p. 309 | Sin’s Pay-Day by Le Roy E. Froom

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 26, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 20.

Sin’s Pay-Day

By Le Roy E. Froom

The Broad Way Ends in Night

By LE ROY E. FROOM

THERE are but two pathways for the travelers of earth. One is the broad, easy way that leads to destruction; the other, the narrow, upward way that leads to life everlasting. We are traveling in one of these two pathways, and our destiny is determined by the road we take.

THE STAIN OF SIN TO BE FOUND

Eternal life and eternal death are set before us by the living God. No provision has been made for eternal blasphemy against His holy name. His divine plan for the universe, though delayed for a time by the uninvited entrance of sin, will be carried out in His own good time and way. The stain of sin will be removed. Divine justice will be satisfied, and God’s “will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

THE WAGES OF SIN

“The wages of sin is death,” not eternal life in torment. The most horrible doctrine ever conceived in the mind of man or demon is that of eternal torment of the wicked. Satan is responsible for such a God-dishonoring doctrine. The joys of heaven would be blighted by the piteous wails of our lost loved ones pleading, throughout the ceaseless cycles of eternity, for a drop of water to quench their burning thirst.

“God is love.” And if, though He beseeches men to turn and live, yet they willfully choose to walk in rebellion against Him, He will do the most merciful thing a just, loving God can do. He will “utterly destroy them,” “burn them up,” reduce them to “ashes,” cause them “to be as though they had not been.”

DESTINY OF DEMONS AND OF WICKED MEN

So speaks the Scripture of the final doom of demons and of wicked men. They will be burned with “unquenchable fire.” This term refers to intensity, and not to duration. The fire is “unquenchable” because it can not be put out, or quenched, so long as there is anything for it to burn. The wicked will always remain dead. Therefore the punishment, which ends in complete destruction, will be “everlasting.”

The agonies of the lake of fire will come to an end, but that end will be the blackness of eternal night. Such is the final ending of the broad and easy way on sin’s pay-day.