The Path That Leads Away

This section is written with sorrow, not with satisfaction. There is no pleasure in what it has to say. But the urgency of the gospel is grounded in the reality of what it says, and softening it would be a disservice to the people whose paths it describes.

The path that leads away from life is not primarily the path of spectacular wickedness. It is the path of the soul oriented away from the living God — not necessarily in dramatic rebellion, sometimes simply in comfortable distance, in the lifelong deferral of the question, in the maintenance of an adequate surface without the real thing underneath.

The outcome of that path, as the texts describe it, is the permanent version of what Adam entered temporarily. Sheol-separation was reversible for Adam because the descent had not yet happened. For the soul that arrives at the final judgment outside of Christ, the condition of separation from the living God becomes permanent. The great chasm of Luke 16 becomes the final state. The second death of Revelation 20:14 — the lake of fire, the final disposition of everyone whose name is not in the book of life — is described with the same adjective Paul uses for eternal life: aiōnios, age-lasting, permanent.

What that condition is like from the inside — whether it involves ongoing conscious experience in the mode of eternal torment or whether it terminates in annihilation, the second death as actual cessation — is the question Part Five identified as a genuine textual tension that Scripture does not fully resolve. This book will not resolve what Scripture does not resolve. What Scripture does resolve is this: the condition is permanent, the separation from God is complete, and the relational knowing of John 17:3 is absent. Whatever else is true of the final negative outcome, the absence of knowing is at the center of it. The soul made for the relational knowing of the living God, permanently in the condition that is the absence of that knowing. That is sufficient to make the gospel urgent without requiring a resolution of the question that the texts leave open.

The people on this path are not primarily the people whose external lives look dramatic. They are the people who have been quietly too busy, too comfortable, too invested in the present arrangements to attend to the one question whose answer outlasts everything else. They are, in some measure, every person reading this — because the deferral is universal and the attending requires the deliberate act of poverty of spirit that does not happen by default.