9stines- Merthiolate For The Christian Soul

This is an older blog that has been transferred from another site:

The word Hell is an interesting one. You know, when I was a small boy I learned that Hell was a bad word and I was not allowed to say it. In school we would do the 7734 thing on our calculators and giggle because we spelled a naughty word and we could not get in trouble for it. I would hear things like, ‘Go to Hell!’ or ‘you’re going to Hell if you don’t change your ways!’ or ‘I hope you burn in Hell!’ and I thought that it was just something grown-ups said when they were mad at each other. I was even told that Hell is where the devil lives and when you die if you weren’t a good person that is where you went.

Lets take this time and talk about Hell. At the moment I am writing this there are people literally dying everywhere. Death surrounds us. There is a war going on, there are miners trapped in Utah, cancer patients, heart attack victims, AIDs victims, auto accidents, plane crashes…all sorts of death. So, what does death and Hell have to do with each other? This is what I am going to attempt to explore here. I want to tell you about me first. I am not a theologian. I am not a scientist. I am not a philosopher. I am not a scholar. I am just a family man who has a concern about his eternity and the eternity of his wife and children. I do happen to be a born again Christian and I have put my faith in Christ. So, I will be looking at the topic of Hell from a Christian perspective.

I am going to refer to myself by three different names. First, there is Jimmy. Jimmy is me up to the time I turned about 14. Then there is Jim. Jim is the person I was from 14 to 24. Then there is James. James is the person I am now. The reason I am doing it this way is to be able to distinguish between the varying views I have had in life. I honestly believe that apart from what your beliefs are on who Jesus Christ is, what you think about Hell is the most life altering factor there is. What you believe about Hell will help shape your life and your morals. So, lets begin this study.

As a boy I believed that there was Heaven and there was Hell. The way it was explained to me was that if you were good when you died you got to go to Heaven. If you did bad things you got sent to Hell. I was also taught that you could be in the state of going to Heaven in one minute and then in going to Hell in the next. Life was a constant state of flux. You had to be on your toes so that God would not have anything to judge you on when you got there and that He sort of graded on the curve and weighed your good deeds against your bad deeds. So, me as Jimmy, was actually a pretty decent boy because I wanted to go to Heaven and not Hell. I did my share of naughty things but I did not steal, I did not cuss, and I did not beat up on people, and I strove to please my teachers. I was afraid of God and that He wanted to catch me doing something wrong.

To me Hell was the place where the devil would poke you with a pitch fork and he looked like a small skinny man with horns and a forked tail. Hell was the devils home and he would come and go from there to get people that died and take them there. I heard men, mostly my uncles, say that they were looking forward to Hell and that their friends would all be there.

As Jim my views of Hell really did not change that much. I did believe that there was a Heaven and Hell still, but I was also and evolutionist. I somehow was able to blend a safe mixture of believing in evolution, that we evolved from nothing, with the idea of when we died we had two options of eternity. In truth though I actually though that when we died we just ceased to exist. But, just in case…in case I was wrong the thought of being in Hell did not sound appealing to me. There were bad things I did but again I thought that my good things would out weigh the bad ones.

As James something wonderful happened. I was presented with the gospel of Jesus Christ. I read the New Testament and was terribly convicted. I had never read the scriptures before. I had never heard the gospel before and here I was coming face to face with eternity in a powerful way. The message I got from reading the gospel- I am going to Hell and it will be very bad. I read the gospels and I did not find Jesus to be a kind gentle soft person- I found Him to be harsh and stern and the primary message was that I am going to burn. I learned there was no way I could do anything to change that. I was hopeless. The sermon on the mount was like a battery of hot arrows piercing me. Whoever says Jesus is just kind and gentle does not know what he is talking about. Jesus gave us the message just as a ship crewman would yell ‘all hands abandon ship!’ He was not giving a soft blow- His message was urgent. Hell is going to be very very bad. I also gathered that there are varying degrees of Hell. God is just and we will be judged based upon what we have done, said and thought. That would mean that a person such as Adolf Hitler would get a greater dose of Hell-fire than say someone who lived a ‘good’ life. Child molesters, adulterers, murderers will be burned based upon the deeds they have done. Their punishment will fit the crime. I saw that the whole purpose Jesus came was to save people from this eternal damnation. His whole ministry and purpose was to be the sacrifice for us so we would not have to suffer in Hell.

Hell is real. Think about standing in an open field in Kansas and looking out and see a large tornado that you can not possibly run from or hide from come straight at you. Imagine standing in the side of a mountain that has just errupted into a volcano spewing ash and lava that you can not possibly find shelter from. Imagine being in the midst of a six lane highway with vehicles racing at you at 70 mph and you can’t move. Imagine being in the belly of a great ship that is sinking and you have no means of escape, Imagine being in a tall building with the floors below you engulfed in flames and you feel the heat through the floor and you have no hope of rescue. Imagine being suspended over a tank of hungry crocodiles about to be dropped with your legs and arms bound. These are all scary scenarios and the outcome for these leads to inevitable ending of life- you are going to die. But now think of this, in all those scenarios the outcome results in death of the physical body, but after the body has died the soul goes on and it never dies. After the physical death which can occur in a heartbeat, what about the destination of the soul that lives forever? Can you now imagine yourself on fire, burning, in searing unbearable pain with the knowledge of why you are there with no hope of relief for eternity? Can you imagine this happening to your loved ones? Can you imagine it happening even to those ‘good’ people you knew but they did not accept the sacrifice of Jesus Christ? That is exactly what will happen. Don’t be mad at me! I am just the messenger, God is the One who said it so if you have a problem you will need to talk to Him about it. Go ahead, He will listen…