Life And Death

Near the end of Deuteronomy, the final outcomes for obeying or disregarding Yahweh's laws, the commands which match his moral nature, are made very clear in the Old Covenant.  The two destinies are life and death (30:15, 19-20).  If the society of ancient Israel turned to God in rationality and righteousness (a prerequisite to anything bring possible is that it just be consistent with reason, so rationality is always a part of righteousness), there would be life.  If the society turned away, there would be the destruction of death (30:17-18).  This is stated after a blatant affirmation of how not even the whole of Mosaic Law is beyond anyone's ability to uphold (30:11-14).  After this is clarified, the final results of maintaining righteousness or succumbing to unrepentant failure in this life are presented.

What Deuteronomy 30 says will ultimately befall sinners in this life, that being destruction and the cessation of life (death), is exactly what is said to be the general, deserved fate of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23), the destiny of the unsaved who do not have eternal life (John 3:16), and also specifically what awaits people in hell (Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15).  One cannot have life if one is dead, and the very contrast between life and deserved death logically necessitates that Yahweh's justice is utterly contrary to endless torture.  It is either eternal life or destruction that the Biblical God has ready for a given person, the latter being the dissolution of their consciousness and the body it dwelt in.

As Deuteronomy 30 elaborates on the conditions for prosperity or the covenant curses--and the curses apply specifically to Israel even though the moral commands of Mosaic Law, the criminal justice laws included, are immutable due to God's nature (Malachi 3:6)--it is again and again this offer of literal life or death that summarizes the reward for righteousness and the penalty for sin.  There is no implied threat of eternal torture, something that would egregiously contradict the very tenets of justice revealed in Deuteronomy itself as it is.  There is not any mention of an afterlife at all.  However, eternal life and a permanent, total, second death are precisely what other parts of the Bible describe as the fates of the righteous and wicked in the next life after their resurrection.

This continues the same promise of either life or death that is first given in Eden when Yahweh offers the first humans the choice between blissful life and eventual death, the inevitable state of being cut off from the only being who inherently lives forever (1 Timothy 6:15-16).  The deity of Christianity reserves death as the final, most severe consequence of justice not because torture is cannot easily be far worse than death (it plainly is in many cases), but because to go past that into eternal torment is unjust.  It is far past the point of abuse/degradation (Deuteronomy 25:3) and could not possibly be proportionate to even a whole lifetime of intentional sin.  The Old Testament affirms this long before the New Testament does.