An Awful Conception

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 49.

An Awful Conception.

A tract before us has the following paragraph, among others of kindred thought:—

Some sinners presume on the mercy of God, and wonder that He should damn a human spirit to everlasting torment. Such people do not take into consideration the fact that the substance spirit which creates life and consciousness is in all creatures the very same breath of God that makes God immortal. And that the difference between an evil and a good spirit is, not of any corruption of substance, per se, but it is moral corruption; and even as God can not extinguish His own Spirit He must needs also create a place, a prison and a hell, to confine all sin-polluted spirits, angelic or human. His holiness demands it.

Think of it! God has made immortal creatures without any choice of their own; made them of a part of Himself; and now that He has gotten Himself in this dilemma, He must create a place where these parts of Himself shall be tormented to all eternity! God's holiness demands nothing of the sort. “The wages of sin is death.” “The soul that sinneth it shall die.” “Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” The wicked “shall not be;” they “shall be as tho they had not been.” All this is Bible truth. And it is not only true because God's holiness demands it; the reward of the wicked is the inevitable result of his own sowing; for “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” When the wicked are destroyed, “they eat of the fruit of their own way.” And they do all this contrary to the desire of God; for “as I ‘live’ saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the ‘death’ of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” Why will Christians misrepresent God?