“You Shall Not Surely Die”: The Original Lie and the Truth About Final Judgment

From the beginning, Satan’s first deception was simple and devastating: “You shall not surely die.” That lie redefined death as something other than what God declared it to be. Scripture, however, never wavers—death means the end of life, the loss of being, to be no more. The wages of sin is not eternal life in torment; it is death.

Ezekiel 28:18–19 reveals Satan’s own end after the Millennium. God brings a fire from within him that devours, reduces him to ashes, and declares, “never shalt thou be any more.” Ashes are not a state of suffering; they are the evidence of complete consumption. If Satan himself—the author of rebellion—is destroyed and ceases to exist, then the idea that mortal humans are preserved forever in fire contradicts Scripture at its foundation.

The Bible consistently distinguishes between eternal judgment and eternal burning. The results of judgment are eternal—final, irreversible, and permanent—but the act of burning is not. This is seen clearly in Jude 7, where Sodom and Gomorrah are said to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, yet those cities are not still burning. The fire was eternal in its effect, not its duration. What was destroyed remains destroyed forever.

This distinction matters because immortality is not innate. Scripture teaches that only God possesses immortality, and that eternal life is a gift given through Christ, not a default human condition. Those who reject Christ do not receive immortality—they remain mortal. Mortal beings cannot live forever, whether in joy or in pain. Jesus Himself said to fear God, “who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” Destruction of both soul and body does not describe preservation; it describes total loss of life.

To claim that God keeps mortals alive endlessly in fire is to unknowingly echo Satan’s original lie—that death is not really death. It replaces biblical justice with a concept foreign to Scripture and incompatible with God’s revealed character.

This misunderstanding has had real consequences. The idea that a person who lived thirty years—perhaps flawed, yet capable of kindness and love—would suffer conscious torment forever simply for not accepting Christ has driven countless people away from faith. Not because rejecting Christ is insignificant—it is serious beyond measure—but because infinite punishment for finite life appears morally incoherent. Many have not rejected God; they have rejected a version of God that contradicts justice, mercy, and reason.

The biblical picture is far more consistent and far more sobering. God judges perfectly. Evil is punished fully. Life without Christ ends in death—real death. Those who perish perish forever, not by endless suffering, but by ceasing to exist. The judgment is eternal because there is no resurrection from it, no return from it, no undoing of it.

In the end, God does not preserve evil.
He ends it.
And when judgment is complete, the result is exactly what Scripture says:

They shall be no more.