Our Lord in his account of the final judgment says, that the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.
The sufferings of the finally impenitent, according to the Scriptures, arise: (1.) From the loss of all earthly good. (2.) From exclusion from the presence and favour of God. (3.) From utter reprobation, or the final withdrawal from them of the Holy Spirit. (4.) From the consequent unrestrained dominion of sin and sinful passions. (5.) From the operations of conscience. (6.) From despair. (7.) From their evil associates. (8.) From their external circumstances; that is, future suffering is not exclusively the natural consequences of sin, but also includes positive inflictions. (9.) From their perpetuity.
There seems to be no more reason for supposing that the fire spoken of in Scripture is to be literal fire, than that the worm that never dies is literally a worm. The devil and his angels who are to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, and whose doom the finally impenitent are to share, have no material bodies to be acted upon by elemental fire. As there are to be degrees in the glory and blessedness of heaven, as our Lord teaches us in the parable of the ten talents, so there will be differences as to degree in the sufferings of the lost: some will be beaten with few stripes, some with many.
The Duration of Future Punishment.
On this subject the following opinions have been held: —
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It is assumed that the design of punishment is reformation, and that it is effective to that end. The time will, therefore, come when all sinful creatures, whether men or angels, shall be purged from all corruption, and restored to the image and favour of God. This was the doctrine of Origen in the early Church. Other restorationists rest their hope of the ultimate salvation of all men, not on the purifying effect of suffering, but on the efficacy of the death of Christ. If He died for all, they infer, all will be saved.
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Others hold that future punishment is only hypothetically everlasting. That is, the wicked will suffer forever if they continue to sin forever. But, if the Spirit continues to strive with men m the world to come, or, as others believe, if plenary ability belongs to the very nature of a rational creature, then we may assume that some, perhaps many, perhaps all, in the course of ages, will repent and turn unto God and live.
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Others again teach that the sufferings of the impenitent are only relatively endless; that is, it will forever be true that their condition will be inferior to what it would have been had they been better men.
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Others hold that the life promised to the righteous is immortality, and that the death threatened against the wicked is the extinction of life, or, the cessation of conscious existence. The soul will die in the future world, just as the body dies here. It ceases to act; it ceases to feel; it ceases to be. This death of the soul is called eternal, because life is never to be restored. The punishment of the wicked is, therefore, in a sense, everlasting. It is a final and everlasting forfeiture of all good. Thus Cicero1 calls death “sempiternum malum,” and Lucretius2 speaks of a “mors immortalis.” This second death may be very painful and protracted. The finally impenitent, may, and doubtless will, suffer for a longer or shorter period, and to a less or greater degree, before the final extinction of their being. And thus there shall be a future retribution, answering all the ends of justice.3
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The common doctrine is, that the conscious existence of the soul after the death of the body is unending; that there is no repentance or reformation in the future world; that those who depart this life unreconciled to God, remain forever in this state of alienation, and therefore are forever sinful and miserable. This is the doctrine of the whole Christian Church, of the Greeks, of the Latins, and of all the great historical Protestant bodies.
It is obvious that this is a question which can be decided only by divine revelation. No one can reasonably presume to decide how long the wicked are to suffer for their sins upon any general principles of right and wrong. The conditions of the problem are not within our grasp. What the infinitely wise and good God may see fit to do with his creatures; or what the exigencies of a government embracing the whole universe and continuing throughout eternal ages, may demand, it is not for such worms of the dust as we are, to determine. If we believe the Bible to be the Word of God, all we have to do is to ascertain what it teaches on this subject, and humbly submit.