Will the people of Sodom and Gomorrah who suffered the vengeance of eternal fire be brought into judgment at the last day?
J. H. A.
The judgments of God upon cities and nations thruout all the past are, first of all, temporary to the cities and nations as such, upon the community, upon the aggregate. All of them are more or less typical of the great judgments of God of the future. The destruction and affliction suffered by those who are counted with them in these judgments are not those which come to them directly for their particular sins, but because they are identified with the city, or the nation. Out of Sodom God called Lot, and he followed. It was possible for all Lot's relatives to have come out, and all the other Sodomites, had they believed God; but the time had come when the influence of that city must be blotted from the earth, and those who perished there chose to identify themselves with that city in its destruction. There will come a time when the graves will give up their dead. There shall be a resurrection, both of the just, and of the unjust, and in that resurrection will be the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The expression "suffering the vengeance of eternal fire" has to do with the city as a whole. It occurs in Jude 7. The apostle there tells us that the destruction of these cities is "set forth as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire." Peter tells us in his second epistle, second chapter, sixth verse, that this eternal fire turned "the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that live ungodly." The "eternal fire" is used not in the sense of forever burning, but eternal in its effects. That fire is not now burning. The Dead Sea rolls its heavy waters over the place where the proud cities of the plain once stood.