The Reality Of God’s Wrath
The Reality of God’s Wrath
Excerpted from “The First Resurrection”
Sermon #391, May 5, 1861
In this sermon Spurgeon specifically addresses unbelievers. His message about the reality of Hell is not a popular one, and it’s not easy to swallow in our day, when tolerance trumps holiness. But it’s solidly grounded in the truth of God’s Word, and we need to pay attention to it.
The kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” Revelation 6:15-17
Sinner, you have heard us speak of the resurrection of the righteous. To you the word resurrection has no music. There is no flash of joy in your spirit when you hear that the dead shall rise again. But, oh, I pray you lend me your ear while I assure you in God’s name that you shall rise. Not only shall your soul live—you have perhaps become so brutish that you forget you have a soul—but your body itself shall live.
Those eyes that have been full of lust shall see sights of horror. Those ears which have listened to the temptations of the evil one shall hear the thunders of the Day of Judgment. Those very feet that lead you to the worthless pleasures shall attempt but utterly fail to sustain you when Christ shall sit in judgment.
Don’t think that when your body is put into the soil you will be done with it. It has been partner with your soul in sin. It shall share with your soul in punishment. [God] is able to “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).
God’s book tells me that the dead, both small and great, shall rise. When the archangel’s trumpet shall sound, the whole of the old inhabitants of the world before the Flood shall rise out of the ocean. The buried palaces, the sunken homes shall all give up the once-buried multitude.
Up shall rise from the great deeps of the fathomless sea thousands upon thousands of men who have slept now these three and four thousand years. Every churchyard, too, where men have been quietly buried with Christian rites but were un-Christian still, shall yield up its dead. The battlefield shall yield a mighty harvest, a harvest which was sown in blood and which shall be reaped in violence. Every place where man has lived and man has died shall see the dying raised to life once again, and flesh and blood once more instilled with life.
But the main thing with you is that you will be there. The most awful curse that could fall on you, with the exception of the damnation of your soul, is the sure and certain resurrection of your body. Go and pamper your body. Go and luxuriate and indulge it in ease. You may well pamper your bodies, for there is short enough time for your bodies to have mirth in. And when that short time is over, you shall drink another wine—the dregs of the cup of God’s wrath, which the wicked shall drain to the last drop.
Satisfy your ears with music now. You shall soon hear nothing but the howling of the damned! Go your way—eat, drink, and be merry. But for all these the Lord shall bring you into judgment—sevenfold for all your sinful pleasures, yes seventy times seven. For all your joys of lust and wickedness and crime shall the Lord be avenged on you in the great and terrible day of his wrath. Sinner, when you sin, think of the Resurrection!
But after the Resurrection, according to Revelation 20, comes the Judgment. You have cursed God. You have entered the chamber of immorality or the hall of infidelity. You have walked through the stews of grime and through the stench and filth of the brothel. You have wandered into sin and plunged into it, thinking it would all die with the day, that as the night covers up the sights of the day, so the night of death should cover up the deeds of your day of life. Not so. The books shall be opened.
I think I see you closing your eyes because you dare not look upon the Judge when he opens that page where stands your history. I hear a sinner, boldest among you all. He is crying, “You rocks fall on me.” There they stand, majestic and fearful, those granite rocks. This sinner would rather be crushed by them than stand there before the avenging eye. But the mountains will not give way; their flinty insides will feel no pangs of sympathy. They will not move. You stand while the fiery eye pierces you through and through and the dread voice reads on and on and on, accounting your every act and word and thought.
I see you as the shameful crime is read, and men and angels hear. I see your horror as a nameless deed is told, in terms explicit which none can misunderstand. I hear your thought brought out—that lust, that murder which was in thought but never grew into deed. And you are all this while astonished like Belshazzar when he saw the writing on the wall and his knees knocked together and he was terribly afraid.
So shall it be with you; and yet again, and again, and again, shall you send up that awful shriek: “Hide us! Hide us from the face of him who sits upon the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!”
“You shall soon hear nothing but the howling of the damned. . . . When you sin, think of the Resurrection!”
If you are like me, you shudder at Spurgeon’s words. I shudder not because they are bold but because they are true. They are confirmed by the Word of God. I’m sure Spurgeon got more pleasure speaking about Heaven than Hell. I know I do. But because he preached the whole counsel of God, not just part of it, Spurgeon had to speak about Hell, and he often did.
If I had a choice—that is, if Scripture were not so clear and conclusive—I would not believe in Hell. Trust me when I say I do not want to believe in it. But if I make what I want—or what others want—the basis for my beliefs, then I am a follower of myself and my culture, not a follower of Christ. Were I as holy as I ought to be, I would want there to be a Hell, given the reality of unrepentant sinners. After all, our holy God has determined it should be so.
“There seems to be a kind of conspiracy,” writes novelist Dorothy Sayers, “to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. The doctrine of Hell is not ‘mediaeval priestcraft’ for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgment on sin. . . . We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.”a
In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis writes of Hell, “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”b
Spurgeon says of the unbeliever, “To you the word resurrection has no music.” How sad that the skeptic has no interest in the gift of salvation offered by the Savior and will, instead, reap the sure alternative that awaits.
Contrary to popular belief, Heaven is not our default destination. Unless our sin problem is resolved, the place we will go is our default destination, Hell. The great danger is that people assume they are headed for Heaven. Judging by what’s said at most funerals, you’d think nearly everyone’s going to Heaven, wouldn’t you? For every American who believes he’s going to Hell, there are 120 who believe they’re going to Heaven.c This optimism stands in stark contrast to Christ’s words in Matthew 7:13-14 (NIV): “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Didn’t Spurgeon say in an earlier meditation that multitudes will inhabit Heaven? Yes. But sadly, multitudes will also inhabit Hell. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, one demon says to another, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”d
Hell will not be like it’s often portrayed in comic strips—a giant lounge where people tell stories of their escapades on Earth between drinks. Rather, it will be a place of utter misery (Matthew 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28). It will be a place of conscious punishment for sins, with no hope of relief. This is why Dante, in Inferno, envisions this sign chiseled above Hell’s gate: “Abandon every hope, you who enter.”e
It’s of paramount importance to make sure you are going to Heaven, not Hell. The voice that whispers, “There’s no hurry. Put this book down—you can always think about it later,” is not God’s voice. God says, “Now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2, NIV) and “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15, NIV, emphasis added).
a Dorothy Sayers, A Matter of Eternity, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 86.
b Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 118.
c K. Connie Kang, “Next Stop, the Pearly Gates . . . or Hell?” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2003.
d C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 61.
e Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto 3, line 9.
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