Forgetting About Hell

You're about to witness a blog post that has made its writer tremble. My hands are shaking. My eyes are soaked. I've been studying a topic that makes me want to spread the Gospel faster, more efficiently, and to more people than ever before. The Holy Spirit has reminded me of something that I push to the back of my head all the time: hell. He's reminded me of how insanely real it is. He's reminded me that Satan is real and is the receiver of many souls.

I truly believe that one of the biggest problems in our culture is that people have done exactly what I've done; they've forgotten about hell. Some people have yet to grasp the reality that hell is an option for them. Some of us, church goers especially, have completely erased hell from our thoughts. Listen to me here: hell is not something that we necessarily love to talk about, but it is extremely vital for you to understand it. Exploring the possibility that you and I could spend eternity being tormented in hell is not exactly comfortable or easy to think about, but it is absolutely necessary for a number of reasons that we will get to throughout this post.

Sometimes when the Holy Spirit tells me to write about something, I freeze up. When He brought me to scripture in the Bible about hell, I would skip over it. It made me uneasy. It was a topic that I would just rather ignore instead of facing. He kept bringing me back to it, urging me to read it. You can't take things away from My message; study every word. But, really, who wants to spend their quiet time studying eternal torment? Hope, when you try to ignore hell as an option for souls, you ignore part of the reason that Christ died for you. God was breaking down the barrier of fear for me. He didn't want me to lead my own Bible studies, He wanted me to be led.

After I had spent time studying it, I knew He was going to coax me into writing about it, but I knew I just couldn't. I can't tell people about this place. Hell will scare them off. I realized that I had crossed a line. Refusing to teach a passage of scripture is just as wrong as abusing it. It's time that we stop trying to sugar-coat things. We need to stop apologizing for God and start apologizing to Him for being embarrassed by the ways He has chosen to reveal Himself. Hell shouldn't scare anybody away from God. That's kind of like running to hell. Learning about Hell should make everyone run to God.

As I had spent a few weeks studying about hell, I knew He had brought me to this topic for a reason. It changed my faith. My faith was no longer self-reliant. My faith started to burn like ashes on my tongue. I gained an urgency in my soul to spread the Gospel in any way that was possible. People needed to know. Every person I saw looked clueless about this place. Christians don't speak about it; it makes people uneasy. My job here is not to make things easy for you. My job is to speak of the Gospel exactly as it has been given to me.

The Bible makes us very aware of the existence of hell. Let's open the one book that will give us all the answers and look up some verses:

Revelation 20:14-15 - "And death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death--the lake of fire. And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown in the lake of fire."

Matthew 7:22-23 - "On judgement day many will tell me, 'Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.' But I will reply, 'I never knew you. Go away; the things you did were unauthorized.'"

2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 - "...God will come with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, bringing judgement on those who don't know Him and on those who refuse to obey the Good News of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction, forever separated from the Lord and from his glorious power..."

For those who follow Jesus, there is eternal life in Glory in the presence of God, but for those who don't follow Him, there will be punishment. And as we have seen in those verses, the Bible doesn't hold out hope for a second chance. How terrifying this is for those souls who will be tossed out, wanting to come in to the gates of Heaven, banging and begging, wishing they had made different choices when they had the chance. Doesn't it send chills up your spine to know that you could one day be one of those souls that will be crying out desperately to get into those pearly gates?

God is real. Jesus is real. The Bible is real. Heaven is real. Hell is real. I'll sit here and tell you with every bone in my body, without a single doubt in my mind that God is as real as real gets. If you believe in the Bible, if you believe in God, then you have to believe in hell.

There is no passage in the Bible that says there will be a second chance to fix things after we die. You won't be able to talk yourself out of anything. You won't be able to go back and fix the things that you did on earth. You won't be able to suddenly decide to turn to Jesus because Scripture tells us what He will say, "I never knew you. Go away." Just typing those words is making me sick.

Some of us have developed our own views of hell. You've probably heard someone say something like, "I don't care. I know I'm going to hell anyways," or "Well, if I go to hell, at least all my friends will be there with me." Let me say this again: there are no second chances. Hell will be worse than the worst massacre ever recorded. You won't be surrounded by friends (even if they are there, too). You'll never see them. You'll be on fire constantly and the pain will never go away or get any easier. Just burning myself on the stove hurts; I can't imagine being constantly engulfed in a lake of fire. You'll be surrounded by the constant screams of terror by the millions of strangers around you. The Bible tells us that the lake of fire is the second death. It means that you will constantly face death, but you will never end up anywhere else except hell.

Hell will bring physical pain way beyond what you can imagine, but it will also bring spiritual pain. This brings me back to Luke, chapter 16. When Lazarus died, he arrived in Heaven, and when the rich man died (who denied any help to Lazarus when he was a beggar), he was sent to hell. The rich man cried out for help daily because He could see Lazarus on the other side. He wanted help to be extinguished from those flames, and Father Abraham denied him any help because of what he had done in his life. The rich man cried out, "Please, Father Abraham, send him to my father's home. For I have five brothers and I want him to warn them about this place of torment so they won't have to come here when they die."

The Bible shows us in this chapter that hell is eternal separation from God. It shows us that people who are in hell still have the ability to see the people that are in Heaven. Imagine the mental torture that would be. You would cry out everyday for Jesus to save you, but you have eternally separated yourself from Him. This is what Satan does for us. He provides physical, mental, and spiritual warfare that will last forever.

Hell will never get easier. Hell will never stop being hell. If you are sent to hell after your life is over, you will be there for all of eternity. Do you know how long eternity is? Eternity never ends. Never. You won't burn for a few hundred years. You won't burn for a few million years. You will be in hell forever. You will spend forever in torture, but you will still be able to watch all the glory of Heaven, but never cross over (Luke 16:26). Imagine the mental, physical, and spiritual pain that will take place every second for all of eternity.

Let me just throw this in here: I can try to describe hell to you all day long, but my words will never begin to describe how absolutely mortifying it really is. I, along with you, have a human brain. My human brain doesn't have the ability to conjure up any visions or illustrations of a place that only souls and demons exist. The only thing that I can say is that the Bible tells us in James 1:17, "Every good and perfect thing is a gift from above..." and since hell is the complete absence of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit, hell is undeniably the complete opposite of anything even slightly good.

Now, I ask you: Is there anything on this earth that is worth sacrificing Heaven for?

There is good news in all of this, though. About 2,000 years ago, God sent his very own Son down to this earth to die for us in order to cover our sins, so that we may have a chance to obtain Heaven instead of what we actually deserve. Let me tell you a little secret: Hell has an escape button. But it can only be used while you're still on earth. God has given you this escape button as a gift out of immense love. Each person has one. We can find our button if we open up our bibles to Acts 4:12, "There is salvation in no one else! There is no other name in all of heaven for people to call on to save them." Jesus is your ticket to Heaven. Believing in Him, loving Him, serving Him, knowing Him, that's your escape button. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will get you into Heaven except having a personal and intimate relationship with Jesus. You can't earn your way there. You could go on 1,000,000 mission trips and save millions of starving orphans, but that won't get you there. We don't have the ability to earn our ways into Heaven. Christ is the only way to Heaven.

Now, look around. Look at your family, friends, co-workers, and even complete strangers; don't you want to see them in Glory with you one day? There is no human who is exempt from hell. I look around at all the people I love, and it brings me to tears that some of them are living like I was: erasing hell. And living as if hell is never going to be an option for them. We're talking about people's destinies here. The thought that someone around me may end up in hell after they die is... well... terrifying.

The thought of hell shouldn't send us running for destruction, but it should impact our souls. It should call us to action, knowing that there will be so many people who will never use their escape button. I hope when I enter the gates of Heaven, I don't look back and see anyone I know begging to get in. I have an extreme urgency in me to spread the Gospel. I know Jesus and I know if I fall out this very second, the first face I see will be Jesus', but I cannot sit back and play little church games when there are people dying everyday and going to hell. When it comes to hell, we can't afford to forget.