Was it evil when God drowned everyone on Earth including children and burned Sodom alive including children, "making them an example"?
2 Peter 2:4-6 (NKJV)
4 For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; 5 and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; 6 and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly;
"to be reserved for judgment".....judgement and consequently PUNISHMENT and WRATH. Similarly, unredeemed humanity are in a spiritual prison, awaiting the GWT judgment. And both groups will then suffer the punishment due
in proportion to their deeds.
Laura798 needs to understand: a career criminal who lives sumptuously, never being prosecuted, who then simply dies quietly in their sleep HAS BY NO MEANS paid the penalty for their sin. God's justice has yet to be served, and then the sentence. Degrees of punishment in the lake of fire. Furthermore, this criminal DID NOT satisfy the penalty for his own sin by merely by dying.
Matthew 23:15
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you traverse the sea and the dry
land to make one convert, and whenever it may happen, you make him
twofold more a son of Gehenna than yourselves.
Matt 23:33
Serpents! Offspring of vipers! How shall you escape from the sentence of Gehenna?
Strongs G1067
geenna: Gehenna, a valley W. and South of Jer., also a symbolic name for the final place of punishment of the ungodly
Original Word: γέεννα, ης, ἡ
Part of Speech: Noun, Feminine
Transliteration: geenna
Phonetic Spelling: (gheh'-en-nah)
Definition: Gehenna, a valley west and South of Jerusalem, also a symbolic name for the
final place of punishment of the ungodly
Usage: Gehenna, and originally the name of a valley or cavity near Jerusalem, a place underneath the earth,
a place of punishment for evil.
HELPS Word-studies
1067 géenna (a transliteration of the Hebrew term,
Gêhinnōm, "the valley of Hinnom") –
Gehenna, i.e.
hell (also referred to as the "lake of fire" in
Revelation).
Gehenna ("hell"),
the place of post-resurrection torment (judgment),
refers strictly to the everlasting abode of the unredeemed where they experience divine judgment in their individual resurrection-bodies. Each of the unredeemed receives one at the Great White Throne Judgment (Rev 20:11-15), i.e. a body that "matches" their capacity for torment relating to their (unique) judgment.