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The Horrows of Hell
The Horrors of Hell
Preached September 22, 1996 upon Zion's Hill
20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,
21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.
22 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;
23 And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.
26 And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.
27 Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house:
28 For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
29 Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
30 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
31 And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”
-Luke 16:19-31
The late Jack Woods, from Houston, Texas said one time how he was wanting to preach on ‘The Surprises of Hell’, but God would not let him. Perhaps that is because there are no surprises in hell! If you die and go to hell, you are going to find out that hell is just exactly what God said it was going to be like, and there will be no surprises. A surprise is a pleasant sort of shocker that they pull on people at a party. Hell isn’t a party!The ungodly and sinners are always foolishly jesting about going to hell, and joking about throwing a big party. Said one fool, “We’re going to have a barbeque down there!” The party animal always laughs himself out of the conviction of his own conscience about going to hell for his drunkenness, saying, “All the fun folks go to hell!” “We’re going to have a helluva party!” “All the interesting folks will be in hell!” But it won’t be interesting when they get there, and you won’t be interested in anyone or anything beyond finding no relief for your own torments and pains and burnings.
Listen, you are not going to continue to live like hell and go to heaven! There is nothing surprising about a lost sinner’s life. There is nothing unusual or different that 20 billion other damned sinners haven’t lived like in the last 1,000 years. Blow your own smoke from hell before you get there, but there isn’t going to be any surprises about you going to hell, or what is going to happen once you discover for yourself, just like verse 23 says, “and IN HELL he lift up his eyes, being in torments”. If you die and go to hell, nothing about the place is going to surprise you. The old rich man never cried, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe a loving God sent me here to burn!” Are you kidding??? That old sinner never said, “I am really surprised by my misfortune!” That old wretch said, “send Lazarus…to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment…for if one went unto them from the dead, THEY WILL REPENT”. Listen, he knew why he was in hell, and he knew he had never repented of anything in his sorry, miserable life, and he knew if someone did not testify to his family, his family was coming to hell right behind him for the same reason…REFUSAL TO REPENT!
There isn’t going to be any surprises in hell! You go to hell, no one is going to be surprised that you went there, and you won’t be surprised that you landed there. You’ll be HORRIFIED, but you will not be surprised! HORROR is the shock of the reality when it first hits you, and you had prior knowledge that it was going to be like that, and then all of sudden, you are horrified that it is exactly like what God said it would be like, and now you are burning in hell forever. Man how horrible is hell going to be for everyone that falls right off into it! So my topic is ‘The Horrors of Hell’. O my God, how horrible hell is going to be! You go to hell, and you are going to be so insanely horrified, that this preacher does not know the words sufficient to warn you anymore than I am going to warn you right now, about ‘The Horrors of Hell’!!!
The Horrible Reality of Hell
The very first Horror of Hell is the burning realization that Hell is Real! You have been told all of your life that it was real, but chose to ignore it, as if the only real thing about hell was the fanatical fear of it propagated by religious fanatics. And education without salvation taught you to overcome the fear of it, by imagining that it wasn’t real at all. But when you get there, you will know the horror of the final realization, that you and every major educational institution were horribly wrong. Hell is real! So real, that it will wait upon you to get there, to prove the reality of it is more horrible than the fear of it that drives you to pretend Hell isn’t real! But it is real! Horribly Real! You see, when something or someone is real, they do not have to propagate themselves, or push themselves or advance themselves to be known as being real. Reality has no marketing strategy, or advancement protocols to make itself manifest to the doubters or the idealists or the realists.
Reality is what it is, and makes no apologies for its existence, nor does reality give advance previews of what it is or shall be beyond its on state of being. God Almighty is just like that. God says of Himself, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). When God showed up the first time on earth as a Man, he said to both his doubters and his believers, “Ye say that I am” (Luke 22:70). Because Christ knew that when a person says either that ‘God is real’, or that “God is not real’, both are the horrible admissions of the absolute reality of God in the beliefs or disbeliefs of someone whose entire existence is only as real as it fearfully lasts. Hey Man, why comment about the non-existence of someone or something, if you really believe they don’t exist??? They exist in your thoughts, or else you wouldn’t bother talking about them as if they did not exist.
That Bible says, “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming” (Isaiah 14:9). The Bible says that God Almighty created hell, and that it is “everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41), and that “Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering” (Job 26:6). And Oh, so horrible it will be when you drop off into hell, and discover the pain more horrible than the fear induced ignorance you entertained all of your life just to escape thinking that one day you might find yourself in hell! O Sinner! Hell is very real! Hell is Horribly Real, and you best not wait until you are there to deal with the horror of its reality! Just as death is real, Hell is real. People do not doubt death, because they see and hear of it every day of their lives. The cemeteries testify how real and all consuming death is. But to stand and look DOWN into some coffin or grave, and refuse to learn something about the direction death takes in everyone’s life, is the height of ignorance and blatant stupidity.
In May of 2010, this preacher walked into very small, concrete morgue in Bunda, Tanzania that was constructed on the grounds of the Lutheran Diocese Designated District Hospital. The small concrete block building lay beneath overhanging Brachystegia trees, and the moment the Chief Physician Dr. Hayamhagatta opened the doors to the morgue, the smell of death took your breath away. Entering the outer foyer, Death was so prevalent it hung in the air like a vapor that could be felt on your skin. A horrible feeling and a horrible smell. Opening the steel door to the Death Vault revealed a room 10’ foot by 10’ foot, with stainless steel metal bunks fastened to the walls, with elongated metal bed pans hung upon the left side and right side walls five high on each side, enough to hold ten bodies at a time. There were only three bodies in the morgue. On the right side, lying upon the metal bed was the body of Bishop Alphonce Lutakakwa, the Anabaptists National Bishop of Tanzania. His body was lying naked and exposed on the steel pan that slid out away from the wall on the metal cleats that kept the elongated bed pan in the second tier up from the concrete floor. There was dried blood and body fluids on the floor of the vault, from years of African bodies being taken in and out of the vault.
Bishop Lutakakwa was a man of God, with a very small physical frame, weighing no more than 110 pounds, but was larger than life throughout Tanzania, about whom Evangelists Stephen Katembo said, “When Bishop Lutakakwa opened the Bible and preached and taught the word of God to me, I became an Anabaptists by life. And I will die an Anabaptists in Christ forever”. With all the attending preachers and his son standing by in disbelief and shock, the doctor and I reached in and slid his bed pan out from the wall and placed it upon the concrete floor of the vault. With everyone peering down on the naked body of Bishop Lutakakwa, the first thing I noticed was the scabbed over blisters on his feet and toes from walking thousands of miles across all of Western Tanzania preaching the gospel and establishing churches around the western and southern shores and islands of Lake Victoria. It was a horribly sad sight to see a man that you had loved so much, ordained and supported in the ministry, lying cold stone dead and naked on a dirty steel bed pan on a filthy, contaminated floor. His teenage son stood directly behind me with a paper sack containing a change of clothes and shoes for his father’s body.
Reaching into the bag, I grabbed the brown trousers, and knelt on that filthy floor and began dressing that holy man of God’s black body, lifting his legs up one by one to dress him for the last time in this world. As Dr. Hayamhagatta assisted me in lifting the legs and hips, silently the national bishops of Kenya and the Congo, along with evangelist George Calvas from Michigan, all squeezed into the vault and helped dress Alphonce’s body for burial. There was body fluid seeping from his mouth and nose, and each time we turned or lifted his body, you could hear the expanding body fluids swashing back and forth within that well worn out body of a great African minister of God. O, the horrors of life and death. Five being the number of death in the Bible, the Psalmist of Israel said in Psalm 55:5,
“Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,
And horror hath overwhelmed me.”
-Psalm 55:5
Bishop Lutakakwa’s body had lain in the vault four days, while Brother Calvas, Bishop Mustafa, Martin Esakina and this preacher travelled across Tanzania from the United States for the funeral. With the delay, Riga mortise had set into the body, leaving the arms and chest cavity stiff and almost unmovable. Mary the brother of Lazarus said to Jesus at the grave of her dead brother, “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days” (John 11:39). In despair, the African ministers looked on, not knowing how to get Bishop Lutakakwa’s shirt on the body. Finishing with the trousers, I could see the confusion on the faces of the African ministers, as Bishop Muliro from the Congo began covering his nose with a white handkerchief, to filter the stench of death. Drawing out my belt knife, the preacher took Alphonce’s shirt from his son, and I buttoned the front of the shirt, then sliced the back all the way up from the shirt tail to the collar, and then placed the shirt up over the arms and chest, and tucked it in beneath the sides of the body, as they do in every funeral home across America. Beckoning the others to bring in the wooden coffin, we all lined along the side of the vault pan, and gently lifted the bishop’s body from the pan, and laid it into the coffin, re-tucking the shirt around the sides of his arms, and tucking it into the trousers. Placing the lid upon the coffin, I nailed it down, and we carried it out, placing it into the hired ambulance for the ride out to the village.
That was a horribly sad and difficult day. But it was real, because death is real! Life is real! Brother Lutakakwa was real, and his life and ministry were real, and impacted all of western Tanzania for real! And he was really murdered and really died. And we buried him in a mud soaked cotton field outside Bunda Town, Tanzania. But that man’s life did not end there in that cotton field, any more than it was over inside the vault of that tiny African morgue! Life goes on at death, in a very real way, and each of you know it, regardless of how you allow yourself to deal with it. This preacher stood ankle deep in the thick, black mud of that fertile cotton field, and looked down into that deep dark grave, as the natives lowered the wooden coffin down by ropes into the sepulcher, as both friend and foe gathered round, to watch the bearded white man bury his friend. And as this grey haired preacher began shoveling the thick, black soil into the sepulcher to cover the coffin of the best friend he had in all of Tanzania, the enemies of God began to laugh and snicker at the sight of a white man, come all the way from America to bury the little preacher they had killed. But they weren’t laughing because it was humorous or funny. They were laughing because the horrible reality had finally hit them so deadly serious, their consciences horrified them, and they knew not how to deal with the guilt and fear, beyond trying to laugh it off, and pretend it really wasn’t that serious. Just like some of you do everyday of your miserably fearful life. Death is horrible outside Jesus Christ, and Hell is more horrible than death!
Death is as real as life, and Hell is as real as death! Lost sinners all over this world are so fearful of the realities of dying, death and hell that they force themselves to either deny it, or laugh about it as if it was not real. And when Death and Hell are so fearfully real to you, that you have to daily joke about it, curse about it, or openly deny its existence, you prove the reality of Death and Hell or else you would ignore it. But you cannot ignore it, nor get the horrible thought of dying without God out of your mind, and you never will. Drinking will not drown it out. Music will not drown it out. Laughter and a lying education will not dissolve the fear of death, torment, destruction and hell from the lost sinners mind.
“For a fire is kindled in mine anger,
and shall burn unto the lowest hell,
and shall consume the earth with her increase,
and set on fire the foundations of the mountains.”
-Deuteronomy 32:22
Even the National Geographic editors have come to deal with the reality of Hell, in their special edition called, “Going to Hell”, which they highlight with this ominous face of reality.
The Sierra Club’s Robert Wenkam writes of the molten, fiery core of the earth, that exposes itself from volcanoes, "a new religion, Christianity was getting organized in Palestine with a Bible telling of an underworld filled with molten lava, a lake of fire they called Hell. . .Hell is perhaps the most sadistic fantasy ever conceived. It is described, painted, and contemplated with incredibly perverse relish as a perpetual Lake of Fire where inextinguishable flames burn forever. To a Christian and a Geologist, it is a reasonable description of the earth below, and it is understandable how. . . [volcanoes] have come to be associated with the ultimate punishment of sinners and unbelievers". (Wenkam, Robert. The Edge of Fire. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. 1987. p. 132, 133). Wenkam goes on to say, “The Devil and sulfurous lakes of fire are like Hades and Hell, Christian liturgical symbols that have become American folklore. . . But even the most sophistic explorer will often describe awesome vistas in terms of the nether world, as Jacques Cousteau did on his television segment describing the summit crater on Deception Island in Antarctica"
‘It is satanic, like Hell frozen over’.
-Jacques Cousteau
“Hell is naked before him,
And destruction hath no covering.”
-Job 26:6
Even as the molten fires of earth’s lavadic core spew themselves forth from hundreds of volcanic mountains of fire and brimstone throughout the world, lost sinners stand in awe and splendor of the sights and sounds of the reality of what is fearfully right below their feet, yet they laughingly reject the horrors of the reality of what their eyes can see, and their ears can hear that tell them most assuredly, they are all without exception headed “DOWN to death; their steps take hold on hell” (Proverbs 5:5). Even in the horribly sick environment of the cartoon comic strip, the “Elevator to Hell” only has a down button!
O the horrible insanity of unbelieving minds looking in wonderment at the awe and splendor of fire and brimstone breaking forth from beneath their feet, yet ignore the horror and reality of ever descending down therein when death seizes upon your soul and spirit, in a downward spiral of uncontrollable desperation and rage that burns with never ending torments of fire long before one breathes their last gasp of air above in exchange for the ash filled smoke of their torments below. The scientific and factual reality of fire, brimstone and smoke spewing forth from the lowest parts of the earth beneath, are the horrors of the certainty that God did not lie when He wrote thereof,
“Fear Him which is able to destroy both
soul and body in Hell.”
-Matthew 10:28
“I beheld Satan as lightning
Fall…Fall…Fall from Heaven.”
-Luke 10:18
“Cast forth lightning, and scatter them:
Shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them.”
-Psalm 144:6
“And the smoke of their torment
ascendeth up forever and ever.”
-Revelation 14:11
“And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth,
Blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.”
-Joel 2:30
“The wicked shall perish…they shall consume;
into smoke shall they consume away.”
-Psalm 37:20
“HELL…and DESTRUCTION HATH NO COVERING!”
-Job 26:6
O the horrible reality that struck when that “rich man died, and IN HELL he lift up his eyes, being in torments and seeth” (Luke 16:23) that Hell was horribly real, and horribly hot! Listen, nothing was dark and secret. Nothing was hidden and unknown. There is nothing about hell that cannot be seen or felt! The Horrors of Hell are real, and they can be seen and they can be felt the moment you lift up your eyes in the horrible damnation of your own sinful, Christ rejecting life! Sinners don’t go blind, deaf and dumb when they die. You might willfully live that way on this earth, but when you die and your soul drops far below the surface soils of this earth whereon you stand today, you will both see, and feel and hear all the horrors of hell about you forever.
The sights of hell are horrible in that you will see very clearly that you are damned and other people aren’t!!! That rich man could see Lazarus comforted, but he couldn’t feel the comfort. All he could see was what he felt and heard of his own torment in the fires of hell and damnation, where the sights are as horrible as the feelings, and the feelings are worse than what you can hear of the horrors of hell.
“There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matthew 8:12
“There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matthew 22:13
“There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matthew 24:51
“There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matthew 25:30
“There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Luke 3:28
Five times God says that! How many times? How many times? How many horrible times does God have to say that, before you realize how horribly true it is going to be for you when you get down there, and see it and hear it the very first time in an eternal “weeping and gnashing of teeth”??? Doctors and Pharmacists will tell you that people who grind their teeth at night, have worms in their gut from parasitic foods and unsanitary dining conditions, that grow in the intestinal tracts, spreading filth and germs through their blood system into the nervous systems of the body that stress and strain the nervous system in everything they do in life; until they grind their teeth uncontrollably in the dark hours of the night as if in a neurological torment. That Bible says three times of those horribly lost souls that damn themselves to hell that they are
“Cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:
where their WORM dieth not,
and the fire is not quenched.”
-Mark 9:43-48
But you vainly suppose and imagine that such gnashing and torment in this life is medically real, but hell is not real??? O how horribly vain the imagination that accepts the reality of a tormented life upon this earth, but desperately ignores and rejects the possibility of an even more tormented life below the earth. Men die and women die, and children die every day, and they don’t go sideways into eternity. Their bodies are buried down beneath the earth, but you vainly imagine their souls go no where??? Each of you have known persons in this life who were friends, family and close associates, fellow students and neighbors whose lives were vibrant and joyful, passionate and moving in both work and school, home and play and all of life. Yet you see them die, and their bodies lie in state within the confines of some funeral home coffin, AND WHERE ARE THEY??? Where is the laughter now? Where is the joy and vibrancy now?? Where is the hard work and sport now? WHERE ARE THEY NOW??? You walk up at the viewing in all your formality and mourning, yet there lies the body, once full of life and emotion, but now it lies stiff and cold and horribly dead to anything that resembles what their life was manifest to have been….YESTERDAY! Their body will shortly be lowered beneath the surface of the earth, and put to bed with shovels of dirt beneath the sod of a cemetery grave; and do you horribly suppose their emotional soul and vibrant spirit and mind went side ways into the darkest hour of their life spent and gone as if it was never there??? Their voices silenced as their breath was taken, but they went no where? The Word of the Living God says,
“Yet thou shalt be brought DOWN to hell,
to the sides of the pit.”
-Isaiah 14:15
If all of mankind by nature are buried beneath their feet and yours, why say ye that there is nothing down there? It matters not how high in life one may attain, or be promoted to before you die. For death sends everything down just as fast as the body closes its eyes and lies down in death, regardless of the person’s comfort in this life. There was a village in the Bible called, Capernaum, which means, “Village of Comfort”; of which Jesus Christ lamented,
“And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven,
shalt be brought DOWN TO HELL.”
-Matthew 11:23
One of the first horrible realities of Hell is the falling, the uncontrolled downward spiral into “the fire that never shall be quenched” (Mark 9:44). Down, Down, Down into “the fire that never shall be quenched”! Listen, Sinners, your friends and family are buried in some lonely cemetery, they once walked around in life, and moved and had their vibrant life in an upright, vertical transport from the cradle to the grave. But they laid down or fell down and died! And once dead, no one launched them upward on the wings of the wind to float about the clouds, or in-circle the moon as some imaginary lunar satellite. They laid down and died, and their friends and family buried them even further down than they had fallen in death. And you suppose that the downward spiral ceased in the dirt of some graveside plot?? When did you ever see someone fly up, or move left or right when they died. The first reaction of every human when death grips, is to FALL DOWN! And that is just the beginning of the journey.
In 1976, this preacher was a young minister working his way through Bible College as a policeman in Ft. Worth, Texas, and he was assigned by his pastor the task of preaching his first funeral in Dallas. An elderly woman had died when she was 82 years old, and had lived her entire life, as far as anyone knew without Christ. She died alone, at home, and they didn’t miss her or find her for two weeks, until she failed to show up for the Christmas holiday. My pastor didn’t want to preach the funeral, so he assigned this preacher, a Bible School student to do so. The woman’s mother was still alive, and attended the graveside service on a rainy, Texas winter day. The mother was 99 years old, and 85% deaf, so the funeral service and graveside service went horribly! An absolutely horrible experience in every way. Trying to preach the graveside service, where you couldn’t honestly give the family any hope, in a pouring down rain, they had tried to get the old mother to remain in the car, 20 yards down the hillside from the graveside tent; but mother couldn’t hear the young preacher. So in the middle of the rain storm, the graveside sermon was stopped, and the family carries mom up the grassy slope, and seats her in one of the chairs closest to the coffin. The coffin was placed onto the graveside stand, which had hand cranked straps, that held the coffin above the grave, until it was lowered into the sepulcher after the service. As a young, in-experienced preacher student, the author was trying to press upon the family, that life goes on somewhere, stating, “When people die, they all go somewhere. The saved go upward to heaven with Christ, and the unsaved go down into hell.” And no sooner had the words came out of the preacher’s mouth, the hand crank on the head of the coffin gave way, and the coffin suddenly collapsed head first into the sepulcher, standing right on its head in the grave. At that horrible sight, the 99 year old deaf mother, let out a wail, and fainted backwards in her chair, which fell backwards right into the mud. An absolutely horrible, unforgettable event in a family’s life.
QUESTION: Where are you going when you die? Most folks go down…way down into the pit! “Thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:15). John F. Kennedy lived a drunken, adulterer’s life, and though he attained unto the White House, died and went to hell as a lost Catholic adulterer with his head shot off, and they buried him DOWN beneath the sod and capped his downward fall beneath the dirt with a solid black stone with nothing but his name and date of birth and date of death to identify where they put him to bed with a shovel. As a head stone, the United States Government put an “Eternal Flame” as a sign of how he fares today!
Hell is very real! It is Horribly Real! And it is right down below your feet, and to prove the reality of it in everyone’s life, the journey starts when you fall down and die, and they put you to bed with a shovel DOWN into the dirt of some empty “new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid” (John 19:41). But the journey doesn’t stop there in the dirt, for the Bible says of our rich man, that he “also died, and was buried; and IN HELL he lifted up his eyes, being in torment” (Luke 16:22, 23). In Hell, the look is always upward. When the Bible says, “Hell from beneath”, it is indicative that regardless from where on this earth you die, in hell the only direction to look is upward. Within the center of this earth, is a place full of molten fire, out of which any direction is upward! And the reason a lost sinner is damned to that upward look, “out of the belly of hell” (Jonah 2), is because all your life time on this earth, you were commanded to “look up…for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28). Listen, that Bible, that Holy Bible says, “God is in heaven, and thou upon the earth” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). The Bible says, “Consider it in thine heart, that the Lord he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none like him” (Deuteronomy 4:29). Job said, “Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are!” (Job 22:12). “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). But, sin casts the heart and the eye downward away from the glory of God, so the sinner seeks not an answer that is higher than man. David said, “From the end of the earth I will cry unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalm 61:2). Failure to look up to God, results in a bed in hell, where the only direction you can look, is where you should have been looking all your miserable life.
The Horrible Sights of Hell
And when that old rich man lifted up his eyes, the Bible says, “he lifted up his eyes, being in torments and seeth Abraham afar off” (vs. 23). How horribly ironic, that for the first time in his miserable life he could look upward and “see afar off”. Listen, Sinner, the Bible says, “O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end” (Deuteronomy 32:29). 2 Peter 1:9 speaks of a person that “is blind, and cannot see afar off”.
O, how horribly tragic and fearful, when for the first time in a sinner’s miserably lost life, they look upwards, only to see everyone else “afar off”, looking downward at them! Mom and Dad standing by the emergency room hospital bed, looking down at the battered body of their drunken child as their eyes close in death, in one last upward, blank stare of unbelief. And as with any funeral, no one looks up into the coffin of a friend or family member. They all look down with tear filled eyes.
They don’t nail the coffin to the roof of the church, so lost loved ones come and glance upward at the one who dropped down dead!!! Fool yourself! When you die, everyone looks down at you. The very last look everyone has of you is a downward look.
Being in torments and SEETH…AFAR OFF”.
-Luke 16:23
Can you imagine how horrible it must be, to finally drop off into hell, and for once in your life look up, while everyone else is looking down with no hope of ever seeing one another again. Listen, verse 28 describes how that rich man in all that he could or could not see from hell, he was looking out for his five brethren, but it didn’t do him or them any good. It meant nothing, for though he “lifted up his eyes…and seeth afar off”, THERE WAS NO HOPE TO BE SEEN, either for him, or his brethren that were still living just like he had lived. The view from hell doesn’t do anyone any good. The view from Hell is a horrible sight to behold, because that view is always the lowest view and the darkest view, and the most helpless view. Listen sinner, you spend your entire life time over seeing things and people and places you think are important to you. You over see the raising of your children, and remember over seeing the assembly of all their tricycles and bicycles and doll houses. You looked down on their smiling faces as they grew up looking up into Mommy and Daddy’s face with laughter and joy. You over see your household, and over see paying the mortgage payments and the car payments and the insurance payments. You go to work and over see the management of contracts and disputes, and designs and finances. You over see the savings account that pays your kids college tuition, and over see getting the family up and dressed for church, where you can go and sit down and listen to some lost hireling tell you how things are looking up, while you look down on everyone outside less fortunate than you. And then one day the death angel shows up while your mowing the lawn, or cooking on the grill out back, and Satan touches you once in the heart and once in the side of the head and you fall down with a massive stroke, and for hours you lie on your backside in some hospital bed looking up at everyone you have been looking down on your entire life. And the wife or husband stand by your bedside and look down at you, and the children all gather around and look down at you, and the doctors do everything they can for you while looking right down at you as they try to be patient while you begin to lose your life to the darkness of eternity. And the emergency room is cold and clammy as everyone looks down on you gasping for breath with sweat beading up on your forehead from the fires beneath your death bed struggling to regain what now you know is lost forever. And the monitors starting reeling off their alarms like some “familiar spirit…that peep, and that mutter” (Isaiah 8:19) to sound off that your upward glance of death is falling even further below the physicians’ medical ability to stop the downward spiral. And then the beeping straight lines into the most god awful screeching sound of death; and everyone loses sight of you as you disappear and leave behind a cold, lifeless body that everyone recognizes but each witness knows for certain is no longer you. You’re gone forever! And you didn’t leave sideways into eternity! And they walk out of that room with a sinking feeling in their heart that continually testifies that you went the same direction as their hearts. And then someone asks, “Why was he sweating like that?”
They don’t see anything else, but the sights of that tragedy are just beginning for every lost sinner who dies in his sins thinking he can die without them! Listen you die like that, and everyone will walk out of that room with the full understanding that you did not walk out with them, but you are definitely gone and there is no reason to linger in that room waiting for you to come back. You’re not coming back, and they know it, or they wouldn’t leave your dead body lying their naked and cold and all alone for strangers to carry away! But you don’t see them walk away, and you don’t see those strange people carry your body away to the darkness of the morgue. But you do see some things, and those things you have never ever seen in your sorry, miserable, sinful life are now a horrible reality and a horrible sight to behold as you fall, fall, fall “down quick into the pit” (Numbers 16:30). O, the horrible sights of Hell that one sees as he falls into it.
The Bible lays bare in many places the horrible sights of what a lost sinner is going to see from the moment he dies, until he finds himself in hell. Listen lost sinner, you die and hit the judgment of God long before you ever breath your last breath, or you wouldn’t sweat so profusely as you lie on your death bed with your mouth gaped open in one horrible death stare at what no one can see but you, as they stare down at you dying in your sins, and you stare upward at the same event. But what a lost sinner sees of his own dying, is like nothing in this world. One of the horrors of Hell is what you see that others don’t!
By that the preacher means, when a saved child of God, who has repented of his sins and turned to Jesus Christ for eternal salvation stands before the throne of God to give an account, the Bible says they see “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1). But when a lost sinner hits the judgment before that same throne, you don’t see that “pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne”. What a lost sinner sees of that river is a horrible sight, and a horrible reality. Daniel 7:10 and Revelation 19:12 say “a fiery stream issued and came forth from before him…the judgment was set, and the books were opened…and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead…the dead…the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works…and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them…and death and hell were cast into the lake of fire”. Listen, what the saved child of God sees in that “pure river of water of life”, the wicked see as “a fiery stream” that will “take away the wicked from before the King, and His throne shall be established in righteousness” (Proverbs 25:5). There is a high mountain in Yosemite National Park called “El Capitan”, which means God is our Captain (see Hebrews 2:10), that has a beautiful, pure water fall stream going over the side, and it drops straight down into a rocky cavernous pit hundreds of feet below. However, in the evening, when the Sun sets, the Sun light (see Psalm 2:12 c.f. Malachi 4:2) hits that same water fall and turns it into a fiery stream dropping over the abyss.
“Doth not nature itself teach you…”
- 1 Corinthians 11:14
O how tragic it is that sinners can believe what they see in nature, but cannot see what they are told from the Bible about nature’s God. Listen, Romans 1:20 says, “For the invisible things of the Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse”. Lost sinner, you hit the Judgment of God on your death bed, and you will see something so horrible, that none of your loved ones can see: and that “fiery stream” will carry you away and drop you off into “the lower parts of the earth” (Psalm 63:9/ Isaiah 44:23/ Ephesians 4:9) into “the fire of hell” (James 3:6) that geologist tell you and show you is there; but you refuse to believe until God Almighty “turnest man to destruction” (Psalm 90:3) and “the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone” (Isaiah 30:33) “carriest you away as with a flood” (Psalm 90:5) “where your worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44, 46, 48).
Photo by Kenneth Garrett: info@kennethgarrett.com
National Geographic, Used by permission
“Fear him which is able to destroy both
Soul and body in hell.”
-Jesus Christ (Matthew 10:28)
Man can show mankind some horrible sights for the eyes to behold at a distance, whether they be real, imaginary or unreal, and lost humanity believes what they see as it relates to creation and life as they know it in a 24 hour existence without God or the knowledge of God. But that same mankind refuses to entertain that what technology can show you today, the Bible told you 4,000 years ago.
“Hell from beneath is moved for thee
to meet thee at thy coming”.
-Isaiah 14:9
And when that fiery stream before the throne of God sends you sliding right off into hell, and the bars and gates of hell slam shut behind your descent into the “fire that shall never be quenched” (Mark 9:44, 46, 48), O how horrible the sight of thine eyes shall be forever! Sanity cannot imagine the horror of sliding down a fiery stream of molten fire like some child on a water slide, and passing violently through “the gates of hell” (Matthew 16:18) with “the earth and her bars…about you forever” (Jonah 2:6), and every where you look on every side is “the land of darkness and the shadow of death” (Job 10:21) except the eternal glow of the “fiery indignation” (Hebrews 10:27) of a God the Bible declares is “a consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24/ Hebrews 12:29). You scoffed all your life at the thought of the “river of water of life, clear as crystal” (Revelation 22:1), and now “the sorrows of hell compass you about” (2 Samuel 22:6/ Psalm 18:5) in the “fiery stream” of God’s indignation and wrath, and you drink “the dregs of the cup of God’s fury…and wring them out” (Isaiah 51:17, 22) over the fire of hell. O the horrible sights of a sinner burning in hell.
O Sinner, the Bible prints out for all to read the fiery denunciation of God against your soul saying, “A fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains” (Deuteronomy 32:22). You have never seen anything from that depth in all your life, but if you die in your sins, you are going to see the horrors of hell from “the foundations of the mountains” as you cry aloud for none to hear, “I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel” (Psalm 31:12). Hell is described as “an horrible pit” Psalm 40:2), and that pit has sides that are impossible to scale. And the very hour that you are “bought down to hell, to the sides of the pit” (Isaiah 14:15) where your eyes will weep fiery tears at the sight of men and angels burning as together; where the latter may just be the fiery torment of the other. Listen, the Bible says that “everlasting fire, is prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41), and that God “maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire” (Psalm 104:4). You bind those together with the souls of men and women and children, into “the lowest parts of the earth”, little wonder there is a combustible torment of liquid fire and damnation burning and consuming the heart of the earth. And you think you can bear to see yourself from the center ring of that fire, knowing it burns forever!
And worse than that is the horrible feelings of being in hell.
That rich man “in hell…lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth…a great gulf fixed” (Luke 16:23-26), and new he was never getting out of there. Most sinners today refuse to allow themselves to even imagine that they could ever land themselves IN HELL; but when you get there, you will go stark raving mad seeing that you can never, ever get out. The human mind wants not to think about how it will feel when you are in hell with the gates shut, and there is no escape; and there is no relief. Yet more horrible than that is what that old wretch did once he saw he could not “escape the damnation of hell” (Matthew 23:22). In verses 28 and 30 he did not want his five brethren coming to hell, but in verse 24 he wanted father Abraham to send Lazarus to hell to comfort him in his torment. All his life he and his five brethren lived like hell, or else he wouldn’t be there! You live just the way you die! And you die just like you lived. If you die and go to hell it will be because you lived like hell all your life. But Lazarus in his lifetime was a beggar, who “was laid at the rich man’s gate, full of sores”, and was fed “with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table” (vs. 20, 21). That Bible says the rich man during his lifetime “received…good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things” (vs. 25). But when you “let the good times roll”, and sing “I’m here for a good time”, then know this that when the good times are over, and you wind yourself up in hell, it bothers you that someone you despised lives forever and is comforted while you are in hell and your five brethren just like you are coming right behind you. That is a horrible mind set to die with! And the finality of that feeling is horrible to live with or die with! And it is an incomprehensible feeling as much as it is an unreasonable and unbearable feeling.
That old wretch never asked to get out of hell, he just wanted someone he viewed as worst than himself in his lifetime to come to hell with him, to help cool his tongue! Horrible way to feel about yourself and others, and a horrible way to live and a horrible way to die. But he died just like he lived and felt all his “lifetime”, and his feelings died with him. Ever felt like hell in your lifetime??? Do you want to know how horrible hell feels like? It feels just like that. That is what hell feels like! You say like what? It feels just like any lost sinner feels: how he feels about God; how he feels about himself; how he feels about his family; how he feels about others; and how he feels about living and dying. Everyone and everything can go to hell, as long as he is satisfied and feels good. He or she doesn’t care about God; they don’t care about their family and they don’t care about their so called friends. And frankly, they don’t care about living or dying. And when you consider what that old wretch said after he was damned in hell, you will understand what this self serving world means when they say, “I don’t give a damn about anyone!” They really do not care about their family, at least enough to do something personally to help them. Did you notice that! That old boy never asked to be set free so he could go back and tell his five brethren the truth so they would repent. He never asked to be let out of hell to help anyone! He asked Abraham to send Lazarus back from the dead. Doesn’t it strike you strange that if he was going to ask that anyone be allowed to go back from the dead and warn his brethren, that he would have asked that himself be allowed to get out of hell and go back to his family?! What that shows you is that in hell, feelings never change! They are just horribly manifest as “contradiction[s] of sinners against themselves” (Hebrews 12:3). He didn’t care to personally be around his family to help them when he was alive, and once he is dead in hell, he still doesn’t care to be around to help them. Self centered people do not mind if others care for and help their family or anyone else; but they are not going to do it! He didn’t care if someone gave Lazarus “the crumbs that fell from” his table, but he wasn’t going to personally do anything to feed that old beggar outside the gate! It is an inconvenience for him, EVEN IN HELL! He never cared to tell them the truth when he didn’t know what the truth was; but now that the truth has put him in hell and he knows the truth, he still doesn’t care to tell his family the truth in death either. He doesn’t mind if someone else tells them, but he wouldn’t even escape the damnation of hell to personally tell them the truth, that they might be saved. Do you realize how horrible it is to feel that way? Even the pains and fires of hell didn’t change how that old wretch felt about his family or himself. You would think the burning fires of hell and its torment would change a fellow’s mind to want to get out hell, even if he used helping his family as the excuse to escape the torment. But he didn’t change his feelings one bit.
O Yeah! Listen, that wretch wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone including his family. He doesn’t mind if someone else helps them in his behalf, but he is not going to do it! He would not lift a finger to help. But he wanted Lazarus to lift his finger to help him in his torment! O, “send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger…his finger…his finger in water and cool my tongue” (vs. 24), but he wouldn’t lift a finger to save his five brethren! He did not feel compelled to try to even pray himself out of hell, to go help his five brethren get saved. And he didn’t want to be with them either! These naïve Christian ministers and their congregations would think that everyone in hell would be praying and crying to get out, crying day and night, “O Lord! Please! Please! Please help me. Forgive me! Please give me another chance and I’ll go back and straighten up and work to straighten my family up! O Lord, my five brethren, just give me another chance to spend time with them and help them get saved! O Lord, please!” That is a bunch of nonsense, because no one in hell is or ever will be like that. They don’t care about anyone but themselves, and those feelings never change, even in the most awful, horrifying pains of everlasting burning, and burning and burning in hell. Listen, there are some sinners just like that who are going to read this that would go to hell and burn forever, before they would lift a finger to help their family, friends or neighbors to stay out of hell and live forever in truth and righteousness. What a horrible way to feel about yourself and everyone else. But that was the way he felt. He felt like HELL!
You say, Preacher how do you know what Hell feels like? Well stick your tongue out of your mouth, and grab hold of it with your fingers and you’ll know what hell feels like! Listen, the Bible says, “The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and IT IS SET ON FIRE OF HELL” (James 3:6). That is why, though he was “tormented in this flame” (vs. 24), he only wanted his tongue cooled! Did you notice that??? He never asked to have the flames extinguished around him. He never asked to cool his feet, or bath his body in water. That old wretch demanded that Abraham “send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue” (vs. 24). He didn’t ask Abraham anything. He demanded Abraham to send Lazarus, like he was still in charge giving the orders. “Father Abraham, send Lazarus…send Lazarus” (Luke 16:24, 27). “Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue…send him to my father’s house” (vs. 24, 27). Just one horrible insistent life of making demands for other people’s inconvenience, trouble and despair while doing nothing worth while yourself but shooting your lousy mouth off about everyone else! Going no where and doing nothing but shooting your mouth off! Just a loud mouth zero, that spends his or her entire life going nowhere and doing nothing, but jacking your jaws to get out of helping others, or caring about anyone! Listen, because that Bible says, “the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and IT IS SET ON FIRE OF HELL” (James 3:6), you can count on it, if you wind up in hell, your tongue got you there, and set you on a path of destruction, that once you head down that road to hell, every one just has to let nature takes its course, and when it is through, you will wind up in hell. Every hell bound sinner in this world is a loud mouth, whose “tongue is a fire, and a world of iniquity” (ibid.), who long before they die and go to hell, the Bible says of them, they “are set on fire…whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword” (Psalm 57:4). And the reason that bunch always talks like hell is because they feel the fires already and are about to move right in and burn forever! And you may scoff at it now, but that is a horrible way to live, full of cursing and bitterness, and then die the same way and burn four fold worse than you ever lived. And when you get to hell, your tongue will still drive you just like it does in this life. Drive you right off into hell, because a person starts talking like hell the same moment they start living like it! And they are like that because deep down inside, the feel like hell and have hellish emotions all their life! And there is no exception to that rule!
You find someone who talks like hell, they live the same way! And they have the most hellish feelings about everything that concerns their damnable life. And when you live like hell, you are going there; but hell will be much more horrible than you ever lived like, talked like or felt like in your miserable short existence on earth. And if what the author just wrote hurts your feelings, you deserve to have your feelings hurt, because the way you have been living all your life has hurt the feelings of everyone who comes in contact with you. But it never bothered you, and still doesn’t bother you and never will bother you at all to hurt them, as long as you are gratified by the pain you inflicted with your tongue and lousy attitude at living like hell. And when you die and go to hell, you will continue to feel the same way. And if you were to die right now, everyone would be justified in writing on your grave stone;
Here lies a Sinner who lived for himself!
Who cared for nothing but his own fleshly self.
Now where is he? And how he fares!
Nobody knows! And nobody cares!
How does it feel to live just for yourself? The Preacher will tell you how it feels: it feels just like HELL! And one of the first horrible feelings of hell is how hot it is. And every self serving, self gratifying, egotistical selfish slob of a personality is a hot head! An arrogant, lifeless hot head of self conceited rage against anything and everyone that crosses him, corrects him or disagrees with him. And a lot of women, as well as men are just that very way!
QUESTION: Ever met a heavenly minded saint of a personality, old or young? They always have a tender heart and cool head!
QUESTION: Ever met a hellish extroverted, contemptuously self conceited fool of a personality, old or young? They always have a hard heart and hot head!
And you get around that bunch, and the atmosphere, the feelings and the situation and circumstance at hand goes to hell in a second just being around them! Ever felt like hell??? Ever known a man or woman that just to be in their presence, or hear them talk, immediately sets an atmosphere that just feels like hell every moment they open their mouth??? Those feelings are real, and the atmosphere is real, because hell is real, and those that have set their pathway in this life on the road to hell, demonstrate the horrors of hell that can be felt even unto the soul of their personalities. Ever met someone whose personality, outlook and manner of life resonates with the feelings of a burned out warehouse, that you could almost smell the brimstone and smoke of their torments?
Hell is a very painful, horrible tormenting place to drop off into, that only a fool would ignore the truth of its horrors as if the earth existed and what is beneath the earth’s crust did not exist! Even science in all of its advanced technology has proven beyond any doubt, that the Bible truly did cry out of its horrors in saying, “Hell from beneath is moved…is moved…is moved for thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee” (Isaiah 14:9).
One of the strangest, and most horrible fields of medical research concerns itself with what the American Medical Association calls “Dysesthetic Burning”. Neurologists call it “Dante-esque Pain”, after the Classical Novel, Dante’s Infernal. Medical researches have recorded statements from patients diagnosed with Dysesthetic Burning as explaining the pain they feel 24 hours a day as,
- “Like Hell’s hottest knives tearing at my flesh”.
- “Like my flesh being consumed in a fire” (Boivie 1989).
- “Like my flesh is being torn from my body”.
- “Like my flesh has been burned off”.
- “A pain worse than pain” (Riddoch 1939).
- “Indescribable burning”.
- “Like an alien pain monster has taken over my body and has ignited my flesh”.
- Dr. Patrick Walls, a pain researcher wrote of one of his patient’s horrors of having Dysesthetic Burning, “it feels like tinfoil under my skin”.
- http://www.painonline.org/dyses.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysesthesia
Researchers describe their patients’ inability to describe their horrifying pain in any terms other than “burning…burning…burning…always burning”. They cannot regardless of how they question, interview or interrogate their patients, the physicians cannot get them to describe their pain in relative terms, such as “blunt”, “sharp”, “poorly recognized” or “cramping”. Every single patient in the last 80 years have horrifyingly described their Dysesthetic Burning as just horrible “burning…burning…burning and more burning; nothing but burning.”
Listen sinners, hell is very real, for the Bible is real, and the heart of the earth is real, and the burning, horrible lavatic flows of earth’s core are real, and so is the pain of everlasting burning. Pain is real. And there is no disease known to man, that is more horribly painful than “Dysesthetic Burning”. And you want to take a chance that none of it will combine to your destruction? Lost sinners want to take the chance that God is not the author and creator of both the earth, the molten core beneath the earth’s surface, and the indescribable pain and torment of everlasting burning, that medical science knows exists in the most horrible studies they have ever had to acknowledge. The inner earth’s molten core of supernaturally hot fires of lava didn’t just happen, and those fires of liquid torment do not exist beneath your feet for scientific reasons, because science has not answer for why a vast expanse of molten fire does not completely consume the relatively shallow crust of earth’s land mass, and why they do not boil the oceans dry. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), and beneath the earth’s crust God Almighty created a place of burning torment that makes everything in nature work, including “the damnation of hell” for those who live like it!!!
The rich man in hell cried aloud, “I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:24). Well do you think he was just joking around about it because he was able to talk and describe it! The man cried aloud, “I AM TORMENTED IN THIS FLAME!!!” A young woman in Indianapolis describes her pain, writing in horrible despair, “I have every description you named. I try to keep telling Doctors that it burns like I am on fire inside me but at the same time I feel like I have an ice pick stabbing me, and even though it feels like its on fire, it also feels like its frozen, like ice. I cannot stand for any clothing to touch my skin or now that its getting warmer, and I have a fan on. If the fan is blowing on me, that makes it hurt also. It is miserable. I’ve been on so many pain meds for the last 4 yrs that it is not funny. NOTHING helps. It is literally hell on earth! I am tired of it. The pain literally makes me feel sick at my stomach. I am having a hard time just getting thru each day. I keep thinking what’s the use if this, if this is the way its going to be for the rest of my life. I am totally disabled from it. I either just sit on the couch and cry or lay in bed and just cry or just stare out into space. I really don’t know what’s the use. No one seems to either care or can help me. It’s pure hell!”
(http://www.dailystrength.org/groups/neuropathy/discussions/messages/3682109).
O the horrible feelings of Hell! They are worse than the Horrible Sights of Hell! But there is more horror than just what you see and feel! This preacher does not know sufficient words to describe the horrible climax of hell, other than what God Almighty has already declared three times, saying for all eternity that,
“And mine eye shall not spare thee,
Neither will I have pity:
But I WILL RECOMPENSE thy ways upon thee,
And thine abominations shall be IN THE MIDST OF THEE:
And ye shall know that I AM THE LORD…
Now will I shortly pour out my fury UPONE THEE,
And accomplish mine anger UPON THEE:
And I will judge thee according to thy ways,
And WILL RECOMPENSE THEE for all thine abominations.
And mine eye shall not spare,
Neither will I have pity:
I WILL RECOMPENSE THEE
According to thy ways and thine abominations
That are IN THE MIDST OF THEE;
And ye shall know that I AM THE LORD THAT SMITETH [THEE].”
-Ezekiel 7:4-9
A “recompense” is a pay back. “ReCOM”…the return, THE COME BACK”; and “pense”…penny, payment. The pay back. The ultimate payback from God is called a “recompense”. And the Bible says that “I will recompense thy ways UPON THEE…I will RECOMPENSE THEE…I WILL RECOMPENSE THEE.”
Listen, Ecclesiastes 8:11 says, “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.” People vainly think that because God Almighty hasn’t judged them yet, He will never judge them. Lost humanity thinks and believes that because God Almighty hasn’t sent them to hell yet, that He never will send them to hell. Yet that Bible says, “Though a sinner do evil a hundred times, and his days be prolonged…it shall not be well with the wicked, neither shall he prolong his days, which are as a shadow” (Ecclesiastes 8:12, 13). “I will recompense…I will recompense…I WILL RECOMPENSE THEE” (ibid.).
The absolute and unsurpassed horror of a wicked life is the Horrible Recompenses of Hell. The Payback from God is so personal, and it is for all eternity a “recompense”, that it will be your own Personal Hell and you will feel it, you will feel it, you will feel it down the debts of your soul and HELL. A Personal Hell so fitting, so absolutely suited and balanced to your wicked life and personal feelings, and eternally synonymous with your wicked personality that no one including your own miserable soul will fail to see it, and fittingly say Amen to your own damnation! The Horrors of the Recompense are too many to count, but the Preacher must lay before you these.
The Horror of Dying Just Like You Lived!
God makes no mistakes in life or death. He has perfected both, so much so, that His Holiness and His Righteousness demand that everyone’s death is just as perfect as God Almighty is in Life. It is a horrible recompense to die just the way the you lived! O the absolute finality of how and when a person dies at the end of horribly wicked life. And O, the absolute finality of how and when a person dies at the end of a neglected life, where you lived your entire existence without God; and DIED THE VERY SAME WAY! No one is brought into this world by accident, and no one leaves by accident. Your creation and birth were perfected by God, even in the most degraded and tragic circumstances imaginable. Listen, that Bible says of every soul born into this world, whether in riches or poverty, whether in the best of society or the worst of slums, before you were ever conceived in the womb your “substance was not hid from God, when you were made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth” (Psalm 139:15); and you are headed right back there without Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. Your mother may have been the most delicate, socialistic lady of kingdoms that deposited you into a satin lined cradle of hand planed mahogany, or the most degraded, hopeless and dirty vagabond prostitute that bore you in some dark alley bathroom, and laid you down in a cardboard box or beer crate she found in the alley. But that Bible says that God Almighty “did see your substance, yet being unperfect; and in God’s book all thy members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there were none of them” (139:16). God had your design written down before you were ever conceived in your mother’s womb, whether by marriage or lust driven fornication, and that design was written down in perfect order when your soul was just a “substance…made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth” (Psalm 139:15). The stork did not bring you, and you did not parachute down out of heaven, and you didn’t come crawling into this world from some former life. Mom and Dad were not your creators, and you didn’t just show up here by “hap chance and circumstance”. And if you think that God Almighty is going to start something so perfect and not end it the same way, just because you entirely messed it up between your first breath and your last, you are in for one Horrible Recompense that this preacher knows no words to describe. But you will come face to face with that Horrible Recompense a split second before you die, and collide headlong into the perfection of God in just how fitting it will be “when” and “how” you die! Ask Michael “the pervert” Jackson if God Almighty did not perfect the horrible way he died. Ask John F. Kennedy to testify if there was anything missing in the time, place and manner of his death that did not perfectly match just the way he lived. Ditto for Elvis, Adolph Hitler, Ted Bundy and John Wayne and a million others known and unknown. Ditto for every lost sinner throughout the world.
Several years back, there were two mentally retarded brothers that attended our local congregational services named Burkett, who had repeatedly asked prayer for their drunken father to be saved. After a year or so of praying for their Catholic father, the oldest brother asked that one of our preachers go with him to visit their father, to see if he could be led to Christ. Brother Dan Gowen, an evangelists in our church visited the old man in his home, on the north side of Johnstown, but was cut short by the old foul mouthed drunkard, who became enraged at his sons bringing an Anabaptists preacher into their home, and the old drunk cursed profusely at Brother Gowen and threw him out of the home, taking God’s name in vain and using Jesus Christ as a vehement curse towards the preacher. A few days later, that old drunken Catholic was taking a shower, and dropped his bar of soap, which provoked him to a barrage of profane utterances, and he began to curse God and swear repeatedly as he stooped down to find the bar of soap. In his vociferous volley of profane utterances, old man Burkett slipped on the bar of soap and went crashing through the shower curtain, falling head first into the open toilet knocking himself out, face down in the toilet bowel, and he drowned in his own urine. His last words were “God damn it”; and so the Lord did just that!
So let it come unto him:
As he delighted not in blessing,
So let it be far from him.
As he clothed himself with cursing
Like as with his garment,
SO LET IT COME INTO HIS BOWELS LIKE WATER.”
-Psalm 109:17, 18
The horrible recompense of Hell is that every lost sinner dies just the way they lived. You live without God, you die without God. You live like hell, you die like hell. You will die just the way you lived! That is the horrible reality of Hell and Damnation. On of the most horrible realities of Hell is that you will die just as far from God Almighty as you lived!
O, The Horror of Dying Just as Far From God as You Lived!
Did you notice that the rich man in hell, never mentioned the Lord one time as he burned in hell??? That is because he never mentioned God one time in is life! God was nothing to him in life, and he died and went to hell the very same way. That is the horrible damnation of Hell, in that when the Bible says of some lost sinners, that they “have forgotten God days without number” (Jeremiah 2:32), those same sinners will never remember the Lord in hell either. For all eternity they will forget the God that sent them to hell, and the God that could have kept them out of hell. Many will go to hell just like they lived, and they lived all their life thinking life was an accident, and a perchance event in the destiny of time that spins out of control with darkness and light, good and evil, up and down being just opposite ends of a spectrum no one understands beyond “It just happens”! And when they wind themselves up in the fires of everlasting torment, even in their most excruciating pains they will never acknowledge God in the thoughts of their torments in Hell, beyond the insane revelations of mad men turned devils in hell: they simply wound up in hell because “HELL HAPPENS”. The dying thief, crucified with Christ had stolen all his miserable life; and when it came time to die, and that old thief died right beside Jesus Christ, he turned to Christ and cried, “Lord remember me…remember me…remember me when thou comest into they kingdom” (Luke 23:42). And don’t you think for five seconds, that God could not have remembered some things about that old thief that would have put him in hell forever! Listen, that thief hung there dying on the cross, right next to Jesus Christ the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and that old thief had not thought about God or the consequences of his sin before God, his entire wicked life of robbery and stealing and sin! Then for the first time in his life, on the last day of his life, that old thief came face to face with both the reality and consequences of his sin, and he came face to face with the penalty of his sin and the wages of his sin.
“The wages of sin is death”.
-Romans 6:23
But for the first time in his sorry life, he turned and looked up to his left, and he was face to face with God Almighty, and there was really nothing to say, because it was all over for him. Life was coming to a close for that old thief, and death was crashing in on him in a recompense that he could clearly see, was very fitting for how he had lived all his life. And he looked at his fellow thief on the other side of Christ, the wrong side of Christ, and declared, “We receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (Luke 23:41). But “O, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24). And when you come face to face with death and life the very same hour, what can you say? That old thief was looking at his own well deserved death at the very moment he for the first time in his life was also looking straight into the eyes of “the Light of life” (John 8:12), and there was nothing more to say, than what was so prevalent on his mind. The memory of his deeds. “WE RECEIVE THE DUE REWARDS OF OUR DEEDS!!!” That old thief took the last few moments of his life to remember, to REMEMBER…REMEMBER every sorry, wicked thing he had ever done, and that memory was as devastating as it was remorseful. And that thief knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that if God remembered what he had done, he was dead in hell: and if God didn’t remember him he was dead in hell either way! And all his sins came right back before him just as painfully real as the nails in his hands and his feet, as he hung there dying for what he had done with his hands and his feet and what he had made of himself. And there was nothing left to say about what he had done beyond “I receive the due reward of my deeds”. But the memory of all that he had done, drove him to plead just the opposite with God; ‘Lord don’t remember what I have done, just REMEMBER ME!’ ‘Lord remember you made me, I didn’t make myself! You made me without sin, and I sinned irregardless. You made me to serve you, but I served sin and self. You made me to worship you, but I ignored you. You made me to live for you, but I lived for the devil. You made me to do right, but I have done wrong all my life. Lord, don’t remember what I’ve done, for I have done nothing worth remembering. But “Lord, remember me…O remember me O my God for good!” (Nehemiah 13:31). David prayed, “O remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low” (Psalm 79:8). Listen, lost sinner, if you learn anything from this preacher learn this, you had better remember just how far from God you have lived all you life, before you die and go to hell the same way………FAR FROM GOD! In hell that horror will damn you forever: the horror of dying just as far from God as you lived. That old thief on the cross took his last chance, when the memory of his deeds brought him within speaking distance of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. And the nails of recompense fastened his hands to death so that he could not reach out to God. And the nails of recompense fastened his feet to death so that he could not approach unto God. And the only thing he had left in a miserable life was the memory of his sins, and his voice to bridge the gulf between him and the Lamb of God that could take away his sin. Father Abraham told the rich man in hell, “between us and you THERE IS A GREAT GULF FIXED” (Luke 16:26), and Sinner, you fixed it right there between you and the God that created you. You created that eternal chasm between yourself and the God that created you! And the Bible says of that “great gulf” betwixt you and God, “that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence” (16:26). The Bible says, “Your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2). And if you keep it that way the rest of your life, you will die in the same condition and situation, and nothing will ever bridge that gulf between you and God Almighty.
Listen, that thief on the cross was nailed for his own sins. The sins of his youth (Psalm 25:7) and the sins of his mis-spent life had nailed him. The tragic, dirty sins of that old thief had nailed him right where he belonged, and his hands could no longer reach out to God, and his feet could no longer approach unto God (Psalm 65:4). And just as God Almighty declared in the Book of Jeremiah, “Who is he that engaged his heart to approach unto me? Saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 30:21), that sinner found himself in so much pain and suffering, that his heart could not engage itself to free his hands and feet to bridge the gulf between him and God when it was only five feet wide. And when he was looking life and death right in face, and he hung there dying right next to the God and Creator of the heavens and the earth, literally within just inches of Jesus Christ, that small distance was a far away as the back end of the universe, and there was nothing to bridge that great gulf but his pleading voice, “Lord, remember me when Thou comest”. And Lost Sinner, if you do not quit your sin but for a moment to cry unto God to close that gap before you die, after you are in hell, and your eyes see the horror of how far from God you have fallen, the torment of your everlasting punishment in Hell’s damnation will not change your mind or your voice or the distance you lived and died from God.
The most damnable horror imaginable to face at the gates of hell is the horrible reality that in hell your sorry prayer life will not close the distance between you and God anymore than your sorry prayer life closed that gulf when you were alive! You never fervently prayed to God in this life, when the Bible says that you “should seek the Lord, if haply you might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27). But to live in disregard of that precept, will land you in hell so far from God, that all the fervent praying you can muster in such flames of torment, will not bridge that “great gulf” betwixt you and God Almighty. What an absolute horror to learn how to pray the very first time, and have it count for nothing! And the vanity of that act is founded upon the reality that you thought it was so easy to pray to God and live like hell, that it will be a horror beyond belief to realize that it is just as easy to pray and burn in hell! Listen the world is full of Catholics that go to confession and make daily and weekly prayers while living like hell. Just go to confessional and pray your “hail Mary’s” and everything will be alright. And Protestants have learned the same damnable religious rituals in their carnal Christianity. You live like hell all week, and debase yourself all weekend long, until Sunday morning: and then you go to church and pray and sing hymns. O how nice! O how easy it is to be a “christian fornicator”, a ‘christian drunk’, a ‘christian lesbian or sodomite’, and a ‘ministerial adulterer’. Just sin and pray, sin and pray, sin and pray and sin some more. Then you wind up in hell where you belong, and find there is no more sin, but the prayer meeting goes on and on and on, but it does not quench the fires, or the pain, or the suffering or the torments. You just pray and burn, pray and burn, pray and burn and burn and burn! O the horror of having excused your wicked life while praying and thinking God doesn’t answer your prayers as an excuse for living like hell while wanting everyone at church to think you pray; only to wind up in hell and discover it is true-God doesn’t and never will answer your prayers because they will never be any more sincere than they were when you were alive! The flames of hell will teach you why God does not answer your prayers, because God doesn’t listen to lies! And He doesn’t listen to arguments either.
The rich man in hell had been contentious all his life, and in hell he burned the same way. That old contentious wretch argued with father Abraham, saying, “Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent” (Luke 16:30). What that shows you is that he argued with God all his life, and he wasn’t going to quit arguing with God after he died and went to hell for the sake of arguing. You would think that if you were contentious and argumentative all your life, you will stop being that way when you die and go to hell because of being that way: but it is not so with any lost sinner. You wouldn’t listen to anyone in life, and you will not listen to anyone in death either. What a horrible recompense, to die just like you lived. That is the horrible reality of Hell, in that you will die the same rotten character that you lived like all your life, and God’s recompense in hell is that he will not let you forget in hell just how you lived on earth. Abraham said to the rich man in hell, “Remember…remember…remember that thou in thy lifetime…” (Luke 16:25).
The Horror of Never Being Allowed to Forget How You Lived
God will never let you forget just how you lived, and He intends and has the power of damnation in his hands to make you remember how you lived by the torments of how you die! And you will die just the way you lived forever, and ever and ever again. Always dying! Always burning! Always damned just the way you always lived! Always remembering! And you will NEVER FORGET IT! And you will NEVER GET OVER IT!
You see, that is what the salvation of Jesus Christ is designed to do for you: make a way to get over how you have lived all your miserable sinful life. That Bible says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, HE IS a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things ARE BECOME NEW” (2 Corinthians 5:17). When a person turns from their sins to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, that Bible says they become and “are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). And that workmanship works in you what the Bible calls a “clearing of yourselves” (2 Corinthians 7:11), whereby “godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation” (vs. 10) that makes things right with those you have harmed, and clears the sins that you have committed both before God and man, that leaves you with a clear conscience, that in time blots out all the past as if it never occurred. But you miss that opportunity and refuse to repent and turn to God, you will die and go to hell, and you will never forget how you lived and missed the chance to be created anew in Christ Jesus. But you will burn in your own damnation, dying and burning and dying and burning in the horrible recompense of the out of control consuming fires of your own lust and degradation. Everlastingly consumed by the sins of your own life! And the fires of damnation and the voices of the damned and the memories of your own reprobation will never let you forget just how damned you really lived, by the eternal torments of the fires of your own damnation in dying just the way you lived!
Lost sinners do not realize, and never take the time to think rationally about just how wicked they have really been. If you cannot see your own wickedness to the point that you can understand and see that if your conscience bothers you so bad in this life, and troubles you over what you have done, can you imagine the torment when the fires of hell take over where your conscience left off? God has given every person in this world an attribute of the heart that science will never understand, but they will never get over it either: and that attribute of the heart is called a “CONSCIENCE”. Listen one of the last shocks of God’s creative power in you that will hit you right before you go out into eternity damned forever, will be what the Bible said of the religious hypocrites of his day that “trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others” (Luke 18:9). When those hypocrites brought before the Lord an adulteress, “a woman taken in adultery, in the very act” (John 8:4) but didn’t bring the adulterer, didn’t bring the man caught with her; Jesus Christ wrote a verse of scripture (Leviticus 20:10) on the dirt they were standing on, that commanded that both the adulterer and the adulteress be stoned. Then “lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7), and that Bible records the last shock that every lost sinner is going to face the moment he or she dies in their sins.
“And they…being convicted of their own conscience,
went out one by one…”
-John 8:8
And that is exactly the way every lost sinner is going to go out into eternity. Every lost soul damned by their own wicked life, is going to go out just that way. You can die with a crowd in some tragic terrorist attack or plane crash, or you can die with all your friends in the back seat of their car crossing a train track, but you are all going out “one by one”, with one damning forethought pounding from your heart into your ears. The last sane thought you will ever have, is “being convicted of your own conscience” (John 8:8). And the horrible mind set of your conscience searing into your mind every damnable thing you have ever done, as your lost, miserable hopeless life flashes before your eyes in a moment of utter desperation and helplessness as you fall headlong into the flames of hell beneath the crust of this earth, those very molten fires of lavatic torment will take over where your conscience left off, and you will never forget why you are burning in hell! Listen, the particular sins of your lost life do not matter anymore. It doesn’t matter whether you were a murderer, rapists, child molestor, adulterer or adulteress. The fact that you were a drunkard or dope head carries no more weight than a sodomite choir director in some lifeless church. You might be a fornicating preacher or mafia hit man, but none of those sins matter anymore. Everyone goes to hell the same way and in the same condition because of the same self inflicted wound to the heart, and that is a “seared conscience”. God’s word declares,
“That in the latter days some shall depart
from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
speaking lies in hypocrisy;
having their conscience seared with a hot iron.”
-1 Timothy 4:1, 2
Listen, that King of Jacob Bible talks of “good conscience” (Acts 23:1/ 1 Timothy 1:5, 19/ Hebrews 13:18/ 1 Peter 3:16, 21), “a conscience void of offense towards God” (Acts 24:16), a “weak conscience” (1 Corinthians 8:7), “a pure conscience” (1 Timothy 3:9/ 2 Timothy 1:3), a “defiled conscience” (Titus 1:15) and an “evil conscience” (Hebrews 10:22). But when it is all over, every lost sinner in this world goes to hell with a heart that spent their entire life getting around the conviction of their own conscience, to the point where they had to lie to themselves and lie to their friends, and lie to the preacher and lie to God by either “excusing” themselves or else “accusing” someone else of something worse (Romans 2:15) just to get around the conviction of their own conscience towards God. And when you do that over and over, you sear your conscience with a hot iron that will one day fire your soul in hell and a lake of fire for all eternity! There is nothing that burns like a seared conscience! There is nothing hotter than a seared conscience, and up ahead of you is the darkest day of your life without Jesus Christ that will teach you with the flames of hell that you used all your life to sear your conscience so that it no longer bothered you about your sinful life of wicked desperation. And when sin lays you down on your backside for the last time, and your soul falls right out the back of your dead body and disappears beneath the ambulance gurney or hospital bed, your conscience will for the last time flash your sins before your face, as the fires of hell lick up around you and take over where the conscience left off. But it will not be the conscience being seared anymore with the burning lust of your lying, deceitful life. YOU…YOU…YOU will now be seared throughout all of eternity in the fires of your own creation. And those fires will work all around you what your conscience worked in you, and that is to remind you that you seared your own conscience, and now that same conscience sears you for all eternity. O, the horrible recompense of a seared conscience that will never, ever quench the burnings and torments of hell’s damnation and knowledge of why you burn forever. And the horrors of hell only get worse.
The Horror that in Hell,
God Almighty is no more concerned for you in Death,
as you were concerned about Him in life!
God Almighty works every day of your life to bring you to the salvation and redemption that is in His Son Jesus Christ, declaring “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). The Bible declares for every soul in this world, “The Lord is…longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Nevertheless, if you ignore Him, He will ignore you. If you reject Him, He will reject you. In Hell you will finally and absolutely come to a complete understanding of just how much you missed of God, when the Bible declares “To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses” (Daniel 9:9), yet “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31), “for our God is a CONSUMING FIRE” (Hebrews 12:29). All your life time, God was more concerned about you than you were concerned about God. All your lifetime, Jesus Christ loved you more than you loved Him. But you wanted a god that would love you inspite of your sin while leaving you in your sin to enjoy your sin. You keep living that way and thinking that way and you are going to find yourself in hell, without a God that is no more concerned for you than He is for your sin! Sin doesn’t burn in hell! Sinners burn in hell! And God leaves them there in spite of how much or how little they sinned. And the absolute horror of hell is that when you get there, God is no more concerned for you in Hell than you were concerned for Him on earth.
“Because I have called, and ye refused;
I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;
But ye have set at nought all my counsel,
and would none of my reproof:
I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your fear cometh;
when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh
as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.
Then shall ye call upon me,
but I will not answer;
ye shall seek me early, but ye shall not find me:
for that ye hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord:
ye would none of my counsel;
ye despised all my reproof.
Therefore shall ye eat of the fruit of your own way,
and be filled with your own devices.”
-Proverbs 1:24-31
The horrible recompense of Hell is that all your lifetime you wanted your own way, and you wanted to devise your own means to be happy and acknowledge God. When that vanity comes to a desolate, tragic end of what everyone knew you to be, then Hell will make certain that “you eat of the fruit of your own way, and are filled with your own devices”. And you will discover by your own way and your own devices of the absolute, eternal horror of how bad Hell really hurts.
You do not hurt God by ignoring Him. He hurts you by ignoring you when you are going to need Him the most! The most excruciating pain and torment of the fires of Hell is not the heat or the burning, but the ignorance of your own life of sin! “YOUR OWN WAY…AND…YOUR OWN DEVICES”. God Almighty does not have to devise the means and methods of your destruction and recompense in hell! YOU DIVISE THAT ALL BY YOURSELF! Your destruction is the creation of your own futility and worthless existence, that fell so far short of what God created you to be. The wisest man to ever live on earth testified that, “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; BUT THEY…BUT THEY…BUT THEY have sought out many inventions” (Ecclesiastes 7:29). You devised your own ways and means of dying in Hell! The Bible says that God Almighty created “everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). God didn’t create it for you, Lost Sinner. But you devise your own destruction and make your own bed in hell! And the horror of Hell is that you are going to wind up there to burn forever, because you lived “YOUR OWN WAY” and by “YOUR OWN DEVICES”, and hell’s place for you was prepared the very same way! You lived just for yourself, without God, and you are going to die the very same way. You ignored God and that Bible, and when you drop into hell, God and the Bible will ignore you just the same way your lived.
Because the last and foremost Horror of Hell is that all of your pain and torment, and eternal suffering will always be the finality of the very thing you hated the most about God all your life: and that is God will still put the final emphasis on the Bible in YOUR DEATH, just as much as He placed the emphasis on the Bible in YOUR LIFE. All your lifetime you wanted no authority in your life to tell you and demand of you how you should live your life. You despised the thought of God’s Word being the absolute final authority in all matters of your personal life and existence. The FINAL HORROR OF HELL will be for all eternity, the realization that God puts the final emphasis on HIS WORD in all your destruction and torment. You despised the thought of that King of Jacob Bible being the final, absolute authority in your life: and in Hell you will suffer eternally with the reality that the King of Jacob Bible will forever be the final, absolute authority in your destruction and torments in everlasting fire. Nothing is capable of extinguishing the flames of everlasting fire but the very words of God; and you wanted nothing to do with those words in your life, and they will have nothing to do with you in your death. As you would not let the Bible control the happiness of your life, it will not control your torment in death.
O Lost Sinner, how vain it has been for your to reject the word of God because you did not want God intervening in how you live, how you dress, how you talk and what friends you should embrace. Keep living that way and you will shortly die and go to a place where by the authority of the very Bible you rejected all your life, God will never intervene in how you die; God will not intervene to cover your nakedness; God will never intervene in the cries of your anguish and tormented speech: and God will not intervene against the horrible souls that embrace you in your God rejecting torments and sufferings in the Lake that burneth with fire and brimstone. There is no sin worth dying that way for!
If you are lost in your sins and reading this, please know that there is a way of repentance to salvation, and it begins with SORROW. The Bible says, “For GODLY SORROW worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of this world worketh death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). You can be sorry that your life isn’t working out, and you can be sorry that you are having to go through such misery of your own making. But that kind of sorrow will never lead you to repentance. “Godly Sorrow” is the remorse and pains of heart that is not just sorry about what you did, but sorry for what YOU ARE and HAVE BECOME! “Godly sorrow worketh repentance”, and Biblical repentance works in you a “carefulness” (7:11) that seeks a “clearing of yourself” (vs. 11) in both forsaking your sins and your sinful life (Proverbs 28:13) and making things right with both God and those you have sinned against. And that sorrow inflames the passions of your heart with a “vehement desire” (vs. 11) to make things right and do the right thing by the word of God and not your pathetic feelings about the situation you are in. Godly sorrow will enlighten and stir your conscience to the memory of the sins that you need to make right before God and man. And repentance will drive you to your knees before all the world, your family and your friends in repenting and turning to God through Jesus Christ His only begotten Son. This Preacher’s “heart’s desire and prayer to God” is that you might be saved after reading this (Romans 10:1). The author will help you come to Christ, if you are truly willing to forsake your sins and your sinful life. Please! Please! Do not die in your sins when Jesus Christ has already suffered that for you (Acts 2:31) and the Bible says “of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell” (2:31). But your soul will be left in hell if you do not repent and turn to God through Jesus Christ. God help you see the way everlasting, and the peace of God that passeth all understanding.
If you need help in finding Jesus Christ as the only path away from your sinful life, contact the author at:
bishopmcrae@theanabaptistschurch.com
