Killing the Soul

The Lord Jesus taught that nothing men are capable of doing to one another in this life compares to eternal punishment. Not on their worst day with all the weapons at their disposal. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” he told his disciples. “Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Interestingly, scientists confirm that our nervous systems have a built-in upper limit to the agonies they may allow us to experience. They refer to the phenomenon as Conditional Pain Modulation or CPM. Pain inhibits pain. In this life, you can only hurt so much.

That’s not, by the way, to minimize the awfulness of torture or the human capacity for depravity. Men have done some despicable, unconscionable things to one another over the centuries, and God will call them to account for it one day soon. The Lord’s point was that no matter how intense bodily suffering may become, there is something much worse to which we can compare it, and that is the utter eternal ruination of soul and body in hell.

Degree and Duration

The difference is not just in the degree of suffering, it’s in the duration. The terrifying feature of God’s wrath against sin is that it abides. The greatest enemy of the unrepentant sinner is time. On one level, that’s exactly what eternity is: lots and lots and lots and lots of time. All the time in the world.

Jeremiah’s Lamentations tacitly reinforces the truth of this principle. The prophet notes:

“The chastisement of the daughter of my people has been greater than the punishment of Sodom, which was overthrown in a moment, and no hands were wrung for her.”

You may remember Sodom. The Lord rained sulfur and fire on that city out of heaven. She burned up in an instant and ceased to exist. As bad as that was, says Jeremiah, the sufferings of Jerusalem during Nebuchadnezzar’s siege and during its aftermath were greater than anything that happened to the Sodomites because they lingered interminably. Surrounded on all sides for three years, sword, famine and pestilence took the lives of the vast majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants. Unlike Sodom, their doom was not quick. Time took its ugly toll. Jeremiah continues:

“Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger, who wasted away, pierced by lack of the fruits of the field.”

Again, a quick death by the sword beats a slow, painful destruction from inside. You wouldn’t choose the first either if you could avoid it, of course. But if you had to choose …

A Dubious Distinction

Yesterday, the Canadian media was full of articles about the MAID program, an acronym for Medical Assistance In Dying. Apparently last year our Canadian government dispatched into eternity so many of our fellow citizens that even doctors who endorse assisted death in principle are saying the current rate of program uptake is too much, too often for too little reason. We have achieved the dubious distinction of becoming “the euthanasia capital of the world”. Public awareness of the outrageous number of questionable assisted dying approvals is on the rise. Worse, there are stories that some medical professionals are actively promoting the program even in cases where nobody is asking for it. (This is most definitely the case. My own family experienced it.)

The mental health expansion of the program scheduled for March of next year is finally meeting with opposition, and there is talk of delaying it at very least. For people aware of the difference in weight and consequence between this present life and eternity, it’s hard to see this pushback as anything but a very good thing.

The Enemy Time

Time is the enemy of the unrepentant sinner in two very different ways:

• Firstly, as the scripture teaches, torment that lasts for eternity will always be worse than torment of limited duration. The more time, the worse the punishment.
• Secondly, as I become increasingly aware when I pray daily for friends and family, time is our enemy in the sense that we are all on the clock. The minutes to midnight are always ticking down, and nobody knows when midnight in any particular life will come. The cuckoo never announces the hour until the hour has already arrived.

While we understand many people’s lives are very difficult indeed, leaving them with little hope for a better future, governments have no business making the choice to end one’s life easier, let alone promoting that choice. Choosing death over the gifts of God is a grave evil, but it’s a limited evil because it’s individual and personal. Perhaps it is even forgivable. Institutionalized death is a much greater evil because it stops that ticking clock before it would happen naturally, and ends all opportunity for repentance and faith in Christ. God does not grant forgiveness to those who do not ask for it.

If the secularists are right and death brings only oblivion, well, no biggie. But if the Lord Jesus spoke truly, when the clock hits midnight for a man or woman on whom the wrath of God abides, there is no worse conceivable outcome for that person. In that case, killing the body IS killing the soul.