The Unbeliever Damned
He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved but he that believeth not, shall be damned. Mark 16 16. If we admit that damned means final torment, we shut out of salvation all infants, idiots, insane, and heathen, for they do not believe. We also consign all the rest of mankind to endless torment, for according to the test given, there is not a believer on earth today. We are told in the next verse that all believers may be known by their being able to heal the sick, and take poison without...
Adams Punishment
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Gen. 2 16,17. The penalty that God intended to threaten to Adam would certainly be found at the very promulgation of the consequences of his sin. But it is nowhere intimated in the account of the first human transgression that he had incurred endless torment. Adam...
Origen And Theodore Of Mopsuestia
Origen used the expressions everlasting fire and everlasting punishment to express his idea of the duration of punishment. Yet he believed that in all cases sin and suffering would cease and be followed by salvation. He was the most learned man of his time, and his example proves that aionion did not mean endless at the time he wrote, A. D. 200 253. Dr. Beecher says 83 As an introduction to his system of theology, he states certain great facts as a creed believed by all the church. In these he...
The Word Translated Punishment Means Improvement
The word is Kolasin. It is thus authoritavely defined Greenfield, Chastisement, punishment. Hedericus, The trimming of the luzuriant branches of a tree or vine to improve it and make it fruitful.Donnegan, The act of clipping or pruning restriction, restraint, reproof, check, chastisement. Grotius, The kind of punishment which tends to the improvement of the criminal, is what the Greek philosophers called kolasis or chastisement. Liddell, Pruning, checking, punishment, chastisement, correction....
Hadees Is Temporary
But is this a final condition No, wherever we locate it, it must end. Paul asks the Romans, Have they the Jews stumbled that they should fall God forbid but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles. For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own conceits, that blindness is in part happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in, and so all Israel shall be saved. As it is written, There shall come...
Sheol And Hadees
The Hebrew Old Testament, some three hundred years before the Christian era, was translated into Greek, but of the sixty-four instances where Sheol occurs in the Hebrew, it is rendered Hadees in the Greek sixty times, so that either word is the equivalent of the other. But neither of these words is ever used in the Bible to signify punishment after death, nor should the word Hell ever be used as the rendering of Sheol or Hadees for neither word denotes post-mortem torment. According to the Old...