Mark 9:44

(44) Where their worm dieth not.—The words are taken almost literatim from the closing verse of Isaiah (Isaiah 66:24), where they appear as part of the description of the triumph of Jehovah. The true worshippers should serve in His Temple continually, and they should go forth and see the carcases of the transgressors, “for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” The scenery is, like that of Isaiah 63:1-6, drawn from the slaughter of earthly battles, and the prophet exults in vision over the putrid carcases and the blazing fires that consume them, and thinks of that scene as perpetuated throughout eternity. The imagery was thus already familiar, and it coalesced naturally with the ideas of Gehenna. Possibly the valley of Hinnom, as the great cloaca of Jerusalem, receiving its solid as well as its fluid sewage, with putrid offal and blazing fires consuming them, had become in this way a visible type of the unseen Gehenna; but the authorities are hardly definite enough to warrant the positive statement that it presented such a scene. The interpretation of the symbols (for a literal acceptance of the words is obviously out of the question) is not far to seek. Well-nigh all Christian thinkers have seen in the gnawing worm, the anguish of an endless remorse, the memory of past sins. Fire retains its wonted force as the expression of the righteousness of God (Hebrews 12:29) manifesting itself to the consciousness of the sinner in all its awfulness, purifying where there is any desire, and therefore capacity, for purification, but never altering its essential character, even as the fire “never can be quenched.” So much the words declare distinctly, as the law of righteous retribution. They do not absolutely exclude the thought that the fire may consume or destroy that which it cannot purify; still less do they affirm that it will.