THE WAGES OF SIN by Dudley Marvin Canright

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 8, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 14.

THE WAGES OF SIN.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

IN a recent sermon preached in Chicago, Dr. Henson (Baptist) expressed some views concerning future punishment, which have occasioned not a little comment. Among other things he said:—

"The preachers of the olden time sinned in their use of hell as a topic for homilies, in two ways—first, by holding it up as a motive, and, secondly, by depicting it in a material, gross manner. The result was that people were repelled by the apparent vindictiveness of the Deity."

The Doctor then expressed the opinion that modern preachers err by going to the other extreme, and offered the following view as the happy via media, which taking, the evils resulting from extreme views would be avoided. Mr. Henson said:—

"In hell we shall have bodies. The resurrection of the body implies place and implies physical torment. But physical is not the worst. It is only brutish men who think so. Mental pain, remorse, anticipation, that makes the body writhe as the worm writhes on glowing embers, is the worst, and this poor sinners will have to suffer. Thirst with no water to quench, hunger with no food to satisfy, a knife thrust into the heart, but to be thrust there again—endless, awful. This is the hell we have to meet. Death offers a release from life's treadmill, but there is no relief in hell. But God, who doesn't believe in hell any more than we do, warns us by the blood of Christ to reform and escape the terrible fate. God is not vindictive. Hell is a necessity, like our State prisons."

It requires a fine discrimination to discover any real difference between this view and that of "the preachers of the olden time," which Mr. Henson characterizes as "gross" and "material." Indeed, if there be any difference worth mentioning, his idea of repeated knife thrusts is the more revolting. But be that as it may, both these conceptions of future punishment are a libel on the divine character and a negative of the teaching of the Scriptures.

It is true that "the resurrection of the body implies physical" punishment—not "torment," as Dr. Henson puts it. The word of God expressly declares that "the wages of sin is death;" not what we call natural death, which is suffered alike by righteous and wicked, but the second death referred to by that name, Rev. 2:11; 20:6; 21:8, but more fully described in Mal. 4:1. There is more or less of physical suffering connected with the first death, and there is every reason to believe that there will be also with the second death, but that suffering is not the punishment. The punishment, "the wages of sin, is death." Rom. 6:23. Again we have the words of the Lord by the prophet Ezekiel: "When a righteous man turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and dieth in them; for his iniquity that he hath done shall he die." Eze. 18:26. In this text we have the same truth stated as in Rom. 6:23, namely, that death is the punishment of sin. Here, too, the distinction is clearly made between the first death, which is the common lot of all men, and the second death, the wages of sin; but in both texts death is declared to be the punishment, and nowhere does that term mean eternal life in misery.

Mr. Henson deplores "the tendency to humanize everything" and "to regard depravity as a disease, and the sinner as one to be pitied rather than punished." He says: "It is one of the evils of the day that the advance of modern thought and the resulting skepticism has shamed people into believing hell to be a relic of superstition." And the hell of the popular theology of a half century ago is a relic of the worst kind of superstition. It is perverted truth—perverted till it contains only a single element of truth, namely, the idea of punishment after death, or, rather, after its resurrection.