There are those who mock and make light of the place called Hell. They have made so little of its significance they have coined phrases that show their contempt for its existence like “go to Hell”. This brings for them a feeling of control that is not theirs for no one but God could sentence anyone to Hell!! I do not know how Hell can be both a lake of fire and yet a place of darkness. The closest I have come to realizing this could be true came from learning there can be a fire so hot and intense in heat that it will actually burn and not give off light. This type fire “burns from the inside-out” it burns so intensely and there is no cooling breeze. There are coal pits which burn 24 hours a day. Even though you know they are there, all you see in the dark are the fires from those pits. IF this exist should, here, should we not heed the warning, not to go to this place. But, if this were not enough, Hell is a place of remembrance.
Some think this means only that miserable wretches who, like the Pharisees whom Jesus called “offspring of vipers,” will writhe slowly like serpents cast into a bonfire. But, WE are the ones who have far more to remember! Indeed, they will so die, but WE will live to whip our torsos from side to side in anguish and un-relieved, insane, anguishable, punishment. One would think the bodies given when we obeyed the gospel would in some sense relieve this pain, but it seems only to “hold in the wordless pain” you continue to feel in greater and greater degrees. We are indeed as but miserable worms in God’s sight. There is more to this figure of speech than that. Picture a diamond-back rattler with fangs dripping poison, rearing back its head and driving its fangs again and again into your tortured flesh, and with each strike injecting into your veins some strange poisonous substance that keeps you for ever in the state of dying. Or picture some blind senseless maggot-like creature of monstrous proportions burrowing into your flesh and gnawing forever upon our body. As they enter, the sting of death is again and again realized with ever increasing magnitude until the pain is so unbearable we would (if you could) bang our heads again and again against the fiery rocks ablaze with the incendiary-like flames coming from their midst. Oh! If only there was some way to relieve this pain!! As time cannot pass, for time is non-existent, as sensation cannot acclimate, this unbearable experience brings constantly to mind the remedy God had set so you would not have to “come to this place”. We will remember the blood of God’s only Son that washed away our sins, the times when meeting around the Table of the Lord you delighted to ignore the emblems and the precious Lord they represented, and the galling burden of unbelievable coldness falling heavier and heavier on your poor naked body (for this fire emits no heat) that now mocks you because you did not “remain faithful unto death”. Crying aloud or silently whimpering in dreaded disgust for your own stupidity, will not alleviate or relax the endless punishment you would have NEVER experienced, for you were at one time apart of the REDEEMED. It truly would “have been better never to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and turned from It”.
Then there is the anguish of indescribable remorse you have dashing through your lifeless body every time you hear the cry of your child, your mate, your father or mother, your sister or brother to whom you never taught the gospel of Christ being too busy and caught up with the things you were SURE were more important!! In the blackness so deep it can be felt, you try to move in the direction of the cry, calling out the names of those who baptized you into Christ, begging for intercession, and they cannot be found.
