The Horrors Of Hell

The Horrors of Hell

Excerpted from “The First Resurrection”

Sermon #391, May 5, 1861

Hell isn’t polite dinner-party conversation. Even Christians often downplay the topic or avoid it altogether. We might convince ourselves that it’s more compassionate to assume that everyone will go to Heaven. But Spurgeon makes it clear why we need to affirm and declare to others the stark realities of Hell—and the fact that without Jesus, Hell is our default destination.

He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. Hebrews 9:26-28

Spurgeon • After death, the judgment; after judgment, the damnation. If it be a dreadful thing to live again [when you thought you wouldn’t], if it be a more dreadful thing still to spend the first day of that life in the courtroom of God, how much more awful shall it be when the sentence is pronounced and the terror of punishment shall begin!

We believe that the souls of the wicked are already tormented, but this judgment will cast both body and soul into the lake of fire. Men and women, you who fear not God, and have no faith in Jesus, I cannot picture to you damnation. Across it let me draw a curtain. But though we must not picture it, I pray you realize it.

This much we know: that Hell is a place of absence from God, a place where there is never sleep or rest or hope. It is a place where a drop of water is denied, though thirst shall burn the tongue; a place where pleasure never breathed, where light never dawned, where anything like consolation was never heard of; a place where the gospel is denied, where mercy droops her wings and dies; a place of fury and of burning; a place the likes of which imagination has not pictured.

May God grant that it may be a place which you shall never see and whose dread you shall never feel. When you die, sinner, flight from Hell becomes impossible. You are lost then, eternally. Oh, while yet you are on praying ground, I pray you, think on your end. Think! Think! This warning may be the last you shall ever hear. Perhaps while you sit here, the last sands are dropping from the hourglass, and then no more warning can be given because redemption and escape shall be impossible to you.

Sinner, I lift up before you now Christ the crucified one: “Whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so this morning the Son of Man is lifted up. Sinner, see his wounds. Look to his thorn-crowned head. See the nails in his hands and his feet. Do you perceive him? Pay attention. Listen again while he says, “It is finished!” (John 19:30). Salvation finished!

Believe on Christ and you shall be saved. Trust him and all the horrors of the future shall have no power over you. Oh, that today some of you may trust my Master for the first time in your lives. This done, you need not curiously inquire what the future shall be, but you may sit down calmly and say, “Come when it will, my soul is on the Rock of ages. It fears no ill; it fears no tempest; it defies all pain. Come quickly! Come quickly! Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

Alcorn • In my book Lord Foulgrin’s Letters, inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demon Foulgrin writes instructions to Squaltaint, the evil spirit assigned to tempt a man named Jordan Fletcher: “It’s long-term results we seek. Tactics count only insofar as they produce the desired impact on Fletcher—reality distortion, moral failure, thoughts, and actions displeasing to the Enemy. Whatever sends them to hell, we support. Whatever draws them toward heaven, we oppose.”^a

Spurgeon was as conscious of the devil’s strategies as any man who ever preached. Satan has obvious motives for fueling not only procrastination about preparing for judgment but also our denial that there will even be a judgment or that eternal punishment will be a verdict. The enemy of our souls wants unbelievers to reject Christ without fear, he wants Christians to be unmotivated to share Christ, and he wants God to receive less glory for the radical nature of Christ’s redemptive work.

Ironically, those who think themselves compassionate for denying Hell or not speaking of it are effectively ensuring that more people will go to Hell. Even some professed Christians are now, subtly or plainly, embracing a fashionable universalism—the belief that all people will ultimately be saved. Some consider Hell to be the invention of wild-eyed prophets obsessed with wrath. They argue that Christians should take the higher road of Christ’s love.

But this perspective overlooks a conspicuous reality: Jesus says more about Hell than anyone else in the Bible does (Matthew 10:28; 13:40-42; Mark 9:43-48). He refers to it as a literal place and describes it in graphic terms—including raging fires and the worm that doesn’t die (Mark 9:48). Christ says the unsaved “will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12, NIV). In his story of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus teaches that in Hell the wicked suffer terribly, are fully conscious, retain their desires and memories and reasoning, long for relief, cannot be comforted, cannot leave their torment, and are bereft of hope (Luke 16:19-31). The Savior could not have painted a bleaker picture.

How long will Hell last? “They will go away to eternal punishment,” Jesus says of the unrighteous, “but the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46, NIV). Here, in the same sentence, Christ again uses the word translated “eternal” (aionos) to describe the duration of both Heaven and Hell. Thus, if Heaven will be consciously experienced forever, Hell must be consciously experienced forever as well.

Scripture says of those who die without Jesus, “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:9, NIV). Because God is the source of all good and Hell is the absence of God, Hell must also be the absence of all good. Hell will have no community, no camaraderie, no friendship.

I don’t believe Hell is a place where demons take delight in punishing people and where people commiserate over their fate. More likely, each person is in solitary confinement, just as the rich man is portrayed alone in Hell (Luke 16:22-23). Misery loves company, but there will be nothing to love in Hell.

Hell will be inhabited by people who haven’t received God’s gift of redemption in Christ. Everyone whose name is not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life will be judged by God according to the works they have done, which have been recorded in Heaven’s books (Revelation 20:12-15). Because those works include sin, people on their own, without Christ, cannot enter the presence of a holy and just God and will be consigned to a place of everlasting destruction (Matthew 13:40-42; 2 Thessalonians 1:9, NIV). Christ will say to those who are not covered by his blood, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41, NIV).

If we understood Hell even the slightest bit, none of us would ever say, “Go to Hell.” It’s far too easy to go to Hell. It requires no navigational adjustments. We were born with our autopilot set toward Hell. It is nothing to take lightly—Hell is the single greatest tragedy in the universe.

One day we’ll see clearly that God revealed himself to each person and that he gave opportunity for each heart or conscience to seek and respond to him (Romans 1:18–2:16). Those who have heard the gospel have a greater opportunity to respond to Christ (Romans 10:13-17), but every unbeliever, through sin, has rejected God and his self-revelation in Creation, conscience, or the gospel.

God loves us enough to tell us the truth. There are two eternal destinations, not one, and we must choose the right path if we are to go to Heaven. All roads do not lead to Heaven. Only one does: Jesus Christ. He said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, NIV).

The high stakes involved in the choice between Heaven and Hell will cause us to appreciate Heaven in deeper ways. May we never take God’s grace for granted—the grace that delivers us from what we deserve and grants us forever what we don’t deserve.

We should emulate Spurgeon’s commitment both to truth and to compassion and join him in saying to unbelievers, “May God grant that [Hell] may be a place which you shall never see and whose dread you shall never feel.”

^a Randy Alcorn, Lord Foulgrin’s Letters (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1999).