THE FINAL DOOM by D. T. T.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 3, 1876

THE FINAL DOOM.

By D. T. T.

THAT is a fearful word which the Spirit makes use of in Acts 3:23, viz., exolothreumai. Our translators in the common version render it “destroyed.” The English here scarcely comes up to the original. The emphatic form of the verb is used. The Greek term is found nowhere else in the New Testament. The Septuagint and Josephus use the word, but it is never found in the classics. It is quite peculiar here. Now the Syriac renders the word, “shall perish.” The Bible Union version has it, “shall be utterly destroyed.” Alexander Campbell makes it, “shall be cut off.” It means, say Parkhurst and Robinson, the lexicographers, “to utterly destroy.” Greenfield says it means “to utterly destroy, to exterminate;” and Bloomfield, “to utterly exterminate.”

The corresponding Hebrew word, Chereth, signifies “a cutting off.” It refers to the major excommunication; and Maimonides and his peers, the Rabbis, interpret it as denoting a complete excision, a death that truly kills, an utter destruction of both soul and body. Yes, God can kill soul and body in hell fire. Who can doubt it? Who is the subject of this intense, terrible anathema? Ans.: The human soul that will not hear Christ. “There is,” writes Hudson, “no hint here of a death that does not kill.” Do you hear Jesus when he speaks to you, O sinner? You had better listen.—D. T. T., in Bible Banner.