Is it not unjust to punish a few years of sin with an eternity of torment?

A man sins for seventy years, and God punishes him forever. A finite crime, an infinite sentence — the arithmetic looks harsh. But there is a flaw in our assumption: that the seriousness of sin is measured by how long it took to commit.

No court on earth measures crime that way. A murder can take a minute and draw a life sentence; a fraud can take a decade to build and draw a lighter one. The clock has never been the measure of a crime. What a court weighs is the deed itself — and, just as much, the one against whom it was done. Spitting at a stranger and spitting at the Queen are not the same offence, though the act is identical. Strike a man in the street and you answer for assault; strike a judge in his own courtroom and you answer for a great deal more. The dignity of the offended party is part of the offence.

Now raise that principle to its limit. Every sin — the private ones included — is committed against the infinite, eternally holy God. Anselm of Canterbury made the argument formal in Cur Deus Homo (1098): an offence against a being of infinite worth carries a weight the offender cannot measure. Jonathan Edwards pressed it in The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners (1735). The case is not that God is petty in His sentencing. It is that we have not reckoned with the One we have sinned against. Sin looks small to us the way the sun looks small to us. The problem is not the size of the thing. It is where we are standing. We fear suffering far more than we hate sin, and then we audit God’s justice using that broken scale.

Scripture is not embarrassed by this question. It was raised long before any sceptic thought of it — and raised by a friend of God:

Genesis 18:25 (NKJV)

Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?

Abraham was bargaining with God over Sodom. What frightened him was the thought that God might destroy the righteous along with the guilty — that a man might be charged for a crime that was not his. He was not accusing God. He was asking the question a man asks when he already knows the answer, and the answer is yes: the Judge of all the earth will do right. He would not be the Judge otherwise. And God did not answer him with a speech. He agreed to spare the entire city for the sake of ten righteous people (Genesis 18:32), and when ten could not be found, He took Lot out before the fire fell.

So Abraham’s fear was answered, and the answer was no. Cruelty means inflicting a punishment more severe than the crime deserves, and that is the one thing the Judge of all the earth cannot do. There will be no cruelty in hell. No one there is handed the same sentence as everyone else; each is judged for what he did and for what he knew. Jesus told Capernaum as much. That town had watched Him preach and heal and would not repent, and He warned them that Sodom — the city the fire fell on — would face an easier day of judgment than they would (Matthew 11:23–24).

What hell will not have is an end. But the objection assumes something Scripture never says — that the sinning stops when the judgment starts. Hell is not a place where sinners become penitents who have now paid enough. No one there repents; no one there softens; the rebellion that earned the judgment continues under it. Jesus described a rich man in torment who begs for relief and still speaks of Lazarus as an errand boy to be sent with water (Luke 16:24). He wants the pain to stop. He never asks forgiveness. Revelation puts the same thing at the very end of the Bible: “He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still” (Revelation 22:11). What a man is when judgment comes, he stays.

The sentence never falls behind the crime, because the crime never ends.

Some soften the doctrine by proposing that the lost are simply extinguished — punished, then switched off. But Jesus put both destinies in a single sentence:

Matthew 25:46 (NKJV)

And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Everlasting and eternal translate the same Greek word. Shorten the one and you shorten the other with it — and nobody who wants a shorter hell wants a shorter heaven.

The theory also gives itself away. It offers non-existence as a mercy. Edwards took Revelation 6:15–16 as his text and preached an entire sermon on that point, stating it as his doctrine: “Wicked men will hereafter earnestly wish to be turned to nothing and forever cease to be that they may escape the wrath of God.”

Annihilation is not what justice requires. It is what the guilty would choose — and it is not offered.

The sentence is severe. The Judge is not eager to pass it, and He said so under oath:

Ezekiel 33:11 (NKJV)

Say to them: “As I live,” says the Lord God, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?”

“As I live” is an oath — God swearing on His own life, because there is nothing higher for Him to swear by. And He swore it to people already under His judgment: Israel in exile, sitting in the wreckage of their own rebellion, still being called home. So the charge of cruelty fails twice over. The sentence is measured exactly, and the One who passes it takes no pleasure in passing it.

It is not the rejection of the gospel that first earns the sentence, as though sin itself were a minor matter and declining the offer the real crime. That version flatters us, and it is not what Scripture says. “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) — the sentence rests on the sin, and it was standing before the offer was ever heard. What the gospel changes is not the arithmetic of justice but the person who answers it: Christ crucified for sinners, so that the guilty who trust in Him will never face a judgment He has already borne. Refusing Him does not create the sentence. It declines the only hand that can lift it.