Eternal Death

Romans 6:23 -- THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH

Although there is a sense in which death, in all its aspects, is the penal consequence of sin, the Bible speaks of an unending punishment of those who depart this life without being reconciled to God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In Romans 6:23, Paul contrasts a death which is the 'wages of sin' with a life which is God's gift and which is eternal. The one is given according to strict justice; the other is granted according to gratuitous favour.

In peace let me resign my breath
And thy salvation see
My sins deserve eternal death
But Jesus died for me.

This was the traditional, evangelical view of the Gospel. The death of Jesus Christ had meaning and relevance only because 'my sins deserve eternal death'. Take Hell away and it is difficult to see what the relevance of the cross is.

Let me recommend two books for your study: John Blanchard's Whatever Heppened to Hell? (Evangelical Press, 1993) and C.W. Morgan and R.A. Peterson (eds), Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment (Zondervan, 2004). Both of these are very thorough treatments both of the biblical material and of why we have arrived at the situation we are in.

Yet within the evangelical world, this doctrine is under increasing scrutiny, attack and revision, either in favour of some kind of universalism -- that is, the belief that all will eventually be saved -- or some kind of annihilationism -- the belief that fate of the impenitent, whatever it may be, is not a conscious, endless torment. John Wenham, the Anglican New Testament scholar, whose Elements of New Testament Greek continues to help students to read the New Testament, declares in his autobiography, entitled Facing Hell, 'I believe that endless torment is a hideous and unscriptural doctrine which has been a terrible burden on the mind of the church for many centuries and a terrible blot on her presentation of the gospel. I should indeed be happy, if, before I die, I could help in sweeping it away' (Facing Hell, pvii).

There is something ironic about a teacher of New Testament language contracting what is so very clearly written in that language. But Wenham's aversion to the doctrine of endless punishment is not new. Charles Hodge, in his Systematic Theology, summarises four other views which have been held on the duration of future punishment, one being 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' (Vol III,p869).

Wenham's has not been the most influential voice in this debate, however. That place must go to John Stott, whose revision of the doctrine of eternal punishment has become the touchstone for much subsequent evangelical thought.

Stott's position appeared in dialogue with David Edwards, a liberal Anglican. In discussion of the theme of evangelism, Edwards raises the issue of Hell, to which Stott responds by saying:

we need to survey the biblical material afresh and to open our minds (not just our hearts) to the possibility that Scripture points in the direction of annihilation, and that 'eternal conscious torment' is a tradition which has to yield to the supreme authority of Scripture. There are four arguments; they relate to language, imagery, justice and universalism. ( 'The Gospel for the World -- Response' in Essentials: A liberal-evangelical dialogue, Hodder and Stoughton, 1988, p315).

Stott's critique of the traditional view of eternal death was based, first, on the nature of biblical language. The vocabulary of destruction, he argues, means to kill, to deprive of life, and not to continue life in a situation of torment and pain. Since God alone possesses immortality (1 Timothy 1:17), Stott concludes that 'nobody survives death except those to whom God gives life' (316).

Second, Stott concedes that it is true that the image of fire is used of eternal punishment, but this may refer to destruction rather than torment. Revelation 14:11 talks about the 'smoke' of the torment rising for ever; suggesting perhaps, according to Stott, that the fire has done its destructive work.

His second argument related to biblical justice. Judgement must be meted out in the light of what has actually been done, and taken place. 'Would there not be a serious disproportion,' he asks, 'between sins committed in time and torment consciously experienced throughout eternity' (318).

Fourthly, Stott refers to universalism. He denies that he himself is a universalist; he does not believe that all will be saved. But he has difficulty reconciling the promises of God's ultimate victory over evil with the concept of eternal punishment; and this concept also runs contrary to the univeralism of some Gospel texts (John 12:32, Jesus drawing ALL men to himself).

He does not wish to be dogmatic; he admits to being hesitant and heavy-hearted in his presentation. But his conclusion is hat 'the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment' (320). For a refutation of this position, see Robert Reymond's essay 'Dr John Stott on Hell' in Contending for the Faith, pp339-62.

Stott's position was homologated the following year in Philip Hughes' The True Image. He too had a fourfold argument for annihilationism:

First of all, because life and death are radically antithetical to each other, the qualifying adjective eternal or everlasting needs to be understood in a manner appropriate to each respectively. Everlasting life is existence that continues without end, and everlasting death is destruction without end, that is, destruction without recall, the destruction of obliteration...

Secondly, immortality or deathlessness ... is not inherent in the constitution of man as a corporeal-spiritual creature, though, formed in the image of God, the potential was there. That potential, which was forfeited through sin, has been restored and actualised by Christ...

Thirdly, the everlasting existence, side by side, so to speak, of heaven and hell would seem to be incompatible with the purpose and effect of the redemption achieved by Christ's coming. Sin with its consequences of suffering and death is foreign to the design of God's creation. The renewal of creation demands the elimination of sin and suffering and death...

Fourthly, the glorious appearing of Christ will herald the death of death ... Without the abolition of death the triumph of life and immortality cannot be complete...The horror of everlasting destruction will be compounded ... by the unbearable agony of exclusion ... The destiny they have fashioned for themselves will cast them without hope into the abyss of obliteration ...

Philip E. Hughes,The True Image: the Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ, Eerdmans/IVP, 1989, pp405-407

These were influential arguments when they first appeared, and they have led to a shift within evangelicalism over the past decade, with several influential scholars embracing either some kind of universalism, in which no-one goes to Hell, or some kind of annihilationism, in which there is no Hell for them to go to. (See Hell Under Fire for a refutation of both these positions in chapters 8-9).

These positions are not new, but nor are they the orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church. That is summarised by Charles Hodge as follows:

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 (Vol III, p869).

He then comments: 'It is obvious that this is a question which can be decided only by divine revelation' (p870). The Word of God must be our guide and our standard in this, as in every other discussion.

Some Strands of Biblical Data

All the elements which feed into the doctrine of the final state of the wicked arise out of the same covenant curse whose consequences we have been considering in the two previous lectures. 'In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die'. The covenant curse works itself out on man in his banishment from the garden of Eden both as symbol of his estrangement from God, but more particularly as the penal consequence of it. When we enquire into what the penalty for man's sin actually was, we must concur with Hodge that

The death threatened was the opposite of the life promised. But the life promised ... includes all that is involved in the happy, holy and immortal existence of the soul and body, and therefore death must include not only all the miseries of this life and the dissolution of the body, but also all that is meant by spiritual and eternal death (Systematic Theology, Vol 2, p120).

Every expression of God's judicial punishing of the wicked is the development and outworking of the threatened curse. So when the Old Testament talks about the wicked provoking God so that he kindles a fire in his anger which burns to the depths of Sheol, devouring the earth and setting on fire the foundations of the mountains (Deuteronomy 32:22), this is man's 'death', the penalty of his sin. Similarly when Daniel talks about some wakening from the dust of the earth 'to shame and everlasting contempt' (Daniel 12:2), this too, is man's death, the penalty of his sin. And when Isaiah, the evangelical prophet, concludes his great prophecy with the sight of the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against God, declaring that 'their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh' (Isaiah 66:24), this too, is man's death, the penalty of his sin.

And far from revising the Old Testament image, Jesus quotes directly from Isaiah 66 in such passages as Mark 9:47-8:

It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.

This is how Jesus nuances the Old Testament insistence that the curse of the broken covenant extends beyond the temporary duration of man's life in the world, and stretches into eternity. The hell of which Jesus speaks is the ultimate meaning of the death threatened in the Garden of Eden.

Jesus' doctrine of hell, therefore, must become normative for our understanding of the meaning of eternal death. So let's take a few moments to remind ourselves of what that doctrine actually is. In Hell under Fire, Robert Yarborough devotes a chapter to 'Jesus on Hell'. In spite of the attempts of the Jesus Seminar and others to undermine confidence in the Gospels as authentic historical records, we believe that we have a remarkable access to the teaching of Jesus in the first four books of the New Testament. So much of his teaching concerns life after death that, as Yarborough puts it,

The problem is that if Jesus spoke as frequently and directly about hell as Gospel writers claim, then it may not be the Christian message that we end up proclaiming if we modify his doctrine of posthumous existence (Hell Under Fire, p71).

That may be self-evident to us, but it is at the heart of our discussion. To be faithful to Jesus Christ means holding to a very particular view of what happens when we die, and a very particular view of the consequences of dying without being first reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

The doctrine of future punishment appears in the Sermon on the Mount, in Jesus' treatment of anger. 'whoever says 'You fool!' will be liable to the hell of fire' (Matthew 5:22). 'It is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell' (Matthew 5:30). It also appears in the commissioning of the twelve: 'do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell' (Matthew 10:28).

That Jesus understands hell to include conscious torment is evident in Luke 16, with the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Even if this is a parable, the force of the statement 'the rich man also died and was buried and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes' (Luke 16:22-23) cannot be underestimated.

Furthermore, the reason for such punishment, in Jesus' teaching, is that the wrath of God abides on those who are his enemies; 'whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him' (John 3:36). The vocabulary of John's Gospel is sufficient to demonstrate that the penal consequences of sin extend into the afterlife; those who believe do not 'perish' (3:16, 10:28); those who do not believe are 'condemned' (3:18, 5:24). If one eats of the bread from Heaven, that is, Jesus himself, one will not die (6:50). So, in the teaching of our Lord, 'the blessed state of eternal life is logically opposite to the condemned state of eternal destruction. If salvation and conscious bliss are everlasting, so are perdition and conscious torment' (Yarborough, Hell Under Fire, p75).

Ultimately, Jesus reveals himself to us as the final judge, who will appear in glory to separate people from one another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31ff). Contrasting the invitation to the blessed to come into his presence is the solemn word of malediction to the rest: 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels' (Matthew 25:41). We could say much about this, but I want to emphasise two things: first, those who are thus rejected and banished are under the curse, which brings us all the way back to what is threatened on the human covenant breaker: 'you will die'. Second, Jesus envisages this death to be of eternal duration, accompanied, as in the Old Testament presentation, with fire and conscious deprivation and suffering.

The Christian doctrine of eternal death is the Christian doctrine of Hell, and it is more prominent in the teaching of the Saviour than any other doctrine. This seems a good place to look at Thomas Boston's discussion of this subject as he comes to the final part of the Fourfold State. The last 'state' he discusses is the eternal state, or 'State of Consummate Happiness or Misery'. Here he has six sections; first, he discusses the topic of [physical] death; second, the difference between the righteous and the wicked in their death; third, the resurrection, fourth, the judgement, fifth, the Kingdom of Heaven, and sixth, Hell.

In the discussion of the resurrection, Boston talks about the resurrection body, and admits that the Bible says little about the resurrection bodies of the wicked. Nonetheless, the wicked will be raised with bodies which will be fitting for the state of eternal death and separation from God. 'Whatever may be said of their weakness, it is certain they will be continued for ever in life, that they may be ever dying' (p273). Boston continues:

Their shame will be too deep for blushes; all faces shall gather blackness at that day, when they shall go forth of their graves, as malefactors out of their prisons to execution, for their resurrection is the resurrection of damnation (p273).

Having exhorted his readers to remember that this is seed-time, a time for sowing prior to the harvest of judgement with which the world will end, Boston moves to a consideration of the judgement and, at last, to his discussion of Hell. The text from which he commences is Matthew 25:41, 'Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels'.

Boston emphasises the three points made explicit in the text -- first, the quality of the condemned: they are 'cursed'. Second, there is the twofold punishment to which they are adjudged -- on the one hand 'depart from me', and on the other, 'depart into fire'. Thirdly, there is 'the aggravations of their torments' (p333) -- they are ready for them; the fire is prepared, and there is no respite. They will keep company with devils -- 'they hearkened to his temptations and they must partake in his torments' (334), and their punishment must be eternal.

Boston develops this text by discussing four areas of doctrine.

First, the curse under which the damned are shut up.

Second, their misery under that curse.

Third, their society with devils in that condition.

Fourth, the eternity of the whole.

First, the curse. Boston reminds us that this curse does not first appear over the impenitent when they stand before God. No: 'they were born under it, they led their lives under it in this world, they died under it, rose with it out of their graves; and the Judge finding it upon them, sends them away with it into the pit, where it shall lie on them through all the ages of eternity' (334). The curse has, he says, its firstfruits on earth, a pledge of the whole lump. 'As in heaven grace comes to its perfection, so in hell sin arrives at its highest pitch' (335). The voice of the judge is thus a voice of anger, or contempt, of hatred, of rejection. Boston urges us to flee to Christ now, so as to be rid of the curse of the broken covenant.

Second, the misery of the damned under the curse. Boston views this in two ways: the punishment of loss, and the punishment of sense.

There is a punishment of loss, of deprivation. Here we come to the essence of the issue: that this is a death, a separation, which Boston understands in two ways. The lost 'shall be eternally separated from God and Christ ... They will be locally separated from the man Christ, and shall never come into the seat of the Blessed ... They cannot be locally separated from God, they cannot be in a place where he is not ... but they shall be miserable beyond expression, in a relative separation from God ...they shall be deprived of the glorious presence and enjoyment of God; they shall have no part in the beatific vision, nor see anything in God towards them, but one wave of wrath rolling at the back of another' (338).

Of this separation, Boston says it will be involuntary, total, and final. If God is our chief good, separation from him must be the chief evil -- 'the better anything is, so much the greater evil is the loss of it' (338). If God is the fountain of all goodness, then separation from him 'must of necessity bring along with it a total eclipse of all light of comfort and ease whatever' (339).

Boston makes an interesting reference to Matthew 19:17 -- 'there is none good but one, that is, God'. So Boston:

Whatever sweetness, rest, pleasure or delight one finds in other creatures, as in meat, drink, arts and sciences; all these are but some faint rays of divine perfections, communicated by God unto the creature, and depending on a constant influence from him for their conservation, which failing, they would immediately be gone ... thus, in their separation from God, all peace is removed far away from them, and pain of body, and anguish of soul succeed to it ... common operations of the Spirit, which now restrain them, are withdrawn forever, and sin comes to its utmost height (339).

Man naturally desires to be happy, and was constituted with the capacity to enjoy God, but in Hell, all the doors both of earth and heaven are shut, and no happiness is to be found. Aggravating this will be the knowledge that some are perfectly happy; Boston argues from Luke 16:23 that 'we have ground from the word to conclude that the damned shall have a very exquisite knowledge of the happiness of the saints in heaven' (341). There will be the remembrance of what might have been, as they see that the loss is irrecoverable. This is the first penal aspect of eternal death: 'depart from me', a punishment of loss.

But there is also a punishment of sense: 'depart from me into fire'. Boston says he is not going to discuss what kind of fire this is, or where it is, but to show that it is more terrible than any fire on earth. Just as the blessings of heaven exceed our highest joys, so the torments of hell exceed all earthly torments. Just as the blessings of heaven are represented to us by analogy (by the figure of gold and pearls), and will exceed the metaphor, so hell will exceed the representations of Scripture. Although earthly fire affects the body, hell fire will pierce the bodies directly into the spirits of the damned. Finally, we need to remember that it is a prepared fire -- Boston alludes to Daniel 2:9-22 and the preparation of the fiery furnace -- in which God himself, who is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24) will be immediately present to all the senses. This torment will be universal, internal and external, just as the Mediator registered from Psalm 22:14, 'my heart is like wax, it is melted within my breast', so the lost in hell will have an inner awareness of the wrath of God against them. The absence of good will be accompanied by a 'confluence of all evils there'; hell will be 'a prison they can never escape out of; a lake of fire, where they will be ever swimming and burning, a pit, whereof they will never find a bottom' (346). Further, these torments will be uninterrupted, unpitied and eternal: 'the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever' (Revelation 14:11).

Boston does not revel in this word-painting. He comes to his uses. What are we to do with this doctrine? First, we are to learn the evil of sin. Why will men hug the serpent who will sting them in the end? Second, we are to remember the God with whom we have to do. Boston reminds us of God's words to the wicked in Psalm 50:21-22: 'you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you. Mark this, then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver!'

Third, the misery of the lost in the company of devils. Hell was prepared for the devil and his angels. Who would gladly choose that company? Yet the lost will be in that company as the only fitting place for those who did not wish the company of the godly in this world.

Finally, the eternity of the whole. Those who are lost have eternal beings; they are under an eternal curse; they are subject to an eternal punishment; they have an eternal knowledge of their condition.

What shall we do with this? We must use it, first, as a measuring reed, applied to our time in the world. Only in the light of eternity can we see just how short our lives are. We must then use it as a balance, in which to weigh things. Some things, says Boston, seem very weighty, until they are weighed in the balance of truth. The world and all that is in it, its pleasures and profits, are all light things in comparison with eternity. So too are our afflictions. They seem heavy here, but in the light of eternal wrath, they are a light cross to bear. So too our religious duties: sometimes they seem very heavy: 'repentance, and bitter mourning for sin, on earth, are very light in comparison of eternal weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in hell' (357).

On the other hand, weigh sin in this balance. It seems a light thing here, but it is sufficient to bring an eternal weight of wrath on us. 'Precious time, and seasons of grace, Sabbaths, communions, prayers, sermons and the like, are by many nowadays made light of; but the day is coming, when one of these will be reckoned more valuable than a thousand worlds' (358).

'and now, if you would be saved from the wrath to come, and never go into this place of torment, take no rest in your natural state; believe the sinfulness and misery of it, and labour to get out of it quickly, fleeing unto Jesus Christ by faith. Sin in you is the seed of hell; and if the guilt and reigning power of it be not removed in time, they will bring you to the second death in eternity. There is no way to get them removed, but by receiving of Christ, as he is offered in the gospel' (359).

Theological Parameters

Boston's is a classic statement of the orthodox evangelical doctrine of the punishment of the impenitent, the second death of which Revelation 20:14 speaks. Let us remind ourselves of the theological boundaries around this doctrine.

Doctrine of God

We believe in the eternal death of the wicked, because of the nature of the God of the Bible. Now Edwards, and Stott, and Hughes and Pinnock would say that they want to move away from that traditional view because of the nature of the God of the Bible. He is Love, and he wishes all men to be saved and is not willing that any should perish.

Yet, faced with such realities about God, eternal death is not the only difficulty that confronts us. The judgement of the world by a flood in Genesis 6, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18, the wars in Canaan mandated by God to dispossess the inhabitants of the land, the curse of Jesus on the fig tree in Mark 11, the judicial deaths of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 -- all of these biblical incidents point to a doctrine of God that cannot be reduced simplistically to a notion of love.

The reality is that these incidents illustrate for us both the anger and the holiness of God. John Blanchard reminds us that although God is 'slow to anger' (Psalm 103:8), both Old and New Testaments clearly present the wrath of God to us. Does Paul not tell us in Romans 1:18 that it is the wrath that is revealed? Blanchard says that God's wrath is personal -- it is not the personalisation of some abstract notion, but the response of God to the sin of man. It also pure wrath, not like our irrational and uncontrolled outbursts; God's wrath does no violence to any of his attributes. As Norman Geisler puts it, God's wrath is 'an act that flows from his unchanging righteousness' (Systematic Theology, Vol 2, p397). It is powerful wrath, as Psalm 90:11 puts it, terrifying us in its intensity. And it is permanent wrath, operating throughout history, but to be revealed on the Day of God's wrath. The prophet Nahum runs these ideas together:

The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty (Nahum 1:3).

Coupled with this is the theology of God's absolute holiness. His eyes are too pure to look on evil (Habakkuk 1:13). Blanchard quotes from John Benton who reminds us that we are not starting here from a position of neutrality. People ask: how can a God of love send people to Hell? Benton's answer is 'God does not send people to hell; he sends sinners to hell'. Or, as Donald Macleod puts it, 'I can give you a categorical assurance that if you have a real case to offer in your own defence you have nothing to fear. No innocent man ever went to Hell; and no man was ever sentenced to Hell if the Judge had another option' (A Faith to Live By, p283-4).

All of which is a reminder to us that although death is separation, and although eternal death means separation from God, there is another sense in which the reality of this condition is precisely the eternal confrontation with the wrath and holiness of God. In other words, while at one level we may speak of sinners eternally separated from God, at another we may speak of sinners eternally confronted by God. Blanchard warns against using the idea of eternal separation:

The Bible never uses this term. It would be more biblical to warn people about the danger for them of the eternal presence of God ... In a sermon delivered in 1742 Jonathan Edwards said that for the unrighteous and the righteous eternity would be spent "in the immediate presence of God ... God will be the hell of the one and the heaven of the other" (160).

So Lorraine Boettner expresses it accurately and precisely when he refutes annihilationism with the observation that 'eternal death is not the extinction of being, but of well-being' (Immortality, p121).

Doctrine of Man in Sin

Secondly, the idea of eternal death arises out of a thorough biblical understanding of the nature of sin. Revisionists question the justice of punishing temporal sins with eternal penalties. But, as the Larger Catechism (Q.152) reminds us,

Every sin, even the least, being against the sovereignty, goodness and holiness of God, and against his righteous law, deserveth his wrath and curse, both in this life, and that which is to come; and cannot be expiated but by the blood of Christ.

Let us remind ourselves that sin was present in God's universe before Adam. The angels who rebelled against God were not annihilated as a consequence of their disobedience; but they were expelled from the presence of God, and eternal death is their portion; Hell is prepared for the devil and his angels. The nature of sin is always the same: it is apostasy, lawlessness, rebellion against the sovereign throne of God. What aggravates it beyond measure is that it is directed against the rule of God in our lives. There is, therefore, no injustice in meeting sins committed in time with a penalty which is forever.

Nor ought we to overlook the fact that eternal death 'is the permanent state of what the sinner chose in life' (Millard Erickson, Christian Theology, p632). It is, to use R.A. Finlayson's terminology, 'the fixation of moral character. At death character seems to have passed the point beyond which there is no possibility of change' (Reformed Theological Writings, p180). Eternal death represents continuation in the state of rebellion, without opportunity, desire or possibility of change, but not without the thought of what might have been.

Again, we must bear in mind that the sovereign, holy God will have the last word. It will not belong to those who have rebelled against him. He will deal thoroughly with every breach of his law, and with every transgression of his commandments. And although men have the opportunity here, by God's grace, to exercise their wills in opposition to God, Hell represents the final limitations upon sin: 'evil will be put under eternal restraint and in this fact lies the biblical conception of hell' (Finlayson, p180).

Doctrine of Atonement

Finally, feeding into this doctrine is the biblical declaration that 'God did not spare his own Son' (Romans 8:32). In context, Paul's statement is to be an encouragement for believers everywhere; if God gave us his all at the point of giving us his Son, what will he not give us? Everything else is a lesser gift. The magnitude of his grace is evident in the fact: 'he did not spare his Son'.

Why did he not spare him? Because he enjoyed seeing him suffer? Not at all -- the reason he did not spare him was, as Christ acknowledged in the garden of Gethsemane, when the cup of a criminal's portion and destiny was formally assigned to him, that 'it was not possible'. He was made sin for us, and the Judge of all the earth does what is right, and condemns him in our place.

If ever God might have shrunk from the demands of equity, surely it was here. If ever His resolution might have weakened it was here! Christ is the proof that God will not spare. Christ is the demonstration of what Hell involves. And Christ is the paradigm of how you and I ought to feel in the face of such a prospect (Macleod, p284).

And what did Christ secure for us in his dying on the cross? Did he die to secure immortality for us, as the annihilationists would have us believe? Clearly not, for all his declarations about a lost eternity assume that it is just that -- an eternity. Eternal death is for ever. Did he die to save all men, as the universalists would have us believe? Clearly not, for on his own admission he was to lay down his life for the sheep (John 10:11), and on Paul's authority we can say that he lay down his life for his church (Ephesians 5:25). There is a world of difference in saying that Christ died for all men at Calvary, and saying that Christ is dead at Calvary for whosoever will believe in him. The universal call of the Gospel is possible only on the basis of an effectual, limited atonement.

So what did he die for? He died that we might not be lost. He died in order that he might exhaust the curse, and, instead, that the blessing of the Abrahamic covenant might come on the Gentiles (Galatians 3:14). That blessing is life in his presence, which is why the great High Priest of our profession can say, on the basis of having accomplished the work given him to do: 'Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world' (John 17:24). That is what he secured for us.

Conclusion

Yet as Sinclair Ferguson writes, 'to speak of hell is to speak of things so overwhelming that it cannot be done with ease' (Hell under Fire, p220). In our preaching, we must seek Christ's faithfulness and Christ's compassion in proclaiming the whole counsel of God.