THE FINALLY LOST by D. T. T.

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 3, 1867

THE FINALLY LOST.

By D. T. T.

An esteemed brother takes exception to our criticism on Luke ix, 25, “Lose himself,” and claims that those who thus perish at last are only lost in the sense in which one is lost in a terrible snow storm, lost on an island at sea, lost in the woods, lost as the sheep of the house of Israel were lost (Matt. x, 6), they all the while in their second death retaining a consciousness of their condition, as men in this life in the above-named cases were, though lost, still conscious of their identity and existence. We reply, the cases are not parallel, the illustrations lack force and point, and the argument is unsound. For apollumi in some seventy-two instances of its usage (out of one hundred and two times) in the Greek New Testament, when referred to whole, living men, or to parts of these integral men, describes their actual perishing destruction, or their devotement to such a real perishing, in which case they were as good as perished and dead. It is also applied to sheep as good as actually dead to the owner unless found, to bottles broken or perishing as bottles, so that they are no longer whole bottles, money forever lost unless found by the owner, and food left to corrupt and be utterly wasted. In no instance is it used to describe human beings as such, only as truly killed and their life taken away, or as being in a condition where their death was a certain thing, an inevitable tendency, and this result unmistakable and sure at last. Thus, in some instances, the prolepsis is used, the apollumi is anticipated, and they are spoken of as perished or dead when doomed to die, as a Montpelier (Vt.) physician, a few years since, exclaimed upon accidentally swallowing a large dose of strychnine, “I am a dead man,” though he survived the fatal dose six hours.

In about twenty-four instances the word is used to describe the final destiny of man at the Judgment. If the place of this destiny were as temperate, and at all to be compared with an island, the woods, this world, or even a snow storm; if there were a good shepherd to hunt for and find the lost sheep there, and the sinner not doomed to the full infliction of the second death in that place; then might the lost hope to live on in anguish for a time. But what shall survive the destruction (apollumi, Matt. x, 28) of “both soul and body in gehenna—fire?” Who will restore the apollumi—“lost life” (Luke ix, 24) “in them that (apollumi) perish” (2 Cor. ii, 15)? And Heaven lost, soul and body lost, yea, even life lost, where can the lost one find himself in this outer darkness? Submerged in the lake of fire burning with brimstone, will the totally lost without immortality, without eternal life, cut loose from the source of being, compared to stubble, to chaff, to tares, to dry branches, to thorns and briars, to corruption, live on and on? Must he not with such a nature, and amid such surroundings, rather “lose himself?” Shall we make this apollumi have no deeper meaning when applied to a man in a sea of literal fire, in the eternal world, than when used to set forth the condition of a man in a wilderness on this earth? Is he no more lost in the eternal fires than in the green woods? And shall we take the accommodated or secondary sense of a word to explain its primitive meaning?

Note the first use of apollumi in the New Testament, in Matt. ii, 18, i. e., “to destroy,” i. e., to kill, murder, take away life, cause to perish. Fifteen or twenty times in the Bible is the first death denominated a shadow, and if it be but the shadow, then what shall be the substance? For the righteous the shadows will flee away, but for the evil, in their second death, never. From this last death there is no resurrection. It is to “be as though they had not been.” No being, hence no consciousness. Hence our position, viz., consciousness and unconsciousness are directly opposite terms. Life and death are directly opposite terms. Therefore in life man is conscious, but in death man is unconscious. And so in the apollumi, the perishing, the destruction in the lake of fire beyond the Judgment, life, all life, and consequently all consciousness of life and being, is forever lost. This being true, the lost will be lost to God and angels, and the saved, yea, more, he will “LOSE HIMSELF.”

Tenaciously, as with a strange love for something unfathomed and horrible, do good men cling to the dogma of endless misery, to be inflicted by a just and merciful God. Do they really ever look the awful doctrine in the face? Do they truly believe it? When they walk their rooms at midnight in sleepless, mental agony at the bare thought, as did Jonathan Edwards, we will believe that they do. But believe the dogma you never can. Thank God, the touch of the Ithuriel spear of truth awoke us from twenty years of sleep in the overshadowing of the horrible nightmare.—D. T. T. in World’s Crisis.