Mat. 10:6, 39, 42—“the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it ... he shall in no wise lose his reward”—in these verses we cannot substitute “annihilate” for “lose”; Acts 13:41—“Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish”; cf. Mat. 6:16—“for they disfigure their faces”—where the same word ἀφανίζω is used. 1 Cor. 3:17—“If any man destroyeth [annihilates?] the temple of God, him shall God destroy”; 2 Cor. 7:2—“we corrupted no man”—where the same word φθείρω is used. 2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might” = the wicked shall be driven out from the presence of Christ. Destruction is not annihilation. “Destruction from” = separation; (per contra, see Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. in loco: “from” = the source from which the “destruction” proceeds). “A ship engulfed in quicksands is destroyed; a temple broken down and deserted is destroyed”; see Lillie, Com. in loco. 2 Pet. 3:7—“day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men”—here the word “destruction” (ἀπωλείας) is the same with that used of the end of the present order of things, and translated “perished” (ἀπώλετο) in verse 6. “We cannot accordingly infer from it that the ungodly will cease to exist, but only that there will be a great and penal change in their condition” (Plumptre, Com. in loco).
(d) The passages held to prove the annihilation of the wicked at death cannot have this meaning, since the Scriptures foretell a resurrection of the unjust as well as of the just; and a second death, or a misery of the reunited soul and body, in the case of the wicked.
Acts 24:15—“there shall be a resurrection both of the just and unjust”; Rev. 2:11—“He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death”; 20:14, 15—“And death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, even the lake of fire. And if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire”; 21:8—“their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.” The “second death” is the first death intensified. Having one's “part in the lake of fire” is not annihilation.
In a similar manner the word “life” is to be interpreted not as meaning continuance of being, but as meaning perfection of being. As death is the loss not of life, but of all that makes life desirable, so life is the possession of the highest good. 1 Tim. 5:6—“She that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while she liveth”—here the death is spiritual death, and it is implied that true life is spiritual life. John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”—implies that “life” is not: 1. mere existence, for they had this before Christ came; nor 2. mere motion, as squirrels go in a wheel, without making progress; nor 3. mere possessions, “for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15). But life is: 1. right relation of our powers, or holiness; 2. right use of our powers, or love; 3. right number of our powers, or completeness; 4. right intensity of our powers, or energy of will; 5. right environment of our powers, or society; 6. right source of our powers, or God.
(e) The words used in Scripture to denote the place of departed spirits have in them no implication of annihilation, and the allusions to the condition of the departed show that death, to the writers of the Old and the New [pg 994] Testaments, although it was the termination of man's earthly existence, was not an extinction of his being or his consciousness.
On שאול Sheol, Gesenius, Lexicon, 10th ed., says that, though שאול is commonly explained as infinitive of שאל, to demand, it is undoubtedly allied to שעל (root של), to be sunk, and = “sinking,” “depth,” or “the sunken, deep, place.” Ἁιδης, Hades, = not “hell,” but the “unseen world,” conceived by the Greeks as a shadowy, but not as an unconscious, state of being. Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, on Job 7:9—“Sheol, the Hebrew word designating the unseen abode of the dead; a neutral word, presupposing neither misery nor happiness, and not infrequently used much as we use the word ‘the grave’, to denote the final undefined resting-place of all.”
Gen. 25:8, 9—Abraham “was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him in the cave of Machpelah.” “Yet Abraham's father was buried in Haran, and his more remote ancestors in Ur of the Chaldees. So Joshua's generation is said to be ‘gathered to their fathers’though the generation that preceded them perished in the wilderness, and previous generations died in Egypt” (W. H. Green, in S. S. Times). So of Isaac in Gen. 35:29, and of Jacob in 19:29, 33,—all of whom were gathered to their fathers before they were buried. Num. 20:24—“Aaron shall be gathered unto his people”—here it is very plain that being “gathered unto his people” was something different from burial. Deut. 10:6—“There Aaron died, and there he was buried.” Job 3:13, 18—“For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest.... There the prisoners are at ease together; They hear not the voice of the taskmaster”; 7:9—“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, So he that goeth down to Sheol shall come up no more”; 14:22—“But his flesh upon him hath pain, And his soul within him mourneth.”
Ez. 32:21—“The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol”; Luke 16:23—“And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom”; 23:43—“To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise”; cf. 1 Sam. 28:19—Samuel said to Saul in the cave of Endor: “to-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me”—evidently not in an unconscious state. Many of these passages intimate a continuity of consciousness after death. Though Sheol is unknown to man, it is naked and open to God (Job 26:6); he can find men there to redeem them from thence (Ps. 49:15)—proof that death is not annihilation. See Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 447.
(f) The terms and phrases which have been held to declare absolute cessation of existence at death are frequently metaphorical, and an examination of them in connection with the context and with other Scriptures is sufficient to show the untenableness of the literal interpretation put upon them by the annihilationists, and to prove that the language is merely the language of appearance.
Death is often designated as a “sleeping” or a “falling asleep”; see John 11:11, 14—“Our friend Lazarus is fallen asleep; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... Then Jesus therefore said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” Here the language of appearance is used; yet this language could not have been used, if the soul had not been conceived of as alive, though sundered from the body; see Meyer on 1 Cor. 1:18. So the language of appearance is used in Eccl. 9:10—“there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol whither thou goest”—and in Ps. 146:4—“His breath goeth forth; he returneth to his earth; In that very day his thoughts perish.”