3. Errors About a Lost Eternity

Rev J R Tallach

The nature and duration of the suffering in hell. The terms used are fixed and immutable. The “smoke of their torment” ascends “for ever and ever”. The worm of conscience never dies. The “fire” is “unquenchable”. The “chains” are “everlasting”. The “blackness of darkness” is never dispersed.

The term everlasting in Greek is based on the word for age. This word is used in two ways in Scripture. In Matthew 12:32 we find both illustrated: “It shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world [age] nor in the world [age] to come”. Mark 10:30 says, “He shall receive an hundredfold now in this time . . . and in the world to come eternal life” (where eternal is based on the word age). These two uses correspond to time and eternity in our common use of the terms.

The words for ever are used in these two ways also. At times they represent as long as a man lives, as in Exodus 21:6, where the servant has his ear bored and remains his master’s servant “for ever”. They may also mean as long as the world stands: “The earth abideth for ever” (Ecc 1:4). But in the majority of cases, the words refer to the endless age. Christ “is over all, God blessed for ever”. They generally refer to the infinite future age, not to finite time – to eternity, not to time.

This is further illustrated by the way in which the lostness of the lost is tied to that of Satan and his angels. “Then shall [Christ] say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from Me ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25:41). The lostness of the fallen angels is absolute. Christ “took not on Him the nature of angels” (Heb 2:16). If lost sinners are to be with them, there is no restoration for them either.

John Gerstner wrote a book entitled, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell.² In it Edwards is quoted: “This doctrine is indeed awful and dreadful, yet it is of God”. He considered the nature of hell and wrote, “’Tis the infinite and almighty God that shall become the fire of the furnace”.

The pains of hell will be both spiritual and material after the resurrection of the body, and this is illustrated in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane also lends support to this

¹The previous section of this Theological Conference paper dealt with heaven. This article concludes the series.

²Baker, 1980. All the Edwards quotations in this article are from this volume.

view of body and soul suffering in hell. Wicked men will remember how things were with them in this world, with their pain increased as they remember warnings and, looking back on their lives, they will know they were the authors of their own destruction. As the rich man did, they will see the blessed state of the redeemed and hear their songs of praise. Heaven’s songs of triumph will aggravate their grief and woes. In heaven the glory is a revelation of God Himself as the lover and beloved of His people. In hell God reveals Himself as the great and relentless enemy of the sinner. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31).

Purgatory. The disembodied state of the person who has died gave rise to misconceptions and therefore to errors in eschatology (the doctrine of the last things). The intermediate state was viewed by the Church fathers as dubious and unfixed since the body is required for completeness of the person. It was thought that, since the person was incomplete without the body, the saved were imperfectly happy and the lost imperfectly miserable and sinful. Shedd quotes one writer as saying “that the Fathers between 250 and 730 AD said that men do not receive their full reward until after the resurrection.”³ Even Ambrose, spiritual father of Augustine, taught that the soul, “while separated from the body, is held in an ambiguous condition”.

From this “incompleteness”, the doctrine of purgatory for the redeemed arose in the papal church. The believer, we are told, goes through a painful process, between death and the resurrection, which cleanses from remaining sin and fits him for paradise. The corresponding view is taken of the intermediate, incomplete state of the wicked by modern Restorationists, who teach that the intermediate state is a time of probation and redemption for those sinners of Adam’s race who were not saved in this life.

The pagan view of Hades was wide and included all men, good and bad, whereas the biblical view of hell was narrow and included the wicked only. The Greeks and Romans taught that the nether world was the abode of all the departed spirits. Later Jewish thought was influenced by this wider view of Hades until the doctrine of purgatory appeared in their apocryphal literature (2 Maccabees 12:45). The idea that real happiness and real misery did not feature until the resurrection passed into the Christian Church, although it did not appear in the early creeds.

The Protestant Reformers, taking their stand on the Scriptures already cited, rejected entirely the theories of the intermediate state outlined above. Calvin in his Institutes (2.16.9) says, “I know not how it came to pass that posterity should imagine the intermediate state to be a subterranean cavern, to which they gave the name limbus. But this fable, although it is maintained

³W G T Shedd, The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment, London, 1887, p 56.

by great authors and seriously defended as a truth, is, after all, nothing but a fable.”

Annihilationism. This teaching endeavours to prove that the punishment of the wicked is the extinction of consciousness. One form is Conditional Immortality. All immortality, those who follow this teaching claim, is by the redemption of Christ and, since the lost are not redeemed, they lose all consciousness at the death of the body. This constitutes, they say, the spiritual death threatened in Scripture. The death of the soul, they argue, is the extinction of consciousness.

Shedd makes the following points against Annihilationism: 1. Birth does not mean the creation of substance. An individual man is a union of soul and body, not a creation out of nothing. Death is the separation of soul and body, not the annihilation of either. The death of the soul constitutes a change in the relations of the soul and the manner in which it exists, not annihilation.

1. Spiritual death is described in Scripture as being conscious and rebellious. Adam and Eve died spiritually on eating the forbidden fruit, according to the warning God had given. They then fled to hide from God, as we read in Genesis. The dead in trespasses and sins walk according to the course of this world (Eph 2:1,2). “Unto the angel of the church in Sardis write . . . I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead” (Rev 3:1). Sardis was an active church among the seven churches of Asia but was spiritually dead.

2. The extinction of consciousness is not in the nature of punishment. Punishment is suffering, and suffering requires consciousness.

3. If loss of consciousness is punishment then the brute beast at death, losing all consciousness, is punished. Annihilation of the soul finds no support in Scripture.

Universalism. Some assert a dangerous form of universalism at this point, by claiming that the work of redemption through the death of Christ goes on after the death of a sinner, during this intermediate state – between the sinner’s death and the day of resurrection and final judgement. This makes the intermediate state a third “age” between the present “age” and the “age” of eternity to come. However, that there is no such intermediate second “age”, between heaven and hell, is proved by the following:

1. Scripture knows nothing of any such intermediate disembodied state. This intermediate state only arose with the idea of purgatory, an idea which in itself is unscriptural.

2. Scripture is clear that the death of a man is the boundary between the two worlds of the Bible. “As it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement” (Heb 9:27). Man’s state is settled at death. At that moment

the sinner knows their state as contrite and gracious, or impenitent and proud, and this “private” judgement is confirmed in the general judgement of all men at the last day. “The night cometh,” the Saviour said, “when no man can work” (Jn 9:4). The work of salvation ceases when the night of death falls. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is to the same point: the rich man asks that his brethren be informed of a lost eternity before they die, as the impassable gulf between heaven and hell makes salvation impossible after death.

The fact of the Word teaching that the time of redemption terminates with the death of the individual is evident from many scriptures. “My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years” (Gen 6:3). The Spirit through Noah, a preacher of righteousness (2 Pet 2:5), warned that generation, but this period of warning would be brought to a close with a judgement – the flood. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Ps 90:12).

The only way we could know that the time of redemption extends beyond death was if God told us in His Word. Since no such revelation has been given we have to conclude that redemption is confined to this present age.

Conclusion. Consider the following two brief applications of the above. First, it is a basis for the earnestness Paul shows in setting life and death before sinners: “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor 5:11).

Second, having mentioned heaven, let us remember Samuel Rutherford’s illustration of the traveller who has to spend a night in an unwelcoming inn. Though the food is poor, the bed hard and the innkeeper surly, the traveller can console himself that it will not be for long and that home awaits.

There is a hell to be saved from and a heaven to be won.