What About People In Hell?

Q

My question is about people in hell. How can unbelievers be in torment if they are not in human fleshly bodies? Wasn’t the Rich Man in agony in the flames? How could a spirit be in agony from flames? And in the Lake of Fire, human fleshly bodies would be immediately destroyed in flames once and for ever. So do unbelievers in the Lake of Fire have resurrected bodies too?

A

From the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) we know that even though people in Hades are in spirit form, they can see and communicate with each other and can feel things like heat, thirst, and torment. This tells us that while spirits are not material beings in our world, they apparently are in theirs. All this is outside our experience, but the Bible confirms it is so.

Those who are cast into the Lake of Fire will also be in a form that can feel the effect of the flames without being consumed by them. Again, we’re not told whether this form is what we would think of as a resurrection body, but it does seem to have similar properties to one, in that it’s both eternal and subject to external stimulus.