Despite the numerous Scriptures warnings given by Jesus himself, Seventh Day Adventist and presidential candidate Ben Carson told The Washington Post that he does not believe in hell.
“I don’t believe there is a physical place where people go and are tormented,” he stated. “No. I don’t believe that.”
As previously reported, Seventh Day Adventists believe in the “annihilation of the wicked,” rejecting the doctrine of eternal torment out of their assertion that the Bible doesn’t teach about a permanent place called Hell, but rather the snuffing out of the soul.
“How repugnant to every emotion of love and mercy, and even to our sense of justice, is the doctrine that the wicked dead are tormented with fire and brimstone in an eternally burning hell; that for the sins of a brief earthly life they are to suffer torture as long as God shall live,” wrote founder Ellen White in “The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan.”
“The theory of eternal torment is one of the false doctrines that constitute the wine of the abomination of Babylon, of which she makes all nations drink … They received it from Rome,” she asserted.
The early Church “did not [believe the Scriptures meant] eternal punishing, but rather punishment in the world to come that ends in cessation of being,” also asserted Adventist author LeRoy Edwin Froom in as outlined in “The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers.”
Carson said that while he doesn’t believe Hell is a physical place, he does believe that Heaven is literal. However, he suggested that souls sleep until the Second Coming of Christ.
“The Bible says when you die, you know, there is no soul that kind of floats away. But essentially, when you die, the next thing you know is the coming of Christ because you don’t know anything when you’re dead,” he told the Washington Post. “If you’re dead for a second or a thousand years, it’s the same. But when he comes, according to the book of First Corinthians, that the sound of the archangel will rise and that’s when things happen.”
In Matthew 25:41, in speaking of the separation between the sheep and the goats, Jesus said, “Then shall He say also unto them on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.'”
“And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal,” He outlined.
Jesus also spoke of the punishment of Hell in the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus.
“And in Hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom,” Jesus explained in Luke 16:23. “And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.”
“[I]t is better for thee to enter into the Kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into Hell fire, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched,” He also warned in Mark 9:47-48.
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