<p>25:41&nbsp;<em>Then he shall also say to them on the left hand: You who are cursed, depart from me</em>- The same word has just been used about the foolish virgins when they were told to &ldquo;Go s.w. &lsquo;depart&rsquo;&rdquo; to buy more oil (:9). The rejected will be told: &quot;Depart from me&quot; (Lk. 13:27); and yet in their lives, they will have already departed themselves. In time of temptation some&nbsp;<em>fall away&nbsp;</em>(s.w. &quot;depart from&quot;; Lk. 8:13). Some&nbsp;<em>depart&nbsp;</em>(s.w.) from the faith (1 Tim. 4:1; Heb. 3:12). Demas departed (2 Tim. 4:10), as the rejected will depart (s.w. here in Mt. 25:41). The same word is used about how the seed sown among thorns&nbsp;<em>goes forth</em>, it departs (Lk. 8:14) to condemnation.&nbsp; They departed, and so He tells them to depart. Now they willingly absent themselves from the Lord, but then they will not want to depart from Him. God will gather up the nations to thresh them, but they gather themselves to Him (Mic. 4:11,12).</p><p><em>To the perpetual fire which is prepared for the Devil and his messengers</em>&ndash; Clearly alluding to the Gehenna myth. This is a phrase taken straight from Jewish apocalyptic thinking and literature. It was the worst category of punishment conceivable in Judaism. And yet Jesus in the context is talking of the way that religious people who claim to believe in Him will not go unpunished for ignoring the needs of their poor brethren. This all too easy to commit sin... The Lord uses Judaism&rsquo;s toughest language to condemn. But this doesn&rsquo;t mean that He actually believed in the literal existence of either &ldquo;eternal fire&rdquo; nor a personal Devil. The Devil&rsquo;s angels are those who ignore their needy brethren. It&rsquo;s a powerful and telling juxtapositioning of ideas by the Lord Jesus. The warning that the wicked will be cast into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil (Mt. 25:41) was referring to the apocryphal fate of supposedly &lsquo;wicked angels&rsquo; as recorded in 1 Enoch 54. The references to Tartarus and sinful angels in 2 Peter and Jude are also clear references to wrong beliefs which were common in Jewish apocryphal and pseudo-epigraphical writings. These wrong ideas- and they&nbsp;<em>are</em>&nbsp;wrong- are not corrected directly, but rather a moral lesson is drawn from the stories. This is the point of the allusion to them; but there is no explicit correction of these myths in the first instance. It is the Angels of Jesus, and not of the Devil, who punish the wicked (Mt. 13:42&ndash;50). A wresting of Scripture to make out that the Devil is the tormentor of the wicked simply runs in straight contradiction to these plain statements of the Lord Jesus.</p><p>It is a common theme that the wicked snare themselves, falling into their own pit, rather than God specifically snaring them (e.g. Ps. 7:15; 9:15; 57:6; Prov. 26:27; 28:10; Ecc. 10:8). Their condemnation, the nature of their punishment, will have been specifically &quot;prepared&quot; for them (Mt. 25:41). The bitter self-hatred and ineffable regret of the rejected will be their punishment; and in accordance with the specific, personal way they mistreated and neglected God's Truth in this life, so they will mentally torture themselves. From their own mouth and words men will be judged (Mt. 12:37; Lk. 19:22 cp. 2 Sam. 1:16).</p>