The fire of God's anger...

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Preface

This book is a series of Bible studies, from a newpoint of view, of the burning question of future punishment. Its author has served for many years in the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. No other church stands more in need of a free discussion of the vital questions raised in this volume. He has herein asserted, both for himself and for his brethren, the right to inquire into matters about which he knows many of the ministers and members of that church are profoundly exercised, but concerning which many of them believe they are bound to keep silent. He cannot, for a moment, accept that low idea of the church which makes it a merely voluntary association, formed in the interests of a certain system of doctrine. It is a living body, formed for growth in knowledge and purity. And to such increase each member is bound to contribute as God may give him light and opportunity. This carries with it the right, and just at this time of excited interest on this subject imposes the duty, to reverently investigate the matters treated of in this volume. The author can render no higher service to his own church than to assert within her, and for her, this principle of liberty.

These pages are prepared also in the interest of that large class of Christians in all churches who believe the Bible to be the Word of God, and yet whose loyalty to it is put to a painful test by their inability to reconcile

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its teachings about future punishment with what they have learned from its pages, and from their own enlightened convictions, of the character of God. A church, which builds hospitals for the sick, and retreats for the aged and the poor and the insane, which seeks to carry Christ's consolation to men of every class, maimed and wounded in this battle of life, which carries His gospel to the sons of want on heathen shores, and which grows into the life of Christ by so doing, cannot long remain content with a view of His redeeming work which makes death the limit of it, and which estops her from any further priestly ministry toward the ignorant and the outcast beyond the grave. In the present bewilderment of the church upon this subject, this book shows that a perfectly satisfactory solution is to be found in the Scriptures themselves by those who search for it. Two fatal misconceptions have thus far prevented her from perceiving it.

i. She has interpreted the Scripture teaching concerning final judgment as relating chiefly to a remote assize to be held after a general resurrection of the dead Whereas Jesus was careful to teach His disciples that He would enter upon His office as Judge of the world before that generation passed away.

2. She has therefore misconceived the place and meaning of resurrection in the divine economy, as the gracious provision of another life to those who must suffer the wages of sin under that judgment. That which was meant to be a boon, the purchase of the ransom given for all, has been perverted into an untold curse to all who have died unsaved in this life, — the prelude to an aggra-

Preface. v

vated retribution and endless despair. This monstrous mistake concerning the purpose of God in raising the dead has vitiated the eschatology of the church for fifteen centuries. It has drawn a mask over His face, and blinded men to the knowledge of the only true God and of Jesus Christ, whom He has sent.

This mistake has largely arisen from the attempt to fix a meaning upon the words of Christ concerning the punishment of the wicked without a previous study of the Old Testament conceptions out of which this teaching grew, and upon which it was based.

This book carries its readers back to this beginning, and invites them to proceed from it to the study of this whole subject of man's destiny, of God's great plan of grace, and of the church's priestly calling under it. It finds in the principle that resurrection is redemptive the key to the mysteries of this subject. With this in hand, we are enabled to give proper place to the Scriptureteaching about the punishment of sin, in that it makes the death-state, or sheol, to be essentially penal, deepened and prolonged according to the intensity of evil character; and in that it makes resurrection a process of sorting and judgment as well as of deliverance. It thus presents a doctrine of retribution in harmony with the laws of life, as well as with the Word of God, and so erects a barrier against that crude universalism which has come in as a reaction against the old creed-doctrine of hell, and which tendis to weaken the bonds of human society by concealing from men their accountability to God. And yet, on the other hand, it makes room for the larger hope, which has made for itself a lasting place vi Preface.

in the convictions of enlightened Christians. But it locates this hope in the only place where Scripture gives it warrant. It insists that sinful men must first serve out their death-sentence, and be restored to the life and estate of manhood through resurrection, before they can be amenable to the discipline of the gospel, and capable of winning the prize it sets before them. If there be any probation in Hades, it can only be a probation for resurrection. After that, men who died in ignorance of this great salvation may have their opportunity to win it. The superiority of this scriptural doctrine of the larger hope over that now known as the Andover view, lies in the fact that it preserves undiminished the Scripture warnings of the present peril which overhangs men who die in their sins. It makes no room for intervention in their behalf, until after the righteousness of God is fully vindicated in their punishment, and the sentence of His law executed. Beyond this His grace has provided to again take up their case in the only way possible — through their resurrection from the dead.

It will be seen also that this doctrine of redemption through resurrection, of which a chosen seed are the first recipients, and which proceeds from them in wider circles until all the families of the earth are reached, is in accord with those organic principles which underlie the constitution of the human race, and by which it is seen to be something besides an aggregation of individuals. The laws of race-life and the laws of heredity all receive new meaning from it.

A want of the proper view of human destiny, and of the calling of the church in relation to the mass of man-

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kind, out of which she is an election, has been a most fruitful cause of her debasement and division. A true knowledge of the goal towards whieh we are all tending, would be a most powerful means of drawing into the unity of the faith her scattered bands. These pages are now sent forth with the conviction that they contain that truth which the church especially needs in this day to reconcile the conflicting views of human destiny by which she is distracted and perplexed, and that they will so help her on in that path to unity, which she must tread before the world will believe that the Father sent the Son to be its Saviour, and before she can fulfil her high mission in the future as the chosen vehicle of His Life and blessing to all mankind.

Chapter I. Introductory

Very many persons are reluctant to admit the right to enter upon such investigations as we now propose. In their view whatever is generally accepted by the church as true and as taught in Scripture, and to which she has given formal sanction in her public standards, should be regarded as settled. And he who would reopen such questions is looked upon as a troubler in Israel.

Such persons, however, need to be reminded that, in ill that pertains to The Last Things, there is very wide diversity in the beliefs and the teachings of the best and snost enlightened Christians. Every church is compelled to allow great liberty here, because of the obscurity of the subject and the confessed inability of even herwisest teachers to grasp it. Moreover, we have no right to assume that any interpretation of these subjects is, of necessity, correct, because it has been long and widely received. The whole history of the professed people of God proves that they have long and repeatedly acquiesced in the gravest errors, and enforced as orthodox the most meagre and mistaken opinions. The generation of Jews in our Lord's time had been carefully instructed in the Old Testament Scriptures. And yet all the orthodox conceptions of the Messiah's office were painfully wrong.

The whole synagogue were blind to the most important features of His redeeming work, and especially failed to see how the Scriptures taught that He must needs suffer and be killed, and the third day rise again. If the Lord has thus allowed whole generations of His people to misconceive important features of His revealed Word, He may, for some wise purpose, do this again. In view of this past history of Israel, and of similar blindnesses which have come upon the church during the centuries of her experience, how can any one affirm that she may not be mistaken about many things pertaining to the future of which she seems most confident ?

It is often said that the Bible is a plain book addressed to plain people. And therefore the common understanding of what it teaches concerning any great matter of doctrine must be correct. And yet these w common understandings " of men have been most faulty in the past. They may be so now. They will be necessarily so unless these prevalent judgments are of a higher order than those which are merely literal or logical. They must be spiritual. Truths may be so stated in the Word of God as that the mere literalist, or the man of mere intellectual insight, shall necessarily mistake. Only he that is spiritual judgeth all things. Moreover, the church will be almost sure to err if she assumes that she "knoweth anything yet as she ought to know." (i Cor. viii. 2.) So long as she notoriously fails to realize that unity for which her Lord prayed, and which was to be the witness to the world of His divine mission, so long all her conceptions of His truth must be partial. A fragmentary church is but a broken vessel, unfit to contain either the divine life or the divine knowledge in its fullness. The Holy Spirit was given to illumine the One body of the One Lord. It is only with all saints that we

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can comprehend the love which passeth knowledge. If even an inspired apostle could say, " For we know in part and prophesy in part," surely these marred and broken sections of the church cannot be too humble in their claims. The church's divided state is prima facie proof of her imperfect knowledge of God's word. She is therefore bound to refuse the assumption that she has nothing more to learn, and to hold herself open to receive light from whatever quarter it may come. Indeed, her constant prayer should be for a deeper understanding of the mystery of Christ, in which are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge. And instead of frowning upon any of her children who may reverently believe that God has given him a revelation for the common benefit, she should "despise not prophesyings." She must indeed " try the spirits ; because many false prophets have gone out into the world." And yet she cannot be too careful lest, by her harsh tests and her servile adherence to preconceived opinions, she stifle within her the voice of that Spirit whose office it is to guide her into all truth and show her things to come. And just as it was true of the first disciples that there were many things He should hereafter show them because they could not bear them then, so it has been always true that God has caused new light to break forth from His Word as men have been prepared to receive it. There are secret things there which have been brought to light in His good time, and there are yet other things tt to be testified in due time." (i Tim. ii. 6.)

Moreover, it would be strange indeed if there were no new light to be expected from the book of God's works upon dark places in. His Word. Both are from the same hand. The wonderful progress made in these last days in the study of nature, however much it may have been marred by the natural blindness and conceit of men, has certainly given us a larger knowledge of the great plans of its Author. And this knowledge cannot but be useful in aiding us to a broader and better understanding of His Word, in which these plans are more fully outlined.

The writer has a firm conviction that there are two great facts of Scripture which must be made the centres of far wider circles of truth than we have yet grouped around them. These are the facts of judgment for sin, and of Redemption through resurrection. He is also persuaded that the times are ripe for, and the church is earnestly crying out for, some such restatement oi these great mysteries as shall harmonize them with all that she has learned of the condition of man and of the character of God.

And he enters this field of inquiry not to criticize or to dogmatize, but as an humble seeker after truth, hoping, if he fail to find it, that he may at least point out a path along which it may be sought, and which leads out of our present twilight toward the sun-rising.

Chapter II. The True Method Of Inquiry

The church doctrine* of future punishment is wholly drawn from the New Testament. A glance at any of its Confessions or Manuals of Theology will show that all the proof texts, whose support is of any value, are taken from this part of Scripture. The Old Testament economy, through the whole period of its history, a period longer than the Christian dispensation, was carried on without any clear revelation to men of their liability to an everlasting punishment in hell after death. The first five books, in which the principles of this divine economy are fully set forth and its laws and ordinances fixed, are silent as to this point. They contain much concerning God's purposes toward mankind. They reveal Him most plainly as the Righteous One, before the consuming fire of whose anger the wicked are destroyed. But there is no threat of their never-ending torment in hell after death. We find then that, when God was revealing to men such truth about Himself and His relation to mankind as was to be the basis of their moral discipline, and of their worship and obedience for centuries, He gave them no clear warning of such tremendous doom. Nor did the Psalms and Prophets supply this defect. Not a single passage in these later Scriptures would be suspected of teaching this doctrine, did not the reflected light of certain passages in the New Testament seem to invest them with this meaning.

* By '« church doctrine " is meant the doctrine set forth in the accepted standards, as, e. g. the Westminster Confession, chaps, xxxii. and xxxiii.

The three principal proof-texts quoted from the Old Testament in its support are :

1. Daniel xii : 2, which seems to assert the resurrection of some who sleep in the dust of the earth to shame and everlasting contempt. Tregelles (on Daniel pp. 162-167) makes it probable that it is tlie unawakened sleepers, not resurrected, who are left to shame and contempt as captives in the realms of death. The same view is ably maintained by Dr. N. West in a recent number of the Fresbyterian Review, in an exhaustive criticism upon the passage.

2. Isaiah (xxxiii: 14) asks the question, "Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings ?" in which the answer is pre-supposed that none shall be able to dwell with such devouring fire, unless it be the righteous, of whom the next verses speak.

3. Isaiah lxvi: 24, gives a vision of the dead carcasses of transgressors, whose corruption cannot be arrested, nor can the fire that consumes them be quenched. Similar Old Testament uses of the term "unquenchable fire" occur in Jeremiah xvii: 27; xxi: 12.

We refer to these three passages, however, not for the purpose of advocating any special interpretation of them, but in order to show how doubtful and slender a support is given in even these strongest Old Testament passages to a doctrine of such tremendous weight as the endless torment in hell of all who die in their sins. They confirm what we have said that this is not a plain doctrine of the Old Testament. And yet from all we know of the character of God we should suppose that, if true, He would not have left His chosen people, nor mankind at large for so many generations, in ignorance of it.

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And this brings us to remark upon the defective method by which this doctrine has been drawn from the Bible. It has been taken from one portion of it. Men have believed it to be clearly taught in the New Testament. And so they have forced the Old Testament to yield it some support. We cannot, of course, affirm that God might not have concealed this doctrine from the men of past ages, bringing it out at a later age through Him who spake as never man spake. We must affirm, however, that this is highly improbable. It is strangely unlike our God. All other great truths of such immense importance to mankind, the sacrificial death of Christ, His resurrection and the consequent resurrection of all men, the restitution of all things, *were spoken of, at least darkly, by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began. We understand them, as revealed in the New Testament, because they were all typically and germinally revealed in the Old. Nor is the Old Testament silent upon the great features of human destiny. God's wrath against sin, and the final outcome of His dealings with men and with nations on account of it, stand out luminous upon its pages. The doctrine of future judgment, the awards of life and death, reaching by implication far beyond the bounds of time, the tests of character to which all men should be brought under the Messiah's reign, and the final subjection to it of all men and of all things in heaven and on earth, — the Old Testament pages glow with these themes of living interest.

And hence we are right in insisting that the church has pursued a wrong method in making up her doctrine concerning the final destiny of men.

She has first fixed her faith from the New Testament and then inquired what support she could find for it in the Old. This process should have been reversed. She should have first inquired what God had been teaching for four thousand years concerning the great problems of man's duty and destiny. And then she might have come with a truer intelligence to the interpretation of the later revelation. We are in no proper mood to understand these "hard sayings'' of Jesus unless we first "know the Scriptures." They were spoken to men who had been taught from these Scriptures all their lives and who were yet strangely blind to their meaning. They pre-supposethis previous revelation. They were never meant to be understood apart from it. They were surely not meant to annul or supersede it. We are unprepared, therefore, to advance to their interpretation before we have made ourselves familiar with that body of truth upon which they are grafted.

There must be falseness somewhere in a method which leads men to imagine that the words which fell from the lips of Jesus are less gracious than those which God spake unto the fathers by the prophets. We have been compelled to assume that the more fully God has revealed Himself the less is He seen to be Love.

We have formed a portrait of Him on the canvass of our narrow exegesis and with the hard drawn lines of our pitiless logic, until even good men have revolted from the image as if our God were a fiend.

This treatise is an attempt to study this deep subject along the lines of what we have indicated as the only true method. We shall first seek to ascertain what the Old

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Scriptures, to which Jesus and His apostles constantly appealed as the source of all their teaching, have to say upon the dark problems of human destiny. And then we shall advance to the interpretation of New Testament teaching by the light thus derived.

We know of no recent attempts to solve this great question in which this method is pursued. Canon Farrar's " Eternal Hope" gives us much that is bright and comforting on one side of this question. His discussion is able and learned and throws much light upon the meaning of special texts. But it is unsatisfactory, in failing to lay down a broad Scriptural basis upon which to rest this hope. The same may be said of his more recent book, " Mercy and Judgment." Dr. Pusey, on the other side, in his able inquiry, u What is of faith as to everlasting punishment?" has linked together a surprising catena of proof-passages from Apocryphal and Rabbinical writers and from the Christian fathers, but he has not told us what the Old Testament prophets believed. They are the only " Fathers" who can speak to us with authority upon this matter. Jesus placed His divine seal upon their teaching. We are therefore right in demanding that, before we decide upon the meaning of His teaching concerning human destiny, we examine what is revealed about it In the law and prophets which He came not to set aside, but to fulfill.

Chapter III. The Song Of Moses

(Deut. xxxii.)

If any passage of Scripture deserves to be regarded as a key to the whole, it is this passage. It was spoken at a most important period in Israel's history. Their wanderings and long chastisement in the desert were now over and they stood upon the borders of the promised land. Moses had reviewed for them this history and enforced its solemn lessons. He had recited again the law, with its blessings and curses, and entreated them by these weighty sanctions to obey it. And yet he foresaw that they would disobey and that this long catalogue of evils would be visited upon them.

About to be removed from them by death, the Lord commands him to speak this song in their ears and to write it out as a testimony against them.

The passage is a vindication and a prophecy. It surveys the past and gazes far down into the future. It hints at God's deep designs in allowing these failures of His people and in their subsequent chastisements. It foreshadows the calling of the Gentiles. It speaks of a. series of revenges upon the enemies who had wrought the ruin of His people and provoked His anger, and ends by summoning the nations to rejoice with His people in the mercy with which this long history of sin and of suffering should close.

Let us now examine minutely what this song teaches

concerning the wages of sin; concerning judgment and

retribution, and concerning redemption and resurrection, and the final outcome of this deep problem of the world and of man.

1. The importance of the matters which make up the substance of this song is such that Heaven and Earth are invited to hear it.

" Give ear, O ye Heavens, and I will speak ; and hear, O Earth, the words of my mouth. My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb and as the showers upon the grass." (vs. 1-2.)

Even the song of judgment is for the refreshment and growth of those who hear it.

2. The subject of the song is declared.

11 Because I will publish the name of the Lord : ascribe- ye greatness unto our God. He is the Rock, His work is perfect : for all His ways are judgment ; a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is He." (vs. 3-4.)

The strain of these verses is the one which is taken up in " the Song of Moses the servant of God, and the Song of the Lamb.'' (Rev. xv. 3, 4). The subject of this Song is the same as of that, only the redemption phase comes out more brightly in that song of victory. The Song in the Revelation contains but two verses, and these are drawn from the beginning and the ending of this Song of Moses. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the Song of Moses referred to in the Revelation is not the one He sang after the passage of the Red Sea (Ex. xv.), but this Song of Judgment, which was spoken under such impressive circumstances just before his death.

3. It asserts the wickedness and ingratitude of the chosen people and recounts their mercies and apostasies.

" They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of His children : they are a perverse and crooked generation. Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise ? Is not He thy Father that hath bought thee ? hath He not made thee and established thee ?

u Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations : ask thy father and he will shew thee ; thy elders, and they will tell thee. When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the Lord's portion is His people ; Jacob is the lot of His inheritance. He found him in a desert land, in a waste howling wilderness; He led him about ; He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings ; so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with ,him. He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that he might eat the increase of the fields ; and He made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock ; butter of kine and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat ; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape.

u But Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked ; thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness ; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation. They provoked Him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations provoked they Him to anger. They sacrificed unto devils, not to God ; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not. Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee." (Vs. 5-18.)

Observe here that, behind the forms and forces of nature worshiped as gods, there were demoniac powers, the real recipients of this homage. "They sacrificed unto devils."

4. It declares the Lord's abhorrence of their sins, their consequent rejection, and the calling out from the Gentiles of a new people.

11 And when the Lord saw it, He abhorred them, because of the provoking of his sons and of his daughters. And He said, I will hide my face from them, I will see what their end shall be : for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith. They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God ; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people ; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation." (Vs. 19-21.)

Their rejection, however, would not be final. So St. Paul affirms in the eleventh chapter of Romans, after his quotation of the last verse of the above passage at the close of the tenth.

5. It affirms that the Lord's anger, which must burn against them on account of their sins, must burn also to the final destruction of this world system under which this depravity in His people had been developed.

" For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains." Verse 22.

Here occurs the first mention in Scripture of the fire of Hell. It is represented as burning down to the regions of the dead, and to the very foundations of this natural order, as if it were the source of that corruption which had come upon His people.