What about books, tracts, movies, YouTube videos, and pictures depicting Satan and demons torturing sinners in hell? Wasn’t hell created as a place of punishment for the Devil and his demons?
The Devil and fallen angels are not going to be caretakers of hell; rather, they are going to be incarcerated in hell. This is very clear in the Scriptures, including passages such as Matthew 25:41 and Revelation 20:10–15. The premise to the question is absolutely right — hell was created as a place of punishment for the Devil and his demons.
Another thing that needs to be pointed out is this: hell is not torture. It may be torment, but it is not torture. The pictures or images that people come back with after they have had supposed trips to hell and back are simply manufactured. They do not correspond to reality.
Hell is ultimately what people have an earnest of today. Those who reject the goodness, grace, and glory of God, which could be theirs, are experiencing hell in the present. But this is an earnest (or token) of the holy wrath that is yet to come.
What happens ultimately is separation from the blessings of God. The Lord will say to those who rejected His love and forgiveness, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). This separation is shown in the intermediate state with the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31. The rich man had all the fineries of life, but then he dies and ends up in torment. Again, this is an earnest of what is to come, because that rich man ultimately will stand and give an account for what he did in the flesh, and then death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death, which is a complete separation forever from the goodness, grace, and glory of God.
Remember that hell is not torture; rather, it is torment. The torment is that you are separated from the very one you were created to have union with. Again, I think that hell is misconstrued. Quite often, the metaphors used for hell in popular books, and even those found in Scripture, are taken in a wooden literalistic fashion, as though people are going to be consumed or burned with fire that never fully consumes them. Fire is a metaphor for the horror of the holy wrath of God, being separated from the goodness of God, the very one who knit us together in our mother’s womb and created us for fellowship with Him.
— Hank Hanegraaff
For further related study, please access the following equip.org resources:
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here (Hank Hanegraaff)
Why Should I Believe in Hell? (Hank Hanegraaff)
What about Hell? The Doctrine of Hell (Douglas Groothuis)
The Dark Side of Eternity: Hell as Eternal Conscious Punishment (Robert A. Peterson)
C.S. Lewis on Hell (Louis Markos)
The Justice of Hell (Donald T. Williams)
Love Wins: Making a Contradictory Case for Universalism (Doug Groothuis)
We also recommend the following bookstore resources:
AfterLife: What You Need to Know about Heaven, the Hereafter, and Near-Death Experiences (B1076) by Hank Hanegraaff
Resurrection (B545) by Hank Hanegraaff
Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (B1060) by Robert A Peterson
Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment (B1062) edited by Christopher Morgan and Robert A. Peterson
This blog is adapted from the October 24, 2017, Bible Answer Man broadcast.
