Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; Rev. 22:11—“He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still; and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still.” Calvin: “God has the best reason for punishing everlasting sin everlastingly.” [pg 1049]President Dwight: “Every sinner is condemned for his first sin, and for every sin that follows, though they continue forever.” What Martineau (Study, 2:106) says of this life, we may apply to the next: “Sin being there, it would be simply monstrous that there should be no suffering.”
But we must remember that men are finally condemned, not merely for sins, but for sin; they are punished, not simply for acts of disobedience, but for evil character. The judgment is essentially a remanding of men to their “own place” (Acts 1:25). The soul that is permanently unlike God cannot dwell with God. The consciences of the wicked will justify their doom, and they will themselves prefer hell to heaven. He who does not love God is at war with himself, as well as with God, and cannot be at peace. Even though there were no positive inflictions from God's hand, the impure soul that has banished itself from the presence of God and from the society of the holy has in its own evil conscience a source of torment.
And conscience gives us a pledge of the eternity of this suffering. Remorse has no tendency to exhaust itself. The memory of an evil deed grows not less but more keen with time, and self-reproach grows not less but more bitter. Ever renewed affirmation of its evil decision presents to the soul forever new occasion for conviction and shame. F. W. Robertson speaks of “the infinite maddening of remorse.” And Dr. Shedd, in the book above quoted, remarks: “Though the will to resist sin may die out of a man, the conscience to condemn it never can. This remains eternally. And when the process is complete; when the responsible creature, in the abuse of free agency, has perfected his ruin; when his will to good is all gone; there remain these two in his immortal spirit—sin and conscience, ‘brimstone and fire’ (Rev. 21:8).”
E. G. Robinson: “The fundamental argument for eternal punishment is the reproductive power of evil. In the divine law penalty enforces itself. Rom. 6:19—‘ye presented your members as servants ... to iniquity unto iniquity.’ Wherever sin occurs, penalty is inevitable. No man of sense would now hold to eternal punishment as an objective judicial infliction, and the sooner we give this up the better. It can be defended only on the ground of the reactionary power of elective preference, the reduplicating power of moral evil. We have no right to say that there are no other consequences of sin but natural ones; but, were this so, every word of threatening in Scripture would still stand. We shall never be as complete as if we never had sinned. We shall bear the scars of our sins forever. The eternal law of wrong-doing is that the wrong-doer is cursed thereby, and harpies and furies follow him into eternity. God does not need to send a policeman after the sinner; the sinner carries the policeman inside. God does not need to set up a whipping post to punish the sinner; the sinner finds a whipping post wherever he goes, and his own conscience applies the lash.”
(d) The actual facts of human life and the tendencies of modern science show that this principle of retributive justice is inwrought into the elements and forces of the physical and moral universe. On the one hand, habit begets fixity of character, and in the spiritual world sinful acts, often repeated, produce a permanent state of sin, which the soul, unaided, cannot change. On the other hand, organism and environment are correlated to each other; and in the spiritual world, the selfish and impure find surroundings corresponding to their nature, while the surroundings react upon them and confirm their evil character. These principles, if they act in the next life as they do in this, will ensure increasing and unending punishment.
Gal. 6:7, 8—“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption”; Rev. 21:11—“He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still: and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still.” Dr. Heman Lincoln, in an article on Future Retribution (Examiner, April 2, 1885)—speaks of two great laws of nature which confirm the Scripture doctrine of retribution. The first is that “the tendency of habit is towards a permanent state. The occasional drinker becomes a confirmed drunkard. One who indulges in oaths passes into a reckless blasphemer. The gambler who has wasted a fortune, and ruined his family, is a slave to the card-table. The Scripture doctrine of retribution is only an extension of this well-known law to the future life.” [pg 1050]The second of these laws is that “organism and environment must be in harmony. Through the vast domain of nature, every plant and tree and reptile and bird and mammal has organs and functions fitted to the climate and atmosphere of its habitat. If a sudden change occur in climate, from torrid to temperate, or from temperate to arctic; if the atmosphere change from dry to humid, or from carbonic vapors to pure oxygen, sudden death is certain to overtake the entire fauna and flora of the region affected, unless plastic nature changes the organism to conform to the new environment. The interpreters of the Bible find the same law ordained for the world to come. Surroundings must correspond to character. A soul in love with sin can find no place in a holy heaven. If the environment be holy, the character of the beings assigned to it must be holy also. Nature and Revelation are in perfect accord.” See Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, chapters: Environment, Persistence of Type, and Degradation.
Hosea 13:9—“It is thy destruction, O Israel, that thou art against me, against thy help”—if men are destroyed, it is because they destroy themselves. Not God, but man himself, makes hell. Schurman: “External punishment is unthinkable of human sins.” Jackson, James Martineau, 152—“Our light, such as we have, we carry with us; and he who in his soul knows not God is still in darkness though, like the angel in the Apocalypse, he were standing in the sun.” Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 313—“To insure perpetual hunger deprive a man of nutritious food, and so long as he lives he will suffer; so pain will last so long as the soul is deprived of God, after the artificial stimulants of sin's pleasures have lost their effect. Death has nothing to do with it; for as long as the soul lives apart from God, whether on this or on another planet, it will be wretched. If the unrepentant sinner is immortal, his sufferings will be immortal.” “Magnas inter opes, inops”—poverty-stricken amid great riches—his very nature compels him to suffer. Nor can he change his nature; for character, once set and hardened in this world, cannot be cast into the melting-pot and remoulded in the world to come. The hell of Robert G. Ingersoll is far more terrible than the orthodox hell. He declares that there is no forgiveness and no renewal. Natural law must have its way. Man is a Mazeppa bound to the wild horse of his passions; a Prometheus, into whose vitals remorse, like a vulture, is ever gnawing.
(e) As there are degrees of human guilt, so future punishment may admit of degrees, and yet in all those degrees be infinite in duration. The doctrine of everlasting punishment does not imply that, at each instant of the future existence of the lost, there is infinite pain. A line is infinite in length, but it is far from being infinite in breadth or thickness. “An infinite series may make only a finite sum; and infinite series may differ infinitely in their total amount.” The Scriptures recognize such degrees in future punishment, while at the same time they declare it to be endless (Luke 12:47, 48; Rev. 20:12, 13).
Luke 12:47, 48—“And that servant who knew his Lord's will, and made not ready, nor did according to his will shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes”; Rev. 20:12, 13—“And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne; and books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works ... judged every man according to their works.”
(f) We know the enormity of sin only by God's own declarations with regard to it, and by the sacrifice which he has made to redeem us from it. As committed against an infinite God, and as having in itself infinite possibilities of evil, it may itself be infinite, and may deserve infinite punishment. Hell, as well as the Cross, indicates God's estimate of sin.