Billy Graham on the final state of the lost
Eternal conscious punishment
He told us that it is a place where we have consciousness and the use of our faculties.
THE POSITION
Hell is "essentially and basically" separation from God, Christ called it "everlasting punishment," and those in it keep consciousness and memory, as the rich man in Luke 16 does. His last book, Where I Am (2015), written with collaborators, speaks, as quoted by Religion News Service, of a lake of fire "that burns forever." In a 1983 Sacramento sermon, known only from a third-party transcript, he wondered whether the fire might be a fire within our hearts for fellowship with God that can never be quenched, while still calling hell "separation from God."
41 Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
25 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Evangelist of the citywide crusades from 1947 to 2005, ordained a Southern Baptist minister, founder, with L. Nelson Bell, of Christianity Today (1956) and convener of the 1974 Lausanne Congress. He is generally reckoned to have preached in person to more people than anyone before him and was the public face of postwar evangelicalism. This entry rests on sermon texts dated 1951 to 2005 that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association republishes on the Decision magazine website, his recorded Billy Graham Minutes, his daily devotions, interviews he gave to Time, Christianity Today, Newsweek and Robert Schuller, and the My Answer column that ran under his name. By the standard account the column was written with staff, so cells that rest on it say so.
Cite this page
"Billy Graham on the final state of the lost", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/graham/final-state (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/graham/final-state).