Again, the Lord says, speaking of a certain class of his enemies, “For yet a little while and the indignation shall cease, and mine anger in their destruction.” Isa. 10:25. This is conclusive testimony that all those with whom the Lord has occasion to be angry, as he is with all the wicked, Ps. 7:11, will be finally destroyed, and in that destruction his anger toward them will cease. Yet the majority of divines tell us that God’s “fiery indignation and incensed fury” toward them will never cease; that he will never literally destroy them, but will forever torment them, and keep them alive expressly that he may torment them. Says Benson:--
“He will exert all his divine attributes to make them as wretched as the capacity of their nature will admit.” And he continues, “They must be perpetually swelling their enormous sums of guilt, and still running deeper, immensely deeper, in debt to divine and infinite justice. Hence after the longest imaginable period, they will be so far from having discharged their debt that they will find more due than when they first began to suffer.”
Thus the sinner is represented as being able to distance in sin the power of Omnipotence to punish. They go on accumulating loads of guilt in their rebellion against the divine government, while God, exerting all his divine attributes, follows tardily after, in fruitless efforts to make the terrors of his punishment adequate to the infinitude of their guilt. Oh, horrid picture of perverted imagination! Did we not believe its authors labored under the sincere conviction that they were doing God service, and did we not know that many good and estimable persons still defend the doctrine under an earnest, though mistaken, zeal for God, it would deserve to be styled the most arrant blasphemy.
This condition of the finally reprobate, so often and so distinctly defined as a state of death, is also set forth by very many other expressions, by every variety of phrase, in fact, which expresses, in the most complete and absolute manner, an utter loss of existence.
Henry Constable, A. M., in his work on “The Duration and Nature of Future Punishment,” p. 12, says:--
“But it is not only by this phrase, ‘death,’ that the Old Testament describes the punishment of the ungodly. By every expression in the Hebrew language, significant of loss of life, loss of existence, the resolution of organized substance into its original parts, its reduction to that condition in which it is as though it had never been called into being--by every such expression does the Old Testament describe the end of the ungodly. ‘The destruction of the transgressors and the sinners shall be together:’ ‘prepare them for the day of slaughter:’ ‘the slain of the Lord shall be many:’ ‘they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have sinned:’ ‘God shall destroy them:’ ‘they shall be consumed:’ ‘they shall be cut off:’ ‘they shall be rooted out of the land of the living:’ ‘blotted out of the book of life:’‘they are not.’ The Hebrew scholar will see from the above passages that there is no phrase of the Hebrew language significant of all destruction short of that philosophical annihilation of elements which we do not assert, which is not used to denote the end of the ungodly.”
The wicked shall be destroyed. “The Lord preserveth all them that love him; but all the wicked will he destroy.” Ps. 145:20. Here preservation is promised only to those who love God, and in opposition to this, destruction is threatened to the wicked. But human wisdom teaches us that God will preserve the wicked in hell--preserve them for the mere sake of torturing them. Mr. Benson again says:--
“God is therefore present in hell to see the punishment of these rebels. His fiery indignation kindles, and his incensed fury feeds the flame of their torment, while his powerful presence and operation maintains their being, and renders their powers most acutely sensible, thus setting the keenest edge upon their pain, and making it cut most intolerably deep.”
The wicked shall perish. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16. A double enunciation of the truth is couched in this short text. It is that eternal life is to be obtained only through Christ, and that all who do not thus obtain it will eventually perish. John testifies further on the same point in his 1st epistle, 5:11: “And this is the record: that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” From which it follows, as a most natural consequence, that “he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” Verse 12.
The wicked shall go to perdition. “We are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the saving of the soul.” Heb. 10:39. We either gain the salvation of our souls by a perseverance in faith, and obtain eternal life by a patient continuance in well-doing, Rom. 2:7, or we sink back into perdition, which, is defined to be utter ruin, or destruction.