How is an eternity in hell a just punishment for only a human lifetime of sin?

We are not, therefore, called upon to measure what is measureless, or to conceive of so many sins, or those of so many sinners, weighed out to be atoned for by a particular amount of suffering. Such a commercial idea (as it has been rightly called) of the Lord's wondrous work is an essential degradation of it, — not a high, but a low estimate of the requirements of absolute holiness which were to be met thereby. It is not that God must have so much suffering for so much sin, but that His holiness necessitates displeasure proportioned to the evil which awakes it. So even in the final judgment. The deeds done in the body become the manifestation of the person upon whom the judgment of God rests correspondingly, but forever rests; not because, as people have wrongly conceived, the sin itself is necessarily worthy of eternal punishment, but because the sinner remains eternally with the character which his life manifests.

But it is objected, "How can God who is righteous, pronounce an everlasting punishment, on sins, which committed during a short and limited period, were interrupted in their continuance?" Now where is the scale by which we can determine the amount of punishment for sin? It is quite evident that the duration of the punishment cannot be dependent on the length or brevity of the time in which the sin was committed. A person may commit a crime in five minutes, on which the best earthly government pronounces the punishment of imprisonment for life, or even of death. Even the action in itself does not determine the period of punishment. Two men for instance may be guilty of one and the same crime, and notwithstanding this, the court may sentence the one to two years, the other to twenty, because the one may be for the first time before the bar, whereas the other is known as a hardened and repeatedly punished criminal.

But there is another objection urged against the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is frequently said, "How can we suppose that God would inflict eternal punishment as a penalty for a few short years of sin?" We reply, It is beginning at the wrong end to argue in this way. It is not a question of time as viewed from man's standpoint, but of the gravity of sin itself as looked at from God's standpoint. And how is this question to be solved? Only by looking at the Cross. If you want to know what sin is in God's sight, you must look at what it cost Him to put it away. It is by the standard of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and by that alone, that you can rightly measure sin. Men may compare their few years with God's eternity; they may compare their short span of life with that boundless eternity that stretches beyond; they may seek to put a few years of sin into one scale, and an eternity of woe and torment into the other, and thus attempt to reach a just conclusion: but it will never do to argue thus. The question is, Did it require an infinite atonement to put away sin? If so, the punishment of sin must be eternal. If nothing short of an infinite sacrifice could deliver from the consequences of sin, those consequences must be eternal.

In a word, then, we must look at sin from God's point of view, and measure it by His standard, else we shall never have a just sense of what it is or what it deserves. It is the height of folly for men to attempt to lay down a rule as to the amount or duration of the punishment due to sin. God alone can settle this. And, after all, what was it that produced all the misery and wretchedness, the sickness and sorrow, the death and desolation, of well-nigh six thousand years? Just one act of disobedience — the eating of a forbidden fruit. Can man explain this? Can human reason explain how one act produced such an overwhelming amount of misery? It cannot. Well, then, if it cannot do this, how can it be trusted when it attempts to decide the question as to what is due to sin? Woe be to all those who commit themselves to its guidance on this most momentous point!

We cannot, it is true, plumb depths that are infinite, and apply God's perfect standard to the judgment of sin, or grasp in our minds the full extent of its enormity as it is seen by Infinite Wisdom, and measured by Infinite Majesty, for we are not Gods, but we can see and own that only thus is sin rightly measured. Its punishment, therefore, must be infinite, for it is according to God's estimate of that which is an offence against Himself; the Infinite One, and so could be no less. It is idle for men to raise objections, as many do, against eternal punishment, on the score that the notion is foreign to their minds, and contrary to their ideas of what is right. These objectors should begin at the beginning, and say if ever they have allowed themselves one true thought of the enormity of that which must be punished. Let them but own that it is beyond their puny minds to comprehend how dreadful is that which their wills have dared to do, and then there would be no difficulty in acknowledging that, while it is not in man to comprehend infinite punishment, yet, when he owns what sin is, he has the sense that nothing else than that can be right.

When man punishes sin, he weighs it as it affects himself, its effect on society, as it relates to time. And yet, even in that case, a crime, which may take considerably less time to perform than it would take the reader to peruse this short pamphlet, is often followed by many years of punishment, or it may be by capital punishment.

But when we come to sin against an infinite Being, we have no measure to use except what is given us by that infinite Being. The problem is beyond our solving. Sin, which took nothing less than an infinite Sacrifice, cannot be measured by the justice of the law courts. We are thus shut up to what God says in His Word and our wisdom is to refuse our own reason in this matter.

The torment of the lost and of the devil is eternal. “No rest day and night” is the solemn pronouncement in chapter 14:11, and “tormented day and night” is the equally emphatic declaration of chapter 20:10 — no cessation, no alleviation; the agony is ceaseless. The endless horror of the Beast worshippers is beyond human conception. The eternal punishment of the lost is graven on the imperishable records of revelation. Sin and its punishment are measured by the greatness, the glory, and the eternity of God. He alone can reveal who and what He is. Sin against an infinite Being must necessarily entail infinite and eternal consequences.

Thus we see from human testimony of the very highest order that sin against God is an affair inseparably connected with His government, it is "an infraction of the moral order of the universe," it is "a thrust at the infinite majesty of the moral law," an "impeachment of the honour of God's throne;" and on account of its intrinsic demerit, if for no other reason, calls for punishment such as only God, "the Judge of all," knows how to adequately apportion. And though man may not, in himself, understand the extent or degree of this punishment, it is enough for the purpose of our argument to know that he has within himself the consciousness of guilt and carries with him the conviction that a God of holiness and truth cannot do otherwise than mete out punishment to him for his sin. So then it is not so much a question of whether God will punish sin in the future, but the moral certainty that He must.

Another argument against the truth is that reason revolts against the eternity of punishment for a lifetime of sin; but whose reason revolts against it? Quite recently there was a case of a man who received a life sentence for the attempted murder of a policeman; his reason revolted against it, he thought the sentence too heavy, too terrible; he said so, and appealed against it on that ground, but his reason was no match for the sentence of the law, his appeal was dismissed. It is not for the criminal to say what the sentence shall be; the judge decides that, and when God judges He will do it in absolute justice; "We are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth" (Romans 2:3). He has told us what that judgment will be before any come into it, and He has done this in love that warns of it that men may escape.

So it is not a question of how long or in what measure God will punish sin; if He punishes at all it must of necessity be for ever. It has been truly and aptly said that "if He punishes sin in moral agents anywhere, He will also do so everywhere and for ever."

Nor will it help the objector to say that God will punish man's sin in another world, though not for ever, but only for a time, as in the purgatory of the Romanist, or the "age-lasting" hades of the Restorationist; for why should He punish sin at all if He punishes only for a time? if it were an arbitrary act and not founded on the eternal principles of justice, we might well ask, "Why does He, a God of love and goodness, punish man at all?" But since it is done by the requirement of His holy character as Judge, and thus leaving Him no choice (and we say it with all awe and reverence) He cannot do otherwise than make the punishment continue so long as the existence of the soul and its sin.

The eternity of the doom at last has been wrongly based by many. Judgment is eternal, not necessarily because sin as an infinite wrong must have an infinite punishment; that at least might be debated, and from Scripture could scarcely be established; but because the sinner remains a sinner, and the wrath upon him necessarily remains. There is not, and cannot be, any more open rebellion; all bow necessarily under the hand of God, and there are no more sins to suffer for; mercy has limited punishment to the reward of what was "done in the body" strictly, and punishment is in this way truly corrective — a restraint.