22 Future Punishment – Character Determines Doom
Future Punishment – Character Determines Doom By Rev. J. L. Burrows, D. D., Louisville, KY
“He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still.”— Revelation 22:11.
Whatever applications or limitations may be given to this passage, to make it fit in with the varied theories of interpreting the Apocalypse, this much at least is certain: That it teaches that the tendency of both evil and good affections is to fixedness and mastery in the soul that fosters them. And this is not simply a truth of revelation, it is a fact of all human history and experience. Even if God’s Word had never referred to it, it is indisputable truth. Men do become worse and worse by indulging and practicing evil, and they become better and better by cherishing good. The boy of fifteen may timidly and tremblingly enter upon a career of vice, which shall harden into inveterate and unchecked villainy in the man of forty. Right principles, persistently operative, mould habits of spirit and life, and become incorporate and incarnate as righteous character. Loose principles, carelessly acted upon, develop into evil habits of soul and life and form bad character. And this is only saying what every thinking mind knows to be true; that men good at heart become better and better, and men bad at heart become worse and worse.
There has been a good deal of preaching and writing and talking during the past few years about the existence, nature and duration of hell. Much of it has been misapprehended. As to the essential fact that the Scriptures do reveal that the impenitent ungodly will be wretched in the future world, there is almost entire agreement among evangelical Christians holding to the inspiration of the Scriptures. As to the precise nature of the wretchedness, and as to the right interpretation of some of those terrible texts which speak of future woe, there may be differences. Some, too, may imagine that, through some yet unrevealed methods of redemption, there may be deliverance from misery and restoration to the favor of God. This is about the sum of the differences among evangelical ministers on this subject. Now let me say to you, my friend, you will be very unwise to permit any discussions of this sort to encourage you to live in disobedience to God’s commandments, and jump to the conclusion, “There is no hell, and therefore I may live as I please; no matter how vilely I sin, I shall escape all punishment in the future world and be translated to a happy heaven.” You had better not risk your soul upon a doubt, and live as though you were sure there would be no future retribution. Even a doubt on such a subject should impel us to choose the safer side.
All agree that heaven may be secured by a holy soul, and that this holiness may be attained through faith in Christ and the renewing of the Holy Spirit. This at least is a sure way to heaven, and he is a fool who risks his soul upon a doubt as to whether there may not be some other way to heaven. Who would grope his way in storm and darkness to a mansion when he might have a clear and sure light along his path?
I submit for your serious consideration the following propositions, which, I think, are in harmony with all known mental laws and with the whole scope and tenor of God’s Word. May God help you to weigh them with an honest heart as plainly set forth in the Word of God!
I.—Heaven is a home for the holy. A few out of many similar proofs from the Bible are these: Romans 2:7 : “To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life.” Romans 6:22 : “Being made free from sin and become servants of God, ye have your fruit unto holiness and the end everlasting life.” Hebrews 12:23 : “The general assembly and church of the first born which are written in heaven,” is composed of “the spirits of just men made perfect.” It is “an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled * * * and reserved in heaven for you.” Revelation 21:27 : “There shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth nor worketh abomination, nor maketh a lie, but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” With such proof-texts I think it can scarcely be doubted that the Scriptures plainly teach that those who are gathered into heaven will be holy. But then:
II.—In this life men are not holy.
“There is none righteous, no not one.” (Romans 3:10.) “The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” (Romans 8:7.) This is a fact so universal and palpable as to be undeniable. No theory of morals, heathen or philosophical, asserts that men anywhere are what they ought to be or might be. There is no standard of right raised which man reaches. In every one’s own consciousness and conscience is a conviction of failure and wrong. I care not how short may be your measuring-rod of perfection, it will always be longer than your own conduct and character will stretch over. You know in your own soul that you are not holy, and we have only to listen to your criticisms of the failings and faults of others to assure us that you do not believe that anybody else is immaculate. There seems scarcely need to argue such question at all. The proof is in the statement. All history, observation and experience confirm it. Men are not pure and holy beings.
If heaven is a home for the holy, and if men are not holy, then, III.—Men’s affections must be changed before they can be fitted for heaven. This is a proposition which, as it seems to me, must be self-evident to every thinking mind. One cannot be happy amid surroundings which he dislikes, in employments which he hates. Take a vicious and hardened man out of a filthy hovel or a thieves’ den, where he finds enjoyment in carousing and drinking and gambling, in obscene songs, and blasphemous slang, and ribald jests, and drunken laughter, plotting burglaries and thefts, and introduce him into a pious family, where the conversation is decorous and delicate, where culture, and intelligence, and virtue characterize the whole intercourse of the household, and tell him to be happy there. Have you made him happy by the transfer without any change of him tastes and habits? You may tell him that his old haunt was a hell, and that this is a heaven, but he will scowl and curse you, and clamor, “Let me out of this! I had rather go back to my hell than live in such a heaven as this.” And he would dive, too, into his hell in an hour, if he could find his way there, and jest and laugh with his comrades about the mawkish and insipid and flat enjoyments to which he had been introduced. You must change the man’s whole nature before he can be satisfied with what is pure and refined and elevating. Can yon not see that the teachings of the Bible on this subject are founded upon profoundest knowledge of human nature. “Ye must be born again or you cannot see the kingdom of God.” You must be “created anew,” become “a new creature,” “dead to sin and alive unto holiness,” before heaven could reveal any joys that would suit your tastes or give you any pleasure. Why, sinner, when you think of heaven as a pure and holy place, can you imagine any enjoyment which you could find amid such environments or in such society? But perhaps you answer me: I hope to be so changed in tastes and feelings that I shall enjoy the pleasures which heaven furnishes. When and how? And let this question lead to our next proposition:
IV.—Death works no change of character. This our text plainly intimates: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him De filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still.”
Men sometimes talk loosely about death, as though it created some change of moral character, tastes and propensities. But death has to do only with man’s physical being. It only stops the beating of the heart and the heaving of the lungs —stops the action of the vital forces and leaves the body to dissolution and decay. But in all this there is nothing that touches mind or spirit, nothing that can annihilate or alter faculties or dispositions of the soul. A change of state or of place does not work a change of character or of conscience. A bad man in America does not become a good man by travelling to France or Palestine, nor is there anything in the transfer from time into eternity to transform a filthy into a holy heart. What a man is in essential character this side of death he will be beyond it. You cannot die a sinner and be raised a saint. The bullet driven through a man’s heart cannot reform his spiritual tastes and propensities or loves. If in death he lies down depraved, he will wake up depraved. What he loved here he will love there; what he hated here he will hate there. If he ended this life a rebel against God, he will begin the new life a rebel against God. If he repudiated God and his authority and commandments in this life, he will, with equal dislike, repudiate them in the life to come. This position is in the line of all the deductions of mental science, as well as of the teachings of God’s Word. In no sense can death be a renewer, purifier or saviour of the soul. Then it follows:
V.—If man a is unholy at death, he will be unholy after death
You will carry with you across the line the nature you possess here. If you are “holy, you will be holy still; if filthy, you will be filthy still.” Death is nothing but the stoppage of the life forces; it is simply the absence of life, as darkness is the absence of light, or cold absence of heat. Death does not improve the body; it initiates deterioration, decay and corruption. It cannot improve mind or soul. It can have no influence in purifying or in any way changing moral character, in modifying mental habits or affections. In the very nature of things, then, it must be that if the soul continues to exist after the dissolution of the body, it must exist with the same affections, dispositions and habits as before that dissolution. If a man hates God before he dies, he will hate God after his death. If he repudiates his right and authority this side the grave, he will repudiate them the other side. If he loves sin in this life, up to the point of his departure, he will love it beyond that point. If he is rebellious and selfish, and impatient and malignant until he dies, he will be all this afterward. If he is pure and loving and good, he will wake up so in eternity. If he has faith in Jesus to save and keep him, when he goes out of this life, he will find this faith sustaining and cheering him when he enters the next. Death changes nothing but matter. It has no power over mind and spirit. What a man is within himself in time, he will be in eternity.
VI.—Affections and passions arc confirmed and intensified by indulgence and exercise. Of this we have clearest proof in this life. Evil passions by every indulgence become stronger. Pure affections by every exercise become more pleasant and controlling. The man who gives way to anger, hate, avarice, lust, becomes worse and ever worse, strengthening habits and enlarging capabilities for evil. He who cultivates patience, forbearance, kindness, benevolence, charity, grows in these graces and becomes better and ever better in heart. Every thoughtful eye perceives this: that the bent and culture of one’s affections enter into the formation of his permanent character. Is there any reason for believing that this natural law is suspended beyond death? What will there be to check or correct these proclivities and propensities of his nature? What will there be to hinder rebellion from becoming more rebellious; hate becoming more hating; envy, more envious; blasphemy, more blasphemous; every vile passion more violent? And, on the other hand, why should not there, as here, every virtue and grace, by its own cultivation and exercise, become purer, sweeter and pleasanter! If the same mental laws operate there as here, there will be progressive developments and experiences— in the one direction wicked and wretched; in the other, pure and joyful.
VII.—There will be law and government in the next world as really as in this.
Many have an indefinite sort of notion that in the future life everything will be fixed and unchangeable; that heaven will furnish rewards only for what has been done well in this world, and that hell will execute penalties only for what has been done of evil here. But God’s word furnishes no warrant for such idea. “From everlasting to everlasting Jehovah is God.” “He shall reign forever and ever.” As the laws which govern physical nature operate through all time, so must the laws that govern mind. If law is violated in eternity, it will be followed by penalty as surely as in time. You cannot get away from God’s government. His laws will be as binding in heaven and hell as upon earth. “If I ascend to heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there,” etc. The sum of all his laws is this: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Wherever this law is not obeyed there is sin. It follows, then, VIII.—So long as the soul sins it will suffer.
Sin, by its own inherent nature, works woe. The question then is, will you continue to be a sinner in the future world? And what is to prevent this, if your nature is not changed and purified? You will be as responsible for obedience to divine law there as you are here. Will you be likely to love God and your neighbor there? Carrying with you that nature and disposition you now possess, will you not hate God, and blaspheme his name, and wish you could conquer and dethrone him? You would not be reconciled to him in this life, where you had offers and opportunities; will you become reconciled to him there, when these opportunities are passed over! By your persistence in impenitence in this life, by your refusal to become fitted for the purity and blessedness of a holy heaven, you will have brought upon yourself a fatal necessity of perpetual sinfulness—an impure state of heart—and that will bring its own wretchedness there, just as it does here. God does not arbitrarily send any man to hell. The man sends himself thither, because he is not fitted and would not become fitted for heaven. His own corrupt nature, his love of evil, his wicked dispositions, his antagonism of spirit to a holy God—these compose his hell. And according to his own evil propensities and affinities he finds his own place and companions. We find fearful illustrations of this in this world. There are hovels and dens in this, in every city, where parents and children live in bestial filth, riotous, blasphemous, vicious, criminal — where the parents are brutal and quarrelsome and violent, and where the children are trained to beggary, theft and burglary, and glory in their skill, and not a member of the household would change their hell of a home for an abode of purity and refinement and intelligence. And there is an awful sense in which wicked men will prefer hell to heaven. They will find in hell associations and affinities that will better suit their own tastes and habits than heaven could furnish, unless their natures are changed and purified.
IX. — Wretchedness works no change of character. A notion prevails that punishment is reformatory; that suffering can purify the heart; that the fires of purgatory or of hell can burn out the impurities of the soul and fuse the spirit into holiness. And we had the novel spectacle a few years since of thousands of priests praying at thousands of altars that the Pope, the infallible head of the church, might speedily be purified by the fires of purgatory and be permitted to enter heaven. They seemed to have had doubts as to whether he whom they called and almost worshipped as the Vicegerent of God and the Vicar of Christ had been welcomed to heavenly blessedness. If he believed and trusted in the sacrifice and intercession of Jesus, and if his soul was cleansed in the blood of Christ, like any other poor, ransomed sinner, he is in heaven to-day. And if not to-day, he never will be. “He that is holy will be holy still, and he that is filthy will be filthy still.”
If suffering could purify, this world would be a paradise to-day. In all the ages pain and agony have tortured humanity, and still the race is corrupt and vile. The horrors of delirium tremens do not change the drunkard’s tastes nor reform his habits. The cariosity of the libertine’s bones cannot extirpate his lusts. Prison chains cannot subdue the robber’s greed. A recent earnest writer says: “Turn to the world’s prison-houses and see how baseless is the notion that men can be morally renovated by punishment. The Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman dungeons were synonyms of horror. Pains and penalties were meted out without mercy. But not a single prisoner among all the thousands that suffered amid danger and chills, in chains and stocks, was ever transformed in moral character by this fearful punishment. In fact, criminals in the prisons of Christian nations have been morally transformed only by the Gospel. Not punishment, but the revelation of divine love and truth in Christ has lifted many of them out of sin and brought them into fellowship with God.”[39] [39]
X.—No revelation warrants hope of future remedy.
It is imagined by some that at some indefinite period in eternity the Lord will interpose some remedial method by which the lost may be redeemed and purified and fitted for the peace and holiness of heaven. They urge that his wisdom and goodness can provide such measures and make them effective. I do not deny that such consummation is possible. I dare not limit the wisdom or mercy of God. But this we may say: there is no revelation of such purpose in the Holy Scriptures, nor in the normal operation of the laws that govern mind; and these are given us for our instruction and guidance. We cannot find anywhere else grounds for faith or direction. And these Scriptures speak of the decisions and sentences of the judgment as final, and of the state of both the accepted and the rejected as fixed. It will be safest for us, my friends, to believe and act as if God’s word were true. There is a way of relieving all doubts and of winning our souls’ peace and safety. No one doubts that if there is a heaven it may be gained; that if there is a hell it may be escaped, by repentance for sin and by such faith in Christ’s atonement as shall purify our souls and lead to a holy life. That, by every theory, is a sure way to heaven. And by a thousand motives, outside any dread of hell, we are urged to submission, faith and obedience to God. We exhort you to seek this state of heart, because it is right and pure and blessed. The surest preparation for a holy heaven is regeneration and sanctification of the spirit. Whatever may be the doom of others, “the pure in heart shall see God.”