Question: Your Dec. 2005 article, "Wonderful Love," was especially uplifting [but] I question where ...

Question: My wife and I look forward each month to The Berean Call. We...praise the Lord that someone is still contending "...for the faith which was once delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). Your Dec. 2005 article, "Wonderful Love," was especially uplifting [but] I question where you say, "He [God]...caused Him [Christ] to endure the eternal Lake-of-Fire...." That would certainly make the "little god-Kenneth Copeland" very happy [considering] his teaching...that Jesus had to fight the devil in hell for three days and nights and be "born again" to purchase our redemption. I am wondering WHICH book of the Bible you got that from?!

Response: It is foundational to the gospel that Christ experienced the suffering of the Lake of Fire for every person who would ever be born. Christ's declaration, "It is finished [tetelestai, meaning ‘paid in full']" surely indicates that He suffered what all mankind were doomed to suffer for their sins. That must include the Lake of Fire eternally.

Our Lord became a man "that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man" (Heb:2:9But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.
See All...). Inasmuch as the Lake of Fire is "the second death" (Rv 20:14) that all of the damned will suffer forever, Christ must have suffered that eternal penalty for all mankind. If not, there would still be something for the redeemed yet to pay. But that cannot be the case for those who "shall not come into condemnation; but have passed from death unto life..." (Jn:5:24Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.
See All...).

That Christ endured the pains of the Lake of Fire does not mean that He suffered in the Lake of Fire. The teaching of Copeland (and others) that Christ suffered in hell is false doctrine! He bore our sins on the cross; it was from the cross that He cried in triumph, "Tetelestai!"; and we are redeemed by His blood shed in His death on the cross.