You missed the point entirely!
1. In Matthew 25:14-29, the servants are judged on how they invested the money entrusted to them. This does not refer to the final judgement, for it is based on whether a person believed on Jesus (John 3:16-18, Romans 10:9-10) and whether their names were written in the book of life (Rev 20:15, Dan 12:1, Luke 10:20).
2. In Matthew 25:31-46, the nations/people will be divided as sheep and goats {figurative BTW :) }, right and left, righteous and accursed, based on how they treated the brothers of Christ. The righteous receive eternal life, the cursed are thrown into ... the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
Matthew 25:46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
One has to determine what "eternal punishment" means: either it means "continuous unending torture" or "final irreversible annihilation".
I choose the latter for several reasons:
1. because other words describing the same event are perish (John 3:16) destroy (Matt 10:28) destruction (2 Thess 1:9, et al) second death (Rev 20:14). All of these indicate cessation of life, consciousness, existence.
2.Many passages used by those that assert "continuous unending torture" are taken out of context, eg your reference to Matthew 25:14-29, and Lazarus in Luke 16:20
3. The idea of "continuous unending torture" requires the condemned to be kept alive, conscious, and in an ever renewing immortal body that is constantly being consumed by worms and fire, but never is consumed. There is no support for this in scripture whatsoever. It is a construct built to resolve the prior interpretation and subsequent dogma.
4. Eternal life means never dying. But for keepers of the "continuous unending torture", eternal death means the same thing. They reinterpret death as separation from God, not the cessation of life.
‘You missed the point entirely!
1. In Matthew 25:14-29, the servants are judged on how they invested the money entrusted to them. This does not refer to the final judgement, for it is based on whether a person believed on Jesus (John 3:16-18, Romans 10:9-10) and whether their names were written in the book of life (Rev 20:15, Dan 12:1, Luke 10:20).’
So this is yet another judgment? How many judgments are you up to, now? How do you square all these different judgments with the fact that the Bible says there will be only one judgment? [See the Hebrew verse I quoted.]
“Eternal punishment” means “eternal punishment”. Since you can’t punish a non-entity, the annihilation theory doesn’t make sense. We don’t consider the death penalty to be ‘eternal punishment’. It would be ludicrous to characterize it that way. The idea that ‘eternal punishment’ = ‘death’ in the physical sense is inconsistent. How would you ‘eternally punish’ someone who is no longer in existence?