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I was going to go into a long diatribe. Instead, let me quote from here: http://rethinkinghell.com/explore/

The phrase eternal fire evokes in the mind of the traditionalist a picture of the unsaved burning and suffering in flames for all eternity. And it is assumed that this eternal fire, prepared for the demons, is the same lake of tormenting fire found in the symbolic imagery of Rev. 20. But the text indicates that it is the fire which is eternal, not those thrown into it. And the use of the phrase elsewhere indicates that eternal fire utterly destroys and reduces to lifeless remains.

Jesus uses the phrase elsewhere, in Matthew 18:8, and his admonition there, also recorded in Matt 5:30 and Mark 9:43, likens final punishment to Gehenna, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew “valley of [the sons of] Hinnom,” which was once a place where idol worshippers burned up children as sacrifices to their gods. But Jeremiah 7:32-33 says that Gehenna would become “the Valley of Slaughter . . . And the dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth, and none will frighten them away.” Isaiah 30 speaks of God’s fiery vengeance upon Gehenna, likening it to a funeral pyre, which is a pile of wood for burning up corpses.

Another place the phrase eternal fire is used is in Jude 7, where Jude writes that Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities “serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.” Jude explicitly states that the cities suffered the punishment of eternal fire, as many theologians admit. No wonder the parallel in 2 Peter 2:6 refers to their having been reduced to ashes.

The punishment of eternal fire is therefore not suffering for eternity as everlasting fuel for its flames. Rather, it is the punishment of being utterly destroyed, completely burned up, reduced to nothing but lifeless corpses and ashes by a fire that is eternal insofar as it cannot be quenched—no mere earthly fire but an eternal fire from God.