicked as being “shut out” of the heavenly banquet and “thrown into the outer darkness” (Matt. 8:12; 22:13; 25:30). This language suggests some kind of physical distance between the two groups, even if both exist within the same renewed creation.
There is also a principled reason, Manis argues, grounded in the logic of the model itself. If the saved are being progressively conformed to the image of Christ—if they are increasingly reflecting His glory, becoming radiant with His light—then their very presence becomes an additional source of the same divine light that torments the wicked. The saints do not merely observe God’s glory; they radiate it. This means that the presence of the righteous would itself be a source of anguish to the lost.51 It makes sense, then, that God in His mercy would separate the two groups—not to protect the righteous from the wicked, but to spare the wicked from the compounded torment of being surrounded by beings who shine with the very glory they cannot endure.
The physical separation is real, but it is not the fundamental reality. The fundamental reality is the condition of the heart. Heaven and hell are not defined by their geography but by the soul’s relationship to the God who fills all things. Two people could stand in the same place and one could be in paradise while the other is in agony—just as the prodigal son and the elder brother were both at the same feast, but only one of them was celebrating.52
This is a fair concern, and I take it seriously. But I would push back gently. Everything I have described in this chapter is drawn directly from Scripture. The universal resurrection, the final judgment, the great white throne, the books being opened, the new heavens and new earth, the river of life, the second death—these are all biblical images. What the divine presence model does is provide a framework for making sense of all these images together. Without such a framework, you are left with a collection of dramatic pictures that do not quite fit together. With the divine presence model, they snap into focus like pieces of a puzzle finding their proper places.53
Moreover, the alternative frameworks are no less speculative. The traditional ECT view speculates that God actively sustains the wicked in existence for the sole purpose of tormenting them forever. The standard CI view speculates that God annihilates the wicked by withdrawing His presence—but it gives no clear mechanism for how this withdrawal works. Every eschatological model involves some degree of theological construction. The question is which construction best fits the biblical data and the character of God as revealed in Scripture. I believe the divine presence model does this better than its competitors.
This is one of the most sophisticated objections to combining the divine presence model with conditional immortality, and it deserves a careful answer.
Manis himself acknowledges this tension. If the presence of God is inherently life-giving—if “to the degree that God is present, death is absent”—then it seems like God’s full presence in the new creation would make annihilation impossible. Everyone would be kept alive by the sheer life-giving power of God’s presence, even if that existence were miserable.54
There are several ways to respond. First, Manis acknowledges that this argument, taken to its logical conclusion, actually pushes away from CI and toward either eternal suffering or universal reconciliation. If you accept that God’s presence is inherently life-giving, then you are left with two options: either the wicked suffer forever (because they cannot die in God’s presence), or they are eventually reconciled (because God’s life-giving presence eventually heals them). This is one reason I find the CI-versus-UR question so difficult to settle.55
Second, it is possible to distinguish between different senses of “life.” God’s presence sustains existence, but there is a difference between bare existence and the abundant life that Jesus promises (John 10:10). The second death may not be the annihilation of the person’s bare existence but the destruction of everything that makes existence meaningful, purposeful, and joyful. In this sense, the wicked are “destroyed” even while they continue to exist—though this pushes the model closer to a form of eternal suffering than to strict annihilationism.56
Third, the hybrid view that Baker develops offers another possibility. On her account, the fire of God’s presence burns away everything in a person that is impure. If there is nothing good left in a person—if they have become so thoroughly defined by rebellion that there is nothing of the original image of God remaining—then the fire would consume them entirely. Not because God withdraws His presence, but because the person has become, in a sense, nothing but fuel for the fire. What God’s presence sustains is goodness and being. What it consumes is evil and nothingness.57
I do not pretend to have this all neatly resolved. These are deep waters, and I am honest about swimming in them. What I am confident of is this: God does not torture. God does not sustain suffering for its own sake. Whatever happens to the finally unrepentant, it is the natural and inevitable consequence of a hardened heart meeting perfect Love—not the vindictive act of an offended deity.
The judgment is necessary not for God’s sake but for ours. God already knows the condition of every heart. He does not need to open the “books” to discover what is in them. But we do not know. We do not fully know ourselves, and we certainly do not fully know each other. The judgment of transparency serves at least three purposes.58
First, it vindicates the righteous. Those who have suffered for their faithfulness to God, who have been mocked and persecuted and misunderstood—the judgment reveals the truth about them. Their faithfulness is brought into the light. Their reward is made public. God says to the watching universe, “This is what was really going on all along.”
Second, it vindicates the victims. Those who were oppressed, abused, exploited, and silenced in this life—the judgment reveals the full truth about what was done to them and who was responsible. Justice is not just a verdict; it is the exposure of reality. Baker’s Otto story illustrates this beautifully: Otto’s victims are vindicated not by seeing Otto tortured, but by seeing Otto brought face to face with the full reality of what he did.59
Third, it vindicates God Himself. One of the deepest problems in theology is the question of why God allows so much suffering and evil in the world. The final judgment is God’s answer—not in words, but in reality. When every hidden truth is revealed, when the full story of every human life is told, when the complete picture of what God has been doing behind the scenes is finally made visible—it will become clear that God was just, that God was good, and that God was working all things together for the purposes of love.60
We addressed this in detail in Chapter 16, but it is worth revisiting briefly here. The key text is 2 Thessalonians 1:9, which the ESV translates as “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” On the surface, this seems to say the wicked are separated from God’s presence. But as Manis demonstrates at length, the Greek preposition apo (meaning “from”) can indicate either separation from a source or origin from a source.61 Other translations render the verse differently: “destruction that comes from the presence of the Lord”—meaning the destruction flows out of the encounter with God’s glory, not away from it.
Moreover, the immediate context strongly favors the divine presence reading. In the very next verse, Paul says this destruction happens “when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints” (2 Thess. 1:10). The destruction of the wicked and the glorification of the saints happen at the same event: the unveiling of Christ. They are two experiences of one reality. This confirms, rather than undermines, the divine presence model.62
We have covered a great deal in this chapter. We have walked through the entire eschatological sequence: death, the intermediate state, the bodily resurrection, the great white throne judgment, the final state of the saved and the lost, and the new heavens and new earth. We have seen how Manis’s three unveilings provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the movement from divine hiddenness to divine disclosure. We have seen how Baker’s Otto illustrates both the possibility of restoration and the possibility of final destruction within the divine presence model. And we have seen how the Orthodox tradition, through Kalomiros and the Fathers, gives us the stunning image of one river flowing from the throne of God—experienced as fire by the resistant and as living water by the willing.
Here is what I want you to take away from all of this.
The end of the story is not a cosmic tragedy. It is not a tale of a God who created billions of people knowing that most of them would end up screaming in agony for eternity while He looked on, unmoved. That is the picture that eternal conscious torment paints, and it is a picture that dishonors the God of the Bible.
The end of the story is the triumph of love. Whether the fire of God’s presence ultimately consumes the resistant or ultimately redeems them, the fire is love. It has always been love. God does not change. He is not loving toward some and wrathful toward others. He is love toward all—always, relentlessly, inescapably. The difference is in us. The fire that warms the willing is the same fire that burns the resistant. The river that gives life to the thirsty is the same river that overwhelms those who refuse to drink.
And the new creation is not an escape from this world. It is the fulfillment of this world—the world God always intended, the world that sin and death corrupted, the world that the cross of Christ began to redeem and the resurrection will finish redeeming. It is this earth, healed. This sky, made new. This river, flowing from the throne. This light, shining forever.
God will be all in all. And for those who love Him, that is the best news in the universe.
I think of it this way. Every funeral I have attended, every hospital bedside I have sat beside, every moment I have watched someone I love slip away—all of that grief, all of that loss, all of that gut-wrenching helplessness—it is real, but it is not the last word. The last word is resurrection. The last word is a renewed creation flooded with the presence of the God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb and then called him out of it. The last word is not death. The last word is life. Abundant, overflowing, unending life in the arms of perfect Love.
That is where this whole story is headed. And if that does not make you want to run toward the fire rather than away from it, I do not know what will.
In the next chapter, we will turn to the hardest question of all: Conditional immortality or universal reconciliation? Which is it? Can the human heart truly say no to God forever? Or will infinite love eventually win every last rebel? That is the open question we will wrestle with honestly—because the answer matters, and because honesty matters more than certainty.63
↑ 1. On the distinction between Hades (the intermediate state) and Gehenna/the lake of fire (the final state), see Chapter 21 of this volume. The rich man in Luke 16:19–31 is in Hades, not in the lake of fire. This distinction is critical for the entire eschatological picture.
↑ 2. On the universal scope of the resurrection, see also Daniel 12:2; Acts 24:15; John 5:28–29. The Nicene Creed confesses: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”
↑ 3. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).” Manis develops the idea that the final judgment is a public disclosure of the state of each person’s soul in the light of the glorified Christ.
↑ 4. On conditional immortality and the second death, see Matt. 10:28; Rev. 20:14; 2 Thess. 1:9. On the divine presence model, the destruction is not an act of divine vengeance but the natural consequence of a hardened heart encountering perfect Love.
↑ 5. The universal scope of the resurrection is affirmed across the New Testament. See also Acts 24:15, where Paul says he has “the same hope in God as these men themselves have, that there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked.”
↑ 6. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Heaven and hell on the divine presence model.” Manis writes that the parousia “is the event in which Jesus is revealed in all his glory, the event that inaugurates the final judgment, the event that abruptly brings divine hiddenness to a definitive end.”
↑ 7. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII. Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 253.
↑ 8. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).”
↑ 9. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XIV. Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 251–252.
↑ 10. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).” Manis observes that the disclosure motif and the judgment motif are directly connected in Jesus’s teaching, and both are connected to the theme of light and darkness.
↑ 11. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).” Manis writes: “It’s a judgment because it’s a public declaration of the truth about each person, an event in which all that was previously hidden is made manifest. But . . . the final judgment isn’t a matter of God’s making something true by declaring it; it’s a revelation of what’s already true.”
↑ 12. See Exodus 33:18–23 (Moses sees God’s glory from behind); Acts 9:3–5 (Saul on the Damascus road); Luke 9:28–29 (the Transfiguration). All of these are partial glimpses of the glory that will be fully unveiled at the end of the age.
↑ 13. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).” He writes that “the central event of Revelation, the apocalypse, is thus a double reveal: the revealing (‘unveiling’) of Christ in glory, accompanied by the revealing of every hidden truth about every person. This is the final judgment: a judgment of transparency.”
↑ 14. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The first and second unveilings” and “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).” These chapters develop the threefold framework of unveiling that I summarize here.
↑ 15. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The first and second unveilings.” See 2 Cor. 3:16–18.
↑ 16. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The first and second unveilings.” Manis writes: “Putting these passages together, what we find in Paul’s letters is a picture of two unveilings: the first taking place in this life, an event initiated by an individual act of human free will in response to the conviction of the Holy Spirit; the second taking place at the end of the age, an event brought about by an act of God without regard to human consent.”
↑ 17. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The first and second unveilings.” Manis comments: “It’s crucial to notice that the punishment described in this passage is neither artificial nor arbitrary. . . . Rather, destruction comes from the experience of being in the presence of Christ, fully revealed in glory. Jesus’ unveiling/appearing in glory is the punishment of the wicked.”
↑ 18. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The third unveiling (the judgment of transparency).” See also 1 Cor. 4:5; Rom. 2:16.
↑ 19. See Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 4:13. The entire process of sanctification can be understood as progressive preparation for the full, unveiled encounter with God at the final judgment.
↑ 20. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Heaven and hell on the divine presence model.”
↑ 21. Fr. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. IV: Spirituality (New York: Department of Religious Education, Orthodox Church in America, 1976), 196–97. Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 251–252.
↑ 22. On the postmortem opportunity, see 1 Pet. 3:18–20; 4:6 and our discussion in Chapter 28. On the divine presence model, those who respond positively to their first genuine encounter with God’s love—whenever that encounter occurs—enter into the joy of the redeemed.
↑ 23. See the entire argument of 1 Cor. 15:35–58. N. T. Wright provides an excellent discussion of the resurrection body in Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), chaps. 10–11.
↑ 24. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Separation of the righteous and the wicked.” See Eph. 5:27; Matt. 13:43; 2 Cor. 3:18.
↑ 25. The analogy of healthy and diseased eyes comes from Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII: “Healthy eyes enjoy light and because of it see clearly the beauty which surrounds them. Diseased eyes feel pain, they hurt, suffer, and want to hide from this same light.” Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 253.
↑ 26. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII. Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 253.
↑ 27. Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. IV, 196–97. Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 251–252.
↑ 28. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 115–117. Baker’s full telling of the Otto story is one of the most vivid and moving illustrations of the divine presence model in the literature.
↑ 29. Baker, Razing Hell, p. 117.
↑ 30. On the meaning of apollumi, see Edward Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), chap. 7. See also our discussion in Chapter 12.
↑ 31. Rev. 20:14–15. On the significance of death and Hades being thrown into the lake of fire, see our detailed exegesis in Chapter 26.
↑ 32. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII. Quoted in Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 253.
↑ 33. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 143–144. Baker notes that the Greek noun theion (brimstone) is spelled identically to the adjective “divine,” and that in the ancient world sulfur was used as a purifier and cleanser, especially in temple purification rites.
↑ 34. On the second death as the termination of existence rather than the perpetuation of torment, see Fudge, “The Case for Conditionalism,” in Two Views of Hell. See also Chapter 12 of this volume.
↑ 35. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 300–302. Manis argues that “to the degree that God is fully present, death is, of metaphysical necessity, absent.” He also describes the experience of the wicked in God’s presence as “a kind of living death, a ‘second death.’” See p. 388.
↑ 36. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 296.
↑ 37. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 296–297.
↑ 38. Baker, Razing Hell, p. 122.
↑ 39. See also Col. 1:19–20; Rom. 5:18; Eph. 1:9–10. The universal-scope texts are discussed at greater length in Chapter 13 and will be revisited in Chapter 30.
↑ 40. Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, chap. 4. Beauchemin argues that the parallel structure of 1 Cor. 15:22 (“as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive”) demands that the two “alls” be coextensive.
↑ 41. This is one of the great strengths of the divine presence model: it identifies the mechanism of both condemnation and salvation—the encounter with God’s love—without requiring a prior commitment to CI or UR regarding the outcome of that encounter.
↑ 42. The distinction between kainos (new in quality) and neos (new in time) is significant here. See N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, chaps. 5–6, for a thorough discussion of the continuity between this creation and the new creation.
↑ 43. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Heaven and hell on the divine presence model.” Manis notes that on this model, “the final destiny of all mankind” is “this earth, the same one we inhabit now, albeit completely healed and renewed.”
↑ 44. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 388. Manis writes: “On my proposed reading, this river of fire is identical to the lake of fire in Revelation 19–21, which in turn is identical to the ‘sea of glass glowing with fire’ in Revelation 15: all are references to the divine presence.” See also Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Apocalyptic visions.”
↑ 45. Kalomiros, The River of Fire, section XVII. See also Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 252–253.
↑ 46. See 1 Cor. 15:28; Eph. 1:23; Col. 3:11. The phrase “all in all” (panta en pasin) in 1 Cor. 15:28 indicates the total, comprehensive filling of all reality by God’s presence.
↑ 47. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection. See also our discussion in Chapter 15. Gregory’s vision of the new creation as the complete permeation of all reality by the divine presence is one of the most beautiful articulations of this hope in all of Christian theology.
↑ 48. Rev. 21:22–23; 22:5. The absence of a temple and the replacement of sun and moon with the glory of God underscores that the new creation is defined entirely by God’s unmediated presence.
↑ 49. Phil. 2:10–11. Whether this universal confession is joyful (on UR) or includes the confession of those about to be consumed (on CI) is one of the open questions explored in Chapter 30.
↑ 50. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Separation of the righteous and the wicked.”
↑ 51. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “Separation of the righteous and the wicked.” Manis draws on 2 Cor. 3:18 and Matt. 13:43 to argue that the saints will literally reflect the glory of God, becoming additional sources of the divine light that torments the wicked.
↑ 52. The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) provides a powerful illustration: the elder brother is at the feast but refuses to enter, tormented by his own resentment in the very presence of his father’s love.
↑ 53. See Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 247–255, for a thorough demonstration of how the divine presence model integrates the biblical data more coherently than competing models.
↑ 54. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 300–302.
↑ 55. See the discussion in Chapter 30 for a full treatment of this tension between CI and UR on the divine presence model.
↑ 56. This is related to the distinction between zoe (abundant, qualitative life) and mere biological existence that runs throughout the New Testament. See John 10:10; 17:3.
↑ 57. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 144–145. Baker writes: “What if Otto has no good at all in him? The fire would burn all of him. It would completely destroy him. There would be nothing left of him, which means that he would be annihilated.”
↑ 58. For a thorough discussion of the purposes of the final judgment, see Chapter 23 of this volume.
↑ 59. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 116–117. Baker writes that the victims are vindicated when Otto, standing in God’s fire, is made to touch each victim’s heart and feel all of their pain, disappointment, and fear. The victims’s deepest wish is fulfilled: that their offender feel remorse and know the pain he caused.
↑ 60. See Rom. 8:28; Rev. 15:3–4. The vindication of God’s character at the final judgment is one of the most important themes in the book of Revelation.
↑ 61. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The first and second unveilings.” The Greek preposition apo can indicate source or origin (“from”) as well as separation (“away from”). The context must determine which sense is intended. See also our extended discussion in Chapter 16.
↑ 62. 2 Thess. 1:9–10. The simultaneity of the destruction of the wicked and the glorification of the saints in the same event strongly supports the divine presence reading.
↑ 63. The CI-versus-UR question is the subject of Chapters 30 and 31. See Baker, Razing Hell, chaps. 9–11; Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Parts III–IV; Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell; Phillips, What If Hell Is God’s, Not the Devil’s?
↑ 64. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, “The interconnected problems of divine hiddenness and hell.” See also Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, Part II, where he develops the connection between divine hiddenness and the problem of hell at length.