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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 38. In Their Own Shoes
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In Their Own Shoes
Now, let me try to gather up a few conclusions from all these and kindred passages. There is a sharp distinction drawn between two classes of men. It is based wholely on their voluntary continued attitude of heart toward the good and right and pure.
At the present time God is not acting in judgment. He is letting things work out their natural course. But he is keeping close watch, and there's a day of settlement surely coming.
There's a place of punishment in the next life. It passes through two stages. There is the present stage, running concurrently with the history of man on the earth. There is the final stage, beginning with the completely new adjustment of heavens and earth.
That place of punishment is a place of intensest pain of mind and spirit. It is not clear that there is anything in addition to that intensest of all suffering. The inferences are against its being so.
That place is not made by God. It is the creation or product of those who stubbornly set themselves against God. It seems that their accumulated action carried to its logical extent, with an increasing momentum, produces the condition that is called hell. That is the word used for the place where all such will go by the natural movement of their spirit gravity.
God does not send any one there. Whoever goes there, goes on his own feet, in his own shoes, by the use of his own free action and only so. And it seems quite clear that he stays there in the same way as he goes.
Hell has, and will have, no such huge population as would be logically concluded from much teaching on the subject. But there is un-mistakeable evidence that there is a group of incorrigibles. The language of Scripture leads one to say, a small minority of incorrigibles.
Note these words used at the very close, "and if any was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire" (Rev_20:15). Those words "if" and "any" are very suggestive. It is not the language we commonly use for a great crowd, but rather of exceptional instances.
That all this is so is utterly heart-breaking to God. It is wholly against His will and plan. But, with the utmost reverence be it said, that God Himself cannot change the thing without infringing on man's utter freedom of action. The only possible way of removing utterly any even remote possibility of hell would be by destroying man's freedom of action.
It is objected that, if all this be so, it is a de-feat for God. And so, it is said it could not be, for surely at the last God will be completely triumphant. And that has a very very strong appeal in it.
It is to be noted however, that such reasoning is not based on God's revelation, but on logic, our reasoning processes. Logic is very subtle. The least slip in the process spoils the conclusions. And logic is a very slippery thing. One item left out, even though unconsciously, knocks the conclusion out.
On the other side, there are two things to be said. God will be victorious, even under such circumstances as outlined in this talk, in this: He will have held unflinchingly and unfalteringly, to the original high standard for man, namely that man shall be in His own very image. He will have held to it against the utmost to swerve Him from it. Man is as free in his will as God is in His.
Man retains his high estate in being free to use his will as he will, even while he is damning himself in using it in a bad way. It is full victory for God's great love-purpose in creation. And meanwhile there is clear inferential evidence that the door of right choice is always open, even though it is never used by some. This is the reasoned-out reply. It is the logic process. And again it is recalled that a single flaw in logical reasoning, even though undiscovered, a single factor omitted, quite changes the conclusion.
There's something better, more conclusive, on the other side. That is the revealed fact of truth in God's inspired Book. A single citation here contains enough if there were no more. It is from the final view given of earth's affairs. It deals with the racial climax. It is the description of God's ideal at the very culmination (Rev_21:1; Rev_22:5). Evil has been judged finally.
Satan is disposed of. The old earth is displaced by a new or wholly regenerated earth. Our language seems almost used to the full in the attempt to picture the beauty and bliss, the peace and happiness, of that ideal, now become really real.
In the very midst of this glowing highly-colored picture comes the bit to be quoted here. It could not stand in sharper contrast with its immediate surroundings than it does. It is like a spot of blackest ink on whitest paper, like a mangy cur among thoroughbreds. It's a thing a man, of himself, would never have done, put this statement in that setting of bliss and purity and beauty.
Listen to the words so out of keeping with their surroundings: "But" but, what a tremendous but !—"for the fearful (or cowardly) and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers (partners with demon spirits) and idolaters (worshippers of anything and any one rather than of God), and all (sorts of) liars, their part is in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death" (Rev_21:8).
That doesn't at all mean that these people are commonly known as murderers and sorcerers and liars and so on. Some of them may be. It is the language of the Holy Spirit. It is describing things as He sees them (Note the blunt honest language used by the Holy Spirit of the apostle Judas. Joh_12:6). His eye looks through to the motives as well as the common trend of life. Many of these are what would be called cultured persons, moving in church circles.
But the Holy Spirit, looking down into their motives and lives, sees that this man is using some power he has against another to the degree of shortening the other's life or worse. That man is unclean in his thoughts and imagination and acts. This other one is having communication with evil spirits, which is commonly called spiritism; and that one yonder is living a lie, or practicing deception.