they shall receive eternal life (apparently without faith in the Lord

Jesus, or any knowledge either of His death or resurrection)?

We rejoice to know that such a travesty of the Gospel would be

repudiated.  What, then, is the warrant for rejecting the conditions for

eternal life, and for taking out of its context and applying to a different

people its alternative punishment?  Punishment connected with our preaching

is for rejection of the finished Work of the Lord Jesus Christ, not for the

omission of deeds of charity.  Supposing we allowed the expression,

'everlasting punishment', the full force demanded by orthodox teaching, even

then we should be without the slightest warrant for taking the punishment

attached to one set of conditions, and applying it to sinners of all times

and dispensations.  The eagerness with which this passage is quoted, but with

all its terms brushed aside, is itself evidence of the poverty of the

position of those that fall into such methods, crying aloud at one minute

against a false gospel of works, and the next forgetting its protest so that

the wages of sin shall be, not as Paul was inspired to declare, death, but

eternal conscious torment.

The question of the meaning of the words rendered 'eternal' and

'everlasting' comes up again in these pages under the headings of olam and

aion.  (See Age1).

Orthodoxy mutilates both Romans 6 and Matthew 25.  It takes eternal

life as being the gift of God, and rejects the wages of sin as being death.

It takes the wages of sin from Matthew as being everlasting punishment, and

rejects the grant of eternal life and righteousness as a result of good

works.  Surely it should be manifest to the most zealous advocate of eternal

torment, that to overlap all dispensational boundaries, and make a mixture of

law and grace, faith and works, violating all demands of context, and

ignoring all limits of time, place and circumstance, is to show oneself

disapproved before God, and, so far as interpretation and service arising out

of this doctrine is concerned, to prepare one for shame in His presence

through failure to divide aright His Word of truth.

Dr. Young in his Concordance defines the word 'punishment' by

'restraint' and the literal meaning is 'cutting off' as of 'pruning', which

explanation contains a truth that would yield far more profit by an hour's

meditation than all the indiscriminate repetition of Matthew 25:46 can ever

produce.  The fire into which these rejected nations go is said to be the one

'prepared for the devil and his angels'.  This is evidently the same as

that of Revelation 19:20 and 20:10, which, when it is associated with men, is

defined not as a place of never -ending torment, but as the second death'

(Rev. 20:14,15).  (See Millennial Studies9).  Matthew 25 is parallel with

Psalm 37:22:

'Come, ye Blessed of My Father, Inherit the kingdom ... Depart from Me,

ye Cursed ... into everlasting Punishment' (Matt. 25:34 -46).

'Such as be Blessed of Him shall Inherit the earth; and they that be

Cursed of Him shall be Cut Off' (Psa. 37:22).

Here it will be observed that 'cut off' corresponds with 'everlasting

punishment', even as we have seen that the word used in Matthew refers to the

pruning of a tree.