A Biblical Description of the Extent of Sin

Even the fire of hell through eternity will not take away the stain of sin in the souls there.

That how dreadfully, eternally, deep our sin is, Against a Trice-Holy, Eternal God.


This pollution spreads, like leaven and leprosy. It is universal, and has defiled all the faculties of the inner man, so that there is "no soundness in it" (Isa. 1:6).


Refusal to consider fallen man’s condition helps no one.

Until we are brought to realize this truth
we shall never despair of self
and look away to Another.

Biblical Description of Sin

No representations of sin are more common in the Scriptures than those taken from its defiling effects.

Throughout it is portrayed as ugly and revolting, unclean and disgusting.

Sin is pictured by leprosy, the most loathsome disease which can attack the human frame.

It is likened to wounds, bruises and putrefying sores.

It is compared to a cage of unclean birds.

The inseparable connection of the beautiful and good and the ugly and sinful pervades the moral teaching of both Testaments. That connection is ethical and not aesthetic.

To reverse the order would be to reduce righteousness to a matter of taste, and to regulate authority according to its appeal to our sentiments.

As someone has said, the aesthetic sentiment is a reflection from the moral sphere, a transfer to our senses of those perceptions found in their purity only in the realm of the spiritual and divine.

Sin is really and originally all that is ugly; nothing else is ugly except as a result of its connection with sin.

The ugliness which it creates is its own blot. It has deranged the whole structure of the soul, and morally ulcerated man from head to foot.

"We are all as an unclean thing" (Isa. 64:6).

Thus God’s Word describes us: foul and filthy. That pollution is deep and unmistakable, likened to crimson dye (Isa. 1:18),
or to the blackness of the Ethiopian (Jer. 13:23),

which cannot be washed away by the niter of positive thinking or the soap of reformation (Jer. 2:22).

It is an indelible pollution, for it is
"written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of ... [the] heart" (Jer. 17:1).

The great deluge did not wash it from the earth, nor did the fire that came down upon Sodom burn it out. It is ineradicable.

Even the fire of hell through eternity will not take away the stain of sin in the souls there.

This pollution spreads, like leaven and leprosy. It is universal, and has defiled all the faculties of the inner man, so that there is "no soundness in it" (Isa. 1:6).

Soul and body alike are contaminated,
for we read of the

"filthiness of the flesh and spirit" (II Cor. 7:1).

It extends to the thoughts and imaginations,

as well as to words and deeds.

It is malignant and deadly, "the poison of asps"
(Rom. 3:13).

"I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live" (Ezek. 16:6).

The doubling of that expression
shows the deadly nature of the pollution.

Sin is as loathsome as it is criminal; it is like a foul stench in the nostrils of the Lord.

Thus the day man corrupted himself, his Maker could no longer endure him, but drove him out of the garden (Gen. 3:24).

The Scriptures liken man to foxes for their subtlety,
to wild bulls for their intractableness,
to briers and thorns for their hurtfulness,
to pigs for their greediness and filthiness,
to bears and lions for their cruelty and bloodthirstiness, to serpents for their hatefulness.

However unpleasant and forbidding this subject,
it is an integral part of "the counsel of God"
which His ministers are not at liberty to withhold.

They are not free to pick and choose their themes, still less to tone them down. Rather each one is told by his Master, "Speak unto them all that I commanded thee: be not dismayed at their faces" (Jer. 1:17).

Asylums, prisons and cemeteries are depressing sights, yet they are painful facts of human history.

Refusal to consider fallen man’s condition helps no one.

Until we are brought to realize this truth
we shall never despair of self and look away to Another.

This solemn side of the picture is indeed dark,
yet it is the necessary background to redemption

 

From SIMMONS- THE PRESENT STATE OF THE DEAD

The fact that the wicked dead are yet to be judged and cast into the lake of fire does not prove that they are now non-existent.

It has pleased God to confine the spirits of the wicked dead in prison (Isa. 24:22; 1 Pet. 3:19), finally to bring them forth and consign them altogether to the lake of fire (Rev. 20:11-15).

But that the wicked dead are already in conscious fiery torment we have previously shown (Luke 16:19-31; Jude 7).

The final misery of the wicked, like the final bliss of the righteous, awaits the resurrection of the body; at which time the wicked will be cast, both body and soul, into Hell (Matt. 10:28).

...


III. THE FINAL PUNISHMENT OF THE WICKED


1. IT WILL BE ETERNAL


Matt. 25:41; Rev. 14:11. The plain meaning of these passages is that the punishment of the wicked will be endless.


2. IT WILL CONSIST OF CONSCIOUS SUFFERING


In the last Scripture given above we are told that the wicked shall "have no rest day nor night." That involves conscious suffering. It is contended by some that the final punishment of the wicked will consist only of annihilation. The foregoing passage denies this. Nevertheless we shall examine the grounds of this contention. They are:


(1) Mal. 4:1-3.


This passage refers only to the physical destruction of the wicked just previous to the setting up of the millennial kingdom.


This passage, in substance, is parallel with Isa. 24:17-22; 26:20, 21; 34:1, 2; 66:15, 16, 24; Zech. 14:12-15; Matt. 25:41-46; 2 Pet. 3:7. This destruction will take place in connection with the battle of Armageddon. But there is here no annihilation. This is plain from Isa. 24:22 and 66:24.


(2) The description of this punishment as the "second death."


The "second death" corresponds to the death of the race in Adam, and not to physical death. By this death man was unfitted for God's fellowship and brought under the wrath of God, but was not put beyond hope or the reach of God. The "second death" brings the execution of the wrath of God through "the continuation of spiritual death in another and timeless existence" (E. G. Robinson); a complete banishment from God's presence.


Thus the "second death" no more implies non-existence than does the sinner's present state of spiritual death. Mark 9:48, 49 shows clearly that the wicked in Gehenna retain conscious existence. "Salted with fire" may mean that the fire will have a preserving quality like salt.


(3) The declaration that unbelievers are to perish.


Luke 13:3; Acts 8:20; 1 Cor. 1:18. But that this perishing does not denote annihilation is proved by the fact that the Greek word in Acts 8:20 is the same word used to describe the perdition of the Beast (Rev. 17:8), and we find that the Beast is still in the lake of fire a thousand years later (Rev. 20:10). An annihilated being can never afterward be anywhere. The Greek word in the other two passages is the same word used for "lost" in Matt. 10:6; Luke 15:24; 19:10; 2 Cor. 4.3, where annihilation can not be the meaning.


(4) The representation of the final punishment of the wicked as destruction.


Rom. 9:22; 2 Thess. 1:9. The Greek word in Rom. 9:22 is the same as the one for perdition in Rev. 17:8, which does not express annihilation, as we have just pointed out above. And the Greek word in 2 Thess. 1:9 is the same as the one used for the destruction of the carnal nature in 1 Cor. 5:5; and we know that the carnal nature is not annihilated in this life.


Finally, the fact that there are to be degrees of punishment, because of which it will be "more tolerable" for some than for others (Matt. 11:20-24), shows that the final punishment of the sinner is not annihilation; for in such a case all sinners would suffer the same penalty, and it would be nonsense to speak of annihilation as being more tolerable for some than for others.


(5) The scriptural representation of immortality as something to be sought by man (Rom. 2:7), revealed by the gospel (2 Tim. 1:10), and attained only in the resurrection of the righteous (1 Cor. 15:54, 55).


See discussion of these passages in chapter on The Present State of the Dead.


3. IT WILL BE ACCORDING TO THEIR DESERT


Matt. 11:21-24; Luke 12:47, 48; Rom. 2:6, 12; Rev. 20:13. These passages teach that there will be degrees of punishment based on the light possessed by the individual and according to his deeds.