Will God Forever Have Unfinished Business?

This section was written well by Philip E. Hughes from the book Rethinking Hell, so I will provide the excerpt below:

The everlasting existence side by side, so to speak, of heaven and hell would seem to be incompatible with the purpose and effect of the redemption achieved by Christ’s coming. Sin with its consequences of suffering and death is foreign to the design of God’s creation. The renewal of creation demands the elimination of sin and suffering and death. Accordingly, we are assured that Christ “has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26; 1 Jn. 3:5), that through his appearing death has been abolished (2 Tim. 1:10), and that in the new heaven and the new earth, that is, in the whole realm of the renewed order of creation, there will be no more weeping or suffering, “and death shall be no more” (Rev. 21:4).

The conception of the endlessness of the suffering of torment and of the endurance of “living” death in hell stands in contradiction to this teaching. It leaves a part of creation which, unrenewed, everlastingly exists in alienation from the new heaven and the new earth. It means that suffering and death will never be totally abolished from the scene. The inescapable logic of this position was accepted, with shocking candor, by Augustine, who affirmed that “after the resurrection, however, when the final, universal judgement has been completed, there shall be two kingdoms, each with its own distinct boundaries, the one Christ’s, the other the devil’s; the one consisting of the good, the other of the bad.”

To this it must be objected that with the restoration of all things in the new heaven and the new earth, which involves God’s reconciliation to himself of all things, whether on earth or in heaven (Acts 3:21: Col. 1:20), there will be no place for a second kingdom of darkness and death. Where all is light there can be no darkness; for “the night shall be no more” (Rev. 22:5).

When Christ fills all in all and God is everything to everyone (Eph. 1:23; 1 Cor. 15:28), how is it conceivable that there can be a section or realm of creation that does not belong to this fullness and by its very presence contradicts it?

The establishment of God’s everlasting kingdom of peace and righteousness will see the setting free of the whole created order from its bondage to decay as it participates in the glorious liberty of the children of God (Ro. 8:21).

(Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism. Edited by Chris Date, Gregory Stump, Joshua Anderson, 195)