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There is a most ominous development unfolding before our eyes in today's evangelical
church. I am speaking of the growing popularity of "annihilationism," the
viewpoint that denies eternal punishment and substitutes for it the extinction of the
unbeliever's existence. Instead of positive punishment, such as the Christian church has
always understood hell to be, annihilationists maintain that those who are not saved will
simply cease to exist after the judgment day. The view comes in various forms but all of
them have in common the denial of a continued existence of the wicked and of their
positive punishment. Their doom is that they cease to exist at all.
That view has always had its advocates on the fringes of Christian thought and has been
particularly popular in modern times among the cults. It is the view, for example of both
the Jehovah's witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists. But it has not been a doctrine
accepted in mainstream Bible-believing Christianity. In our day however, its advocates are
sprouting up everywhere. Important evangelical publishers are issuing books teaching it.
Prominent scholars are lending their names to it. Philip Hughes, long-time professor at
Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, in a book published after his death,
argued for annihilationism. So has Clark Pinnock, the one-time associate of Francis
Schaeffer and L'abri. So now has the honored father of English evangelicalism, John Stott,
though it should be said he has only given the position a qualified endorsement. In other
words, He favors it, but without dogmatism.
This is, I believe we should all think, a worrying development. It shows, I believe, a
failure of nerve. At every point at which the world today is scandalized by the Christian
faith, more and more Christians seem willing, even determined, to accommodate the faith to
the world's tastes, to change Christian teaching so that it will be more acceptable to the
world. On gender many of the same people are abandoning the teaching of Holy Scripture
under pressure from an increasingly feminist culture. On sexuality we see the same thing
happening now. And so with eternal punishment. It is a scandal to the world that God
should punish the wicked. They hate that doctrine and despise those who teach it. We can
understand that, surely. But, is it right for us to abandon the doctrine to please the
world? Is it safe to do so? Is it love to do so, if, in fact, there is a judgment
and punishment for the wicked "day and night for ever and ever" as we read in
Revelation 20:10?
Isn't it interesting that it is always the hard things that we come to feel must not be
true. We have no problem with heaven, it is hell we can't be sure of anymore. The world,
of course, has no problem with heaven, but it hates hell. But surely, any careful observer
of human nature and human behavior knows that we human beings have a terrible problem
believing what we do not want to believe. We find it much more difficult to believe what
we don't want to be true, however true it may be.
You perhaps saw the recent report of a survey of Americans' opinion of themselves. 90%
of business managers rated their performance to be "superior." 86% of employees
rate themselves "better than average." Of high school seniors taking the SAT,
70% considered themselves "above average" in leadership ability. When it came to
getting along with others, 60% of the seniors claimed to be in the top 10%. Of the many
thousands who took the SAT, not a single teenager considered himself or herself below
average in this category. Among divorced couples, 90% insisted that the breakup of the
marriage was their spouse's fault. [World, Feb. 10, 1996]
Should we not be very cautious about overturning a teaching of Holy Scripture that
everyone knows we don't want to be true.
Now the advocates of annihilationism, of course, do not accept that they are simply
giving in to the world or allowing their beliefs to be governed by their wishes. They
argue that, in fact, the Bible teaches their doctrine and not the doctrine of eternal
punishment as the church has thought these thousands of years.
Now, it is conceivable that the church has misread the Bible all this while on this
central subject. But, let us begin with the admission that it is not likely that
the careful, devout, and gifted minds that have, over the centuries, framed the church's
understanding of the teaching of Holy Scripture, have missed its meaning so completely. It
is not likely that the generations of earnest Christians who have read the Bible naively,
believing implicitly what it seems so clearly to say, have been mistaken in their nearly
universal conviction that the Bible warns of eternal punishment for the enemies of God.
But, then, let's consider the case the annihilationists make. What are the arguments
for annihilationism? Well, the main one, really the only serious argument, is that the
words the Bible uses to describe the destiny of the wicked mean extinction and not
continuing positive misery and punishment.
They are speaking of such words as "destruction," "perishing" and
the like. Could it not be that the simple meaning of these words is that the unbelieving
will simply cease to exist? When Jesus says that the broad road leads to destruction,
or when John says that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever
believed in him might not perish, might they not mean that those who do not believe
in Jesus Christ will give up their very existence as their punishment.
One problem with this proposal is that, of course, the Bible does in many places say
what it means by these terms, describes the judgment of the wicked in terms of continuing
torment, misery, loss. Wailing, gnashing of teeth, unquenchable fire, terrible thirst,
torment forever and ever. All of this the Bible says is what it means by destruction or
perishing.
Further, the words themselves are not used in the Bible in such a way as to indicate
that they mean the extinction of existence. Sinners are "cut off," but so was
the Messiah. Same word. Sinners are "destroyed," but so was Israel and so were
the sheep and the coin which were then found in the parables of Luke 15. Unbelievers
"die" but then all sinners are dead already in this world. And so on.
But, this morning I want to draw your attention to a still more fundamental argument
against this new and dangerous fad in Christian thinking. And, in doing so, I want to
remind you of an extraordinarily important and fundamental perspective of Holy Scripture.
The annihilationist believes that when the Scripture speaks of eternal death it means
extinction. But the fact of the matter is, death never means that in the Bible. From
the very beginning death refers to a particular condition of life, a particular
state of human existence. It does not refer to the loss or abolition of existence, but
to a corruption, a spoiling, a degeneration and denaturing of that existence.
And we have the evidence of this already in Genesis 2:17. There, before ever sin
entered the world or death for sin, God threatened man with death should he disobey and
eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. "For when you eat of it, you will
die." More literally, "in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die."
Adam, of course, did do what he had been forbidden to do, and the promised judgment
fell upon him and upon his descendants. Death entered the world. But Adam did not cease to
exist, nor did Cain, nor did any of those who came into the world and remained in the
world under the judgment of God for sin. All who are without Christ, the Bible says, are dead
in transgressions and sins. They are dead already, but they exist, they live in that bare
sense. They breathe, they think, they choose, they feel. But all the while they are dead
on account of their sin and the judgment of God and they will continue in death unless
they are made alive in Christ.
In the context of Genesis and of the entire Bible death is not extinction at all. It is
estrangement from God, it is the darkening of the mind, it is bondage to sin and the
bitter fruits of sin, it is the prospect of the physical destruction of the body and its
separation from the soul, and it is the looming specter of the divine wrath in an unending
future. In other words it is human life that utterly fails now and forever to come into
its full rights as life made in the image of God. It is human life denatured. It is human
life as a moral and spiritual condition of estrangement from God who is the source of all
good and all happiness. It is human existence drained of what makes that existence
wonderful.
As Klaas Schilder, the Dutch theologian of the previous generation powerfully expressed
it:
Life never signifies in the Scripture bare existence, and death is never annihilation.
To be dead in the Bible is something wholly different from not existing; to be dead is
always nothing other than inner disintegration, than inner separation, than brokenness
which is the antithesis of the genuine composition of life.
It is this idea, Schilder goes on to say, that gives such terrible menace to the
phrase "the second death" which the Scripture uses in Rev. 20:14.
The second death...what is that but to be always dying yet never to pass away,
always to be dead and never able to die? The body lives not, although it continues
to exist!
By the way, the term "life" is used in the same way. In v. 9 we read of the
Tree of Life, but this life is not bare existence. This life is life, as Paul puts it,
worthy to be called life. The abundant life that Christ said he came to bring to men. Life
with a capital "L." Life that is all that we know human life might be and all
that we long for it to be for happiness and satisfaction and high purpose and achievement
and, especially, communion with God himself. Life in which all of the potential God placed
within human beings is developed and experienced to the full. These then are the 2 and
only 2 possible futures for men: life to the full or the second death!
Is this not the way the Bible is always using both of these ideas, life and death.
Remember Jesus saying at Lazarus' tomb: "I am the resurrection and the life.
He who believes in me will live even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me
will never die." Or John the Baptist who said, "Whoever believes in the son has
eternal life, but whoever rejects the son will not see life." Life or death are
realities already in this world and shall be conditions of existence for human beings
forever.
The annihilationists think that their view is more humane and reflects less discredit
on God that he should be willing to punish the wicked forever as Christian doctrine has
always maintained. But, in order to make God more humane, they must make him less holy,
they must make Christ's atonement less tragic, terrible, and wonderful -- for he was not,
on their view, suffering the pains of hell for us -- and must make sin less odious and its
guilt less mountainous. This is not, at the last a more appealing gospel, but less, for it
is a gospel that has lost its nerve and lost its majesty. [Wells, CT (March 20, 1987) 42]
What is more, if you will think of it carefully, you will find that extinction is not
an adequate response of a righteous God to the evil of this world and no true consolation
in the face of that evil. Hitler ceases to exist and so do his victims! This is justice?
But, I want to spend the time that remains emphasizing the more immediate consequence
of this doctrine that death is a condition of life and not the extinction of existence.
What this means, of course, is that death is already with us, hell is already with us,
as is eternal life. They are all around us. As George MacDonald would put it: you find
eternal life and eternal death under every bush.
We are always in danger of missing this point and usually do fail to grasp the nettle
of this truth as we should day by day.
Schilder made the point in his characteristically brilliant way when he pointed out the
interesting fact that the great images of heaven and hell in the OT lie close beside one
another. Zion or the city of Jerusalem is a figure of heaven -- the Jerusalem that is
above --. And right below the city walls lay the valley of Hinnom where Manasseh caused
Hebrew children to be sacrificed by fire to the god Molech and where later the city
garbage was burned. This is the valley of Hinnom, which is in Hebrew "ge-Hinnom"
and in Greek "gehenna," which is the NT's word for "hell," that became
the Bible's great symbol of divine wrath and judgment. Heaven and hell right together,
within sight of one another, just a stone's throw apart.
This fact led Schilder to say: "Poor men! God has placed Zion, the high
mountain, and ge-hinnom, the deep valley, close to each other in an eloquent
symbol. But men have for the umpteenth time divided what God has joined together. They
hear no more what ge-hinnom, what gehenna says... Poor men!" [Wat is de hel?
p. 32]
He is right to warn us against this error, this way of thinking about death, as though
it were some distant thing that men will see and experience only in the future.
No, death is all around us all the time. It is under every bush, around every corner,
in every face. For the believer in Christ, to be sure, so is life, but for the believer
there is both death and life: death as the sinful remainder of his old self continues to
cling to him and effect him, death as the situation of this world in which he must still
live, but also life as the new creation asserts itself. The unbeliever also, who is dead,
in this world has many encounters with life, real life. Life and death jumbled together --
that is the experience of all men, but for Christians the death will pass away and for
unbelievers the small part of true life he experiences by contact with it will eventually
be no more.
We do not have to live until the Judgement Day to see death. We do not have to die to
see it. We have only to open our eyes and look around us and think about what we see in
the light of God's Word.
We see the curse everywhere, the death that hangs over human life and penetrates it in
every way. We see, of course, the death of the body. This past Thursday, in Florida, the
22 year-old son of a PCA minister was killed in the crash of an ultralight airplane. In
hospitals and nursing homes lives are ebbing away, often in great pain. The former
vitality has become weariness and weakness. This is the death that sin has visited upon
human life.
But, there is much much more. Death is in all the misery, the unhappiness, the failure,
the frustration, the disappointment, the fear, the despair of life. It is in all that
human sin creates and in all the way it harms and destroys.
The broken marriage, the violated children, the loneliness of so many human lives, the
addictions and the cruel cravings for what one can no longer have, the unfulfilled
longings, the desperate ache for what God will not give the sinner, the wasted time, the
disappointment in others, the harm done to others, the pathetic failure of so many human
personalities to rise to their potential, their wallowing in the venal and the petty and
the trivial when they might have soared up to God himself; the gaily living of a worldly
life with no thought of the looming spectre of hell! All this is death!
The child throwing a tantrum in the grocery store, the young men standing rootless and
purposeless on a street corner, the young woman pregnant but alone, the proud young man
choosing for his life the love of money and all of these benighted souls with not the
slightest idea that they were made for so much more! All of that is death! And looming
above it all remains the second death, just more of the same waste and want, to a far
greater degree, with never the possibility of escape.
There is the real difference between this world and the next: the dead here
live in hope--there there is no hope. This was the great insight of Dante who had Virgil
lead him down into the inferno by passing under a portal over which were written the
words: "All hope abandon ye who enter here."
The Bible teaches us to live our lives sacramentally. To see all around us, in the
daily round of life, the unseen world with all of its principles, its powers, its terrors
and its wonders. Every day we are to see life and death before our eyes, every day
consciously warding off the one and embracing the other and helping our children and
others to do the same. Practicing life, experiencing life, drinking it up, true life as
Christians are privileged to do in this world; putting death to death in our own lives and
seeking its death in the lives of others.
God, fight we not within a cursed world
Whose very air teems thick with leagued fiends;
Each word we speak has infinite effects,
Each soul we pass must go to heaven or hell...
And each soul already in this world breathing the air of one place or another, the high
mountain or the deep, dark valley.
No wonder Chesterton should say, "Christianity even when watered down is hot
enough to boil all modern society to rags." What terrible and wonderful significance
in every single day of human existence when seen through Christian eyes: either death or
life, dying or living, going down to the pit or up to the City of God every day, at every
dinner table, in every conversation with friends and neighbors, in every touch between
husband and wife, in every service of Christian worship and at every Lord's Table, in
every gale of happy laughter, in every encounter with death we have each day -- whether in
the face of an unbeliever or the face of God.
I saw death this week in the angry response of Christian man to some bad news he had
received--bitterness, dispair, lashing out, making dark the life of everyone around him.
Imagine a world with nothing but that! But I also saw life asserting itself when that same
man acknowledged his wrong and sought forgiveness. Imagine a world inhabited only by the
gracious, the merciful, and the humble.
It is ours in Christ to live the life of the world to come already in this life. Let us
do so more and more everyday and all the more as we see death always and everywhere around
us.
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