Is annihilationism biblical?

The description of the public appearing of the Lord Jesus, given in verses 7 to 9, is indeed terrible. When He is unveiled from the heavens, nothing will be lacking which is calculated to strike fear into the hearts of rebellious men. Vengeance will fall upon those who do not know God and who do not obey the Gospel. Everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, will be the penalty inflicted. Many attempts have been made to avoid the plain and evident force of the two words, "everlasting destruction," but when all is said and done the fact remains that destruction does not mean annihilation, and everlasting does mean lasting for ever, and this whether we consider the Greek original or the English translation.

Moreover, this awesome punishment is eternal destruction. How can words more dreadfully describe the horror of such judgment than is briefly done here: "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power?" This is not annihilation but "destruction," as a vessel broken and unfitted for its original purpose, for something destroyed does not cease to exist, but exists in a form of no value.

The second death is not annihilation. Death never means annihilation. The first death does not mean annihilation—the soul survives and the body will be raised. The second death does not mean annihilation, but an eternal living death. In short, eternal punishment means eternal punishing. Solemn thought, yet Scripture clearly teaches it, and it is our wisdom to bow to Scripture and not raise in question God's justice. His ways are perfect and right.

The terrible import of verse 8 is apparent. It stands in contrast to the victors in verse 7, and in both verses we are carried outside the bounds of time and into the endless expanse of eternity. There is that confined region, burning with the holy judgment of God, which will be the second death to those that are cast there. The first death is not annihilation. If it were, there could be no second. It is dissolution of soul and body. The second death will be the complete and absolute dissolution of every link that connects with God; complete severance from all that is summed up in the words, life and light and love. There will be existence but not life in the full and proper sense of the word.

In the closing paragraph of Matt. 25 the end is come. The Son of Man is King, the disciples who endured to the end are saved, the nations are judged, the disentanglement of the good and the evil is complete, the result of the judgment is eternal. Three times the word eternal occurs. The punishment of the wicked and the fire into which they go are eternal: the life into which the righteous pass is eternal. The antithesis to life is not cessation of existence, as it would be if life merely signified existence as the result of the vital spark remaining in us: it is punishment, because eternal life signifies the whole realm of blessed and eternal verities in which the righteous will move for ever. The point here is not that the life is in them, but that they pass into it. On that happy note the Lord's prophetic discourse ended.

That particular judgment, then, will have a twofold issue. It will be either life or punishment. Life in its full and proper sense will embrace all that aggregate of privileges, relationships, and blessings, the crown of all being the knowledge of the Lord, of which the earth will then be full. Punishment will embrace all those woes and penalties which are appropriate to the state of sin in which men generally are found, and to the individual sins of those in question, including the crowning one of the rejection of the Divine testimony through those whom the King acknowledges as His brethren. And both the life and the punishment are eternal. No one seems anxious to prove that eternal life is not eternal. Multitudes labour to explain that eternal punishment is not eternal. Why? It is simply a case of the prisoner in the dock revolting against his sentence! Apart from such prejudice — natural enough, but very fatal if indulged in — there is no reason for denying to eternal in the first half of the sentence what is freely admitted as to it in the second. Scripturally both parts stand or fall together.

The statement of everlasting punishment to a simple soul is as plain as possible in Scripture: "These shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into everlasting life." To a simple soul it would be monstrous to say that "everlasting" was not meant to mean the same thing. They are "tormented for ever and ever." Death gives up all it held, into the lake of fire - that is, for ever and ever; the same word always used in that book for God's existence. "They are punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord." Now everlasting destruction has no sense if non-existence be meant by destruction. Total destruction I understand; but everlasting destruction in such a sense, is nonsense. And in this case, on their own theory, it is no destruction then at all; for 2 Thessalonians 1 is at the beginning of the millennium, when, according to their own system, and my own full conviction, they are not destroyed at all.

These words deserve most solemn consideration. They are plain enough indeed; but what is there from which man will not seek to escape, when his will is adverse? The deniers of eternal punishment, both on the side of restitution and that of annihilation, are here confronted with a plain example of it. Two human beings, cast in alive into the lake of fire a thousand years before, are found there at the close of this long period still in existence! How evident that this fire is not, therefore, like material fire, but something widely different! All the arguments as to the action of fire in consuming what is exposed to it are here at once shown to be vain. That which can remain a thousand years in the lake of fire unconsumed may remain, so far as one can see, forever; and it is forever that they here are plainly said to be tormented.

But the gospel! the sweet glad tidings of God, so divinely suited to all man's need, and with its revelation of the incomparable God of our Lord Jesus Christ, made known in the depths of His nature by the love-gift of His Son — what must be the consequence, answering to the revelation of the depths of man's own heart in it, of his disobedience to the gospel? Men, says the apostle, who shall suffer the judgment of everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might. It is not any materialistic annihilation that is declared or implied in this. Banishment from the presence of that glory which he has turned his back upon and despised, — hardening himself into a final, awful incapacity for it, — what is it but the "destruction" of one made at the first in the image of God, — and for communion with Him?

As to the passage of which you spoke to me (Matt. 13:42), the explanation shews that the thought is not extinction, which is but a conclusion drawn from the effect of fire upon weeds. The effect of the fire, as of the outer darkness, is weeping and gnashing of teeth. So that the effect indicated is not a cessation of existence, as they pretend, but suffering - suffering called everlasting (Matt. 25:46), in contrast with everlasting life. The fire is a figure, the habitual figure of judgment: we shall be all "salted with fire;" the day will be "revealed by fire," &c. They shall be tormented "for ever and ever;" words employed for the duration of the existence of God.