WHEN WILL THE WICKED BE PUNISHED?
By G. B. Thompson
THAT there is a place of punishment for all the finally impenitent, a gehenna into which all the nations which forget God will finally be turned, the Bible clearly teaches. Place your finger upon your pulse and mark the throb of that great organ of life, the heart. At every beat a soul, somewhere on the earth, has fallen in death, and gone into a Christless grave. Popular theology, in harmony with the heathen dogma of the inherent immortality of the soul, teaches that these Christless souls are being poured in an ever-flowing stream into the torments of hell fire as fast as they die; that they are not dead in fact, but living in the torments of an endless hell; that now myriads of the lost are gnawing their tongues with pain, and uttering blasphemies in a shoreless lake of lurid flame, with no hope of deliverance. At least this was once taught. With this view the Scripture is at complete variance. It teaches that sinners will reap their reward at the end of the world, when every wrong act has borne its full harvest of results. The judgment is not a work which has been continually going on since the fall of man. It was an event future in the days of Paul; for he reasoned before Felix of a “judgment to come.” Acts 24:25. God has “appointed a day, in the which He will judge the world.” Acts 17:31. And to the writer it would seem wholly inconsistent that He would consign any to the regions of final punishment until they have been judged. Think of that awful spectacle, the opening of the tribunal of the eternal God. Imagine Him summoning before Him the pale nations of the dead to be judged, when from the torments of hell unnumbered millions come forth, seared and burned, some of them with thousands of years of punishment, to be judged to see if they should receive such a doom! What an awful travesty to be charged up to the God of infinite wisdom and omniscience! It transforms the solemn scenes of the judgment into a farce. Yet such conclusions must follow if man enters on his reward at death. But all is plain and clear in God’s Word, which places the work of the judgment the last in the ministrations of Christ as our high priest, and the giving afterward of the rewards determined in this tribunal. Notice carefully the following texts:— “For ye say, Where is the house of the prince? and where are the dwelling-places of the wicked? Have ye not asked them that go by the way? and do ye not know their tokens, that the wicked is reserved to the day of destruction?” Job 21:28-30. To what time are they reserved?—“But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” 2 Peter 3:7. The time, then, to which they are reserved is when this earth is cleansed and purified by fire, and fitted up as the home of God’s people. The place of their punishment is on the earth. Prov. 11:31. At the close of the one thousand years, when the Saviour and His saints come to take their abode in the purchased possession, the wicked dead are summoned from their tombs. “And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city; and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” Rev. 20:9. It is at the end of the world that the tares, or sinners, are cast into the fire. Matt. 13:40-42. From this fire will come forth a new heaven and a new earth, and the universe will be cleansed from all the curse. The scar of sin which has rested upon it for six thousand years will be forever eradicated.4 “And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever.” Rev. 5:13. Reader, do you not rejoice that such a glad hour hastens? Beyond the ruin and wretchedness which sin has wrought lies a land where sin and sinner will not be. The wicked will have passed into the embrace of the second death, from which there is no resurrection. The righteous enter upon a life as eternal as the life of their Creator, at whose right hand there are pleasures and joy forevermore.