ternal good, and the wicked, on the other hand, must
be punished forever. Otherwise God's judgment would not be righteous;
in other words, he would not be God. Now, since this is an impossible
proposition, since God's righteousness and truth are immutable, in
his capacity of judge he must perforce, in due time, come from
heaven, when he shall have assembled his Christians, and avenge them
of their enemies, recompense the latter according to their merits,
and confer eternal rest and peace upon his followers for the temporal
sufferings they have endured here.

GOD DOES NOT FORGET HIS CHILDREN.

7. Christians should certainly expect this and comfort themselves in
the confidence that God will not permit the wrongs of his people to
continue unpunished and unavenged. We might think he had forgotten
were we to judge from the facts that godly Abel was shamefully
murdered by his brother, that God's prophets and martyrs--John the
Baptist, Jeremiah, Paul and others--suffered death at the hands of
bloodhounds like the Herods, Neros and other shameless, sanguinary
tyrants of the sort, and this when God had, even in this life, given
glorious testimony to their being his beloved children. A judgment
must be forthcoming that tyrants may suffer pains and punishments,
and that the godly, delivered from sufferings, may have eternal rest
and joy. Let all the world know God does not forget, even after
death.

8. This is the consolation the future judgment at the resurrection of
the dead holds, that, as God's righteousness requires, the saints
shall receive for their sufferings a supremely rich and glorious
recompense. Paul seems to present as the principal reason why God
must punish the world with everlasting pain, the fact that the world
has inflicted tribulations on Christians. Apparently his words imply
that the perpetrations of the devil and the world--their supreme
contempt and hatred of God's name and Word, their blasphemies of
these, their wickedness and disobedience in other respects, whereby
they bring upon themselves everlasting pain and damnation--that for
these sins against himself God is not so ready to punish as for their
persecution and torment of his poor, believing Christians. This truth
is indicated where we read that Christ on the last day shall say:
"Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared
for the devil and his angels ... inasmuch as ye did it not unto one
of these least, ye did it not un