ETERNAL LIFE
What It Is, and How Obtained
TWENTY WRITERS OFFER THE
GIFT OF GOD
KILMARNOCK, SCOTLAND
JOHN RITCHIE LTD.
PUBLISHERS OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE
CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY
A Delusive Argument.
BY W. HOSTE, B.A., LONDON.
THE many false systems of religious belief, which have sprung up in the last hundred years, have at least one feature in common-they all deny the endless punishment of the wicked, which they affirm to be a mere human tradition, inconsistent with the love of God and foreign to the Scriptures. It is strange, if this be true, that the vast majority of Christians, down the ages, should have read the Scriptures so differently, and believed the solemn doctrine so unhesitatingly.
But while the opponents of this doctrine are agreed as to what the Scriptures do not teach, they cannot agree as to what they do teach. There are many shades of belief ranging from extreme Universalism', which teaches that all will eventually be saved, to extreme Annihilationism, which teaches that all the wicked will become non-existent. Between them lies the truth of the never-ending conscious banishment from God's presence of all who reject the light, and die in their sins. Nor is this an arbitrary decree, it is inevitable. At infinite cost, God has made a sufficient provision for all sinners, in the gift of His only begotten Son, who died for our sins, was buried and rose again, " that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Thus alone can God be justified in saving guilty sinners ; any other ground would nullify the Cross and stultify His own character. Unbelief alone can shut out the blessing : " He that believeth not the Son shall not see life " (which seems clearly to refute Universalism), " but the wrath of God abideth on him " (which seems equally to disprove Annihilationism, for how can God's wrath abide on some one who no longer exists?) Certainly annihilation would not be an excessive punishment for a life-time of rebellion against God. Here it is often the good who suffer, and the wicked who prosper. What would become of the justice of God, were annihilation all these had to fear ? Was it to save from nothing worse than this that our Lord endured the pains of Calvary ? His own words cannot be made to fit in with any such theory ? " Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels " (Matt. xxv. 41). Surely such words imply, if language means anything, that those who enter that fire will last as long as it lasts. We are accustomed to the words " aeonian " and " age-lasting " on the lips of these teachers, as a translation of the word " aionios "-eternal, but they do not impress us, being meaningless. The usage of a word alone determines its meaning, and the usage of this word certainly stamps it with the sense of " endlessness," as we shall see later.
In verse 46 of this passage the Lord uses the same word (aionios) to describe the duration both of the life of the saved, and the punishment of the lost. To meet this, some of these agile teachers assert that " eternal life " is not endless, but only lasts the I thousand years of the millennial reign ; so that to deny the endlessness of punishment they are prepared to sacrifice the endlessness of life. To such extremes are men reduced, who are determined to deny that the Scriptures mean what they say. But as though they knew this would not satisfy, they have another objection, which nullifies the first; the word is not "punishing" but "punishment"; it is an endless result, not an endless process. Thus we are treated not only to home-made Greek, but to home-made English. There is no such phrase in English as "eternal punishing." It would be a barbarism. Certainly most people connect punishment with something endured. If eternal non-existence could mean " eternal punishment," then the viper that Paul shook off his hand into the fire at Melita is suffering eternal punishment, for certainly the effect of Paul's ;fiction is eternal. The word here translated "punishment," in the only other place where it occurs in the New Testament means something consciously endured ; "fear hath torment" (i John iv. 18). As Charles Spurgeon truly said : "Annihilation would be ended punishment, not endless punishment."
The expressions " eternal judgment " and " eternal redemption " are quoted by Conditionalists to show that " eternal punishment " need not be an eternal process. But though it is true that the sentence of judgment is not always being pronounced, nor the price of redemption always being paid, the wicked will always be consciously enduring the former, and the redeemed consciously enjoying the latter. It is absurd to talk of "eternal punishment" unless some one is enduring it. That convicts should rebel at life-sentences is perfectly natural, but will not open the prison doors. And He " who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, who cannot look on iniquity," and who " spared not His own Son " to provide an atonement, will certainly not spare those who reject it. This, it is affirmed, would be inconsistent with His love. But if the lave of God alone could save, Calvary was superfluous and a cruel mistake. How grave the responsibility of those who tamper with God's truth on the plea of defending His character, and thus claim to be more jealous for God than the Lord Jesus Himself.
To return to the meaning of the word aionios, translated eternal or everlasting, expressions philologically identical : deep in it lies aei, meaning always, as Aristotle points out. Aionios in the LXX Greek version always represents olam in the Hebrew O.T. Scriptures, the root idea of which is "mystery connected with unsearchable duration." Seventy-six times in the O.T. is olam applied to God-the Everlasting God. In the N.T., out of about 130 occurrences of aionios and its cognates, where the future is obviously in view, fifteen refer to the impenitent, sixty-two to the blessedness of the righteous, and nearly forty to God Himself. Are we then to believe that heaven will only last " for an age"? or that God will only exist "till a new order of things shall come?" This is the sense of the word we are asked by these teachers to adopt for the future of the wicked. One of them lately, with reference to the fullest phrase of all— "to the ages of the ages," which is a perfectly proper Greek equivalent for our "eternity," has written, "This expression in the Bible signifies, ninety times out of an hundred, in indefinite period of time, limited by the nature the object in view." As the expression occurs at most twenty-two times in the N.T., the above is a misleading way of speaking. Of these occurrences, seventeen are in ascriptions of glory to God, or in descriptions of His Being, two of the reign of Christ and His people, and three of the late of the lost. We must leave the author to reconcile his statement with these facts. It might help us to form a true judgment of the meaning the Spirit of God would have us attach to this type of word to quote a few more specimens of its use. Thus we have " Eternal Spirit " (Heb. ix. 14) ; " eternal life " (Rom. vi. 23) ; " eternal salvation " (Heb. v. 9) ; " eternal damnation " (Mark iii. 29) ; " eternal glory " (i Peter v. 10) ; " eternal God " (Rom. xvi. 26) ; " eternal fire " (Jude 7) ; " eternal redemption " (Heb. ix. 12) ; " eternal inheritance " (Heb. ix. 15), etc. Surely if ever the meaning of a word could be determined with certainty by its use, it is that of aionios. But these teachers sometimes complain that, if endlessness were intended, some word other than the one we are discussing ought to have been used, which would, they say, have avoided all ambiguity. Certainly a very special word would have had to be used to escape the criticisms of Conditionalists.
Actually the word is the clearest and most definite in meaning that could possibly have been used : its equivalent in Luke i. 33 being " without end " and in Heb. vii. r7 " endless " (akalatutos – indissoluble, perpetual). What stronger word then could be imagined ? It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the word by its usage describes that which is endless. I think the inevitable conviction of any unsophisticated mind must be, that as long as God is God, and all glory is His due, so long will His redeemed enjoy their inheritance with their Redeemer, and His enemies abide consciously under His righteous judgment. No doubt the thought of endless punishment makes the mind reel and the heart quake, but it would be foolish for that reason to deny its possibility ? We are not the best judges of the nature of sin, or of the holy requirements of God's righteousness ? Nor can we know what precautions are necessary to prevent the spread of sin afresh in the universe, as He, the Omniscient and All Wise, must ? All must be judged in the light of Calvary. There the love of God toward the sinner and His hatred of sin are fully revealed. Reject the atonement, and God Himself has no other way to save from an endless hell.
IN WHAT WAY DID MAN DIFFER BY CREATION FROM THE BEASTS ?
That there is a connection is evident ; for one thing the body in either case is built up of the same chemical constituents ; also, like the beasts in Gen. i. 20, man in Gen. ii. 7, is called " a living soul," but as " all flesh is not the same flesh " so we may be sure " all souls are not the same souls." Peter recognises this by the Spirit when he records in his first epistle, that at the Flood, " eight souls were saved by water," ignoring the scores of animal souls also saved in the ark, as being of an altogether inferior and, in comparison with human beings, negligible order. Just as a relation exists between God and man as regards moral and spiritual potentialities, the latter being made in His image, though on an infinitely lower level, so between man and the beasts, there exists a relation as living organisms, though here he fair above them. But man was not evolved from the beasts ; his creation being definitely separated from theirs. It was a new start. They had appeared in their swarms from sea and land by the fiat of the Creator; for the creation of man the Triune God calls upon Himself to operate, " Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." It would be blasphemous to ascribe this moral likeness to a swine or a chimpanzee ? Indeed outside controversy, Conditionalists would object as much as other men, to be likened to the beasts. " Thou madest him a little lower than he angels " was not said of any member of the brute creation.
Another contrast is that the animals came forth in their completeness ; whereas the body of man was first formed, and then something happened which we never read of the lower creation, " God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul " (Gen. ii.). The word used here for " breath " is never used of the beasts, but only of God, e.g. " The inspiration of the Almighty" " the breath of the Lord " (Job xxxiii. 8 ; Isa. xxx. 33), and of man, e.g. " the spirit of man " ; " the souls that I have made " ; " whose spirit came from Thee ? " (Prov. xx. 21 ; Isa. lix. i6 ; Job xxvi. 4). Indeed there are passages where the possession of n'shamah specifically distinguishes man from the beasts. Thus in Joshua x. 31-39:
" he smote all the souls that were therein," described in verse 40 as " all that breathed (lit., had n'shamah) as the Lord commanded " (see Deut. xx. 16-17, where the expression refers to the nations of Canaan). But verse 14 shows that this refers exclusively to human beings, for it adds " that they did take for a spoil the cattle," which shows that these have no n'shamah, nor count as souls, when men are in question. Moreover Adam appears as fitted to hold communion with his Maker, and as a morally responsible creature. How could one who " lives and moves and has his being in God " be intended by his constitution for the ephemeral existence of the brutes ? Is then end-less existence dependent on the possession of Immortality ? Are they synonymous terms ? The Conditionalist affirms so, and it is fundamental to his position ; but his belief is mistaken, I Submit, being based on the meaning which he attaches to " life " and " death," which I shall seek to show later is quite foreign to the Scriptures.
Certainly man, as we have sought to prove, was created for endless existence, and this is described loosely by some as " the immortality of the soul," but the phrase is never found in the Scriptures, and the fact that man was capable of death shows that immunity from death was not his possession by original constitution. The second death is eternal existence in separation from God.
Had man been immortal by original creation, God's warning, " In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die " would have had no meaning. Adam was not subject to death before he fell, but he was capable of death as the event showed. " God only hath immortality " (athanasia) by essential constitution of being. This surely is enough to prove, what is sometimes denied, that immortality attaches to the spiritual part of man, as well as to the body, for " God is Spirit." In order to escape from this dilemma an it tempt is made to limit the words of 1 Tim. vi. i6 to Christ, but it could not be said that "no man hath seen or can see" Him, whom angels and men have seen ? It is God as such who is in view. Man died spiritually, that is, became alienated from the life of God, as the direct result of disobedience, physically as the indirect result. " By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin " (Rom. v. 12). To be immune from spiritual death, the gift of eternal life must be received. This happens at conversion ; " God, who is rich in mercy . . . even when we were dead in sins, bath quickened us together, with Christ. This same word is used of the quickening of the mortal body ' (Rom. viii. 11 ; see also John v. 24), which again is the equivalent of the putting on of immortality at the coming of Christ (1 Cor. xv. 53). The immortality in this passage will mark the effect of the Lord's coming on the living saints, incorruptibility on the sleeping saints. The result is the same in either case. The latter word is wrongly translated immortality, etc., in 1 Tim. i. 17 ; 2 Tim. i. 1o, and Rom. ii. 7. In connection with the body " incorruptible " seems a good enough translation, but when applied to God it must have the wider meaning of not liable to deterioration (see Rom. i. 23 and 1 Tim. i. 17). But he possesses the gloriously positive blessing of Eternal Life, to issue in the endless bliss of knowing and enjoying God to the full.
Let us now consider in the light of the Scriptures the question :
WHAT IS DEATH ?
This is the crux of the whole matter. Wrong here, wrong everywhere, and it is precisely here that Conditionalism is found most conspicuously wanting. It confounds death and non-existence on the one hand, and existence and life on the other.
The late Dr. Bullinger, a well-known advocate of the views combated here, replies, " The dead are the dead ; they are those who have ceased to live "; but as a definition must never contain the word defined, we are not much the wiser. In his Critical Lexicon, however, we read under the word " live "-(zao) to live, not " to exist," for a thing can exist without living. And so vice versa, by the same showing, a thing can cease to live, and yet continue to exist. When we say that a man is dead, we do not mean that he has ceased to exist, but that he exists under new conditions. Even the body has not necessarily ceased to exist. Lazarus' body still existed in the tomb, but when the Lord called him forth, it was not only the body that obeyed, but the spirit reunited to it, which had not ceased to exist either. There is no such thought in Scripture as the sleep of the soul. It is the body which, in a figurative sense, sleeps. To under-takers, grave-diggers and suchlike the body may be all, but the friends of the departed believer know he is with the Lord, and even the world, for the most part, have the thought of some kind of survival of the departed, which like the belief in the existence of God, seems an innate intuition in the heart of man of every age and race. This agrees exactly with the Bible usage, where death never means cessation of existence, but separation of existence in the case of physical death, between body and spirit, and in the case of " the second death," between the sinner and God. The first occurrence of the word in the Bible is often the key to its subsequent meaning. The word " death " is found first in the Lord's warning already referred to : "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. ii. 17). To this Satan gave the lie direct, " Ye shall not surely (lie " (Gen. iii. q). If Adam did not die that very day in the sense in which God used the words, then the Devil was right. But what happened ? They did not lose immortality, for they had never had it ; certainly they did not cease to exist, nor even die physically. Indeed no outward change seems to have taken place in them : corporeally they were the same as
before, but A MARKED AND MYSTERIOUS MORAL CHANGE AT ONCE TOOK PLACE IN THEM. Their relations with their Maker were profoundly modified. Hitherto they had enjoyed unbroken communion with Him, now when they heard His voice, they were afraid, and hid themselves amongst the trees of the garden (Gen. iii. 8).
A great gulf had yawned between them and their Maker. This is spiritual death. Physical death, though undoubtedly part of the penalty of their disobedience-" Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return "-had to be insured in another way. They were excluded from the tree of life, of which previously they were allowed freely to eat (Gen. ii. 9-16).
" Now lest he put forth his hand and take also the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever " (Gen. iii. 22), that is, prolong indefinitely his physical existence in a sin-haunted body, " therefore the Lord God sent forth the man from the garden," etc.
The way the " Conditionalist " teachers juggle with this passage is truly mystifying. They do not like to say point blank that eating the tree of life would have atoned for Adam's sin, but they convey an impression that it was partly so. To quote one of them: " This sentence might have been to some extent minimised and mitigated, had the wilful disobedience been followed immediately by partaking of the other tree," and lower down the same writer calls this " the dreadful goal of an age-lasting life in " the state of disobedience to his Creator." How then could it be a " mitigation " ? Certainly there was no virtue in the tree to affect their spiritual condition, but it was apparently just what their bodies needed to counter-balance the natural wear and tear of human existence-containing the true elixir of life, so long sought for since.
The fallen ones were henceforth rigidly excluded from this source of bodily renovation, and physical death eventually supervened.
Spiritual death has characterised the whole human race from Adam to our day. To the Ephesian believers the apostle writes, " And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins " (Eph. ii. 1).
This describes their condition before conversion. They were alive man-ward, for " they walked according to the course of this world," but they were spiritually dead to God. And this was their state, when God in mercy quickened them. How clear then that " death " does not stand for non-existence, but " wrong-existence" !
The Lord taught the same truth in John v. 24, the believer " is passed from death into life." Of course the was existing before, but out of harmony with God, it was a state of moral death. One more example may suffice. " She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth " (I Tim. v. 6). .She is alive but it is a butterfly existence, not worthy of the name of life. It is what God calls death. Flow then is it possible to admit as the Conditionalists hold that death and cessation of existence are synonymous terms ?
WHAT IS THE CONDITION OF THE DEAD IN THE INTERMEDIATE STATE ?
To learn this we need not only the testimony of the Old, but of the New Testament. It is true that both are equally inspired, but in the New we have a fuller revelation of life and death from Jesus Christ, " Who hath abolished death and brought life and immortality (Greek ` incorruptibility ') to light through the Gospel " (2 Tim. i. 1o). The book of the Ecclesiast is a favourite book with the Conditionalists, for having been written in the demi-obscurity of a partial revelation, they think they can prove from it their doctrine of soul-sleep or soul-extinction as some prefer. They quote from ch. ix. to show that " the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that is clone under the sun " (v. 5-6). Certainly, as far as the earth goes, that is, " under the sun," the dead know nothing, and have neither further reward nor portion in it, but how does this prove that the dead have no existence ? Their bodies sleep in the grave, but their spirits consciously exist in the Unseen World – Sheol or Hades. The Old Testament distinguishes between these two conditions, " Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hell (Sheol-the place for departed spirits) neither wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption " (i.e. the tomb) (Ps. xvi. 1o). Only a few chapters on, in Ecclesiastes, we read, "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was : and the spirit shall return to God who gave it" (Eccles. xii. 7). In the New Testament the same thing is taught in clearer terms. The body of the penitent thief was buried in the common grave of the executed, but his spirit was in Paradise with Christ, according to the promise. By His death and resurrection, the Lord hath abolished death " (i.e. for His people) and " brought life and incorruptibility to light through the Gospel " (2 Tim. i. 10). These are the blessings experienced in the bodies of the living and sleeping saints at Christ's coming. Again, the Apostle Paul speaks of death as of " departing to be with Christ, which is far better " (Phil. i. 23), or of being " absent from the body, and ... present with the Lord " (2 Cor. V. 8). This can only describe the intermediate or unclothed state, for in resurrection the believer will in no sense be absent from the body, but in it, in a glorified condition. The Conditionalists deny the possibility of conscious existence apart from the body, but the Apostle Paul evidently did not share their views, witness his description in 2 Cor. Xi. 2 of his wonderful experience when caught up to Paradise ; he was perfectly conscious of where he was, of what was passing around him, of the words lie heard, and their sacred character, etc. Evidently, a Conditionalist would assert, he must have been in his body, for otherwise, he would have known nothing of what passed. The Apostle on the contrary is at pains to assure us twice that " he could not tell whether he was in the body or out of the body." We prefer to be with Paul in his uncertainties, than with Conditionalists in their assertions. All this is illustrated by our Lord when He lifts the veil of the Unseen World in the narrative of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke xvi.) and shows us two souls in the intermediate state, the one lost, the other safe. It is clear from this and the other passages quoted, that in the period between death and resurrection, the condition of the dead is :
1. A disembodied state.
Lazarus and the " rich man " had died, and had in either case no doubt received some kind of burial, but their spiritual personality survived.
2. A state of conscious existence.
These two are no more extinct or unconscious than Abraham, but real and unchanged. One was comforted and the other tormented.
3. A state of active interchange of thought.
How, we know not, but evidently distance and being apart from the body, are no impediment to this. Hades is not a place of silence, as Isa. xiv. 9 shows. " All they shall speak," etc., and Ezek. xxxii. 21, " The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol." No one denies that the grave is a place of silence, the body is not conscious, but it is equally evident that this does not prevent certain spiritual activities.
4. A state of recognition and remembrance." Father Abraham, send Lazarus." " I have five brethren." " Son, remember !
5. An immediate state.That is, it ensues at once on death. " The rich man died, and was buried, and being in Hell, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment." " To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."
6. A state of blessing for the believer : of torment for the impenitent.
7. An irrevocable state. " Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed."
WHAT WILL BE THE ETERNAL STATE OF THE IMPENITENT ?
These teachers insist on resurrection, but what they call resurrection is really, as they deny the survival of the soul after death, the re-creation of an extinct being, with no guarantee of continuity of personality or responsibility. The Lord met the Sadducees in their denial of resurrection by showing that Jehovah's words, " I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob," implied the survival of these patriarchs for " God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." To prevent all misunderstanding the Lord adds " FOR ALL LIVE UNTO HIM " (Luke xx. 38). The Conditionalists change this to " will live " in order to make the words refer to resurrection, but the tense is present, and the argument depends on the patriarchs existing somewhere, when Jehovah spoke to Moses.
Again in Rev. xix. 20 we learn that " the beast and the false prophet," the two human leaders of the rebel hosts in the great closing scene, will be cast alive into a lake burning with fire and brim-stone. According to the older Annihilationists they must at once be consumed, as any material object would, if cast into a furnace ; but I believe their latest theory says something else : it will take time ; every one will suffer a certain amount and endure proportionately. It is really a go-as-you please system of doctrine, to which any teacher may add to or subtract from as may seem convenient. But could not the God who preserved Shadrach and his friends in the furnace at Babylon intervene and prevent these two wicked men from being consumed ? The words, " Every one shall be salted with fire," seem to contain an ominous intimation of this. That this will be the case is proved in the next chapter of Rev. xx. io, when the Devil will be cast into the same place as the two lost men who will be found still existing there, and as we read of the three, " they shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever, a conscious, endless state, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched," and I think it is only too clear that these awful personages are representative of those who have followed them, and who will share their fate. In Rev. xx. 15, it is written, " whosoever was not found in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire," not to be annihilated, but to " have their part " there (Rev. xxi. 8), and that according to their character and works, whether " fearful or unbelieving, or abominable or murderers, or whoremongers or sorcerers, or idolators or liars." This fearful condition is described as " the second death "-eternal separation from God, the source of all life and good.
When we turn to the Gospels and Epistles the above testimony is borne out in many solemn passages. What is called, in order to discredit it, the " figurative," " hyperbolical " language of the Apocalyptic visions, finds its exact counterpart in the language of our Lord and His most prominent servants. Listen to John the Baptist : " He will gather His wheat into the garner, but He will burn up the chaff with fire unquenchable " (Matt. iii. 12), clearly figures in both cases ; but why " unquenchable fire," if the wicked are to be consumed like literal chaff ? Paul speaks of those who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord." " Destruction " is from a root (Ollumi) signifying utter ruin, but never annihilation. The same root is used of " the marred bottles " of Mark xi. 22. Not annihilated, but spoilt for their original purpose, " the lost sheep of the house of Israel " (Mark xi. 22), the lost money of Luke xv., the lost men whom the Son of Man came to save (Luke xix.) They are not " annihilated," but if they refuse the seeking Saviour, their destroyed, ruined condition can only be perpetuated in the future state. Those who refused His " Come ! " will hear His " Depart ! and be banished for ever from His presence. Now " banishment " conveys the thought of exclusion from blessing, rather than of extinction of being. Peter and Jude both write of certain ones " to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever." Such words imply a conscious experience to eyes that fain would see the light. To quote once more from John the Divine, he affirms of the one who takes the mark of the beast that he will he " tormented for ever and ever " (Rev. xiv. II). I ) Does our Lord's teaching, then, harmonise or clash with such words?
Surely the Conditionalists must at any rate find support for their views in His words ! Nothing can be further from the truth. " Fear Him, which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell " (Matt. x. 28), the same word as above. The lost might have become in the hand of a " God who is rich in mercy," " vessels of mercy." Alas ! they have fitted themselves to be " vessels of wrath." Later, the Lord, the embodiment of love to those who repent, says He will carry out the dread sentence in person. " The Son of man shall cast them into a furnace of fire, there shall be (not extinction of being, but) weeping and gnashing of teeth " (Matt. xiii. 42). In another place He warns men that it is better to enter life, having one eye, hand or foot, than, having a full complement of members, be cast " where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched " into Hell (Gehenna) (Mark ix. 43-49). A persistent attempt is made to confuse this with Ge-Hinnom, the literal valley on the outskirts of Jerusalem, into which the " bins " of the city were emptied. But no educated Jew would ever confound the two. " There are two palm trees," says the Talmudist, " in the valley of Hinnom, between which a smoke ariseth, it is the door of Gehenna." Of course this is legend, but is useful as showing the commonly received distinction between the literal and the invisible. If our Lord were in fact referring to a literal burning in the valley of Hinnom, His argument would lose all force or indeed be reversed. It does not need a great logician to see that it would be preferable to be cremated in the valley of Hinnom with limbs intact, than to suffer a painful amputation during lifetime.
But if our Lord was speaking of Gehenna, " the lake of fire," His argument was most convincing. It would certainly be better for a man to suffer any loss now, than keep his sin and be damned for ever in hell. The symbols arc terrible, the reality infinitely more so, for it will be for always. Such are but samples of our Lord's most terrible warnings. Those who under one plausible pretext or another seek to evade these plain teachings of Scriptures, seem to claim a monopoly of love and charge their opponents with scaring sinners away from God by setting up a fearful caricature ; they claim in fact to be more jealous for God than our Lord Jesus Christ, for He was at no pains to avoid language which lends itself to what has always seemed to Christians and others to be the inevitable meaning of Scripture. But surely there is more true love shown in warning sinners, who refuse to repent, of the terrible alternative of an endless hell than in assuring them that they have nothing particular to fear beyond suffering extinction of being.
Such teachers are truly destroyers of men's souls, and are running the terrible risk of bringing on themselves the Divine judgments pronounced on those who take away from the Scriptures : " God shall take away his part out of the tree of life and out of the holy city and from the things which are written in this book " (Rev. xxii. 19).
We may leave this solemn subject with the enunciation of four principles : first, " Let God be true, but every man a liar " ; second, " God Is
love " and " wills that all men shall be saved," so that wherever He can righteously apply to a soul the atoning blood of Christ, which cleanseth from all sin, He will ; third, " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? " fourth, " Flee from the wrath to come ! " (Rom. iii. 4 ; I John iv. 8 ; i Tim. ii. 4 ; Gen. xviii. 25 ; Matt. ii. 7).