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I have a Sunday school student, an adult, who believes just the way you do. We have been going through Revelation 19 and 20 and it’s been an ordeal with him. I mean, he can believe whatever he wants, but I don’t understand his coming to a Southern Baptist Sunday school and argue with everybody! Last time I quoted something I had read in J.V. McGee’s commentary: I’d rather live like eternal literal hell is real and die to find out I was wrong, than live like it is not real (or not literal, or not eternal) and then find out that I was wrong! He glared at me, but for the first time didn’t have anything to say.

Your student sounds a bit like me. 8->

I’ve ben a student of Revelation for a couple of decades now, though. There is a great site that covers how I feel about this to the point that I just post it here as how I interpret scripture regarding Hell:
http://www.jeremyandchristine.com/articles/eternal.php

His link to the interpretation of Lazarus and the Rich Man is also very good.

BTW, regarding this: “I’d rather live like eternal literal hell is real and die to find out I was wrong...”

I’d rather live like Jesus died for my sins and I accept Him as my personal savior. The Hell thing becomes pretty irrelevant for me.

Regarding all scripture about eternity, I very much consider it the equivalent of trying to explain the color “red” to someone who only sees in black and white. It is a study in our willingness to apply strange phrases to our understanding of reality. That is why I use the river/ocean analogy. I also use a “slaughterhouse” analogy regarding the lake of fire. If the fire is never quenched, but it is ineternity - outside of “time” - then what does that really mean? And if it IS in time, then it is like a slaughterhouse that exists for a hundred years. If you say a steer was slaughtered in a slautherhouse that existed for 100 years, it does not mean the first steer was slaughtered for that long. The steer did “stay slaughtered” though, for at least that long. ;->