There are several passages of scripture in which the same word, aionios, is unquestionably used in this sense. In Heb. 5:9, we read of “eternal salvation;” that is, a salvation which is eternal or everlasting in its results, not one which is forever going on, but never accomplished. In Heb. 6:2, Paul speaks of “eternal judgment;” not judgment which is eternally going forward, but one which, having once passed upon all men, Acts 17:31, is irreversible in its decisions, and eternal in its effects. In Heb. 9:12, he speaks in the same way of “eternal redemption,” not a redemption through which we are eternally approaching a redeemed state which we never reach, but a redemption which releases us for all eternity from the power of sin and death. It would be just as proper to speak of the saints as always redeeming, but never redeemed, as to to speak of the sinner as always consuming but never consumed, or always dying but never dead. This fire is prepared for the devil and his angels, and will be shared by all of the human race who choose to follow the devil in his accursed rebellion against the government of Heaven. It will be to them an everlasting fire; for once having plunged into its fiery vortex, there is no life, beyond. Other texts noticed in succeeding chapters.
CHAPTER XXIX.
EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT.
Matt. 25:46: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal.”
This text is very commonly urged as an objection against the view that the destiny of the reprobate is an utter and eternal extinction of being; and it is one which has great apparent force. But the secret of this apparent strength lies in the fact that the term punishment is almost invariably supposed to be confined to conscious suffering, and that when any affliction is no longer taken cognizance of by the senses, it ceases to be a punishment at all. But if it can be shown from sound reason, and from the analogy of human penalties, that punishment is estimated by the loss involved, and not merely by the amount of pain inflicted, the objection vanishes at once, and will cease to hold back many devout and holy minds from adopting the view we here advocate.
On the duration of the punishment brought to view in the text, we take no issue. It is to be eternal; but what is to be its nature? The text says, Everlasting punishment; popular orthodoxy says, Unending misery; the Bible, we believe, says, Eternal death.
Is death punishment? If so, when a death is inflicted from which there is to be no release, that punishment is eternal or everlasting. Then the application of this scripture to the view we hold is very apparent. The heathen, to reconcile themselves to what they supposed to be their inevitable fate, used to argue that death was no evil. But when they looked forward into the endless future of which that death deprived them, they were obliged to reverse their former decision and acknowledge that death was an endless injury.--Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i., 47.
Why is the sentence of death in our courts of justice reckoned as the most severe and greatest punishment? It is not because the pain involved is greater; for the scourge, the rack, the pillory, and many kinds of minor punishment, inflict more pain upon the petty offender than decapitation or hanging inflicts upon the murderer. But it is reckoned the greatest because it is the most lasting; and its length is estimated by the life the person would have enjoyed, if it had not been inflicted. It has deprived him of every hour of that life he would have had but for this punishment; and hence the punishment is considered as co-existent with the period of his natural life.
Augustine says:--
“The laws do not estimate the punishment of a criminal by the brief period during which he is being put to death, but by their removing him forever from the company of living men.”--De. civ. Dei, xxi., 11.
The same reasoning applies to the future life as readily as to the present. By the terrible infliction of the second death, the sinner is deprived of all the bright and ceaseless years of everlasting life. The loss of every moment, hour, and year, of this life, is a punishment; and, as the life is eternal, the loss, or the punishment, is eternal also. “There is here no straining of argument to make out a case. The argument is one which man’s judgment has in every age approved as just.”