Future Punishment and the Bible # 1

Future Punishment and the Bible # 1

"But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath. Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile" (Romans 2:8-9).

Joseph Cook, one of America's soundest and clearest thinkers, said to me a generation ago, "Let the church banish from their pulpits the preaching of hell for a hundred years, and it will come back again, for the doctrine is in the Bible, and in the nature of things." And he said in his great lecture on the "Final Permanence of Moral Character": "The laws by which we attain supreme bliss are the laws by which we descend to supreme woe. In the ladder up and the ladder down in the universe, the rungs are in the same pieces. The self-propagating power of sin and the self-propagating power of Holiness are one law. The law of judicial blindness is one with that law by which the pure in heart see God."

There is but one law that can save me from "the law of sin and death", that is "the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus." If I refuse to submit to that law, I abide eternally under the law of sin and death and endure eternally its dread penalties.

"Every sinner must be either pardoned or punished."

I once heard these words uttered by The Army Founder in the midst of an impassioned appeal to men to make their peace with God; and they have remained in my memory, always representing a tremendous truth from which we can never get away. The Atonement opens wide the door of pardon, of uttermost salvation, and of bliss eternal to every penitent sinner who will believe on Christ and follow Him, while it sweeps away every excuse from the impenitent who will not trust and obey Him.

The Atonement justifies God in all His ways with sinful men.

The holiest beings in the universe can never feel that God is indifferent to sin, when He pardons a believing sinner, lifts up his drooping head and introduces him to the glories and blessedness of heaven, because Christ has died for him. On the other hand, the sinner who is lost and banished to outer darkness, cannot blame God nor charge Him with indifference to his misery, since Christ, by tasting death for him, flung wide open the gateway to escape. That he definitely refused to enter in will be clear in his memory for ever, and will leave him without excuse.

We do not often encounter now the old-fashioned Universalist, who believed that all men, whether righteous or wicked, enter into a state of bleessedness the moment they die. But others, with errors even more dangerous, because seemingly made agreeable to natural reason and to man's inborn sense of justice, have come to take his place and weaken men's faith in the tremendous penalties of God's holy law; in fact, there seems to be a widespread and growing tendency to doubt the existence of hell and the endless punishment of the wicked.

A theory often advanced is the annihilation, or extermination, of the wicked. It is said that there is no eternal hell; and that the wicked do not enter into a state of punishment after death, but are immediately or eventually blotted out of existence.

Then there is the doctrine of "eternal hope." This asserts that the wicked will be punished after death, possibly for ages, but that in the end they will all be restored to the favor of God and the bliss of the holy. The words of our Lord to the traitor appear to be an unanswerable refutation of this doctrine. If all are to be saved at last, would Jesus have said of Judas, "It had been good for that man if he had not been born?" For what are ages of suffering when compared to the blessedness and rapture of those who finally see God's face in peace and enjoy His favor to all eternity?

There is something so awful about the old doctrine of endless punishment, and such a seeming show of fairness about these new doctrines, that the latter appeal very strongly to the human heart, and enlist on their behalf all the sympathies and powerful impulses of the carnal mind which is enmity against God, and which is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

In forming our opinions on this subject we should stick to the Bible. All we know about the future state is what God has revealed and left on record in  "the law and the testimony," and "if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them." Human reason, as well as human experience fails us here, and we can put no confidence in the so-called revelations of spiritualism nor in the dreams of sects who pretend to be able to probe the secrets of eternity. If the Bible does not settle the question for us, it cannot be settled.

The Bible teaches us that there is punishment for the wicked after death, and that of this punishment they are conscious. In the record of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus says: "The rich man also died...and in hell he left up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said..."Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame."

~Samuel Logan Brengle~

(continued with # 2)