We close this argument with a paragraph from the candid pen of H. H. Dobney, Baptist minister of England. In Future Punishment, pp. 139, 140, he says:--
“There is something of awkwardness, which the Scriptures seem to avoid, in making beings who have already entered, and many ages since, on a state of happiness or misery, come from those abodes to be judged, and to receive a formal award to the very condition which has long been familiar to them. To have been in Heaven with Christ for glorious ages, and then to stand at his bar for Judgment, and be invited to enter Heaven as their eternal home, as though they had not been there already, scarcely seems to look exactly like the Scripture account, while it would almost appear to be wanting in congruity. Nor is this all. There is another difficulty, namely: That the idea of a saint already ‘with Christ,’ ‘present with the Lord’ (who is in Heaven, be it remembered, in his resurrection and glorified body, wherewith he ascended from the brow of Olivet), coming from Heaven to earth to glide into a body raised simultaneously from the ground, he being in reality already possessed of a spiritual body, would seem an invention which has not one syllable in Scripture to give it countenance.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE WAGES OF SIN.
“One question more than others all,
From thoughtful minds implores reply;
It is as breathed from star and pall,
What fate awaits us when we die?”[die?”]--Alger.
We have now examined the teaching of the Bible relative to man, in his creation, in his life, in his death, and in the intermediate state to his resurrection; and we have found its uniform and explicit testimony to be that he has no inherent, inalienable principle in his nature which is exempt from death; but that the only avenue to life beyond the grave is through the resurrection. We have found also that such a resurrection to a second life is decreed for all the race; and now the more momentous question, what the issue of that existence is to be, presents itself for solution.
Natural, or temporal, death, we die in Adam. This death visits all alike irrespective of character. The sincerest saint falls under its power, as inevitably as the most reckless sinner. This cannot be our final end; for it would not be in accordance with justice that our ultimate fate should hinge on a transaction, like the sin of Adam, for which we are not responsible. Every person must be the arbiter of his own destiny. To secure this, the redemption which intervenes through Christ, provides for all a release from the death entailed upon us by the Adamic transgression, in order that every person’s individual acts may constitute the record which shall determine his destiny beyond the grave. What is that destiny to be?
Our inquiry respects, not the future of the righteous, concerning which there is no material controversy, but that of the sinner. Is his fate an eternity of life in a devouring fire which is forever unable to devour him? an eternal approach of death which never really arrives?