On Eternity

Eternity, to the godly, is a day that has no sunset.  Eternity, to the wicked, is a night that has no sunrise. – Thomas Watson (1620-1686)

 

On Future Punishment

There is a deep-seated unbelief among Christians, just now, about the eternity of future punishment.  It is not outspoken, in many cases, but it is whispered.  It frequently assumes the shape of a spirit of benevolent desire that the doctrine may be disproved.  I fear that, at the bottom of all this, there is a rebellion against the dread sovereignty of God.  There is a suspicion that sin is not, after all, so bad a thing as we have dreamed.  There is an apology – or a lurking wish – to apologize for sinners, who are looked upon, rather, as objects of pity than as objects of indignation and really deserving of the condign punishment which they have willfully brought upon themselves.  I am afraid it is the old nature in us putting on the specious garb of charity which, thus, leads us to discredit a fact which is as certain as the happiness of believers.  Shake the foundations upon which the eternity of hell rests and you have shaken heaven’s eternity, too. – Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892), from a sermon on Genesis 19.27-28 preached on November 20, 1864

 

Samuel Johnson on the Eternal State

While Johnson and I stood in calm conference by ourselves in Dr. Taylor’s garden, at a pretty late hour in a serene autumn night, looking up to the heavens, I directed the discourse to the subject of a future state.  My friend was in a placid and most benignant frame.  “Sir, (said he,) I do not imagine that all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually.”

I ventured to ask him whether, although the words of some texts of Scripture seemed in strong support of the dreadful doctrine of an eternity of punishment, we might not hope that the denunciation was figurative and would not be literally executed.  JOHNSON.  “Sir, you are to consider the intention of punishment in a future state.  We have no reason to be sure that we shall, then, be no longer liable to offend against God.  We do not know that even the angels are quite in a state of security; nay, we know that some of them have fallen.  It may, therefore, perhaps be necessary, in order to preserve both men and angels in a state of rectitude, that they should have, continually before them, the punishment of those who have deviated from it; but, we may hope that, by some other means, a fall from rectitude may be prevented.  Some of the texts of Scripture upon this subject are, as you observe, indeed strong; but they may admit of a mitigated interpretation.”

He talked to me upon this aweful and delicate question in a gentle tone, and as if afraid to be decisive.

From: Boswell’s Life of Johnson; reprint; 2-volumes-in-1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 2:153.  Conversation of September 23, 1777.  Originally published in 1791.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the great English lexicographer, biographer, poet, playwright, novelist, raconteur, and public intellectual.

James Boswell (1740-1795) was a Scottish attorney, travel writer and, most famously, the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson.

 

A Warning to Sinners

What is needed today is a scriptural setting forth of the character of God – His absolute sovereignty, His ineffable holiness, His inflexible justice, His unchanging veracity.  What is needed today is a scriptural setting forth of the condition of the natural man – his total depravity, his spiritual insensibility, his inveterate hostility to God, the fact that he is condemned already and that the wrath of a sin-hating God is, even now, abiding upon him.  What is needed today is a scriptural setting forth of the alarming danger in which sinners are – the indescribably awful doom which awaits them, the fact that, if they follow only a little further their present course, they shall, most certainly, suffer the due reward of their iniquities.  What is needed today is a scriptural setting forth of the nature of that punishment which awaits the lost – the awfulness of it, the hopelessness of it, the unendurableness of it, the endlessness of it. – Arthur W. Pink (1886-1952)