p. 6 | ETERNAL TORMENT

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California, U. S. A. · Sep 9, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 35.

ETERNAL TORMENT

A. W. Clem of Texas asks for an explanation of Mark 9:48.

It will not be difficult to catch the meaning of Christ's words in Mark 9:48, “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched,” if we learn what the “where” refers to. This is shown in the previous verses, 43-47, to be “hell,” which in Greek is Gehenna, as noted in the margin of the American Revised Version. Gehenna is the equivalent of the Hebrew valley of Hinnom, also called Topheth (see Jeremiah 19:2, 6, 11, 12), which was south of Jerusalem.

Once used as a place where were observed the cruel rites of the worship of the heathen god Moloch, this valley later became a public incinerator, so to speak, where the Jews kept fire burning constantly, in which they threw the refuse of the city, also the carcasses of animals and the dead bodies of malefactors. Such material as this incinerator did not consume by reason of its being beyond reach of the flames, would, of course, be consumed by the maggots, worms, always attached to dead bodies. There was no possible escape from destruction. What the fire did not destroy the ever-present worm consumed.

Because, therefore, Gehenna was a concrete demonstration of complete destruction to anything put into it, our Lord used it as a forceful illustration, an image, of the complete destruction coming to the finally impenitent in their hell of punishment. There would be no escape for them, for in God's retributive judgments “their worm” would not die and their “fire” would not be quenched.

The word “worm” is not used in any subjective sense of the soul or spirit of the destroyed wicked. It is employed in an objective, figurative sense of the punitive consuming forces of a just God operating upon the wicked.