Devotional 37: The Punishment of Sin: Eternal Death and Present Misery

The Confession Read

Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, doth, in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God, and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 6, Section 6

Introduction

Imagine a man standing in the dock of a courtroom. The evidence against him has been presented — not by circumstantial witnesses who might be mistaken, but by his own deeds, each one bearing witness against him with unassailable clarity. The judge is not corrupt, not partial, not swayed by bribery or sentiment. He is righteousness itself, and he has weighed the man in the balance and found him wanting. The gavel falls. The sentence is pronounced. And the man is led away, not to a temporary imprisonment from which he might one day emerge, but to a condition from which there is no release, no appeal, no reversal. This is the picture our Confession paints in its sixth and final section on the fall of man. Having traced the anatomy of sin through its origin, its transmission, its universal corruption, its production of actual transgressions, and its stubborn remainder even in the regenerate, the Westminster Divines now bring us to the terminus of sin — its guilt, its curse, and its punishment. They do not do this to leave us in despair, but because the Scriptures themselves speak this way, and because the depth of our malady must be known if the height of Christ's remedy is ever to be appreciated. A physician who softens the diagnosis may spare the patient's feelings for a moment, but he sentences him to death by his kindness. The Divines, faithful to the Great Physician, give us the diagnosis in full.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, delivers a pointed and terrifying summary of sin's consequences in all of Scripture. Romans 6:23 — "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." The word translated "wages" is the Greek opsonia, a term borrowed from military life. It referred to a soldier's pay, the ration or stipend that was his by right, earned by his service and owed to him by the commanding officer. Paul's choice of this word is deliberate and devastating. Death is not an arbitrary punishment that God capriciously attaches to sin; it is what sin earns. It is the just recompense for the service rendered. Every sin is an enlistment in the rebellion against God, and the paymaster is punctual. The wages are paid in full. But observe the contrast Paul draws. On the one side: wages — earned, deserved, owed. On the other: gift — charisma, freely bestowed, unearned, unmerited. The symmetry of the verse is the gospel in miniature. Death you have worked for; life you cannot work for. Death is what you deserve; life is what you receive. And the hinge upon which everything turns is "through Jesus Christ our Lord." The wages are paid — either to you, or to your Substitute. The same apostle, writing to the churches of Galatia, intensifies this legal language with a term that makes the sinner tremble. Galatians 3:10 — "For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." The Greek word here is katara: curse, execration, that which is devoted to destruction. Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 27:26, the climactic curse of the covenant sanctions at Mount Ebal. Notice the comprehensive demand: "continueth not in all things." Not most things. Not the important things. All things. The law of God is a seamless garment; tear it at any point and the whole is rent. The law is a chain of many links; break one and you fall. This is why the Confession insists that "every sin" — not only the gross and scandalous, but every sin — brings guilt. The curse is not reserved for the murderer and the blasphemer alone; it hangs over every son of Adam who has failed to love God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, and his neighbor as himself. Understanding why this is so requires grasping the nature of sin itself. The apostle John provides the definitive definition. 1 John 3:4 — "Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law." The Greek underlying "transgression of the law" is anomia, literally lawlessness. Sin is not merely a mistake, a weakness, an unfortunate lapse, or a failure to reach one's potential. It is lawlessness. It is the creature looking at the Creator's holy command and saying, "I will not." It is the finite dust shaking its fist at infinite majesty. And because the law of God is not an arbitrary set of rules but a transcript of God's own holy character — the law reflects who God is — every sin is ultimately a personal assault upon God Himself. This is what gives sin its infinite demerit. A crime against an infinite being incurs an infinite debt. The epistle of James sharpens this understanding by closing a loophole we are all tempted to exploit. James 2:10 — "For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." The logic is devastating in its simplicity. The law of God is not a collection of independent statutes, like stones in a pile from which one may be removed without affecting the rest. It is a single expression of the will of the one Lawgiver. To break any commandment is to defy the authority that stands behind every commandment. James anticipates the objector: "But I have kept most of the law. I have not murdered, not stolen, not committed adultery. Surely one small infraction does not make me guilty of all?" His answer is an unequivocal yes. The man who respects every law of the kingdom except the one forbidding treason is a traitor. The man who keeps every door of the house locked except one has left the whole house vulnerable. So it is with the law of God. One sin makes you a lawbreaker, and a lawbreaker stands guilty before the Judge of all the earth. The prophet Ezekiel, speaking in the twilight years of the kingdom of Judah, articulates the principle of personal liability that undergirds the whole biblical doctrine of guilt. Ezekiel 18:4 — "Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die." God claims ownership of every soul. "All souls are mine." This is the foundation of His right to judge. And the principle is clear and unsparing: the soul that sins — that soul, and not another — shall die. Ezekiel is dismantling the popular proverb of his day, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." The exiles in Babylon were blaming their ancestors for their predicament, casting themselves as innocent victims of inherited judgment. Ezekiel will have none of it. Yes, original sin is real — the Confession has spent five sections establishing that. But actual sin brings its own guilt. The sinner cannot hide behind Adam's transgression and claim that his own sins are merely the inevitable outflow of a corrupted nature and therefore not truly his fault. The Confession's phrase "both original and actual" closes that escape route. Every sin brings its own guilt. Finally, Paul gives us a glimpse of the eschatological dimension of this wrath — the final, unmitigated reckoning. 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 — "In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power." "Everlasting destruction." The Greek olethron aionion is not annihilation, as if the sinner simply ceases to exist and escapes conscious suffering. It is destruction in the sense of ruin, of being lost, of perpetual undoing. And the essence of this punishment is relational: "from the presence of the Lord." The sinner who spent a lifetime fleeing from God, suppressing the knowledge of God, refusing the overtures of God's grace, will at last get what he wanted — existence without God. And that is hell. Not the absence of God's presence in the sense that God is nowhere — God is everywhere — but the absence of His favorable presence, His blessing, His comfort, His light. Only the darkness remains. Only the wrath.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly gathered in the Jerusalem Chamber in the 1640s, they were not writing in a theological vacuum. They were answering errors. And by the time they reached the sixth and final section of their chapter on the fall and sin, they had particular opponents in view. The Roman Catholic Church, following the Council of Trent, had codified the distinction between venial and mortal sins — the former not deserving eternal punishment, the latter cutting off the soul from sanctifying grace. The Divines rejected this. The Confession says "every sin" — original and actual, great and small, open and secret. No sin, in its own nature, is venial. What makes any sin "mortal" in the ultimate sense is simply that it is sin. The least transgression of the law of the infinite God carries an infinite demerit. A child's disobedience and a tyrant's atrocity both incur guilt before the same righteous Judge. The Socinians denied eternal punishment altogether, contending that a finite sin cannot deserve an infinite penalty, and that the God of love would not subject His creatures to everlasting torment. They also taught that death is natural to man, not a penalty for sin at all. The Divines countered both errors. Death is not natural; it is penal. "The wages of sin is death." And the punishment is everlasting because the God against whom sin is committed is infinite. A crime's severity is measured not only by the act itself but by the dignity of the one against whom it is committed. Striking a fellow citizen is a misdemeanor; striking a king is treason. Every sin strikes at the King of kings. The Antinomians posed a subtler danger. They taught that the guilt of sin is so fully removed in justification that believers need not concern themselves with it at all — that even ongoing sin in the regenerate carries no guilt whatsoever. The Confession does not deny the complete pardon of sin through Christ; that is the glory of the gospel. But Section 5 has already established that the corruption remaining in the regenerate is "truly and properly sin," and Section 6 now adds that sin, by its very nature, brings guilt. The pardon is real, but it is a pardon that presupposes real guilt. Grace is not the denial of guilt; grace is the bearing of guilt by Another. A forgiven sinner is not an innocent man; he is a guilty man whose debt has been paid. When the Confession says that sin "in its own nature" brings guilt, the Divines are making a metaphysical point. Guilt is not an arbitrary legal fiction attached to sin by divine decree; it is intrinsic to what sin is. Just as fire, by its very nature, produces heat, so sin, by its very nature, produces guilt. The relationship is not external but essential. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition of the Westminster Confession is a careful treatment of the Assembly's theology, explains with clarity: guilt is "that obligation which a person, who has violated a law, comes under to suffer the penalty annexed to the transgression." The obligation arises from the nature of the act itself — the law of God is righteous, sin is contrary to it, and the creature who transgresses incurs a debt to divine justice that he cannot pay. The phrase "bound over to the wrath of God" employs the language of the courtroom. A prisoner who is "bound over" has been transferred from the custody of the arresting officer to the custody of the one who will carry out the sentence. The sinner stands under arrest by the law; the evidence of his transgression is entered into the record; and he is delivered into the hands of divine wrath. This is not an impersonal process. The wrath of God is not the karma of Eastern religion, an impersonal moral mechanism that balances itself automatically. It is the personal, holy, active displeasure of the living God against sin. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, writes that the wrath of God is "the revolting of His holy nature against that which is its opposite, together with the purpose to visit the subject of it with the judicial expressions of His righteous displeasure." It is personal. It is judicial. And it is terrifying. The Confession then enumerates the manifestations of this wrath: the curse of the law, death, and "all miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal." The curse of the law is the sentence of condemnation pronounced from Sinai. Death is the execution of that sentence — and death here is not merely the cessation of biological life but the comprehensive ruin of the creature. Hodge helpfully distinguishes three kinds of death: spiritual death, which is the separation of the soul from God in this life; temporal death, which is the separation of the soul from the body; and eternal death, which is the final, irreversible separation of both soul and body from God in hell. To these correspond three kinds of misery: spiritual miseries such as the blindness of mind, hardness of heart, and terror of conscience; temporal miseries such as sickness, poverty, and all the sorrows of this present age; and eternal miseries, which are the pains of hell forever. One further contrast the Divines knew they were making concerned the nature of the law itself. When the Confession calls the law "righteous," it is echoing Paul's language in Romans 7:12: "The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good." The Greek word translated "righteous" in our section is dikaiosynē, righteousness, justice, that which conforms to the standard of God's own character. The law is not an arbitrary set of restrictions imposed by a capricious deity. It is the expression of who God is. Therefore sin, as the transgression of this law, is not merely the breaking of a rule but the rejection of God Himself. And guilt — the obligation to suffer punishment — is simply the law's righteous response to that rejection. This is the unvarnished teaching of the Confession. It is hard to hear. It was hard for the Divines to write. But they wrote it because the Bible teaches it, and because a church that ceases to speak of wrath soon ceases to speak meaningfully of grace.

Theological Depth

William Perkins, the father of English Puritanism, whose Golden Chain traced the order of salvation from election to glorification, began his famous chart with a frank assessment of man's condition: "Man's misery is his guiltiness and punishment." For Perkins, guilt was the first link in the chain of human woe: the objective state of liability to punishment that sin necessarily produces. What is particularly striking in Perkins is his insistence that guilt is not a feeling. A man may feel no guilt and yet be guilty; a man may feel intense guilt and yet be pardoned. Guilt in Perkins's treatment is a legal reality, a standing before the bar of divine justice. "Guiltiness," he wrote, "is the binding up of a sinner to undergo deserved punishment." This is precisely what the Confession means by "bound over." The sinner is not asked whether he feels bound; he is bound, whether he knows it or not. Perkins then traced the progression: from guilt comes punishment, and punishment "is the execution of the curse of the law upon the transgressor." The order is essential. God does not punish arbitrarily; He punishes because of guilt. And guilt exists because sin is a transgression of a righteous law. The logic is inexorable, and Perkins would have the sinner feel the weight of it before offering the relief of the gospel. A man who does not know he is lost will never rejoice to be found. Robert Shaw, the Scottish Presbyterian whose Exposition of the Confession was written for the instruction of ordinary church members, devotes careful attention to the phrase "in its own nature." Why did the Divines insert those four words? Shaw explains that they were guarding against the error that guilt is something God arbitrarily imputes to actions that are otherwise indifferent. No: "Sin, in its own nature, deserves the wrath of God." The connection between sin and guilt is not a positive enactment of divine will that God could have made otherwise. It is rooted in the unchanging character of God and the immutable relation between the Creator and the creature. The law is righteous because it reflects God's righteousness; sin is contrary to that law and therefore contrary to God Himself; and guilt is the necessary consequence. Fire burns because it is fire. Sin damns because it is sin. Shaw also makes a pastorally vital distinction regarding the threefold death and misery. Spiritual death "consists in the loss of the image of God, and in the corruption of the whole nature." This is the state into which every child of Adam is born. Temporal miseries are "all the afflictions of this life, which are the fruits of sin." And eternal death "consists in the everlasting separation of the soul from the comfortable presence of God, and in the enduring of unspeakable torments in hell." Shaw does not soften this. He is a faithful expositor of the Confession, and the Confession is a faithful summary of Scripture. But neither does he leave the reader without hope. The very next chapter of the Confession, on God's covenant with man, is where the remedy begins to unfold. The darkness of Chapter 6 is the necessary backdrop against which the light of Chapter 7 shines. Edward Reynolds, a Westminster divine who later became Bishop of Norwich, wrote a treatise simply titled "The Sinfulness of Sin" — a title that in its very simplicity conveys the Puritan conviction that sin must be understood before grace can be appreciated. Reynolds develops an argument that the scholastics called the "infinite demerit" of sin. Every sin, he argues, is an offense against an infinite God, and therefore deserves an infinite punishment. This is not because the act itself is infinite — a finite creature cannot perform an infinite act — but because the object against whom the act is directed is infinite. "The greatness of the offense," Reynolds writes, "is measured by the greatness of the person offended." A blow struck against a fellow man is an assault; a blow struck against a king is treason, punishable by death. Every sin is a blow struck against the King of heaven, and therefore every sin is cosmic treason. Reynolds presses this further. Sin offends against God's authority and even despises His goodness. Every sin is committed in the face of God's kindness. The sinner breathes God's air, eats God's food, lives in God's world, enjoys God's patience — and uses all of it as fuel for rebellion. This compounds the guilt. The creature takes the very gifts of the Creator and turns them into weapons against Him. Reynolds puts it starkly: every sin is a kind of deicide, not that the sinner can actually kill God, but that the sinner would if he could. The hatred of God latent in every sin would, if given the power, unmake the Maker. "The aggravations of sin," Reynolds concludes, "are infinite." And if the aggravations are infinite, so must be the punishment. This is not the reasoning of a harsh man but of a man who has looked long into the abyss of his own heart and seen what sin truly is. James Ussher, the learned Archbishop of Armagh whose Body of Divinity was widely used for catechetical instruction, approaches the question of punishment from the angle of divine justice. For Ussher, the justice of God is not a reluctant attribute — as if God would prefer to be merciful but is constrained by some external standard to punish sin. No: justice is essential to God. It is the expression of His holy nature. God is just, and therefore He must punish sin. "The justice of God," Ussher writes, "is that whereby He rendereth to every one according to his works." This is not the justice of an angry tyrant but the justice of a righteous Judge who cannot look upon iniquity without abhorrence. Ussher is careful to note that the punishment of sin — death in all its forms, misery in all its dimensions — is not contrary to the goodness of God. It is rather the expression of His goodness considered as holiness. A judge who acquits the guilty is not good; he is corrupt. The God who punishes sin is the God who is good in the fullest sense — who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, and whose justice is the guardian of His love. To these voices we may add a penetrating observation from Calvin. Commenting on Galatians 3:10, Calvin notes that Paul does not say "cursed are they who do not obey the law" but "cursed is everyone who continueth not in all things." The emphasis on "all things" is deliberate. "The law demands the utmost perfection of obedience," Calvin writes. "It does not say, 'If you do your best, it will be accepted.' It says, 'Do all, and live.'" And because no fallen son of Adam can do all, the law pronounces its curse upon all. This is why the law cannot save. Its function is not to give life but to reveal sin, to silence every mouth, and to shut up all men under condemnation — so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. The curse of the law is the dark tunnel through which the sinner must pass to reach the light of the gospel.

Puritan Application

First, let no one imagine there is such a thing as a small sin. We are apt to grade sins as if they were examination papers — this one a minor infraction, that one a serious offense, this third one truly heinous. But before the infinite holiness of God, every sin is infinite in its demerit. James tells us that "whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" — not because all sins are equal in their earthly consequences, but because the authority of the Lawgiver stands behind every commandment. To break one is to defy the One who gave them all. A child who disobeys his father in a small matter has still defied his father's authority, and the defiance, not the size of the infraction, is what constitutes the offense. Search your heart, dear Christian. Are there sins you have learned to live with — sins you have reclassified as "struggles" rather than transgressions, sins you have excused because "everyone does it," sins you have minimized because they seem small beside the greater sins of others? The Confession permits no such grading. Every sin, original and actual, brings guilt. The smallest pebble of sin, dropped into the ocean of God's holiness, sends ripples to eternity. Second, guilt cannot be self-managed. This is a temptation as old as Eden. Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves; we sew them still. When conscience accuses, the natural instinct is to reach for something to cover the shame — religious observance, charitable giving, moral reformation, comparison with those who seem worse than ourselves. But guilt is not a stain that can be scrubbed away with good works; it is a legal debt that must be paid. And because the debt is infinite, no finite creature can discharge it. As Perkins observed, guilt is objective, not subjective. You cannot feel your way out of guilt, perform your way out of guilt, or wait your way out of guilt. The debt remains, and the day of reckoning approaches. What, then, can a sinner do? Nothing — and to learn that you can do nothing is the beginning of wisdom. The law was given to stop every mouth and make all the world guilty before God, not to provide a ladder by which the guilty might climb to heaven. Until you have despaired of yourself, you will never look wholly to Another. Third, the temporal miseries of this life are, for those who have ears to hear, merciful warnings. The Confession speaks of death "with all miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal." The temporal miseries (sickness, sorrow, pain, loss, disappointment, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to) are not random cruelties in an impersonal universe. They are the rumblings of an approaching storm. Every headache, every funeral, every broken relationship, every dashed hope is a sermon preached in the language of suffering, and its text is always the same: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." God is not obliged to send warnings. He could let the sinner sail smoothly into eternal ruin, untroubled by any foretaste of judgment. That He gives foretastes at all is a mercy. Do not waste your pains. Let every temporal misery drive you to Christ, who alone can deliver from the eternal misery of which these are but shadows. Fourth, the curse of the law must drive the sinner to the only One who has borne that curse. This is the great purpose of the law's severity. Paul, having pronounced the curse upon all who rely on the works of the law, immediately announces the gospel: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree." The very curse that the law pronounces upon sinners fell upon the sinless Son of God. He who knew no sin was made sin for us. He who deserved only blessing became a curse. He who is the beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" — and the answer, the terrible and wonderful answer, is that He was forsaken so that we might never be. The wrath that should have fallen on you fell on Him. The curse that should have bound you over to eternal death bound Him to a Roman cross. The death that is the wages of your sin was paid in full — to Him. This is the gospel. This is the only escape. And it is offered freely to every sinner who will stop working for wages and receive the gift. Fifth, and finally, let the reality of eternal punishment restore to your evangelism the urgency it has lost. The doctrine of hell is not popular. It is not comfortable. It is not the sort of thing one brings up in polite conversation. But it is true, and truth withheld is truth betrayed. If we believe what the Confession teaches — that every sin brings guilt, that the guilt-bound sinner is bound over to the wrath of God, that this wrath issues in eternal death and everlasting destruction — then how can we be silent? How can we let our neighbors, our colleagues, our family members, drift toward a Christless eternity without warning? The Puritans spoke often of hell, not because they delighted in the doctrine, but because they believed it, and because believing it compelled them to plead with sinners to flee from the wrath to come. A church that ceases to meditate on either will soon lose both holiness and hope. Let the weight of this section press upon your soul — not to crush you, for Christ has borne the crushing — but to quicken you. Love warns. Love pleads. Love runs to the lost and says, "There is a city of refuge. The gate stands open. Flee to it, before the avenger of blood overtakes you."

Prayer

O most holy and righteous Lord God, we confess that we are by nature under Thy wrath and curse, bound over to the death and misery that our sins have earned. We have transgressed Thy righteous law in thought, word, and deed. We have taken Thy gifts and used them against Thee. We have breathed Thy air and spoken rebellion. We have lived in Thy world as if Thou didst not exist. And we acknowledge that if Thou shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But we bless Thee that there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared. We bless Thee for the Lord Jesus Christ, who was made a curse for us, who bore Thy wrath in our stead, who paid the wages we had earned and offers us instead the free gift of eternal life. We deserve the wages; we receive the gift. We deserve the curse; we receive the blessing. We deserve death; we receive life. This is not because we are worthy, but because Thou art gracious, and because Christ is sufficient. O Father, let the weight of what we have been saved from never depart from our minds. Keep us from trivializing sin. Keep us from presuming upon Thy grace. Let the memory of the pit from which we were dug keep us humble, and let the height to which we are raised keep us grateful. And for those who have not yet fled to Christ, for those who are still under the curse of the law and bound over to the wrath to come, we pray that Thou wouldst open their eyes, break their hearts, and draw them to the Savior who alone can deliver them from the wrath to come. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. We ask it in His name and for His sake. Amen.