But it would not be an everlasting conscious torture. God plainly declared: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), and not eternal torture. [82]Having fixed this penalty, God could not change it afterward, because God could not be inconsistent; he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:13) It was by the disobedience of one man that sin came into the world and death as the result of sin; so death has been the penalty upon all mankind. (Romans 5:12) And this will continue until God's due time to awaken them out of death and give all an opportunity for life; and this we will discuss later. "The Lord preserveth them that love him, but all the wicked will he destroy." (Psalm 145:20) The Apostle plainly says that all the wicked shall be punished with an everlasting destruction.--2 Thessalonians 1:9. [83]But do not the wicked go to hell? [84]It is true that all who have died from Adam until now have gone to hell. But hell does not mean a place of conscious torture. Wherever the word hell occurs in the Bible it means the condition of death. Hell is not a place, but a condition. Those who go into the grave are not conscious there; but they have gone into the death condition. Their bodies decay and return to the dust. The word hell is translated from the Hebrew word _sheol_, as used in the Old Testament. This same word is a number of times translated grave and sometimes pit. In the New Testament the same word hell is translated from the Greek word _hades_ and likewise means grave, the condition of death, the tomb. [85]Some Scriptural illustrations of this prove that hell means a condition of death. Job was a good and godly man, who tried to obey Jehovah. He had suffered the loss of all his earthly possessions and then his neighbors taunted him because of his suffering; and while he was thus suffering, he prayed that God would permit him to go to hell, saying: "O that thou wouldest hide me in hell [_sheol_, the grave] until thy wrath be past". (Job 14:13) He desired to be hid in the grave until the time of the resurrection, hoping in God's promise that some day the dead would come again. Then Job says: "If I wait the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness". "Our rest together is in the dust." (Job 17:13,16) Thus he pictures the grave as a condition of darkness, where there is no knowledge, no wisdom or device. Again he said: "A man's sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them". (Job 14:21) Why? Because those who are in hell, in the tomb, in the grave, in the condition of death, have no knowledge of anything. They are out of existence, waiting for the resurrection.