The Entire Evidence Of Evangelists And Apostles
With notes on the teachings of Dr. Angus and others.
By W. Griffith.
London:
Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, E.C.
1870
Introductory Remarks
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
Jude
1 John
Revelation
Postscripts
New Testament Appendix
MY intention was to issue the "Evidence on Future Punishment " anonymously, as an argument which might be of service in the discussion of an important question; but present views and sense of duty lead me to send it forth as a TESTIMONY, appending my name. I wish to bear witness to the truth, on a matter which deeply affects the character of God, and the revelation of His will to men. If the doctrine of hell, as commonly understood, be false, it is the gravest slander upon our Judge that can be framed. After more than twenty years of inquiry and pause, reconsideration and prayer, examination of the orthodox arguments and study of all the New Testament evidence, I have reached a settled conviction that the popular doctrine of hell is an error; that there is no more authority for it in Scripture than there is for the Romish doctrine of purgatory, or of the Pope's headship and infallibility. This being my established view, and the question having been so publicly discussed in the Christian World, reverence for the Heavenly Father, and honour to the Son, constrain me to speak, and to bear a clear, firm testimony. This I beg to do with meekness and charity, but without faltering. I rest my testimony upon the plain, natural, and uniform teaching of the New Testament; not upon isolated texts, but upon every text in point, and upon the concurrence of the whole; not upon doubtful passages, or unusual significations; but upon the broad, universal utterances of all the writers, and upon the common meaning of language. I do not deny an everlasting existence in depravity, sin, and suffering, because the thought is horrible and abhorrent; but because God's Word flatly contradicts it in every passage bearing upon the subject. These being my convictions I hope I may escape the charge of attempting needlessly to agitate the Christian mind.
It is a subject which I have never brought forward in the pulpit. It is far better to produce the evidence in such a form that it may be read and repondered in the closet and in the family, than to present it in disjointed and imperfect statements or expositions. Moreover, as this testimony is all of a. negative character, I can declare the whole counsel of God affirmatively, without making statements on the opposite side. The last judgment and hell of actual revelation are sufficiently dreadful to demand an exhaustion of scriptural terms and texts on the subject; so that I have no need, as I have no wish, to soften, nor to repress "the words which the Holy Ghost teaches."
I am not aware that my reading of Scripture on this head is in entire unison with that of any other person. I read. nothing but the New Testament in favour of my views till they were formed and committed to writing. I have scarcely read. anything in their favour since. The orthodox arguments have stimulated my inquiry. The discovery of their unsoundness, one after another, at length emboldened me to take up the Testament de novo, and, releasing my mind as much as possible from its long-standing prepossessions, inquire for myself. The method adopted was this:-I read its several books with the special object of extracting every paragraph, phrase, and word to the point; having thus brought together the depositions, I studied them under such light as I could command. As may be supposed, this work of study has been reviewed with care and labour, and with devout submission of mind and heart to the teachings of Scripture; which I have sought to make my sole authority on the subject.
I should be content to leave the evidence for the consideration of other minds without a word of controversy or general argument; but men, both great and prominent, have so recently and publicly spoken in utterances which I think darken the subject, and prejudice the Christian reader, that some notice of their reasoning and criticism is necessary to vindicate, for the exposition I have given upon the evidence, the right of a fair and patient hearing. All I shall aim at in this notice will be a neutralisation of such opinions, assertions, appeals, and expositions as, in my view, must hinder any man who receives them from reaching the truth.
For example, one writer says:-"It pleased the Lord to make souls immortal." To start with so unproved and unprovable a dictum, is to beg a part of the question, and to prejudice the whole inquiry. It is just as easy to say it did not please the Lord to make souls immortal. The psychological arguments relied upon are easily shown to be fallacious; and besides, can be rebutted by others far stronger, drawn from the same source. It has been assumed that the soul has the capability of ever-increasing knowledge, and inferred, Therefore it is immortal. It has been argued that its thirst for happiness proves its immortality. It has been held that to contemplate immortality indicates an immortal destiny. It has been contended that a moral nature being responsible, and the imperfection of moral government on earth being clear, man with his moral nature must, to satisfy moral government, live elsewhere, and if unregenerated suffer pain forever.
All we can say with truth about man's capacity for acquiring knowledge is, that it depends on his power of paying attention. And that power, as far as our discernment goes, is confined to the exercise of his physical organism. He acquired no knowledge before his organism attained a suitable development. When that organism is deranged, or its vitality suspended, the faculty of acquiring knowledge is enfeebled in the one case, suspended in the other. For anything we know to the contrary-I mean know on psychological evidence-when the organism is destroyed the capacity of acquiring knowledge is destroyed. If we learn from revelation that any soul, independent of the body, retains and exercises the faculty in question, that is altogether another authority. We must leave the a priori ground and go to Scripture for that.
Thirst for happiness is natural to us no doubt; but how that desire of good proves that a man must live forever requires some peculiar logic to develop; and especially hard will it be to prove that he must therefore live forever in a state of suffering. If thirst for happiness proves anything, it does so because everything a man thirsts for he must attain; and it should prove that the thirsty man cannot miss the road that leads to the river of pleasure. It is an argument good for universal restoration, but specially unfortunate to establish the necessity of everlasting hell-fire existence and pain.
Then, who is willing to carry out this enthymeme? Man can meditate immortality, therefore he is immortal. Man can meditate enormous wealth, therefore he is a Croesus. Man can meditate kingship and dominion, therefore he is a monarch. Man can meditate the previous eternity, therefore he is from everlasting. Man can meditate divinity, therefore he is divine. One of these arguments is just as logical as the other. They all lean upon the major,-whatever a man can meditate that he is. Any given man may be so in his own opinion; but his difficulty would be to persuade other people to believe it.
A future and immortal existence it is said is almost a universal belief-so "reasonable" is it. Now Christian men should remember that such evidence, instead of being an argument in favor of the opinion, is rather a presumption against it. All the prime doctrines of Christianity are such that reason is perpetually stumbling at them, objecting to them, arguing against them. Take in illustration the following:-the Incarnation, or the true and proper Deity of the person Jesus. The atonement for sin by the substitutionary death of God's Son upon the cross. Regeneration, in the sense of a new life by the work of the Holy Ghost, born again. The Heavenly Home. The Resurrection of the Body. Is not reason in all her moods, and in all her degrees of feebleness and strength, ever carping against these doctrines? So much so, that if a man will be wise concerning them, he must become a fool; suppressing his reasoning (not his understanding but his reasoning), and sitting at the feet of Jesus with the docility of a little child.
Tried by the test of reason and general belief, we ought to hold that men are saved from sin and death by their own works, good or bad, or by their own natural claims. The Jewish mind revolted against free forgiveness, a gracious and full pardon through faith alone. The Roman Catholics do the same. Infidels and humanitarians, so far as they contemplate any kind of salvation, think to reach it in the same way. That belief is natural, reasonable, general. Had it not been displaced by the Gospel, it would have been almost universal to-day. Human reason, and the superstitious imagination, are ever combatting the Gospel on this very point. So little reliance can be placed upon reason as an authority upon things which pertain to the soul's future destiny and salvation.
It is not a strong reason, and particularly not an enlightened and reliable one, which peoples earth, air, and water with spirits, crowding them into the heights above and the "vasty deep," and enshrining its " gods many and lords many." The Hindoos swarm with deities. The Greeks and Romans had a full plenty. And they have been well supported by all nations except the very barbarous. How general too, even in modern times, has been the belief in ghosts. It is an infirmity of man's mental nature while in a state of ignorance to believe in invisible persons. He sees that a deep and multiform intelligence is wielding a variety of strange forces, and evolving marvellous issues everywhere. His mind being too feeble to generalise the whole into the volitions of an individual intelligence or person, he takes the broad thought in its details. Nothing is more easy than to believe in a spirit world, and to crowd it with the ghosts of the dead. But such a belief is the refuge of mental feebleness, or the resort of unconscious ignorance. It is a postponement of difficulty. It relegates a hard question to another sphere, in which the genii of fiction may deal with it as they list. The advance of knowledge, the inductive logic being substituted for the: a priori, breaks the illusion, and] discounts ruinously the belief in ghosts, in the transmigration of souls, in Polytheism, and in demigods; and it demands that the soul's destiny and condition should be substantiated by clear and adequate testimony from a reliable source.
Retribution in a future state is a solemn subject. I believe it. God forbid that I should ever speak lightly of it. The conscience of the evildoer forebodes it. But while believing the general truth, and feeling some force in the a priori argument from conscience, it is needful to guard oneself from being carried away on the wings of imagination.
Is there not, or might there not be formed, a Science of Vindictiveness? Materials for it exist plentifully, in demonology, in the passions of men, in the history of punishments invented, in the horrors of tortures inflicted, and in the characters of men's gods which they have made to themselves and worshipped. Vindictiveness has its code and philosophy. It inflicts the utmost woe, a woe not so much proportioned to the actual or supposed evil done as to the capacity of the sufferer. Vindictiveness fills the being of its victim to the brim with manifold tortures. It employs shame and spitting, crimination and reviling, the crown of thorns, the knotty scourge. It nails the body to the cross. It stretches it on the rack to the extreme tension and time of endurance. Vindictiveness will not let its victim die nor escape. The worm of a spiritual wrath shall gnaw within; the fire of incensed vengeance shall torture without. Vindictiveness sternly perpetuates this utmost agony forever and ever, without cessation and without hope. Surely the doctrines of purgatory and of the mediaeval hell belong to its requirements; and its patron should be an arch-fiend gifted with almighty power and infinite malignity. It is not too much to affirm, upon an a priori basis, that God stands in essential and irreconcilable antagonism to the entire idea of vindictiveness. Vindictiveness is malignity run mad. God is the Good One. He is good unto all, and His tender mercies are over all His works.
The wrongs of the world, says Dr. Angus, [Letters in Christian World] "would become intolerable if the body had no soul, earth no hell, creation no Judge." This may be true or not. It is difficult to say what the wrongs of the world would be " if the body had no soul." I have never met with a body without a soul that was capable of doing wrong to any man. A world of bodies without souls would hardly require that earth should have a hell, or that creation should have a Judge. But without taking advantage of the solecism involved, it may be remarked that if the body has a soul-which we all admit-that soul may not be necessarily immortal. The best writers do not allow that the soul's existence from hour to hour is independent of God's sustaining will. If earth has a hell-which we all learn and believe upon the authority of Scripture-it may not be a place of ceaseless and endless torture; but, like the Jewish hell, a place of destruction. If creation has a Judge-which is not questioned in this controversy-He need not be the impersonation of infinite malignity, holding His prisoners and criminals in everlasting woe. Soul, hell, aid Judge, are all compatible enough with doctrines that do not teach " a dreadful hell and everlasting pains, where sinners must with devils dwell in darkness, fire, and chains."
By no conceivable perversion of our Lord's words, by no toning down of their meaning as figurative or parabolical, can we get rid of the conviction that it was His intention to teach that there is,-What? Alter this introduction we should be brought to something strong, and to the point. What does it herald? That there is ‘a wrath to come,' a state of being that is 'accursed,' and that its penalties are in proportion to our wrong doing." Yes, it must be allowed that there is "a wrath to come." The New Testament is clear upon that point. The question is, does that wrath involve eternal suffering? "Accursed?" Yes, that word marks a state to be feared hereafter. But what is the state of a sinner when accursed from Christ? That is the question. " Penalties proportioned to wrong doing?" Of course, believing that God is the righteous Judge. But is a hell of ceaseless suffering and unending existence in proportion to wrong doing? Is it not manifestly out of proportion? Who is to be the judge of proportion in such a case? Had we not better refer it to the Scriptures without prejudice, and try to learn from them what is written?
I am glad that Dr. Angus is willing to abandon the authority of great names and high sounding arguments, and that he distinctly says, "the doctrine is to be settled by an appeal to Scripture." It becomes, therefore, a question of interpretation; and Christian men, loving the truth, and trusting the Bible as the depository of truth, should be able to reach a common understanding of what the truth is.
So far as I can discern the tendency of the present discussion it appears to be narrowing itself down to a definition of terms and an interpretation of texts; and I think the sooner it settles itself within those limits the quicker we shall find a common conclusion.
The canon Dr. Angus has proposed is worthy of being observed as the pole star in this research. He says "words must be understood in their common meaning." It is strange that a necessity so imperative should ever have been departed from. In controversy, however, and in interpretation it is by no means difficult nor unusual to take a word in a sense either too broad or too narrow, and so virtually deny the word its own proper testimony in the case.
It seems to me that the Doctor has violated his own canon upon the three words "destruction," "death," and "punishment;" and has thereby disqualified those who trust him from accepting the truth of Scripture. He labours to prove that destruction is not destruction, that death is not death, that punishment is not punishment.
He confounds "destruction" with "annihilation," and argues from the one to the other as though the words were not of essentially different meanings. "Annihilation" is a philosophic term, never found in Scripture; and is strictly applied to a very limited and ethereal class of things-to the ultimate elements of matter whatever they may be, and to the simplest essence of spirit when all known qualities are abstracted from it. Whereas, "destruction" is a common popular term applied to life, all organisms, whatever has construction, constitution, form or fashion, function or special utility. All the works of men, and so far as our observation can carry us, all the works (as distinguished from the creations) of God, are capable of destruction, of an un-doing, of a passing away in such a sense that non-existence can be declared of them. Destruction does not apply to the elements of which a thing is compounded, to the materials out of which a thing is constructed, to the parts of which a thing may consist. But it applies to the thing as a whole, in its entirety and individuality. Destruction always means such a change upon a thing that its use, function, form, power, and individuality have passed away. A destroyed thing, if the destruction be complete, is never expected to re-appear.
It is therefore only a diversion from the subject of inquiry when an issue is raised upon the word annihilation. That word in its philosophic sense has nothing to do with the question. What if destruction stop short of annihilation, is the destruction less complete on that account? I know not. Annihilation is another stage, and takes place not upon the thing destroyed, but upon the materials or elements of that thing. Whether annihilation ever take place or not is a question which may be safely relegated to the philosophers. But it is important to expose the fallacy which results from an indefinite and inaccurate use of the word.
Dr. Angus says "neither is there anything of annihilation in the following." It would be easy to reply to this-Who said there was? and if there is not, what then? We wish to know what is meant by destruction; what the Scripture writers meant when they used the term? But it is fair to pause upon the phrase, and desire to know what Dr. Angus means by " anything of annihilation." Does he mean any approach toward it, any kind of annihilation, any degree of it, any similitude, analogy, or likeness of it? What is meant by " anything" of annihilation? Because annihilation is absolute, and can be neither more nor less. If the Doctor uses the word in the philosophic sense-the reducing to nothing of the ultimate elements and essences of things-then it is sufficient to reply the Scriptures are not a treatise upon natural philosophy. If he uses it in a popular sense, as a synonym for destruction, and it is only in that sense that it will serve his argument, then has he dealt very unfairly with Scripture, as well as with his readers, in saying, "Nor is there anything of annihilation in the following." "The following" are twelve texts of Scripture, not brought forward to deliver their own testimony in their own words, but cited by chapter and verse, and dismissed without a hearing, with the uncertain and fallacious announcement, "nor is there anything of annihilation in them." This is not to adduce Scripture as proof, but to put it out of court by an overruling prejudgment.
Let us bring these texts into court, and reverently receive what they have to say. It does not concern us to know beforehand whether they testify to a cessation of being, to an annihilation, or anything in particular. But it does just concern us to learn what they mean by "destroy," or destruction. Because we may gather from them what the " common meaning" of destroy is according to Scripture usage.
Matt. 26.61, 27.40: "I am able to destroy the temple of God and to build it in three days." Dr. Angus does not allow "that when men are destroyed they cease to be"-what of a temple? When it is destroyed does it cease to be? To be sure of what we are speaking let us ask does what cease to be? Why the temple, the precise subject of discourse. What is the destruction of a temple? To fulfil that word and idea there should be something like the burning of its combustibles, the melting of its metals, the throwing down of its walls, so that persons looking upon the site behold not a temple, but a mass of ruins. Destruction of a temple is an unbuilding, not by careful removal of part from part, but by violent and ruinous demolition. When such a work is done by fire and battering-ram, or by cannon-shot, or by gunpowder-blast-where is the temple? Does it cease to be or not? To say there are the ruins, is not to say there is the temple. The ruins are but the materials. They existed long before the temple was designed, and may survive and subserve many different purposes. They are not destroyed. The proposition was not to destroy them, but the temple; and when the word destruction is fulfilled upon it, the question we have to answer is, does it cease to be, or is it still in existence? In other words, what does the destruction of a temple mean?
Or, suppose the word temple, in the passages quoted, means our Lord's body. When the Savior said destroy this body He did not mean destroy its materials, but destroy its life-functions. We know what was meant by destruction in this case. The event describes it. His living body was nailed to the cross. There its life-powers and functions ceased. When taken down it was no longer a "temple," a habitation of God, but a ruin. The destruction of it was complete and irreparable, except by the "working of God's mighty power." And when "built" anew it was not the old "earthly tabernacle," but a "glorious body."
Rom. 3. 16: " Destruction and misery are in their ways." Whose ways? The context answers, the ways of them "whose feet are swift to shed blood, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, whose throat is an open sepulchre." The thought of Paul is that these men carry destruction before them, and leave its sign in their rear. Homesteads burned, the country laid waste, people slain. What is the meaning of destruction in such a connection? Where are the houses, and property, and lives destroyed by these "cursing" and "blood-shedding" marauders? Have they ceased to be, or are they still in existence? It is by looking carefully into the meaning of the writer that we must determine the sense of the word, and not by saying "nor is there anything of annihilation in it." It is clear that destruction proper is intended.
Let us look at 2 Cor. 10. 8: "Our authority, which the Lord hath given us for edification, and not for your destruction." Destruction is here used as the antithesis of edification. Edification results in an edifice. When an edifice is destroyed it ceases to be. The materials remain, but the edifice is nowhere. Paul uses these words analogically. He contemplates building up in Christians, or building them into a temple of holiness and peace, by the ministrations of Gospel love and meekness; and the destruction has regard to that spiritual work which clearly is conceived of by the Apostle as capable of being undone. That, however, was not his mission. It is not the destruction of the person that Paul alludes to, but of the spiritual edification in the person. Destruction is not here used in any "odd" sense, but simply as a metaphor, requiring its usual sense to give it any force.
This interpretation is confirmed by the next passage (13.10): "Lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me to edification, and not to destruction." Here no mention is made of persons; and the mind is left to dwell on that spiritual work which can be built up by loving Christian ministry, or cast down and destroyed by "sharpness" and contention. The spiritual work of a man can be done away no less than the material; and whatever work of man is destroyed thereby ceases to be.
The next two instances are a double reference to the same thing. "He that destroyed them which called on this name." "Preaches the faith which once he destroyed." Acts 9. 21; Gal. 1. 23. Here the word is evidently used, by ellipsis, of aim and effort, not of result. He aimed to destroy, he attempted to destroy utterly the faith of the Gospel, and all who held it. He was "exceedingly mad" in this wicked purpose and career, and went about breathing forth threatening and slaughter with that "intent," an intent which meditated nothing less than a total destruction both of "the faith" and of "them which called on this name."
1 John 3. 8: "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil." What are the works of the devil? Could the Son of God aim at anything less than their total cessation? Granted that they are not yet done away. Neither is the whole mission of the Son of God completed. But that consummation will come. This text tells us so. He will one day have subdued, by reconciliation or destruction, all things unto Himself. The devil creates no indestructible thing surely. When the love of sin in a human heart is destroyed that work of the devil ceases to be.
Matt. 5. 17: "To destroy the law or the prophets." To destroy the law and the prophets would be to abrogate the authority of their words. Jesus did not come for this purpose, but to uphold their authority. We all know that a law or a constitution is capable of being done away. Let the legislative authority be withdrawn, and the written parchment cannot preserve the statute in force. It ceases to be. Just in that sense our Lord said he was not come to destroy.
Acts 6. 14: "Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place." What place? "This holy place." The words were spoken "to the council," sitting, I assume, in some chamber of the temple. Where is that temple now? It is nowhere. It has ceased to be.
Gal. 2. 18: "For if I build again the things which I destroyed." What had he destroyed? Clearly he refers to a structure of self-righteousness by the works of the law. That which he had devoted to utter destruction as a hope of salvation. For him such a thing was not. It had vanished away forever. For him it was nothing. For the help of others it was nothing in his view.
Acts 13. 19: "When He had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan." A nation is a community bound and acting together under some specific and recognised constitution. It has its chief magistrate, its code of laws, its armies, and captains. Seven such communities were broken up in Canaan; their kings, captains, and armies slain; their property confiscated; the remnant of the people dispersed we know not whither. By their destruction these nations ceased to be. Just in the same sense that a potter's vessel ceases to be when dashed to pieces.
In each of these twelve instances you have only to fix your mind on the precise idea of the writer, or the exact subject of discourse, and you see at a glance that destruction his its "common meaning." The thing destroyed-whether it be temple, life, property, spiritual edification, self-righteousness, the works of the devil, a law, a palace, or a nation, when the work of destruction is done upon it-ceases to be. And common sense teaches us that so long as a thing exists it is not destroyed.
It is necessary that this plain sense of the word should be insisted upon, and wrested from the doubt which Dr. Angus's mode of alluding to Scripture has thrown over it.
Take another series of passages selected to show that destruction does not mean a ceasing to be, and let us notice whether that, nevertheless, is not its real meaning in all of them, at any rate with scarcely an exception.
Prov. 1. 32: "The prosperity of fools shall destroy them." In the previous hemistich, it is said, " the turning away of the simple shall slay them." "The simple" corresponds, by Hebrew parallelism, with "fools," and "slay" with "destroy." As "fools" is an intenser word than "simple," so "destroy" is intended to be more intense than "slay." What objection does there lie against the " common meaning " of destroy here? Where is a fool when he is destroyed? To say that he still exists is, first, to beg the question, and second, to take the word in an " odd " sense, or rather in a contradictory sense. We must bear in mind that the words are used in the popular style of the Bible; not in the conventional sense of philosophy, nor of theology.
Jer. 23.1: "Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of My pasture." Where is a sheep when it is destroyed? Is it still in existence? or has it ceased to be? The sense is-destroy some and scatter others.
Did Christ come to seek and to save that which was annihilated? destroyed? had ceased to be? At first sight this use of the word seems to be in the " odd " sense; yet a little reflection will show that it is only a metaphorical use of it in its " common meaning." Those whom Jesus came to save were virtually, though not actually, destroyed. They were ready to perish. Without Him they must have perished. They were on the brink of perdition. In this metaphorical sense we still say, I am "undone" or "done for," or "ruined," meaning something has happened which leaves us, without help. So, under conviction of sin, many have said, "I am lost," meaning thereby that there was no hope of escaping hell. It is using the word destroyed in its " common meaning," but by anticipation of the full result. A metaphor truly, but owing all its force to the strict and proper sense of the word.
Again, Dr. Angus asks, "Was the Prodigal Son annihilated before he was found?" His father said he had been dead and lost. Besides the imminent risk of death and destruction to which he had been exposed, there is in these words the further thought,-he was dead and destroyed to me, to us, to the family. Therefore now he is returned "safe and sound," contrary to our fears, "let us rejoice and be merry." Jacob held that his son Joseph was dead, torn to pieces. The "common meaning" of the word is not departed from; but by a turn of thought, it describes the idea of the father, and the danger of the son, instead of the young man's actual condition. A condition, however, which in his exiled and exhausted state might any hour have been fulfilled.
Mark 1. 24: "Art thou come to destroy us?" To deny or to doubt that destroy here has its common meaning is not only to beg the question, but to garble the testimony of a witness. You can explain "torment" in the parallel passage by "destroy," without resorting to any "odd" sense of either word: but you cannot so explain "destroy" by "torment."
John 18.14: "When Christ died for the people was He annihilated?" Is this is a fair way of referring to Scripture? Is it not delusive? The question to be raised on this verse is-What did Caiaphas wish to do with Jesus of Nazareth? His own word "destroy," and his own malignity against Him answer, he wished to destroy Him utterly, body and soul. That is, he wished to destroy Him in the "common meaning" of the word. You must 'learn the meaning of the word here not by the possibility or impossibility of annihilating Jesus, but by the wish and aim of a cruel and infatuated man. What did Caiaphas desire should be done with Jesus? That he should be destroyed.
1 Cor. 5.5: "For the destruction of the flesh that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." By flesh here is meant some fleshly lust which warred against the soul. "Fornication." That "flesh" is meant which in alliance with the world and the devil is the spirit's or the soul's great enemy. It is the end of all regenerating grace and church discipline to destroy the flesh in this sense, so that it shall cease to be.
Did God annihilate the men who perished in the flood? (2 Peter 3. 6). " Have the Israelites whom God ' destroyed in the wilderness' been annihilated?" (Jude 1.5). " And all the unbelievers of Rahab's day?" (Heb. 11.31). The answer to these irrelevant questions is-the men have all ceased to be from the time their lives were destroyed. The writers have no reference to an abstraction, ghost, or the residuum of a man, but to the living person.
And is there for them no resurrection of the just and of the unjust? Who may deny it? But why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead? If life may be suspended with all consciousness and sensation and every vital function for two hours or more, as it sometimes has been by drowning or hanging, and yet be recalled by natural means, may not the same life, after years or centuries, or millenniums of death, be recalled by the power of God? It will be rejoined-Such a death is not annihilation. Perhaps not; but it is destruction in the common meaning of the word. Because, apart from the special act of resurrection, the state of death would abide forever and ever.
Where destruction is spoken of as future it cannot mean annihilation; but it may mean what it says. Destruction, though future, may, nevertheless be destruction.
It is the thing threatened. Surely a true destruction may be threatened? Let it be remembered that a future destruction, threatened to the wicked dead, always implies a previous resurrection.
It is described in words that imply conscious suffering. But may not the process or act of destruction produce in-tensest suffering? and be attended with wailing and gnashing of teeth?
Men are punished with it. Of course they are. It is the extreme punishment, and most dreadful. The passage referred to here (2 Thess. 1.9) seems to me specially unfortunate for the Doctor's argument. It is an idiomatic phrase which does not at all express pain or suffering. "Who shall pay justice an everlasting destruction." Whatever pain, or shame, or horror, or remorse may be involved, nothing of it is expressed.
Men are to suffer it. Where is this word suffer applied to a person in a state of destruction, or rather after the great act of destruction has been accomplished? Jude says, "Suffering the vengeance of eternal fire;" but his Greek word is not the one so often used in Scripture to signify conscious, felt evil. His words are adequately rendered by "paying the penalty." And though a present tense is used, a past judgment is meant; for in the same sentence and construction the conduct for which they were destroyed is mentioned also in the present tense, "giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh." The "paying of penalty" is no more present than the sin of "giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh." The penalty has long been paid. The destruction was short and sharp.
They go away into it. True. But the question is, do they live forever in it?
They are cast alive into it. What we desire to learn is, how long do they live in it? Moreover, this phrase, " cast alive into a lake of fire," is employed only of " the beast and the false prophet." It is never said of men. I draw attention to it, to enter a protest against the conglomerate or fragmentary character in which Dr. Angus quotes all his texts, a method unfair to his opponent and delusive to his followers.
They have no rest day nor night. This is another delusive quotation, or rather allusion. It occurs in Rev. 14.11. A quotation of the whole thought breaks the spell which, as the doctor adduces the fragment, it is apt to throw upon his reader. "They have no rest, day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receives the mark of his name." These are living persons. The scene is earth. The period, time. They are the adherents of the Papacy, who, in the act and duration of their adherence, "have no rest day nor night."
Their worm dieth not, their fire is not quenched. The quotation is from Mark 9.48-48. A large portion of the passage is doubtful. Manuscripts vary greatly. There is allusion to Isaiah 66.24-"They shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against Me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched." It is a hieroglyph, and must not, even as it cannot, be interpreted literally. A worm feeds and devours, it does not torture. A carcass is its prey. Fire also consumes, destroys. Interpret these words literally, and destruction in the true sense will be the conclusion reached. In a parallel utterance "destroy" is used of the amputated member. This partial destruction is advised to prevent what otherwise will be complete and dreadful. The carcass, according to Isaiah, were to be looked upon "from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another,"-implying that there would be a succession of the carcass of the men who had transgressed. Judgment should continually be overtaking that class of men without pause, so that the worm should always have its revel, and the fire its destroying mission. The scene in Isaiah is laid on earth, and develops its features accordingly.
The scene depicted in Mark is of a similar kind. The warning is given in the singular number and to the second person. "It is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into hell, where their worm dies not." Why not thy worm? And if their, why not their worms? Does not the language imply that the one worm fed upon them all? But one worm cannot feed upon many at the same time: it must take them in succession. And the succession is such that the revel never ceases; is such, that the fire must blaze on. A continuous succession of victims better fulfils the description than the contradictory notion of an inexhaustible devouring of the same. And in support of this, be it remarked, there is no aionios in this passage. Nothing that implies everlasting nor impossibility of end, but continuousness only. The worm and fire will last as long as there are wicked men to be destroyed -that is, all through the ages of earthly probation. The tell of destruction symbolised by this hieroglyph is the abiding expression of God's displeasure against unrepented and unforsaken sin.
Some think of the worm as living in the fire. But the true conception is a place bestrewed with carcasses or refuse for the destruction of which these agencies in one part and another are ever at work.
Dr. Angus tries to take the force of destruction out of the following passages, 1 Cor. 15.26: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." "In this passage," he says, "the word means simply 'take away the occupation of,' render powerless." Granting that this is the meaning, does it not amount to destruction in its completest degree? Annihilation here would not be inappropriate. For what is death when the "occupation" or "power" of it is gone? Death is not a person following an occupation, but just a conceived occupation or power personified under the word ENEMY. So that to take away the power, or the occupation, is most absolutely to destroy the thing.
The same remarks apply to 1 Cor. 6.18. " Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; but God shall destroy both it and them." If you take away the "occupation" of the belly, or, in equivalent phrase, the function of the stomach, then in the Apostle's sense of the word there is no stomach; for he is speaking of that which is made for and demands "meats." Moreover, when this function (occupation, power) is taken away, the very organism is soon destroyed. So that nothing but the elements remain, and they in dispersion, or in new combinations. Where then is the belly? The same observations apply to food. Take away its "power" to serve the demands of the stomach, and it is no longer food. If the elements remain, nevertheless the nutriment is destroyed.
In another place, 2 These. 2.8, a system that had slowly grown up is personified under the phrase, "That Wicked whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming." Take away the "occupation" or "power" of that "Wicked," and where is he, or it? Could even annihilation of such an abstract thing be better expressed? The destruction will be absolute.
To mention the last instance selected to show that destroy does not mean a ceasing to be, there is Heb. 2.14. "That He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil." To take away from the devil the power of death, would be to destroy that power in him. This at least is the point of the Apostle. Such a destruction of power that those who had been held in bondage by it might be delivered. But further, the grammatical construction puts "him" as the direct object of "destroy." And the dictionaries say that (destroy) in this very place means "put an end to," "abolish," "destroy." The word no doubt is properly used of function and power, but it is freely used of abstract ideas; and in a passage like the one before us it is not a violent trope to apply it as the syntax does directly to the person of the devil. He is not destroyed yet. But our Lord's work in respect to him is not yet completed. There is fire prepared for the devil.
Thus much I have thought it necessary to say to vindicate for the word "destruction," as used by Scripture writers, its common meaning. Whenever a thing is destroyed it ceases to be. The word is sometimes used tropically, of persons and things virtually destroyed, going fast to destruction, or thought of as already destroyed, but even then it owes all its appropriateness and force to its " common meaning." The reader of Scripture is bound to take the word when applied to the future destiny and condition of men in just the same sense as when used in an ordinary way.
A few words should also be said upon "death." Because that word is sometimes applied tropically to living men, Dr. Angus argues that men live after they are dead. And that they live by the physical laws of their being, not by the special renewing grace of Christ. But let us look at his own idea of death, for he speaks of it as a progressive thing admitting of degrees, or forms, or stages. "They," he says (the impenitent), "are already dead in law, already sentenced as is the condemned malefactor; dead to holy feeling, as the blind man is dead to the beauties of color, the deaf man to the harmonies of music; dead to practical holiness, as the man whose motive muscles are paralysed is dead to all activity; dead to happiness, even though they be ' living in pleasure.' " I will only pause over the solecism of a man "dead to happiness living in pleasure" to express thankfulness that God's revelation is not given to us in such confounding rhetoric. St. Paul says, "She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives," meaning probably not regenerated, or dead in trespasses and sins.
The Doctor's argument leans on the idea that death is a condition in which the man may share by parts; or a progressive work that may seize upon him by degrees. Just as before he says, "our everlasting life is only the perpetuation and completion of what we have already." This illustration. opens the question, What is this progressive death to a man when it has reached its completion? Sin commenced initiates death. Sin "finished bringeth forth death," in completion, surely. Think of a man in a state of complete death. To. use the selected similes, he is dead to God, as a blind man is dead to colors; dead to Christ, as a deaf man is dead to. harmony; dead to the universe, as a paralytic is dead to activity; dead to all kind of thought, as an idiot is dead to science and philosophy; carry out the idea of death, according to the "common meaning" of the word, to the whole man, body and soul, and what is the state? Dr. Angus says that living men may be dead in the partial or progressive sense of the word: what is man when death has seized upon him as a whole, and has taken possession of all his powers and faculties? Why, then, his sensation is gone from body and soul; his intellection is gone; his conscience is gone; his consciousness is gone. For death has completely killed him in every power and faculty. Death, let us further remember, is the wages of sin. The wages must be paid to the soul direct, no less than through the body. What then is the "common meaning" of death to the body? Is it not destruction? Where are the dead bodies of our ancestry and of the ancients? Do they exist? The gases, and liquids, and. dust that composed them were in existence long before the bodies were born. They survive now, and have served a. multitude of purposes since the bodies in question died; but the bodies are not. Such is the death of a body; do not apply the word death in an "odd" sense to the soul. It is in the soul chiefly and essentially that death takes effect. It is the cessation of life, of all the powers, functions, and signs of life. When death therefore in its " common meaning" and completed degree is fulfilled upon the soul, will that soul still live? Then is all speech a delusion! Living men in some partial or metaphorical sense are said to be dead, but let not this tropical use of the word destroy in our minds its proper and full meaning. The words death, dead, die, died, are used in Scripture more than a thousand times. Not forty of the thousand have a tropical sense. Every tropical use depends on the literal meaning for its force.
Dr. Angus thinks the "second death cannot be the cessation of all life," for then there would be "no degrees of punishment." If by punishment he means pain, it does not take long to establish different degrees of it. The " few stripes " and the " many stripes," were soon inflicted. At most they might, according to God's appointment, be but forty. And further, according to the common view, the measure of pain, remorse, or anguish, due to impenitence will arise from within, and be determined by what the man is, remembers, or is made by the quickening touch of God s judicial hand to feel in his moral nature. The degrees are in the capacities of the man himself to appreciate the disgrace which is upon him and the loss he is about to sustain;-are in the vexation of being separated, disowned, denounced, excluded, adjudged to the lake,-all, in many cases it is to be feared, contrary to expectation. How long this sort of suffering may continue we cannot decide. Probably through the whole period of assize, and until the preparations for execution are complete; which, for aught we know, may last as long as the period of probation and sin lasted. On any theory the judgment implies suspense and time, during which there must be suffering on the part of the criminals. And in that suffering is abundant latitude for degree; for weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Though Dr. Angus discards in words all psychological authority, yet he turns to it and leans upon it more than he seems to be aware. He has his theory of "trichotomy." He holds that man is composed of matter, of "vital force which sustains the functions of the body," and of soul. And though he allows that soul in the Old Testament means the vital force as well as the seat of affection, thought, etc., he recoils from allowing that the vital force is the seat of affection, thought, etc. And he recoils in spite of the admitted fact, that the Hebrew word for soul is used of animal life in the brutes as well as of animal life in man. This is too large a subject to be treated here; and I only refer to it to show that Dr. Angus has his own theory of " trichotomy." " The vital force which sustains the functions " of the body is no contemptible thing. It is superior to the body. It is, as all physiology proves, of a spiritual nature.
The soul has no material parts, needs no material sus-tenahce, nor is there anything, so far as we see or know, in the soul itself to destroy it. Well, and what then? Can nothing die or be destroyed unless it have material parts? The vital force, in animals for example, has no material parts, " so far as we see or know." Yet we speak of destroying life. Can nothing be destroyed unless we " see and know " that it has an element of destruction "in itself?" This is to make ourselves Omniscient, and to limit the power of the Almighty.
In Dr. Angus's theory of trichotomy he holds that the vital force is "a living germ, which when separated from the body lives still." He supports it by an analogy used by our Lord and by Paul. And he says "if this analogy is to hold, death destroys nothing." What then is this living germ when separated from the body? Where is it? Wherein does it differ from the soul? Why does it not, like the living germ in the seed-corn, "gather to itself new elements" and re-appear in a new body? Why must it wait the archangel's trumpet or the voice of the Son of Man, if it lives still. Has it no Hades? Does it accompany the soul proper? Is it the soul proper? Or the spiritual encasement, "seat," of the soul proper? Is it the spirit-man of Swedenborg? Or is it one of those phantoms which our imagination creates to meet a difficulty, which neither our knowledge nor our philosophy can solve? Dr. Angus is led away by his word "analogy," arguing from it as though it meant an exact likeness. He says "the seed lives in death," which is not true. There is only the analogy of death in that case, and no real death. The "living germ in the corn" does not die; nor is it separated from the corn; nor does the corn die. But the living germ gathers the corn up into itself by absorption. Sometimes, on the other hand, the living germ perishes, and the seed rots. That is a resemblance, an exact likeness, the counterpart to death in us. An inference founded upon it would have been legitimate; but it would have told directly against the Doctor's position. He wants to prove that the "living germ in man can live apart" from the body. In other words, that death does not apply to the soul in the same sense that it does to the body. His analogy, however, only assures us, by an illustration, not by a proof, that the life-force, or that which was the life-force in man, God can preserve, and, when it pleases Him, so revivify by His Almighty power, that it shall again take embodiment. This, however, is no more nor less than the doctrine of resurrection. The re-appearance of a man by resurrection is no proof that the "vital germ" in him never was destroyed. It is indeed a proof positive to the contrary. For resurrection is a restoration of life to that which was dead, and not-merely the clothing of life with a new body.
I thoroughly concede to Dr. Angus the full meaning of aionios, as I contend for the full and proper meaning of every other word in Scripture. But I am, in fidelity, bound to remark that it never applies to the soul, nor to any subjective state of the souls of the lost, though it does apply to the subjective state of the saved. They have "everlasting life." This distinction of use is a telling argument on the present subject. It is freely applied to the subjective state of the one, and only to the objective doom of the other. Why this difference?
I am glad that he does not demand for "torment" the sense of torture, but thinks that if "punishment be used everywhere for it we shall do more justice to the true meaning." This narrows the controversy to a single point,-to a single word; and that word must be understood according to its "common meaning." The word I refer to is kolasis. The noun is used twice in the New Testament, the verb twice. Dr. Angus says, "It describes punishment in relation to the feeling of the criminal, not in relation to law." I join issue on the word italicised, "feeling." I allow that the word has no specific "relation to law;" I contend it has no specific relation to feeling. It is used in a generic, not in a specific sense of any kind. It denotes the award in an objective relation-something to be gone into. Not the subjective thought or emotion attendant upon going into it, nor of being in it. "These shall go away into everlasting kolasis."
So in the other place where it is used. "Fear bath kolasis." It is a very condensed, idiomatic expression; and can only be properly understood in this inquiry by regarding its context, 1 John 4. 17, 18. " Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear; because fear bath kolasis. He that feareth is not made perfect in love." The judgment day is contemplated. There is no fear [of it] in love. Perfect love gives " boldness " in relation to it. Perfect love casts out fear, because fear hath kolasis [in view]. Now mark, it is the " fear " that hath kolasis. And the right understanding of the clause depends much upon the word "hath," echei in Greek. I like to take, not an " odd" meaning of any word, nor its derived meaning, bat if possible its first and most proper signification. What say the dictionaries? Properly and primarily, to have in one's hands, to hold in hand." But fear, has no hand, hence I take an allowable and equivalent expression and say, "Fear holds kolasis in view." Fear always and necessarily has punishment or evil of some form in view. It is the apprehension of evil. Hence the evil contemplated is an objective thing. Something to be experienced another day. The kolasis in question is the kolasis or punishment connected with the judgment day. It is worth noting that St. John does not say fear is kolasis, but hath or holds kolasis. It can do no other. Let the kolasis fade out of view, and fear dies. Fear, indeed, is anything but a pleasant emotion. But the Apostle does not speak of the unpleasantness of fear in its influence upon the soul, but of the evil which it apprehends-an evil external to the soul, and of a future date-the evil for which the day of judgment has been ordained. In each case, therefore, the noun being used in an objective sense, and covering the entire evil of the last judgment and award, clearly is used in a general way, and not with any specific reference to feeling.
Nor are the verbs used in the specific sense Dr. Angus avers. "In Acts 4.21, the priests wanted to make the apostles smart for it." Suppose they did; but they did not say so. We are inquiring after what they said, or what the narrator says of them; not for what they "wanted to do." The passage reads thus: "When they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding nothing how they might punish them, because of the people." Nothing can be more generic than the use of the word here. It may include any kind of evil, imprisonment, or decapitation, confiscation of goods, or banishment. The will of the priests probably was good for anything. And you may be sure that nothing short of destruction would have given them entire satisfaction. The word here is generic, not specific.
And the participle (2 Pet. 2.9) is used in the same all-comprehensive sense: " The Lord knows how to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished." No mode of punishment is intimated, only the general doom foretold. But the context, continuing the same thought, expressly declares what the nature of the punishment will be. "These (as natural brute beasts, made for capture and spoil) blaspheming what they don't understand, shall be utterly spoiled in their despoiling, receiving reward of unrighteousness." Here he simile of illustration, no less than the word, shows that a time of spoiling will come when the wicked will be utterly despoiled as a captured beast is when used up, for food either for dogs or men, or for any other purpose. In all this there is not a word which expresses pain or suffering. The mind rests upon a rapid process of utter destruction.
Nor does the word kolasis carry in it any such sense as suffering in its own radical import. It is taken from horticulture. Properly it means the mutilation, or pruning of trees. If they grew wild they must be restrained, kept within bounds, or cut up altogether. There is no "smarting" in the word. The utmost meaning is destruction. For when a tree is cut down it is destroyed. The tree is not; only the wood remains; and that if cast into the fire is not.
This word, like most others, has a tropical sense. It is applied to men, and then it means to keep them within bounds, to restrain, to correct, to discipline. If carried out here, according to its analogy in horticulture, its extreme use would be to cut a man down as a cumberer of the ground, to destroy him.
Dr. Angus says "all words are best known through their opposites." Now, it so happens that this word has but one opposite. We find it only in one antithetic phrase. There it is opposed to life. But you may judge of a word also by its synonyms, and these are "perish," "destruction," "the second death," "a lake of fire." Nothing can live in a lake of fire.
Since writing this critique on the word 'Awls a friend has drawn my attention to the use of it in the Septuagint. Nothing can be more to the point than the quotations with which he has favored me. I present them in his own words.
In Ezek. 14.3, 4, 7, Septuagint 44.12 (marg.), Kolasis occurs as the equivalent of stumbling-block; whatever is the cause of misfortune or punishment is called a stumbling-block. But the punishment threatened in Ezek. 14.8-10 is being "cut off " and "destroyed."
Ezek.18.30: "So iniquity shall not be your ruin, Kolasis:" v. 31, "Why will ye DIE?"
1 Esdras, 8. 29: " Whoever will not do the law of thy God, and the law of thy king, let judgment be executed, Kolasis"-whether it be unto death, or banishment, or confiscation of goods, or imprisonment.
Wisdom 14.10. Speaking of idol images, "That which was made together with the maker shall be punished- Kolasis:" v. 13, "for neither were they from the beginning, neither shall they be forever." Here a senseless idol is said to be punished.
A better authority on the meaning of a New Testament word, next to the New Testament itself, we cannot have than the Septuagint. The quotations and references here given prove that Kolasis is not a word that means feeling, but punishment in its broadest sense.
Now, courteous reader, if you are prepared to put away all theological bias of every kind, and go to the testimony of Scripture free to receive its entire teaching, my object is gained. Interrogate the witnesses carefully. Let them speak freely, and if possible in their own language. Severely bind yourself down to the exact depositions. If anything, word, or statement, or symbol, appears doubtful, fall back upon what is perfectly clear. Guard against the glosses which systematic theology may have put upon words. Heed nothing you have heard out of court, but master the evidence for yourself, and give a verdict as before God and upon your own soul.
One caution in particular I may make prominent by putting it here. Most people are blind to the teaching of Scripture on this subject, because they will see nothing but through the doctrine of tie soul's inherent immortality. They say it cannot die. It is so constituted by the will of God that it can never be destroyed. They cling to this notion with positive infatuation. Not because they can prove it; not because the Scriptures attest it; but because it is with them a sort of intuition. It belongs to their philosophy, or metaphysical science; as it did to that which the Apostle said was " science falsely so called." I am somewhat amused with the sensitiveness of Dr. Angus on this point. To allow with Solomon that men and animals " have all one breath," so that " one thing befalls them," or with Moses [see the Hebrew of Gen. 1. 20, 24, 30; 2. 7, 19] that man is a "soul of life" in common with God's inferior creatures around him -to allow this " is not so much humbling as degrading."
DEGRADING! There's the rub. That is the great offence of the doctrine of the soul's mortality. It touches that tenderest part of human nature, vanity. It sins against our sense of self-importance. " We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God." We were " made in His image," and were never in " the bondage of corruption." He who doubts our true and proper immortality sins against our just pride. He commits a sin, if not absolutely unpardonable, at least utterly intolerable. DEGRADATION! We are sensitive on that point. The tempter marked it in Eden, and showed our first parents how they might be " as God." 'they took his advice, and their descendants, " nearly all nations," heathen, Jewish, Mohammedan, and Christian, claim now to be of the family of the " Immortals." Man may be sooner reconciled to an eternity of suffering, for any one save himself, than to the degradation of not being thought immortal.
In conclusion let me state that though opposing arguments have been dealt with unsparingly, as loyalty to truth and to personal conviction demand, I entertain a deep respect for the men who advance them. Their aim, I am sure, no less than my own, is to uphold the actual revelation of Scripture, and to promote the best interests of the Church and of mankind. I commend for their candid consideration the following propositions:-
First. Aoinos, everlasting, is never applied to a lost soul, nor to any subjective state of a lost soul.
Second. Reasoning from what men suppose to be due to the moral government of God is clearly irrelevant. Because if that government requires an eternity of suffering for its vindication, we short-sighted creatures are incompetent to sit in judgment upon so infinite a case. Penalty proportionally severe would demoralise any government with which we are acquainted.
Third. The assumed inherent or constituted immortality of the soul is a begging of the question. Nothing short of Divine testimony could possibly prove it at any epoch of its supposed duration.
Fourth. All judicious men who hold the doctrine of endless suffering speak of it with reserve, or append " alleviations," which the terms of future punishment by no means warrant. They believe that existence in hell is worse than non-existence, therefore it must be an infinite evil. To apply the word alleviation to such a state, is it not a biting irony?
May God sustain in all of us who consider this subject the spirit of humble and entire acquiescence in the literal teaching of Holy Scripture. Amen.
W. Griffith.
The Manse, Eastbourne
IN examining this subject there is a distinction touching the evidence which must be specially noted, and constantly remembered; for by its neglect the truth has commonly been overlooked. Our Lord not only employed parable and symbol in His general teaching, but some of His boldest imagery and most captivating analogies are used to warn men of wrath to come. When we attempt to define a doctrine by the literal terms of a parable, or to prove a dogmatic position by the hieroglyphs of prophecy, we are in imminent danger of missing the truth.
The doctrine of future punishment is taught, for the most part, in plain didactic language, words being used in their simple, prosaic sense. But it is also declared in some of the most rhetorical forms of speech and dramatic modes of representation which the New Testament contains. And it is remarkable that this latter mode of teaching is confined to certain books, to the three first Gospels and the Revelations. In all the other New Testament writings the subject is referred to invariably without a metaphor. Not that our Lord confines His utterances upon the subject to metaphor, symbol, and parable. He has spoken also in literal terms, which are both clear in their signification, and emphatic by the decisive connection in which they stand.
The evidence then by which we must form our opinion on the doctrine of future punishment is two-fold, the literal and the symbolical. Under the symbolical I include the bold metaphors and parables of the Lord Jesus, and the prophetic hieroglyphs of the Apostle John. If in considering these two forms of evidence we find discrepancy, or apparent discrepancy, which of them is to yield to the other? Must the literal bend to the symbolical, or must the symbolical be interpreted by the literal? There can be only one just answer to such a question. Granted that the writings or descriptions are of equal authority, and that the authors have an equal claim to our deference, we cannot hesitate to interpret the obscure by what is plain, the figurative by the literal. A parable, symbol, or hieroglyph is a " dark saying," meant to indicate truth, but not to define it. Though adapted to arouse thought, and to encourage inquiry, it cannot satisfy the logical faculty. All figurative expressions, and illustrations generally, however sparkling in beauty, are, from their nature, indefinite, and avowedly beside the mark, therefore to some extent obscure.
For a simple didactic object it might be most suitable to select first the literal statements bearing upon the present subject, and then compare with them the bold representations of parable and prediction. But as the vivid portraiture addressed to the imagination upon this theme has taken firmest hold upon religious and theological thought, it may prove the more satisfactory method to contemplate the evidence in the order of the New Testament books. I propose to quote and consider all that evangelists and apostles have written upon the doctrine, though some of the passages need only be given in a condensed form.
This text speaks of " wrath to come," of trees being " cast into the fire," and of " burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire." John the Baptist by such imagery threatens the Pharisees and Sadducees with future punishment. He forewarns them of destruction, as a tree is destroyed by being " hewn down and cast into the fire," and as " chaff " is consumed by " unquenchable fire." Chaff and straw of the threshing-floor are quickly and utterly destroyed under the action of fire. The materials or elements which entered into their composition remain, but the chaff and the straw, being organised material, are destroyed when their organisation is destroyed.
These verses speak of " being in danger of hell fire," of a convict being " cast into prison," and not coming out till he has " paid the uttermost farthing," and of the " whole body being cast into hell." By " hell " here is meant the Jewish hell into which "bodies" were thrown. It does not mean the mediaeval hell taught by Papal and Protestant theology. Gehenna, or the valley of Hinnom, was the receptacle for all the filth of Jerusalem, for the carcasses of animals, and for the dead bodies of malefactors left unburied, to consume which fires would appear to have been from time to time kept up. (Robinson.) Into this place the dead body of the Lord Jesus might have been thrown by the malice of his murderers if that honorable councilor, Joseph of Arimathea, had not begged it of Pilate, and laid it in his own tomb. The imagery, therefore, of Gehenna, with its worm and fire, teaches extreme, or, as we call it, capital punishment, destruction of life and body, attended with disgrace and contempt.
The "prison" and exaction for debt is another kind of punishment practised at the time, but less than "hell fire." It cannot, therefore, be held to teach as a symbol more than is denoted by that graphic phrase.
All the language here partakes of the hieroglyph. It paints temporal punishments well known to the Jews, and by them warns men against wickedness. Two of the pictures expressly teach destruction by fire or worm. The other does not go so far, though its aim is in the same direction. An eye plucked out, a hand cut off, would "perish." "The whole body cast into Gehenna" would also "perish," but under the most revolting circumstances.
" Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." The conception in this place can hardly be called metaphorical, since we are obliged to express mental and moral truth in language drawn from bodily life and material surroundings. But the chief words, "destruction" and "life," are literal in the most prosaic and abstract form. They are in contrast, just as the broad way is in contrast with the narrow way. "Destruction" is the opposite of "life," and "life," it is of some importance to remember, is the opposite of " destruction." Nor does destruction end just where we conceive death finishes his work, but it reaches to the whole person. There is one who can "destroy both soul and body in hell." The broad way leads to that destruction. This passage is so simple, prosaic, and clear, that we are warranted in using it as a key to open the real sense of any figurative language the Savior may have employed on the same subject. Taking, perhaps, this qualification with us in every use of it, that while here our Lord is speaking to men in general, the most fearful utterances He has delivered on the subject of future punishment were addressed directly to the incorrigible Jews, and were meant to portray temporal judgments upon them as a nation and a church.
Rejection is taught in verse 23, "depart from me," which would of course be followed by final punishment. That punishment is symbolised in the 27th verse by the falling of a house, the simple meaning of which is destruction. The materials of the house remain, but when they are displaced from their architectural relations the house is destroyed.
"The children of the kingdom shall be cast into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." This verse refers to the outcast estate into which the seed of Abraham would be thrown by their rejection of the gospel, and to the miserable vexation with which they would contemplate the Gentiles inheriting their place and privileges. The wailings and lamentations of the Jews over the ruins of the holy city have been spoken of by travellers who witnessed them as most piteous.
Comp. Luke 8.28. Demons here say by the mouth of the possessed, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" At Mark 1.24, in a parallel utterance, the words are, "Art thou come to destroy us?" We must not be carried away by the sound of the word torment. It occurs in several other places. The first meaning of the original is to apply the touchstone or a test, that is, to examine a person suspected or accused; and as this in barbarous or brutal times was done by torture, so he who applied the torture, or practically conducted the examination, was called the tormentor. But the name "tormentor" passed over to another officer, and came to mean a prison-keeper or jailer. And in the same way imprisonment, when unaccompanied with torture, is virtually spoken of as " torment." For, according to Matt. 18.30, to be "cast into prison till he should pay the debt" is the same as to be "delivered to the tormentors till he should pay all that was due." Ver. 34.
The demons deprecated imprisonment, as we may gather from the parallel place, Luke 8.31, "They besought Him that He would not command them to go out into the deep," that is, into Hades, the place of the dead, where, according to Jude, " the angels which kept not their first estate are reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." To be in Hades means to be under privation, but not necessarily in torture. The Lord Jesus by death went into Hades. "Who shall descend into the deep (Hades)? that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead." "His soul was not left in Hades."
The "torment," therefore, which the demons deprecated was intermediate imprisonment. They would be at large.
By possessing men, or even swine, they at least looked out through their prison bars, and gained some sphere of activity and dominion. Their plea, "before the time," cannot be relied upon as suggesting any doctrine. It seems to imply that they had a right for a season to disport themselves in that way. The Savior did not allow the right. For though He permitted them to go into the swine, yet, as He doubtless foresaw, they were immediately dispossessed again, and thereby remanded into Hades.
What the final punishment of the lost will be, whether of angels or men, we cannot learn from this place, because it only speaks of an intermediate state. In passing away from this text we should not forget that a parallel word for "torment" is "destroy." See Mark 1. 24.
Cf. Luke 10.12-15. "It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city." A recorded judgment is here referred to, a judgment which fell upon "the land." The "city" which rejected the gospel should fare more miserably when its judgment came. This is a picture lesson. What has become of "the land of Sodom and Gomorrah?" What has become of the cities Which rejected Christ? They are all gone, miserably destroyed. The warning which they repeat from age to age is that of destruction.
Luke says of Capernaum that it should be "thrust down to hell," not to Gehenna, but to Hades, a state of silence, isolation, darkness, a virtual non est. If the passage may be applied to the ultimate doom of the persons who individually rejected Christ, it cannot threaten them with heavier punishment than Hades. The same line of thought is repeated and somewhat expanded, Matt. 11.20-24.
"Fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." The word hell in this passage refers to a place or a means of destruction after death, and beyond the power of men. It uses Gehenna, the Jewish hell, in a metaphorical sense, to denote punishment in the power of God only. But it teaches expressly and literally the destruction both of body and soul, by means of the unseen hell in the future world. And in harmony with this warning, the 39th verse shows that the utmost loss incurred by the neglect of Christ is "life."
The Lord Jesus here declares that there is no forgiveness for those who speak against the Holy Ghost. Condemnation and judgment must overtake them. What the punishment will be He does not define.
The tares will be bound in bundles and burned. By this imagery the parable teaches destruction. The same lesson recurs in the application. " They which do iniquity " and " the wicked " will be " cast into a furnace of fire;" which is an emblem of awful, but swift, destruction. " Wailing and gnashing of teeth" attend upon the casting into the furnace, but there is nothing to intimate that they are protracted in that devouring element. The Lord's own simile leaves no latitude of interpretation. " As the tares are burned in the fire, so shall it be (with the unrighteous) in the end of this world." Ver. 40.
What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own life? or what shall a man give in exchange for his life? Our translators have not been faithful to the Word. In verses following one another, and without any change of subject, they render the same Greek noun by "life" and "soul." The English reader must therefore be reminded that in the Greek, life is soul, and soul is life. The New Testament writers made no such distinction between life and soul as our two words here express.
This passage is much the same as verse 29, 30, and Mark 9.42-48. It declares that there is a worse punishment than drowning in the depth of the sea. It speaks of persons being cast into "everlasting fire," into "hell fire." It shows how far it is from the will of God that even a "little one" should "perish." "Everlasting fire" denotes final and everlasting destruction-fire being the most active and irresistible agent of destruction. Sodom and Gomorrah are said to be "set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." The fire which destroys forever may also be everlasting fire, an eternal symbol and monitor of God's wrath.
The word " perish " in the passage directs us again without a figure to the final consequences of a severance from Christ. See under, Mark 9.42-48.
34th verse is another picture lesson, drawn from imprisonment for debt. It teaches that a rigid exaction will be made for liabilities incurred, but allows at least that the exaction cannot proceed further than death. A debtor might rot in prison, but death would be the end of his punishment. The lesson no doubt is a full and righteous penalty, but the nature of the penalty must be gathered from other places.
"He will miserably destroy those wicked men." The stone falling upon them "will grind them to powder." Those "wicked men" are described in the previous parable as being exceedingly wicked, beating, stoning, and killing, not only their landlord's servants, but his son also, and seizing upon his inheritance. The extreme punishment, however, is utter destruction.
"Bind him hand foot, and take him away and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." This hieroglyph denotes rejection under circumstances of great mortification, and the rejected person left at worst to die. In such a state of exposure and helplessness, unless relief was brought, a man must soon perish.
"The greater damnation" means the heavier judgment. "Child of hell," or "Son of Gehenna," may be compared to the English phrase, "a child of the gallows." If the phrase is intended to indicate something more than temporal punishments known and abhorred by the Jews, still it cannot carry us beyond the abstract and extreme idea underlying the metaphor, which is destruction effected by torture, and attended with contempt. "The damnation of hell" no doubt means wrath and punishment in the direst degree, but it leaves both the mode and degree undefined.
The closing verses of the chapter point to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the rejection of the Jewish people from their place and privilege as the Church of God. They remind us that as the Son of God was the last prophet of that economy in whom all previous ministries culminated, so by crucifying Him they filled up, even to an overflow, the measure of their fathers. Divine patience and mercy, after the blood of Christ had been shed by them, sent prophets, wise men, and scribes, praying them to be reconciled. But these messengers were killed or crucified, scourged or persecuted; which implacable deeds proved that they were fit only for judgment. A part of our Lord's mission, as a prophet sent to the house of Israel, was to warn them of their danger, and to denounce their doom. Much of the fearful language he employed portrays in burning hieroglyphs the awful punishments, and deep disgrace, which they have sustained as a people.
This verse under the parable of a sensual and self-willed servant declares what their judgment would be. They would be "cut off," ejected from their standing and high relationship, and be treated as hypocrites according to their demonstrated character. The rejection would bring upon them the keenest vexation, the symbol of which is "weeping and gnashing of teeth."
"The door was shut," declares exclusion, but nothing more. So the unprofitable servant, at verse 30, is cast out "into outer darkness."
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." "These shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal." Fire all through this gospel is an emblem of destruction, not of perpetuated torture. The chaff, the trees, cities, and the tares, are to be burned up, consumed; and the wicked in like manner are to be destroyed body and soul in hell. The fire of Gehenna, so often referred to, was not a torturing fire, but, to use St. Paul's expression (Heb. 12.29), "a consuming fire." The worm and the fire destroyed dead bodies. Carcasses cannot be tortured.
Everlasting punishment, like "capital punishment," is final and complete. It is the last sentence of the law. The punishment stands forever. It has no mitigation nor end; for the punished ones, by the punishment of fire, are destroyed. The Greek word for punishment here is used in one other place (1 John 4.8), " Fear hath torment." But " torment " is a most unwarranted rendering. The root meaning is mutilation, pruning. Tropically it means correction, discipline. The severest sense it will bear is punishment, and punishment properly for restraint or correction. By everlasting punishment cannot be meant everlasting correction or discipline. There may be everlasting restraint, but that is just as effectual by destruction as by torture. When a person has proved himself incorrigible, or a tree after pruning and culture is known to be utterly bad, the last resort comes; the tree is "cut down," the man is "punished with everlasting destruction." See page 30-33.
Contrast has been noted in this passage. It should be scanned from both points of view. If punishment is the opposite of life, so, reversely, life is the opposite of punishment. According to all forms of speech and modes of conception, life is properly opposed to death, not to suffering. Hence punishment in contrast with life should mean death. But our word death is the proper contrast to the Greek word Greek, which means organised life, or life viewed as an organising and vitalising force. Whereas, in the text, Greek is used, which means life of a more abstract and spiritual nature, and specially that life which the Savior gives to those who believe in him-everlasting life, and which therefore is a reward. Everlasting punishment is the proper negative and contrast of this Greek. "The unbeliever shall not see Greek." Exclusion from Greek is not a mere natural consequence, as death is. It is something more, in the form of punishment. That evil which comes upon a man naturally is death. But the scene of judgment, in the midst of which the present text lies, if it be taken to describe the last day, involves the great supernatural act of resurrection. The wicked again have life-some organised embodiment, Greek. But soul and body are both to be destroyed in hell. This is "the second death," from which there will be no resurrection. It is the everlasting punishment.
* Dr. Angus says that Psyche, though used in the Old Testament of the life of the brutes, never is so used in the New. But he is mistaken. Rev. 8.9, " The third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had souls, died." The English reader may be informed that the noun, article, and participle are all in the neuter gender, leaving no doubt. Moreover, it is even compared to the life of grass, 1 Peter 1.23-25. When we remember that nothing is farther from the object of Scripture than biology or natural history, the wonder is that such use of the word should be found in it at all.
Attention has been diverted from the real sense of this passage by taking the word Greek to mean "welfare, happiness," which it never does mean except by implication. It might with as much propriety be said that " bread " means "happiness," as that Greek means happiness. Happiness, no doubt, is the end of all life, the aim of all existence. Greek will lead to far greater happiness than Greek. But the Scriptures do not thrust happiness into prominence after the manner of our pleasure-seeking theologians. They speak of life and death, which the philosophers have translated into happiness and misery, much to the detriment of truth, and the deterioration of piety.
Some stress has been laid upon the circumstance that the same adjective is used to describe the punishment on the one hand, and the life on the other. But an adjective receives modification from a noun, as surely as a noun receives modification from an adjective. The act by which the punishment in question is inflicted is not an everlasting act, but the punishment, being the result of the act, is without end-all-enduring. The life, too, is all-enduring. The one is an everlasting negative, the other an everlasting positive. The word occurs in this sense elsewhere, "everlasting destruction," "eternal judgment."
In this Gospel the larger number of references to future punishment unquestionably describe it as destruction; some of them in the most direct and literal way. There is not one, however dramatic may be the connection in which it comes, that presents any difficulty of interpretation in that sense. So that if this book were the only source of evidence available for the purpose, it would be impossible fairly to deny that future punishment consists substantially in perdition or destruction of the person. We must, however, proceed candidly to examine the other books.
"He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation." The word "damnation" commonly expresses so much spite and malice, that plain readers of the Bible can hardly dissociate it from some such feeling. The Greek word means the act of giving judgment, or the judicial sentence. By implication it also comprehends the punishment which the sentence awards. But punishment is inflicted after the judicial sentence is delivered, and usually by another agent, as well as by a separate act. This distinction is important, because it helps rightly to limit the adjective " eternal " to the judicial award. "Damnation" is put in opposition to "forgiveness." It means a sentence of condemnation, in contrast with a sentence of acquittal, or of pardon. The sentence is called "eternal," which word therefore must, in this connection, mean final, or irreversible. That which it applies to holds on forever. It is used in the same sense, Heb. 6.2, "The doctrine of eternal judgment." Here the meaning is not suffering, but a judicial decision from which there is no appeal, and which will stand unaltered forever. It does not imply that the person on whom the sentence is to be executed will exist forever. Indeed it leaves the nature of the punishment altogether undeclared.
Another word in this verse has been inadequately translated. " Hath never forgiveness." Never implies a continuation of the subject in full consciousness of his unforgiven state,-the possibility of forgiveness running on forever, but the boon being forever denied. Whereas the statement, is, " hath not forgiveness." The sin against the Holy Ghost is one which will be visited with the last and everlasting punishment.
"More tolerable for Sodom." (See remarks, Matt. 10.15). The Lord constantly refers to temporal punishments. We are prone, from long habit, and from prevailing custom, to give these references a spiritual application. Thereby we are in danger of adding to the words of the Book by imposing our interpretation upon passages contrary to their sense and intention. Not one of those who listened to the warning based on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah would understand by "the day of judgment," the last day and the general judgment, but some special visitation transpiring in the history of time. In this passage the Savior speaks as a prophet of Israel, warning that people of the doom they will incur if they reject Him and His word.
Here again, as at Matt. 16.24-26, the Greek has lint one word for "soul" and "life." The utmost loss suggested is life. The gain of the whole world could not compensate a man for the loss of his life. Repudiation by the Son of man gives no hint of the state in which the rejected will be left.
"Where their worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched," etc. See remarks on Matt. 5.21-30. These words so closely resemble those of Isaiah lxvi. 24 that we cannot be wrong in supposing a similarity of meaning. "They shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh." This is, doubtless, a symbol or hieroglyph. It is not emblematical of torture, but of rejection with disgrace and contempt. The " carcass " is not the sentient man. They who looked upon this scene beheld not suffering, but the abiding memorial of an awful death.
"He will come and destroy the husbandmen." 40, " Greater damnation," a heavier award.
"Good were it for that man if he had never been born." This is a strong proverbial expression on which it would be eminently illogical to build a theory of eternal torture. According to the orthodox hell it would, by inconceivable degrees, have been better that none of the lost should have been born. An exception proves the rule. Judas Iscariot is at the very bottom of the scale of guilt. " Good were it for him if he had never been born." Therefore birth and life are a boon to all besides. But how can a life of a few years' labor, sorrow, and pleasure be a boon to any man if he must spend eternity In flames which no abatement know, Though briny tears forever flow.
Ten thousand times ten thousand, and millions, of millions of times better had it been for every soul in the perpetual stream of people always, alas, flowing down to perdition, if hell be what respectable and popular theology teaches.
But these words of the Lord Jesus, I believe, are not intended to teach us anything concerning Judas after death. They point to his miserable end, and the universal execration in which he would be held. Who would not rather be unborn than live to develop such a character, and leave behind such a name?
"He that believeth not shall be damned," condemned. The nature of the punishment is not indicated. But the uniform teaching of revelation is of this kind: "In the day thou eats thereof thou shalt surely die." "The soul that sins it shall die." "The wages of sin is death." The condemnation, we abundantly learn, is death.
Passages parallel to these have all been noticed.
Passages parallel to these have all been noticed.
Passages parallel to these have all been noticed.
Passages parallel to these have all been noticed.
Passages parallel to these have all been noticed.
"Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." "Cut it down, why cumbers it the ground." Pilate had mingled the blood of certain Galileans with their sacrifices. Jesus warned His hearers that unless they should seek mercy by repentance they would all in like manner perish. The warning seems to point toward the awful destruction which came upon the impenitent Jews under the Roman general Titus, which great judgment was often in the thoughts and on the lips of the Lord Jesus. The word "perish" stands here to denote the inevitable doom of impenitence, but it intimates no more than a miserable and punitive death. Our translation is a little indefinite. "Likewise" should not be understood to mean "also," but "in the same way." The impenitent Jews would perish by a Roman sword in spite of their religion and sacrifices, just as the eighteen Galileans had been put to death. The warning was literally fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem.
The barren fig-tree was to be cut down, having proved fruitless after long and careful culture. To cut down a tree is to destroy it. The parable is intended to teach that the Hebrew Church, proving incorrigibly bad, would be cut off from all gospel privileges, and cast out of Christ's kingdom. That church is destroyed. Its priesthood, sacrifice, and temple, are all swept away. If the parable be applied to individual persons proving impenitent and faithless under gospel culture, the figure of cutting down a barren tree teaches the destruction of the person.
give another solemn warning to Israel, showing that the day would come when the patriarchs and prophets, and a mighty gathering of Gentiles, would be evidently embraced in the gospel kingdom, while the descendants of Abraham would be excluded. All can see this prophecy fulfilled in the relations of Jew and Gentile to the Church of Christ through the Christian era. The " weeping and gnashing of teeth " fitly describe the vexation and misery which have attended the Jews' outcast estate.
The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This, like our Lord's parables generally, and the prophetical tableaux, must be looked upon as a bold picture-lesson addressed to the imagination, and teaching by analogy. It should not take our thoughts into Hades to rest there. The scene is too limited and definite for a literal description of the unseen state. Lazarus is at table occupying the post of honour, "leaning upon" Abraham's bosom, enjoying his "good things." Do they eat and drink in Hades? or sit at table according to the dining customs of our Lord's times? Did they even converse in that state of darkness and silence?
The colloquy between the rich man and Abraham is consistent enough as a part of the dramatical representation, but not at all so if we attempt to understand it literally. Our Lord dramatises, or, if the word may be allowed, parabolises, that unseen state, after the way in which He has just spoken of the steward, the younger son, the lost sheep, and the great supper. By vivid imagery and burning rhetoric, He depicts the reverse which was about to be sustained by the posterity of Abraham. The poor Gentiles would come into the place of honour and blessed rest with that patriarch. The Jews, rich in spiritual privilege, boastful and vain of their religious standing, would be rejected ignominiously, and left in the unmitigated wretchedness of their outcast condition. This is the warning which the Savior reiterates in several previous parables. This parable of Hades, by its name, by the position it gives to Abraham, by its reference to Moses and the prophets, and by its apparent allusion to Gehenna "flame," was no doubt addressed specially to the Jews. It does not at all correspond to the state of the dead as shown by the gospel. They who sleep in Jesus are not in Abraham's bosom. Absent from the body, they are present with the Lord. He receives them unto Himself. Nor do we believe that the impenitent dead under the gospel, nor indeed under any dispensation, make appeal to Abraham. The parable forewarned the Jew, and pre-eminently the Pharisee, of the great ecclesiastical death which He, though a son of Abraham, was about to sustain.
A nobleman, going to receive a kingdom, entrusted his servants with property, and gave them charge to make diligent use of it till he should return. Some hated him, were unfaithful, and incurred his displeasure. The punishment to be inflicted upon them is thus announced: " But those, mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither and slay before me." Destruction is the ultimate penalty. The specific reference of this parable, also, is the destruction of those wicked Jews who would not have the Lord Jesus for their king.
"He shall come and destroy these husband-men." The rejected stone falling upon the rejecter "will grind him to powder." This parable of the vineyard and husbandmen again foreshows the rejection of the Jews, and their utter destruction as the Church of God.
In this discussion our Lord restricts the great gospel boon to "those who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead." "They can die no more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection." While the Savior vindicates continuous life for Abraham, his argument allows that those who died "without God" are dead in very deed.
Verse 47, " The greater damnation," as before observed, means heavier judgment, but does not indicate the nature of the punishment awarded.
PASSING on from the words of Jesus in the three first gospels, we leave behind us all mention of hell. From this point every reference to future punishment represents the impenitent under some term of death or destruction, till, at least, we come to the book of Revelation, whose prophetical symbols must not be allowed to overrule the didactic and uniform testimony of the epistles, the Acts, and this gospel.
"That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." The same words are repeated in the next verse, " should not perish, but have everlasting life." This contrast is made without a figure of speech. When "perish" is the literal opposite of "everlasting life " how can there be two opinions upon the meaning?
Verses 17, 19 speak of "the condemnation," which means either the state of condemnation, or the evidence and justification of it, but does not define any punishment. At the 36th verse the doctrine is very clear. " He that believeth on the Son bath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abides on him." Life, is the boon, not life or no life is the curse. The utmost expression of God's wrath is death. He "can destroy both body and soul, in hell."
The believer "hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life." Condemnation logically precedes death. Death is the final consequence and full execution of the condemning sentence. A sinner is necessarily under condemnation -"condemned already" but, receiving pardon through faith in the Lord Jesus, he passes from death unto life. He was not only under the curse of the law, which declares "the soul that sinned shall die," but he was in a state of spiritual destitution and alienation from God which by the laws of nature would have issued in death. But he passes from that state, through faith in Christ, and becomes "begotten of God," "born again of the Spirit," in such a sense that he has within him the principle or power of "everlasting life." Death is here the literal and full contrast of life.
In the 29th verse, the same contrast is renewed. Our translators have obscured it somewhat by adopting the fierce word "damnation," which, bearing malignity in its sound and common use, is inadmissible. " The resurrection of judgment" is put in contrast with "the resurrection of life." It may be objected, Why raise the evil-doers at all, if they are again and soon to be destroyed? A sufficient answer to such an objection would be, Because God wills it. There are more and stronger reasons for God's procedure than our philosophy dreams of. Let us not forget that God, all through the history of time, speaks by deeds, not chiefly by words. He has entrusted no revelation of Himself to words only. He purposes to speak His abhorrence of impenitence and unbelief by a great public judgment. The rejectors of divine mercy "will be punished with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power: when He shall come to be glorified in His saints, and admired in all them that believe." For such a demonstration as this, whose lesson is intended for the universe and eternity, it is worthy of God to summon the evil-doers to His bar, by "the resurrection of judgment."
"This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eats of this bread shall live forever." The manna only nourished that life which in the Greek is called Greek. It could give no support to that higher life which our Savior here mentions, Cco4. "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life, in you." The man whose life is mere body, or soul, must, as a conscious person, perish, according to the laws of nature, with all organised things. The unrenewed man has no Conj. The believer obtains this great grace. Hence the one dies, and the other cannot die.
Dr. Angus contends that because zoe is given to living men, and bad men, though living, are without it; therefore death and life are co-existent states in the same person. For a man without zoe is dead, though he be all the time living. He seems not to be aware that he uses the word dead in a double sense-sometimes as the opposite of zoe, and sometimes as the opposite of " existence" or " living." The unconverted man is dead as to zoe, because he has it not: he is alive as to psyche-natural existence. But when he gives up the ghost, psyche, he will be dead as to that also, dead altogether. He very justly says, "Life (zoe) is not existence, but something which, while implying existence, is much more." This distinction is true, and worthy of notice. It leads to the conclusion that our "existence," derived by the laws of nature, will pass away again by the same laws. To attain immortality, we must receive from Christ His great gift, "everlasting life."
"Ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go ye cannot come." "If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins." Though the Savior declares here the penalty of greatest sin, rejection of Himself, He gives no intimation of protracted suffering, nor even of protracted existence. As in the previous place, He denies existence to the unbeliever-"Ye shall die."
"I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand." Here, again, " eternal life" is put in contrast with the term " perish." This is the difference which will hold between the " sheep " of the great Shepherd and those who are not of His flock.
"He that loveth his life, shall lose it; and he that hates his life, in this world shall keep, guard, it unto life, "eternal." The same contrast is again presented. The soul or body is a perishable thing. Those who love it will lose it. Those who hate it will preserve it unto an eternal life. They will find that this is transformed into a life more spiritual and everlasting.
"Those that thou gayest me I have kept, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition." The same leading words are used here as in the previous place. "To keep," "to lose." Some are preserved: one is lost.
Son of perdition. Perdition in the Greek is a noun formed from the verb to lose, to destroy, to perish. It means utter death, destruction. The passage teaches that while the eleven were preserved by their Master, Judas was lost (see pp. 12-25) calling him a son of perdition, the Lord Jesus By either predicted his destruction, or devoted him to it.
Thus, all through this gospel, John draws a contrast between life and no life. There is no intimation given of protracted suffering for' any class of the ungodly. There is no foreshadowing of continued existence for the lost. The renewal of life by a resurrection is for the purpose of judgment, and that judgment, we learn from other places, is destruction-the second death.
This historical book preserves to us the only account we have of the first preaching of the Gospel. It is essentially a missionary record. It contains several outlines of Apostolical sermons or appeals to the people. It was necessary that the first ambassadors of Christ should deal in primary and essential doctrine. They went forth to call men to repentance. Their duty, was to show them, on the one hand, their sin and the dangers to which it exposed them; and, on the other, to testify the love and grace of God for their salvation. The Apostles found the people, both Jews and Gentiles, not only in ignorance but under great religious delusion. It was as necessary to show them their sin, and to warn them in the plainest terms of all the dangers which threatened them for it, as it was to preach an all-sufficient Savior. We should expect, therefore, to find in the book which narrates the planting of Christianity in the earth some sufficient and reliable utterance on so fundamental a topic as future punishment, the judgment of God upon unrepented sin. The subject is introduced. The Apostles in their preaching spoke upon it with point and fervor. And we must suppose that they declared the whole counsel of God in words easy to be understood. What, then, is the nature of their testimony? Let us consider all that they are reported to have said in warning Jew and Gentile of wrath to come.
"Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell." The soul of the Lord Jesus in Hades is the idea. It cannot mean that the Son of God went into a state of torment, but that his soul, was conformed to the state of the dead. Hades is better interpreted of state than of place. All existence known to us has its local habitation, its material surroundings, which greatly affect its condition. We can scarcely conceive of existence or even of being apart from some association of place. The state of the dead is a very abstract idea. It is not wonderful that it should have been anciently expressed under the conception of locality. But when the abode of the dead is described as an abyss of darkness, silence, inaction, and even unconsciousness, it becomes highly probable that the adjunct of place is a clothing given to thought to aid conception and to facilitate discourse. Peter's doctrine on this point is put into his own language in the next chapter. Quoting from the Old Testament, he refers to Hades. Declaring the same fact in a popular style, he says: "Ye killed the Prince of Life, whom God hath raised from the dead."
"Every soul which will not hear that prophet shall be destroyed from among the people." Peter, in these words, warns the Jews against rejecting Christ, and he does it by the threatening originally pronounced by Moses. It might be asked whether Peter, speaking under the Gospel, has not a sorer punishment to testify as well as greater blessings to proclaim? Whatever it is, he contents himself with quoting the ancient threatening. If we take his words to mean bodily punishment or spiritual, punishment to be inflicted in this world or the next, its essential nature remains the same. "Destroyed" is the word which declares it. And the destruction is to take effect upon the whole person, " every soul."
The same doctrine was preached by Paul, in the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia.
"Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish." The word " perish " (vanish, gr.) here means the opposite of " life;" for, at the 46th verse, resuming the same topic of discourse, he says, " Ye judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life."
We may expect that circumstances would arise which might require on the part of a faithful preacher the most solemn warnings that could be framed in calm and earnest language. Such an occasion certainly was given by the Jews at Corinth, who set themselves in violent opposition to Paul and his doctrine. He was obliged to separate himself from them, both for their own sakes and for the good of the Gentiles. Of course he could not do it without warning, and it is to be supposed that the warning given would be clear and full. It is narrated to us in the following words:-
"When they opposed themselves, and blasphemed, he shook his raiment, and said unto them, Your blood be upon your own heads; I am clean: from henceforth I will go unto the Gentiles." This is the extreme warning Paul has to address to his Jewish brethren under these extreme circumstances. It is the last time he may ever, speak to them. He lays the responsibility of this withdraw-merit from them of the Gospel testimony upon their own heads. But he reminds them only that they must answer the consequences with their lives, "Your blood." Would any believer in the intense and eternal sufferings of hell at the present day feel his conscience discharged by alluding to eternal torments, or even everlasting pains, under so feeble and so doubtful a phrase? Surely, if perpetuated life in endless suffering had been incurred by opposing and blaspheming the Gospel, this is one of the places where we might expect to find it distinctly intimated, if not emphatically declared. Instead of any word or allusion pointing toward the popular and orthodox notion of hell, Paul simply says, "Your blood be upon your own heads."
"There shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust." This doctrine of a general resurrection is in harmony with a public judgment, condign punishment and everlasting destruction. It harmonizes with the Apostle John's doctrine of a "second death."
This is the sum of warning contained in the inspired narration of Apostolic preaching. Surely all believers in endless suffering must be struck with its infrequency and feebleness. Peter, in Jerusalem, admonishing those who had "killed the Prince of Life," and were maliciously opposing His Apostles; Paul, pleading with his kindred whom he loved so well, that he "could wish himself accursed from Christ" in their behalf, have no strong, nor even decisive or clear, word to say to them on the subject of perpetuated suffering or protracted shame. If it were simply silence on this topic, the absence of evidence in such a book would be conclusive as to the opinions of the speakers, but they have spoken and their words are "destroyed," "perish," "unworthy of everlasting life," "your blood be upon your own heads."
We can pass, however, from the recorded preaching to their own letters, preserved to us substantially in their very words. In these letters they have made various allusions to future punishment, from which we have every reasonable facility of gathering the opinions they held and taught.
"Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death." In the previous verses Paul enumerates all the vices of the heathen world-every abomination that can be named (see 18-32). He commences the statement with these significant words, showing that his thoughts were occupied with the heinous guilt of what he denounces: "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness," etc. He finishes the shameful indictment by saying, "They which do such things are worthy of death." Hence the wrath of God finds its expression or vengeance in the "death" of the evil-doers.
God will render to every man according to his deeds; "eternal life" to some; "indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish" to others. This latter award is explained more definitely at the 12th verse: "As many as have sinned without law, shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged [and perish] by the law." For there is no respect of persons with God. The contrast presented by our Lord between the broad way of destruction and the narrow way of life, and which we have noted running all through the historical books, reappears here in the old terms: "Eternal life," and "perish." There is no hint of continuous life in misery.
"God taketh vengeance," as intimated in the previous chapter and elsewhere in this epistle by destruction, perdition, death. Verse 8: "Whose damnation is just." Whose judicial sentence is a righteous one. The nature of it is not obscurely mentioned, verse 23: "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."
"Saved from wrath through Him." The "wrath" is explained at verse 21: "As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life," etc. A man is "saved from wrath" by being delivered from "death," and by having conferred upon him "eternal life."
"The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life," etc. This is plain teaching and boldest contrast without a figure of speech.
"The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." 6. "To be carnally minded is death." 13. "If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." The usual contrast between life and death is still kept up: sin is linked with and issues in death: life is conferred by the Spirit of Christ.
The word death occurs in this passage, 2-13, with different shades of meaning. " The minding of the flesh is death." Is it death in the sense of a state entered upon by yielding to the promptings of the flesh? or a liability incurred thereby? or is it a fatal agency, working out appropriate result by fleshly desires and lusts? No great doctrine of revelation is left dependent on niceties of criticism, nor - delicate shades of idea. "The minding of the flesh" is a phrase which brings forward a thought from the previous chapter. There Paul speaks (verse 23) of a "law in the members warring against the law of the spirit." To heed the grosser law would be to mind the flesh, and to mind the flesh is death. A precisely parallel statement, though more amplified, stands in the 6th chapter: "Ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness, and to iniquity unto iniquity." Ye have minded the flesh. "Ye were the servants of sin." "What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death." And again, "The wages of sin is death." See vi. 19, 20, 21, 23. So James puts it: " Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." And our Lord has said, "He that loveth his life shall lose it." It is therefore according to the analogy of Scripture, and in harmony with this immediate connection, to understand that the minding of the flesh tends to death, ends in death.
If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life. This is a paradox, but one easily explained by the connection. Eleven verses before (7.24), the body, by reason of the "law of sin in its members," is, by apostrophe, compared to a putrid carcass fastened to a malefactor-a horrid punishment for some crime. The believer is in a similarly sad predicament; for his body is dead because of sin, while his spirit is alive. But there is relief for him now, through the quickening and indwelling power of the Holy Ghost, and ultimately there will be complete rescue. The word dead being here applied to the body, while life is declared of the spirit, shows that the term is used analogically, and in allusion to the carcass, 7.24.
Paul speaks again of death in this passage, and uses both an intense word and a peculiar form of construction, neither of which our translators have rendered. "If ye live after the flesh, ye are about to die utterly." The lexicons give "to die out," "to die forever," "to come under condemnation of eternal death." The context proves that this death is no metaphor, like verse 10; and no liability or tendency like "the law of sin and death" (verse 2). From that there is redemption by Christ (verses 3, 4). This is a future imminent death, and a death in very deed-utter death.
The whole phraseology of this verse is strengthened in comparison with previous verses, showing, what every good writer evinces, an advance of thought. At verses 8, 9, we read of "being in the flesh," denoting the state of nature unregeneracy; and at 5-7, of "minding the flesh," which indicates a leaning of thought to animal promptings, yielding to natural temptation. But in the 13th verse the apostle says, "If ye live after the flesh"-a phrase with denotes deliberate purpose and confirmed habit. Those who have given themselves over to this moral condition are about to experience death in its full form and last degree.
This passage of itself is conclusive against the restoration theory.
"Vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." "Destruction" is here used as the full and final measure of wrath; just as in the next verse "glory" is the full and final measure of "mercy:" "Vessels of mercy afore prepared unto glory."
This passage shows the meaning of the word "wrath" in this epistle. The civil power is to be obeyed. "They that resist it shall receive to themselves damnation," that is, a judicial sentence and punishment from the civil power. " For he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil." Capital punishment is contemplated. "For he bears not the sword in vain." If the sword of the civil power should do its work upon rebels, it would "execute wrath upon them" -slay them.
"Destroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died." 20. "For meat destroy not the work of God." 23. "He that doubted is damned (judged) if he eat." Paul here appeals to Christians not to put temptations in the way of weak and wavering disciples. He warns them that some, by such careless conduct, might be "destroyed."
In this great doctrinal epistle these are the words and warnings by which the Apostle sets forth future punishment. Occasion arises in it again and again for him to speak of the terrors of the Lord; and he does speak of them in the places quoted. But he has no stronger words to use than "perish," "death," "destruction." Shall we meet with any condition or punishment more dreadful in his other epistles?
"If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy."
"Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them."
"Through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died."
"I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection; lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway," not approved.
In the wilderness the rebellious Israelites "were overthrown." They "fell." They "were destroyed of serpents." "These things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come." The admonition goes no further than destruction.
Persons eating and drinking unworthily in the Lord's Supper brought judgment upon themselves. By such judgment, however, God chastened them, that they might not be condemned with the world. The condemnation of the world alluded to is not here explained, though sufficiently declared in other places.
"Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." 26. "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Verses 50-57 celebrate victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ, over death, corruption, and mortality. But they give no hint of continuous life for the unsaved, much less of any misery in a future state. By allusion at verse 18, we are informed that they are "perished."
"If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed." Paul wrote to the Romans, "I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren." The word anathema means always, "devotion to perdition." Could the Apostle, or any sane man, for a single moment wish for himself eternal torments? There is no consideration that can reconcile a man in the calm exercise of his reason to an eternity of pain, depravity, and conscious shame. But willingness to die for others is not a feeling abhorrent to our nature. Heroism and benevolence have prompted the purpose and sustained the execution. Let us pass on to the second epistle.
"For the letter kills but the spirit giveth life." Our translation "killed" is too feeble. It should be "kills outright." Such is the teaching and tendency of Law in distinction from Gospel. One is the ministration of death, and kills utterly. The other is the ministration of life and glory.
"If the ministration of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious how shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious. For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory." The law was "the ministration of death," or "of condemnation." The two words point to the desert and consequences of sin. "Death" is put in contrast with "Spirit," and "condemnation" in contrast with "righteousness."
"But if our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost," who are being lost, or are exposed to destruction.
"For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." This whole passage, 1-8, is spoken of believers, who when absent from the body are at home with the Lord. Paul deprecates an "unclothing," as leading to an undesirable state, but a state into which some assuredly pass. He earnestly longs "to be clothed upon" with a heavenly embodiment, and longs for it "that mortality (or `the mortal nature') might be swallowed up of life." Hence, apart from "the house from heaven"-the special clothing which is to be given believers in place of the dead body-mortality will hold, death will triumph.
The exceeding small reference to punishment of sin and the state of the impenitent after death by the Apostle of the Gentiles cannot be accounted for on the supposition of his faith in eternal suffering. Why did not his fervid heart and eloquent tongue depict this misery in his own vivid and faithful way? How is it that he does not allude to it in all his warnings? Thus far he has not even named it. Let us search further.
"Who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world." 8. "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." This word means let him be "excluded from the favor of God, and devoted to destruction." Such a bold challenge reveals the unshrinking way of Paul when dealing with subjects dreadful or sublime. He who would devote an angel to the just merit of his sin, should not speak with reserve upon the issue of man's impenitence and unbelief.
"As many as are of the works of the law are under the curse." The word "curse," like anathema, means "a devoting or dooming to utter destruction." Compare also verse 21, where "life" is again put in contrast with "the doom" or "curse." "If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law."
After enumerating the works of the flesh, including adultery, idolatry, murder, yea every lust and crime, Paul says with great fervor and emphasis:-"Of the which I tell you before, as I have told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Why did he not in this connection speak some strong, or at least clear, positive word on the certainty that such wickedness would bring men into the endless misery of hell? If the Apostle believed in perpetual suffering, he ought to have given full and solemn warning of it in this place. Fidelity in his mission, and compassion as a man, required a distinct enunciation of it when denouncing such sins. But he has no such terrors to fulminate. And he finishes this epistle, prompted by his love to the Galatians, and their imminent danger of apostatizing from the Gospel, with a word which must strike every believer in purgatory and eternal torments as excessively tame; viz.:-
"He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting."
"By nature the children of wrath." It shocks every righteous sentiment to suppose that men by nature are children of a torturing hell. That they are born to die, born with a nature whose impulses are carnal and earthly, and so making it a righteous and benevolent arrangement that the nature should perish, shocks no moral feeling.
The condition of the Gentiles apart from the Gospel is described as one "having no hope, and without God." This description is negative, and points toward destruction.
"No whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God." They are excluded from it. If there had been a positive side as well as a negative-a positive involving eternal misery-it behoved the Apostle here to declare it with all possible clearness and force. In the 6th verse he says, "Because of these things (vices, etc.) cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience." He denounces the works with indignation and abhorrence. " It is a shame even to speak of those things," says he (ver. 12). And we must hold that he denounces their utmost punishment by such words as exclusion and death.
"In nothing terrified by your adversaries; which is to them an evident token of perdition (or destruction), but to you of salvation, and that of God." The common word destruction is here again put in contrast with salvation.
"Many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ; whose end is destruction." What statement can be more conclusive? He is affected with their impending doom even to "weeping." Had he seen in it endless suffering, would he have been content to say "destruction?"
"Warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom, etc." What is the warning? He says nothing of-
Flames which no abatement know,
Though briny tears forever flow.
Nor does he give a text for that finely poetical verse-
There is a death whose pang
Outlasts the fleeting breath:
Oh what eternal horrors hang
Around the second death!
The utmost warning is still in the old words, fearful enough in all conscience.
"For which things' sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience."
"He that doeth the wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done."
"Even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come."
"The wrath is come upon them (the Jews, 14-16) to the uttermost."
"The Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified." Paul felt it necessary to forewarn and testify of coming wrath. What is his testimony?
"Sudden destruction cometh upon them;" which, under the idea of wrath, is contrasted with salvation at the 9th verse.-"God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ."
"It is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them. that trouble you; and to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power, when He shall come to be glorified in His saints," etc.
A literal translation of the principal phrases in this text may be interesting to the English reader. "It is a righteous thing (dikaion) for God to recompense oppression upon them that oppress you, and to you who are oppressed, release with us, at the disclosure of the Lord from heaven with messengers of his power in flaming fire, to give right (full) justice (ekdikesin) to those who know not God, and to those who obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who all (hoitines) shall pay right justice (dike), an everlasting destruction." That is, shall make satisfaction to justice by an everlasting destruction. Olethros (destruction) is used 1 Cor. 5.5, "For the destruction of the flesh." By flesh here, no doubt, is meant a fleshly lust, that sin of the flesh, fornication, against which the Apostle was contending. It was a destruction of that whereby the spirit might be saved. What Paul aimed at by the word was the extinction of the sin of fornication. He uses "flesh" in the like sense elsewhere. "They that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit." He regards the flesh as something capable of being done away, for he says of living men, "Ye are not in the flesh." The same general thought recurs throughout his Epistles. (See p. 20, middle.)
There is nothing in 1 Thess. 5.3, " Sudden destruction" (olethros) to fix the meaning. The simile, "as travail upon a woman with child," illustrates the adjective "sudden."
Lusts are said, 1 Tim. 6.9, to "sink men into destruction and perdition." Such will be the final consequence of foolish and hurtful lusts. Here "destruction (olethros) and perdition " seem to be compared to the sea, and the lusts are described as making the mind uncanny-brutish, and the body disabled. The rhetoric reminds us of a man with a millstone about his neck cast into the sea. What will become of him? He must sink down into its deepest depths. And as a popular figure of final extinction, nothing can be more expressive. The prophet Micah has used it, and his words are often quoted to indicate the blotting out of sin. " Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea."
"That man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, . . . whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming." Verse 12: "That they all might be damned (judged) who believed not the truth, etc."
There are but few references to future punishment in this Epistle: " Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment;" "Foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown (sink) men in destruction and perdition" (5.24, and 6.9). In the Second Epistle, 4.1, it is said: "The Lord Jesus Christ shall judge the quick and the dead at His appearing and kingdom." No reference at all in Titus and Philemon.
"How shall we escape."
"But with whom was He grieved forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcasses fell in the wilderness? And to whom swore He that they should not enter into His rest, but to them that believed not?"
"Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief."
"The doctrine of eternal judgment." A judgment which is final and irrevocable.
An illustration of this judgment is drawn from a barren field, which is declared "nigh unto cursing, whose end is a burning up."
"After death the judgment."
"Fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of Grace? For we know Him that hath said, Vengeance belongs unto Me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge His people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." We may bring in here the last verse of the chapter: "But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition." What is the nature of the punishment threatened? It is compared with judicial death under the law. It is described as "fiery indignation devouring adversaries," and as "perdition." True it is hinted that it should be "sorer" than death, by witnesses under the law, "much sorer," "how much sorer?" Still we cannot infer from this that the punishment shall not be death at all, but a life of torture; much less that it shall be a life eternal in its duration, every hour of which would mete out more misery than the entire judicial death referred to.
We cannot suppose that Paul is attempting to compare things so utterly incomparable. For what comparison is there between death and eternal existence? It is contrast. And what comparison can be made between a sentence which may involve a few minutes' suffering, and never-ceasing, never-ending misery. It is certain that the comparison on the one side goes no farther than temporal death: therefore we have no right to suppose, without information, that it proceeds further on the other side. And when/ in the same argument (23-39), "perdition" is the word which names the utmost terror, we are prohibited from opening the question of anything beyond. Probably the writer is contemplating the awful destruction of the Jews as a nation, which the Lord foretold, and which came upon them not long after. And, without doubt, the sufferings, the mortification, and the disgrace, attendant upon that "utmost wrath" of God, rendered it a much sorer punishment than judicial death under the law of Moses. The impenitent Jews approved the crucifixion, despised and trampled under foot the blood of Christ, and resisted the work of the Spirit by which the preaching of Christ began to transform the world; and it was mete that this crime, great and national, should be branded on earth with the utmost vengeance of God. It is so branded. The Jews, as a Church and nation, are destroyed. Their city is in heaps, and its ruins possessed by enemies. Themselves are scattered under every sky. And the judgment which overtook them, by the hands of Titus, the Roman general, was more awful than anything recorded in history.
They like Esau are "rejected: for (like him) they found no place of repentance, though they sought it carefully with tears."
"They escaped not," but proved the truth of the text (29, cf. Deut. 4.24): "The Lord thy God is a consuming fire."
Upon the last phrase it may be again noted that "consuming" fire does not mean a tormenting and not consuming fire. Paul knew what he was writing, and used words to inform, not to mystify and mislead. No phrase for destruction can be stronger than this. Katanaliskon is an intensified form of consume, and means to consume wholly, to consume down to nothing. And when God is compared to a fire, it must mean fire in the most absolute sense. If God undertakes to burn down a sinner with the fire of His absolute nature, so as to consume him utterly, what further argument do we want from physics or metaphysics in proof of the possibility of blotting a sinner out of existence.
In looking over the testimony of this chief Apostle, I have endeavored to mark every word relating to the subject in hand. There may have been oversight; but no important place can have escaped me. I think any unbiassed person will be ready to say, If this is all that most faithful and devoted servant of Christ and of His generation has to say concerning the mediaeval hell-a hell of undying existence and incessant misery-it is clear that he did not hold the doctrine. Further, if that doctrine be a part of the Gospel revelation, Paul did not fully comprehend that revelation, and has proved himself incompetent, in that feature of it, to make it known. His must have been, by this defect, a fallacious testimony: for, in very truth, the doctrine is not in his writings, nor in his recorded oral teachings. What say the other Apostles?
"The flower thereof falls, and the grace of the fashion of it perished: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways." 15. "When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." What more can be expected of a thing when it is finished? The perfection of sin is death; or the end of sin is death.
Death too means here, not that incipient stage of it which begins with a first transgression, and which is death only in a metaphorical and anticipative sense, but its full form and perfected degree:-death in its " common meaning," in that
meaning which alone can give force to the word anywhere as a metaphor.
"The tongue is a fire, . . . and it is set on fire of hell." The whole verse is very rhetorical. The tongue is not fire, though like fire: for as a spark may kindle a conflagration; so a word dropped here, and another there, by the tongue, may do immense mischief. Blazing in passionate fury, as it often does, like wild fire, the tongue is a most dangerous member. Compared to fire, it is a fire of the Gehenna type, which neither warms, nor serves in any way, but consumes, burns to utter destruction. The parallel, may be thus suggested:-An untameable tongue. Unquenchable fire.
From the tone of this chapter-its fierce denunciation-you would expect in it some mention of torment after death and judgment. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you." What are the miseries? "Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire." Then follow fearful criminations, culminating in the awful charge: "Ye have condemned and killed the just One." Still there is no threatening of torments, according to the orthodox doctrine of hell. The chapter concludes in the usual Apostolic language: "Let him know, that he which converts a sinner from the error of his ways shall save a soul from death."
"Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which lives and abides forever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withered, and the flower thereof falls away: but the Word of the Lord endures forever." The product of natural birth perishes like the grass; but the result of regeneration is incorruptibility-it endures forever.
This passage supports the opinion elsewhere expressed, that natural existence is a perishable thing, and will pass away by the laws of nature,-unless we are "born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible." And mark, the person who becomes "born again by incorruptible seed," was born of " corruptible." The phrase is not used of his body, but of himself.
"By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison." This is such a controverted passage that one may be excused from holding a firm opinion upon its meaning. But at most, it only refers to an intermediate state, and gives no indication of conscious existence after the judgment, and everlasting destruction of the great day.
"If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and sinner appear?" The answer expected is clearly, nowhere. Not to be saved is to be destroyed.
"The devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour." If this alludes to the last judgment upon the devil's victims, it clearly points to destruction.
"If ye do these things, ye shall never fall." "Fall" here is put in contrast with " entrance into the everlasting kingdom."
"False teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction." Sudden destruction seems to be the thought-a destruction which is illustrated by three historical references, at which we may glance in the inverse order of their recital. "Turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; and delivered just Lot." Here mark, by "an overthrow" God "condemned those cities." That overthrow was total destruction. The contrast to it was the deliverance of Lot, who escaped with his life.
This is an ensample; and it goes no farther than destruction on the one hand, and life on the other.
The second historical example:- "And spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly." This ensample is simple and unmistakable. Death to the ungodly; salvation from death to the righteous.
The third historical example:- "If God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment." Sinning angels, according to this ensample, were cast down, not to Hades, nor to Gehenna, but to Tartarus, the mythological hell of the Greeks. Tartarus appears in this verse a place of detention, not of torture, where rebels are reserved unto judgment. What their final judgment will be is not stated: but it is implied that it will be something very different from the Tartarus and chains in which they are reserved. And, as we read elsewhere of everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels, we may probably conclude that they await utter destruction by that "judgment." For at the 9th verse, Peter says, "The Lord knows how . . . to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished." And at the 12th he describes the punishment:-"These, as natural brute beasts, made for capture and spoil, speak evil of things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption" (See page 31). The literal statement, "utterly perish," and the simile by which it is illustrated, "as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed," leave no room for doubt as to the nature of the judgment and punishment threatened.
* We have no English word which will of itself adequately translate Ocipoi in all its connections. It means " to despoil," both in a physical and moral sense; and it is hard to say whether the physical or moral should have the priority. These are examples of its use:-To deflower a virgin, who may not thereby have been depraved, but victimised; to desecrate a temple; to corrupt good manners; to deprave heart and character; to despoil a captured beast. The idea of despoiling runs through all this use, and may be thus expressed:-To despoil a temple of its sanctity, a maiden of her virginity, manners of their purity, the heart of its sincerity, character of its integrity, mind of its simplicity. When applied to a captured beast, it means to despoil it of whatever the hunter pleases-its ivory, its skin, its brush, its antlers, its flesh-to devote it as spoil, or to abandon it to corruption. In any case, the despoiling involves the loss of life and speedy destruction of the animal.
The same general idea runs through the Septuagint use of the word:-" The earth also was despoiled" of its virtue (Gen. 6.11). "I have created the waster to despoil" (Isa. 44.16). "After this manner I will despoil the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem" (Jer. 13.9).
Nouns and adjectives formed from the verb, denote a despoiled and perishing state. A captured beast despoiled may be left a putrid and rotting carcass; so the idea of corruptness and perishing prevails in their use:- "Corruptness in the world through lust." "Bondage of corruptness." "Which things are to perish in the using." Man is called " perishable," in contrast with the "imperishable" God. "A perishable crown." "Perishable things as silver and gold." "Born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable." "The perishable must put on the imperishable, the mortal the immortal" "The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption." In this use we find not only moral corruptness or depravity signified, but more frequently physical corruptness or perishability. A thing, being despoiled, sinks into decay and. extinction.
The word is applied by Peter in a physical sense. The simile of the captured beast fixes this sense, and the intensive form of the verb confirms it. Karacti Oopicrovrat, shall be utterly despoiled; despoiled down to extinction.
I have kept to the word "spoil" at p. 31, because it comes nearest the Greek term, and because thereby the original iteration is preserved; although our English version is more idiomatic and more nearly equivalent. At verse 17 it is said of certain sensualists, that " the mist of darkness is reserved for them forever," which is wholly a negative idea, and so indefinite that we must seek its solution in other Scriptures. Such e.g. as:-
"The heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." And at the 9th verse: " The Lord is long-suffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." He teaches, too, that in connection with this " perdition," " The heavens shall pass away with a great noise" (probably the aerial heavens), "and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up." He teaches that " We, believers, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." And we may well here re-propound his own question, if the righteous are saved by possessing new heavens and a new earth, when the old order of human things and habitation is " burned up," where shall the ungodly and sinner appear? His whole representation, no less than his verbal statement, endorses the doctrine of Paul, that they " will be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power when He shall come, etc." Incidental words show that this thought was with him the ultimate evil. There were some unlearned and unstable people who wrested Paul's writings, and the other Scriptures, "unto their own destruction.
The Apostle Peter, then, who speaks of an intermediate state and of the last judgment heaping warning upon remonstrance-exhausting both history and prophecy, and probably drawing something from legend, to set forth the terrors of the Lord-has not a word nor an idea which harmonizes with the medieval and still popular hell. He knew nothing of a life in misery after the judgment of the great day.
It is supposed that Jude, and Peter in his Second Epistle, gathered their notions of the fallen angels and their imprisonment from a common source-from the apocryphal book of Enoch, or from tradition, or from some popular legend. It is clear that each of them appeals to what was well known and fully admitted among the people. Neither of them is imparting information. Neither is vouching for the accuracy of the description, but each is availing himself of admitted premises for the purpose of general warning and exhortation. Peter says: " If God spared not the angels," etc., leaving the basis of the legend or tradition undisturbed without question or confirmation. And Jude aims to put his Jewish readers " in remembrance," by rehearsing what they had read, or heard and admitted. He appeals to the popular belief, and uses it for a hortative purpose. If the contest between Michael, the archangel, and the devil about the body of Moses be a creation of poetry, rather than an historical fact, still the sublimity of attitude and the self-government in the angel which refrained from "railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee," makes the legend worthy of quotation for a popular purpose. Do we not in the same way appeal to the creations of Milton, not to endorse their literal truth, but to give vividness and force to moral teaching? Such allusions could not mislead. The legends were there among the people, resting upon their own authority. The moral use made of them is all the writer is responsible for.
Because of similarity in idea I quote Jude here after the Second Epistle of Peter.
"Certain men crept in unawares who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, etc." On the ground of this admixture of ungodly men with Christian society, he gives the reminder (verse 5), " That the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not." So ungodly men under the Gospel may expect to be destroyed.
Fallen angels are "reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day." See remarks on 2 Pet. 2. The chains are intended to bind for a period till the judgment, yet are they called everlasting. The Greek word comes in the phrase, " His eternal power and Godhead." Here we have a clear instance of an adjective modified by the noun and the connection. If the idea be that of bondage through the whole history of humanity, it is but a short everlasting.
This verse furnishes an example of another modification in a similar adjective: "Sodom and Gomorrah are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." The fire which destroyed those cities is eternal only in its effects. The " vengeance " was short and sharp. The memorial of it abides forever. This vengeance is held forth as an "example." So shall all the wicked perish; as is further intimated.
"Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core." They are (12) compared to "trees whose fruit withers, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots," and (13) to "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever."
If Jude had known anything of perpetuated misery after the judgment, he would have mentioned it, and made it very prominent, for it would have suited his design far better than all he has pressed into his short Epistle. The omission can only be accounted for by total ignorance or unbelief of the doctrine.
" We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abides in death." In Adam all die. From him they inherit a mortal nature. Those who love not the brethren abide in that state. We pass from it into a quickened state by the regeneration of the Holy Ghost.
"Fear hath torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love." "Fear hath punishment " [in view].
It is worthy of remark that the doom of the wicked is rarely represented in a subjective way, and that no word is ever used of it which signifies suffering per se. And when, by glancing down the columns of the Concordance, we find that the word suffer, in its specific sense, is used freely all through the New Testament, its absence from all description of and allusion to the doom of the wicked is a most stubborn argument; for, according to the popular doctrine, no suffering on earth is comparable with the everlasting sufferings of hell. And yet, mirabile dictu, the Apostles have totally overlooked that small feature of the hell-fire punishment!
"There is a sin unto death; I do not say that he shall pray for it." There is an unpardonable sin. Surely such a sin is of the deepest dye. Its punishment is death. Death here is opposed to Zoe, which means life in Christ-the everlasting life. John is not speaking of the death of the body, or natural death, but of that death which is "the wages of sin," which is "the end of those things" that are a shame to us (Rom. vi. 23, 21). Take this death in the true and proper meaning of the word, and what can be made of it? Apart from the a priori belief in the soul's indestructibility, no earnest seeker of the truth could fail to see that death here means the destruction of the person, in every part and faculty. All must allow that it denotes utmost doom:-but again, the word has no reference to suffering. It means total privation. It does not even imply existence, for which some contend so strenuously. It is the very opposite of existence, and it is predicated as a future condition to be readied in due time pros thanaton. "Pros, with an accusative, marks the object towards or to which anything moves or is directed." There is only one way of escaping from this conclusion, and that is by boldly denying that death means death; setting aside the word "which the Holy Ghost teaches," in favor of "the Words which man's wisdom teaches"-an error into which some run in their professed zeal to uphold God's Revelation:-that philosophy, or intuition, is a cloak for many sins in Biblical criticism and interpretation. Death, say they, is such death as is compatible with a deathless thing; destruction is such destruction as harmonizes with an indestructible thing. Thus by science and logic, falsely so called, they make void the "common meaning" of Apostolic words.
This is a book of symbols where most of the writing must be interpreted on the principle of parable or allegory. It introduces our thoughts to a scenic gallery or chamber of tableaux. Strange, incongruous objects, in impracticable combinations are sketched vividly before the imagination, the hieroglyph being eked out often by word-painting, not less unnatural or monstrous in the features presented than are the more pictorial portions. The understanding at most can only comprehend some general significance in these visions. They stir feeling; they arouse inquiry; they teach that good and evil, truth and error, will grapple together through the history of time, and that Christ will ultimately triumph over sin and Satan. But about the details of instruction, which seem to indicate form, mode, time, place, agency, persons, etc. the logical faculty has always been much perplexed, as the varying and conflicting opinions of interpreters abundantly show.
The book deals primarily with the history of the Church, or of Christ's kingdom on earth, portraying: the temptations, persecutions, and conflicts which the believers, or the saints, must pass through. Some of the emblems are explained, and the explanations give a clue to the interpretation, in part at least, of the other. But the clue can only be followed by constant care. We are in danger of taking imagery and words in a literal sense, which really belong to allegory. This is the chief difficulty which besets the present inquiry. In the Epistles, fidelity requires us to accept the language in as plain and severe a sense as possible; but in a book of hieroglyphs, like the present, we are equally bound to interpret the writing by a symbolical rule.
In the first chapter One appears to the mind or eye of the writer, like the Son of Man, in priestly apparel, and of most venerable aspect. In His right hand are seven stars. Out of His mouth goes a sharp two-edged sword. And, among other things, He says, " I have the keys of death and of Hades."
Are not "the keys" symbolical? Do they not mean that He alone has power over death, and the state of the dead? He shuts and no man opens; He opens and no man shuts. This power He exercises as shown by another mode of representation.
"He that overcomes the same shall be clothed in white raiment: and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before His angels." Is there, must we suppose, in heaven a "book of life," in which names are written, and from which some are "blotted out?"- Men on earth keep such books: and the emblem suitably expresses the deed of Him, who by awarding life or death, renders to every man according to his works. How well this imagery harmonizes with the idea of blotting a person out of existence!
The Epistles addressed to the seven Churches of Asia contain threatening both numerous and direful, levelled against many and grievous forms of sin, but there is not in them an expression harmonizing with the prevalent notions of hell. This is the more observable, because some of the judgments threatened carry our thoughts into the future state, and the spiritual world. Exclusion from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God; failing to obtain a crown of life, being hurt of the second death, are all ultimate evils suggested by way of warning in these Epistles.
The song of the elders when "the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ," includes this strain: "The nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear Thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth."
Here begins the series of denunciations upon "Babylon." Babylon is understood to mean Rome, pagan or papal; usually the latter. A heavy doom is pronounced upon all who belong to that community: "They shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation." From the mention of " wine," "cup," and " without mixture," we are safe in taking the language to be symbolical: it means that God's indignation and wrath will come upon them in extreme form.
They shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment ascends up forever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receives the mark of his name. In trying to understand such a passage as this, we must begin with a distinct perception of its dramatic or scenic nature. In the tableau, a "beast" is depicted, and men worship him. The same men are tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence, not only of holy angels, but in the presence of the "Lamb;" as though holy, tender, compassionate natures could look on living creatures roasting in fire, perpetually writhing in torment-for "the smoke of it ascends up forever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night." Single terms, such as "beast" and "Lamb," no less than the general description, should save us from taking the passage in a literal sense.
It is allowed by the best commentators that we have here some allusion to Gen. 19.28: "Abraham looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace." But the imagery corresponds more fully with Isaiah's words, where he denounces judgment upon the enemies of the ancient Church (Isa.34.8-10):- "It is the day of the Lord's vengeance, and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion. And the streams' thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into, brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up forever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it forever and ever." Ins this extreme language Isaiah denounces a temporal punishment upon the land and people of Idumea. Need I say it was never literally inflicted? God never meant to fulfil the particular words; but only to accomplish the general thought.
So the Apostle John denounces judgment upon Babylon and upon the adherents of the papacy. But mark, that according to this symbolism, the worship of the beast and the punishment of the worshippers are contemporaneous,-they run on together,-for it is said, "They have no rest day nor night who worship the beast." We cannot suppose that idolatrous worship would go on if the worshippers were literally tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb. We must interpret the symbolism as setting forth some miserable earthly condition, spiritual, mental, social, or national, which attends upon false and idolatrous worship. The scene is laid on earth, in the history of time. Whatever the punishment is, it was to be inflicted upon living men. Our thoughts are not carried on into the eternal state.
Should it be suggested that this interpretation does not secure congruity of fact with figure - correspondence in minute features between prediction and fulfilment-it may be rejoined that the hieroglyphs of this book are constructed so clearly upon a principle of incongruity and exaggeration, that nothing would be more unsound in interpretation than an attempt to run a perfect parallellism. Is there congruity in giving one beast seven heads and ten horns?-in making a woman drunk with blood?-in giving another woman two wings of a great eagle?-in making a dragon cast a deluging flood out of his mouth? Neither is there congruity in making persons live forever in fire and brimstone, ever burning, never burned. If congruity be violated by one symbol, why insist upon its preservation in another. Nothing can be more incongruous than the popular notion of a spirit, which is conceived to be an immaterial, indestructible substance, suffering forever from the action of a material agent, and a perishable agent such as fire is. The body may suffer from it, because fire violently destroys its sensitive parts. But the soul, according to the generally received notion of it in a disembodied state, must be unapproachable by fire, or by any other material agent. It is only through the nervous system that the soul can suffer from material causes; and the popular notion of a soul in hell torments denies to the soul that gross appendage. The whole idea of perpetuated suffering in fire is incongruous and monstrous; and though, like other contorted and exaggerated symbols herein contained, fitted to arouse and impress the imagination, was never intended to express the precise logical definition of God's wrath. Admitted that it describes the utmost terror and woe that a creature can endure,-or say, that the good and righteous God can inflict,-still the precise nature of that punishment is not declared by this hieroglyph. The passage before us (9-11) is a symbolical, and not a literal portraiture, in harmony with the entire book-for, with small exceptions, that is its character. Who expects that a city built up of polished and precious stones, fifteen hundred miles long, broad, and high (chap. 21), will literally come down from God? And what congruity is there in calling such a city "the bride, the Lamb's wife?" The style of the book is peculiar, Jewish, Oriental,-conformed in much of its imagery to the boldest features of Hebrew prophecy; and is to be interpreted not according to modern and Western ideas, either of poetry or allegory, but by the greater luxuriance and hyperbole of Eastern imagination in fable and parable.
It will help to keep us within the true limit of interpretation, if we bear in mind that the scene of punishment symbolized by these extreme terms is laid, not in eternity, but in time; and that similar imagery had been by ancient seers applied to temporal judgments upon the enemies of Israel. Nor is it without significance, that another symbol follows this, still declaring Divine wrath executed upon men by temporal calamities. Fearful wars seem to be predicted (verses 17-20), by the reaping of the clusters of the earth, casting them into the winepress of the wrath of God, and "blood" coming out of the winepress in a deep stream, or deluge, covering the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs, and reaching even unto the horses' bridles.
"And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds." This language predicts a judgment upon the living no doubt; for the seat of the beast is on earth among living men. "They gnawed their tongues with pain" is a symbol of suffering taken from mad people, or persons in fits. It, like tormenting fire, must not be understood literally. It probably denotes extreme vexation and ungovernable rage.
Another incongruous combination. " The ten horns shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire." Horns do not eat. Kings, even in cannibal states, do not eat the flesh of harlots or concubines; and even if they did, they could not burn the persons eaten with safety to themselves. The symbol shows, that confederates and dupes shall take savage and relentless vengeance upon their leader and accomplice in iniquity. Any attempt to interpret this fearful hieroglyph, by the law of congruity, in detail would be absurd. There may be some allusion to the worm and fire of Gehenna. Eating and burning denote utter destruction. No one can reflect on the political condition of the Papacy now, without perceiving a remarkable fulfilment of this symbol. She is virtually abandoned by every nation in Christendom. The states and princes who had been her vassals or confederates, have well nigh made " her desolate and naked." Heavier judgments will yet come, and, as it would seem, suddenly or in a troop.
"Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire. . . . And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication, and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the fear of her torment,. saying, Alas, alas! that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come." The whole chapter shows that a temporal judgment is portrayed by the phrases " utterly burned," "the smoke of her burning," and "the fear of her torment:" "The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for fear of her torment, weeping, and wailing;" others " cried, when they saw the smoke of her burning; . . . they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas! that great city," etc.; "Thus with violence shall that great city be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all." The fact to be chiefly noted about this picture-writing is, that it employs upon a temporal judgment-which ends in total destruction (" shall be found no more at all")-such terms as "the smoke of her burning," "torment," "weeping and wailing," some of the boldest metaphors of punishment contained in Scripture.
"And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great. And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war upon Him that sat on the horse and against His army (verses 11-16). And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet. . . . These both were cast alive into a lake of fire, burning with brimstone. And the remnant were slain with the sword of Him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of His mouth: and all the fowls were filled with their flesh." This is a hieroglyph whose every feature is symbolical. What else can we infer from " an angel standing in the sun, and calling all the fowls of heaven to supper;" from "the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords," sitting on a horse, and slaying His enemies with a sword which "proceeded out of His mouth;" from "the taking of the beast and the false prophet," which in previous chapters are. the symbols of politico-religious systems, and casting them " alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone." Here they are impersonated as the chief leaders in a battle, with the design, no doubt, to indicate the impulse and aim of the armies under them. The armies were slain and utterly destroyed. The system of things also which the armies were marshalled to support was totally overturned, which is graphically foretold by the casting of its symbols or impersonations into a lake of fire. Without attempting to decipher all its details, the great lesson of the picture is evidently an awful destruction.
This is another tableau, or allegorical scene-painting, representing the last conflict on earth between Christ and His saints, on the one side; and on the other, the nations of unbelievers under the leadership of Satan. "They went up on the breadth of the earth, and encompassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet were cast, and they shall be tormented day and night forever." Again we notice, the men, the nations who composed this great army, are devoured with fire from God out of heaven. The evil spirit by whom they were deceived-the dragon, that old serpent, the devil and Satan-is cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, to be tormented day and night forever. From such a hieroglyph we are not at liberty to take a leading word, as "tormented," and insist upon its strict etymological sense. In other places (see 18.10, 15, 18), it helps to describe destruction under the general symbolism of a burning city. It must be explained by its connection, and in harmony with the whole scene of which it forms a part. Joined too, as it is here, with "fire and brimstone," material agencies which have no known physical relation to an immaterial entity, such as the devil is represented to be, it is certain that the word, as well as the entire description, was intended to carry an allegorical sense. This is the more evident when you remember, that the suffering in fire is inflicted on the beast and false prophet,-symbols of evil systems; and that it is confined to the trio, devil, beast, and false prophet; the nations gathered together to battle in numbers as the sand of the sea, having been devoured by fire from God out of heaven, were not cast into the lake at all. So, in the 14th verse, "death and Hades," under the conception of prison-houses, having first " delivered up the dead which were in them," were "cast into the lake of fire." How can such impersonal things, or rather abstract ideas or states, be cast into fire except by allegory and symbol? Paul's announcement in prosaic diction, " The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death," furnishes a literal solution to this pictorial emblem.
"Whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." It is observable that, of all the persons brought before our attention in this chapter, one only is said to be tormented day and night forever, and that is the "deceiver," the "old serpent." Accomplices partake of like judgment with him, similar but so different. He is made pre-eminent and unique in doom, as He made Himself pre-eminent, and was unique, in sin. The allegory or hieroglyph teaches this. But to infer an eternity of torture, even for him, is to depart from the style of writing, and to accept symbolism as though it were plain prose, than which no error of interpretation can be more fallacious. The "torment, day and night forever," is no less allegorical than are "the dragon" and "that old serpent." The meaning of the one and of the other alike underlies the literal terms, and is very different from the physical object or state presented to the mind's eye.
"This is the second death," death after the general resurrection (see 20.11-13). Being cast into the lake of fire is the second death. This is the doom of "Death and Hades." The phrase "second death" applied to Death and Hades, upon their being cast into the lake of fire, shows that the nature of the doom is utter destruction. Death is the executioner of God's wrath against sin; Hades is the prison of the dead. To cast executioner, or jailer and prison into a lake of fire, proves that they, and the whole class of ideas they represent, are done with. What is that death to a soul, when death itself and the state of the dead are dead by the second death? Is such a dead soul, in spite of all that death, not dead? only in a state of intense life and of exquisite torture?
I thank God devoutly that the last vision given to us of the doom of my fellow creatures-not more unworthy, large numbers of them, I must think, than myself-from whom I have been made to differ by the better influences, natural and supernatural, it has been my happy privilege to enjoy-to say nothing of the doctrine of special renewing grace dispensed in high sovereignty:-I give hearty thanks to God that those of my fellow sinners who fail to attain heaven-doubtless, in every case most justly-are last referred to in this revelation under imagery, not of a miserable existence in endless suffering, but under symbolism of most absolute non-existence and destruction. I rejoice that the awful oppression which the doctrine of hell-torments has thrown upon my soul from my youth up is relieved by a clearer knowledge of the Scriptures, and that every fresh investigation of the subject confirms me in the belief that Evangelists and Apostles have not been permitted by commentators and theologians to speak their own words and thoughts on this subject.
After the second death, we only meet with imagery of life, holiness, and liberty.
In the parables and predictions of our Lord, and in the prophetic allegories of the Apostle John, there are bold and fearful emblems sufficient to suggest the horrors of the popular hell. But in the midst of them, both in the Gospels and in the Revelation, are clear teachings of destruction, harmonising with the uniform doctrine of John's Gospel, the Acts, and the whole of the Epistles. When the emblematical character of the writing is properly recognised and duly scanned, there is no imagery which does not resolve itself into punishment by death and destruction. The devout and faithful student of the Word may, with all confidence, abide by the simple utterances on the doctrine of future punishment which the Apostles used in their ordinary preaching and exposition of the truth. They are not obscure nor in-frequent; they do not even suggest a divergency of opinion. Paul and Peter, John, James, and Jude, have all spoken more or less upon this subject; and they all agree in teaching that destruction is the last judgment of God upon impenitence, ungodliness, idolatry, unbelief. Can we, therefore, hesitate to regard the mediaeval hell, no less than its associated doctrine of purgatory, as a departure from the pure teaching of Scripture? And shall we not thankfully accept and boldly vindicate a Scriptural truth, which, while it accords with our natural and instinctive benevolence, at the same time illustrates and glorifies God's essential and revealed rectitude, truth, goodness, mercy, and love?
P.S. I.-Patristic interpretation and divinity have been referred to upon this subject. There is one source of evidence of highest antiquity, which I think of great significance: the Apostle's Creed, the Nieman, and the Athanasian, all omit to mention continued existence and suffering in hell-fire. The Athanasian, in boldest contrast with its manner on other doctrines, is content to speak of future punishment in the words of Scripture. The believers in endless suffering of our day would not think a creed sufficient and satisfactory which did not explicitly mention it.
P.S. II.-Since these pages were put into the printer's hands, Dr. Angus has re-issued his letters with some emendations and additions; and Mr. White has sent forth a rejoinder. The present pamphlet may seem to be an intrusion uncalled for and superfluous. It should be borne in mind, however, that my aim properly is neither controversial nor expository, but strictly to exhibit the sure sayings of God on the subject in their fulness and naked naturalness. Dogmas and opinions are adverted to solely with the view of clearing away what is extraneous and adventitious; that the precise testimony of the New Testament writers may be contemplated alone, in its all sufficient simplicity and independence.
In reading again the arguments and comments relied upon, I am confirmed in the conviction,-that the great want among Christian men and Christian teachers is severely accurate knowledge, and severely honest faith as to the plain and real teaching of Scripture. Scholarship is abundant: but much of it concerning Scripture is loose rather than exact, all-grasping instead of to the point. Reliance is placed on an adjective when the gist of the question is in the noun. "Punishment," without proof, is assumed to mean suffering, although Evangelists and Apostles uniformly avoid the use of the word "suffer" when the final judgment of God is their theme.
Suffering is a subordinate idea in the word "punishment." Lately a man under sentence of capital punishment was (according to the papers) spared death, because the formation of his neck was such that he could not be killed by hanging without causing him great suffering. Capital punishment does not contemplate suffering now-a-days, although it must involve it in some degree. The object of the heaviest punishment inflicted by the laws of our times is not suffering. I say nothing of the knout-scourging a man to death. That is a barbarism which properly belongs to a past age.
Dr. Angus has a paragraph (p. 9, "Future Punishment") professedly, and by italics, on the "nature of this punishment." In that passage, if anywhere in his pamphlet, ought to be found his proof texts. Which of the quoted words he relies upon to describe the nature of future punishment cannot with certainty be gathered. Those which refer to the subject are the following- "condemnation," "damned," "cast into a furnace of fire," "punishment," "beaten with stripes," "perish" (which the Doctor forgot to mark with italics), "judged," "pay righteous punishment" (=penalty), "destruction," "judgment," "devour" (which also is unmarked), "punishment" (incorrectly made parallel in meaning with chastisement), "execute judgment," "convict," "cast into a lake of fire."
Of these terms "condemnation," "damned," "judged," "pay righteous punishment" (=penalty), "judgment," "execute judgment," and " convict," have specific reference to law and justice, and do not even foreshadow what the "nature" of the infliction will be. To quote them on masse with other words may help to alarm and confirm prejudice, but cannot possibly aid the elucidation sought. These seven terms out of the fifteen may be laid aside as simply declaring the certainty of punishment and its rectitude, and as giving no hint of its "nature."
One of the terms is metaphorical, and deserves special notice, because it does not refer to the general judgment-" Beaten with stripes." The suffering indicated by it is very temporary-short-lived. In the parable from which it is taken, the " beating " does not imply rejection of the person beaten. The "servant" who received that correction the parable allows to remain a servant after the beating, just as he was before. It makes a distinction between the steward who in the absence of the master had abused his power "to beat the men-servants and the maidens, to eat and drink, and be drunken." Him the lord, coming unexpectedly, would "cut off" (not " cut asunder," as our translation has it), and " appoint him his portion with the unbelievers." But the "servants" would not be "cut off." They would be simply chastised or corrected, according to their degree of culpability. It is a mistake to apply this "beating" to the last and general judgment. The "coming of the lord," in the parable, is that kind of coming described in the Epistles to the seven Churches of Asia.
Punishment is the word which in Scripture expresses the doom of the condemned in its full form. It is comprehensive of all that the sentence of the Judge contains. But it does not in the least indicate the nature of the doom. Dr. Angus feels this himself, and has therefore supplemented it with a word of his own. He calls it " chastisement," overlooking, what he elsewhere admits, that chastisement aims at correction, recovery, improvement. He does not allow that God by the everlasting punishment proposes any such aim- In this I thoroughly agree with him, and can but think that his mind wavers greatly upon the word kolasis, or he would never have interpreted it by chastisement.
There remain, however, five terms in the proof texts selected, which do declare the nature of future punishment. Two of them were apparently overlooked, and no wonder, for they are fatal to the Doctor's theory. Two of them he has emphasised. The fifth he has emphasised, but probably for the sake of the adjective which accompanies it. Take those on which he chiefly depends, first:- "Cast into a furnace of fire"; "Cast into a lake of fire." The other three terms are "devour," "perish," and "destruction." Can anyone, finding these terms gathered together by the Doctor himself in his proof texts, on the nature of God's last judgment, avoid this conclusion-that "a furnace of fire" would "devour" those "cast" into it, so that they would "perish" by a miserable and awful "destruction." Not only are the ideas contained in the proof texts, but the very words. And they are the only idea and words in the proof texts, which express the "nature" of the punishment. So that the nature of God's last judgment upon impenitent men is shown from the Doctor's selected data, and in their very words, to be a "perishing," a " devouring," a "destruction," by the "furnace of fire," by the "lake of fire."
One might suppose, from the anxiety shown to establish a figurative sense of New Testament words in preference to the literal, and a secondary meaning rather than the primary, that the language and style of God's revelation are really exceptional-not conformed to the rules of ordinary speech and literature. It must be a sorry criticism on God's communication to mankind which requires such special pleading in its support. When writing on the word aionios, the author very justly will allow no such beating about for exceptional and secondary meanings. Nor is there any necessity for it in the words “salvation" and "destruction," "life" and "death." If salvation sometimes means deliverance of the body from disease threatening death to it, and sometimes the deliverance of the soul from sin and guilt threatening death to it, the reason is, because health and life equally underlie each use of the word. It is but applying the same word in the same sense to two different things. If the word suggest a higher meaning in the one case than in the other, it does so, not by any change into a secondary sense, but because the subject in which the salvation is wrought is nobler in its nature.
All questions, it seems, must now be tabulated, and determined, or demonstrated by statistics. Let me follow example in this line and present the sum of usage on the words which declare the nature of future punishment. Throughout the Scriptures the following words are used as the numbers under them indicate:-
Die 295
Dies 163
Died 34
Dead 216
Death 308
I have read them all twice, and cannot feel that either of them is ever used in a secondary sense. I believe they are not, taken all together, used fifty times even figuratively.. Sometimes death is personified. Sometimes imminent danger of death is meant,-"We be all dead men." Sometimes a state of condemnation, or liability and exposure to death from law and sin is denoted: sometimes the perception of this exposure. Sometimes a partial death, as moral or spiritual deadness, is declared,-" Let the dead bury their dead." Sometimes the cessation of life-function, or of living relations is intimated. Sometimes we meet the word in hyperbole,-"I die daily." Sometimes in a trope,-"My son was dead" to me. Sometimes as a metaphor,- "Death is in the pot." Sometimes by prolepsis,-"To be carnally minded is death." In such and similar figures of speech "die" and "death" are used. But let me repeat, I have not found a single instance of them in any secondary import. The figurative use, if men will be guided .by common-sense, rather than by creed, philosophy, and intuition, can mislead no one. They never require a secondary signification-as misery or pain-for their interpretation, but always lean upon the radical and first meaning.
Destroy and "destruction" occur in the Old and New Testaments 500 times. Dr. Angus searched for exceptions to their primary and proper signification, and presented a few-about twenty-passages; but all of them have been proved not to be exceptions. They deliver a clear and unanimous testimony against his theory.
Suffer is used in the New Testament 60 times, to denote pain or the endurance of felt evil; but it is never applied to the last punishment of the wicked. If a life in suffering be the revealed nature of the wrath to come, how happens it that no Evangelist nor Apostle has expressed it by that very common and appropriate word?
It is said that- the life and death of which our Lord and His Apostles so constantly speak are not literal but spiritual. Pray what is the difference here between literal and spiritual? Is not a spiritual life as literal as a carnal life? Is not the death of a spirit as literal as the death of the body? Is not the death of soul and body in hell-or by the " second death " in the " lake of fire "-as literal as the death of the body by decapitation or by the cross? Death and destruction are not threatened to the body alone, nor to the soul alone, but to the person consisting of body and soul. Death will be destruction, both to the spiritual life and to the material life. Death and destruction also will be literal. Every death is literal, if it be not figurative; and every life which is not figurative, is literal. That is to say, death is real and life is real. God neither threatens a figurative death, nor promises a metaphorical life. His revelation is hard stern TRUTH; and it is given in words "fitly spoken;" so that we may neither add to them without incurring the threatened "plagues," nor take from them, but at the risk of losing our "part from the book of life." From which, Good Lord, in Thy mercy and by Thy wisdom, deliver us. Amen.
Revelation 14:10
Revelation 20:10
Revelation 21:8
Revelation 2:27
Luke 3:17
Romans 1:27
1 Corinthians 3:15
Hebrews 6:8
Revelation 18:8
Revelation 18:9
Revelation 18:18
Revelation 21:8
2 Peter 2:4
Revelation 18:17
John 3:18
James 3:1
Luke 9:54
Hebrews 12:29
Hebrews 6:8
Matthew 7:19
Luke 1:52
Luke 3:9
Revelation 18:21
Romans 11:22
Matthew 23:14
Matthew 23:14
Matthew 23:33
Matthew 23:33
Mark 3:29
Mark 3:29
Romans 3:8
Romans 13:2
Romans 14:23
1 Corinthians 11:29
1 Timothy 5:12
Matthew 8:12
Matthew 15:14
Matthew 22:13
2 Peter 2:4
2 Peter 2:17
Jude 1:6
Jude 1:13
John 3:36
Acts 1:18
Acts 5:3
Acts 5:4
Acts 5:9
Romans 1:32
Romans 5:21
Romans 6:21
Romans 6:23
Romans 7:5
Romans 7:24
Romans 8:6
2 Corinthians 1:10
2 Corinthians 2:16
Galatians 5:19
Galatians 5:20
Galatians 5:21
Ephesians 2:5
Ephesians 5:5
Hebrews 2:14
Hebrews 2:15
James 2:26
1 John 3:15
1 John 5:12
Jude 1:12
Revelation 1:18
Revelation 2:11
Revelation 2:23
Revelation 18:8
Revelation 20:6
Revelation 20:13
Revelation 20:14
Revelation 21:8
Matthew 23:38
Matthew 23:38
Acts 1:20
Revelation 18:19
Matthew 7:13
Matthew 10:28
Acts 3:23
Romans 6:6
Romans 16:20
1 Corinthians 1:19
1 Corinthians 3:16
1 Corinthians 3:17
1 Corinthians 6:13
1 Corinthians 10:7
1 Corinthians 10:9
1 Corinthians 10:10
Philippians 3:19
1 Timothy 6:9
Hebrews 2:14
2 Peter 2:12
2 Peter 3:16
1 John 3:8
Jude 1:5
Matthew 23:14
Hebrews 10:27
Revelation 11:5
Revelation 20:9
Mark 9:44
Mark 9:46
Mark 9:48
Romans 8:13
Hebrews 10:28
Matthew 7:27
Mark 9:42
2 Peter 2:5
Philippians 3:19
Hebrews 6:8
Romans 13:4
Matthew 7:27
Matthew 15:14
Luke 6:49
Acts 1:18
Acts 5:5
Acts 5:10
Romans 11:22
1 Corinthians 10:8
1 Corinthians 10:12
1 Timothy 6:9
Hebrews 3:17
Hebrews 10:31
2 Peter 3:17
Revelation 18:2
Matthew 5:22
Matthew 7:19
Matthew 11:23
Matthew 11:24
Mark 9:43
Mark 9:44
Mark 9:45
Mark 9:46
Mark 9:47
Mark 9:48
Luke 3:9
Luke 3:17
Luke 9:54
Luke 10:12
1 Corinthians 3:13
1 Corinthians 3:15
Hebrews 10:27
Hebrews 12:29
James 3:6
2 Peter 2:6
2 Peter 2:7
2 Peter 2:8
Jude 1:7
Jude 1:23
Revelation 11:5
Revelation 14:10
Revelation 14:11
Revelation 18:8
Revelation 19:3
Revelation 20:7
Revelation 20:8
Revelation 20:9
Revelation 20:10
Revelation 20:11
Revelation 20:12
Revelation 20:13
Revelation 20:14
Revelation 20:15
Revelation 21:8
Matthew 5:22
Matthew 5:29
Matthew 5:30
Matthew 8:12
Matthew 10:28
Matthew 23:15
Matthew 23:33
Mark 9:43
Mark 9:45
Mark 9:47
Luke 10:15
Luke 12:5
1 Corinthians 6:9
1 Corinthians 6:10
2 Timothy 3:9
James 3:6
Revelation 1:18
Judgement.
Matthew 5:22
Matthew 11:24
Matthew 12:37
Luke 10:14
Romans 1:32
Romans 2:2
Romans 2:3
Romans 2:5
Romans 2:6
Romans 2:9
Romans 2:12
Romans 3:19
Romans 14:10
1 Corinthians 3:13
1 Corinthians 3:14
1 Corinthians 11:31
1 Corinthians 11:32
2 Corinthians 5:10
2 Corinthians 5:11
Galatians 6:7
Galatians 6:8
2 Peter 2:13
Jude 1:6
Matthew 10:28
Luke 12:5
Revelation 2:23
Revelation 11:5
Overthrown.
1 Corinthians 10:5
2 Peter 2:6
1 John 2:17
Matthew 5:29
Matthew 5:30
Matthew 16:26
John 3:15
John 3:16
Acts 8:20
Romans 2:12
2 Corinthians 2:15
2 Peter 2:12
Jude 1:11
Revelation 14:10
Revelation 18:4
Revelation 18:8
Revelation 18:9
Revelation 18:10
Revelation 18:17
Revelation 19:2
Jude 1:12
Hebrews 10:29
2 Peter 2:9
Revelation 2:27
Luke 6:49
Luke 1:51
Romans 13:4
Revelation 2:16
1 Thessalonians 2:16
2 Peter 2:12
Revelation 18:8
Mark 14:21
Acts 1:20
1 Corinthians 1:19
Luke 18:7
Romans 12:19
Hebrews 10:30
Jude 1:12
Luke 3:7
John 3:36
Romans 1:18
Romans 2:5
Romans 2:8
Romans 12:19
Romans 13:4
1 Thessalonians 2:16
Revelation 14:10
Revelation 15:1