NOTES for Th2 1:6-7
These words of Paul are easy to understand in the sense in which religious people usually understand them, namely within the traditional paradigm of posthumous recompense, common to many religions, including rewards for 'right' people and punishments for 'wrong' people, right and wrong, of course, from a religious point of view. But another interpretation of the apostle's words is also possible, one connected with the idea of the spiritual path in general and the Christian path in particular.
And the idea of the spiritual path is in principle incompatible with traditional religious ideas about recompense, whether in this life or after death.
Those traditional religious ideas presuppose that a person remains in a kind of spiritual and life sandbox, as is usual with children watched over by a more or less strict teacher who always has a supply of rewards for obedient children and punishments for disobedient ones. But adults, unlike children, cannot be dealt with in this way; here each person makes his choice freely, without outside supervision, and answers for it himself. A person who has set out on a spiritual path, any path he has chosen, will have to walk it as an adult, not as a child.
At the end of the path what awaits him will not be a reward in the form of a bag of gifts earned along the road and hidden in an agreed place, even if the gifts are 'spiritual,' but the results of the spiritual path he has traveled. Of course, God has always allowed a person to do more on his path than the person could do by himself, and the Savior is also always ready to help a person be freed from the consequences of sins committed earlier, if the person truly repents of them.
But even with such support, each person still walks his own path and receives at the end what he was walking toward. There, at the end of the path, it may turn out that different people, in the spiritual sense, were walking in different directions and came, symbolically speaking, to different places. Neither the Kingdom nor eternal destruction is a reward or punishment in the traditional religious understanding of either one; both are only the result of the path, and of the choice that determined the paths of those who walked them.