How long has it been since you heard anything about hell? I was praying one morning about the subject, and, specifically, whether or not I should preach about it at a certain church which had invited me to speak.
I had been thinking about the subject for some time, had just finished a book on it (“Four Views of Hell”) and had re-read my manuscript on the subject. (In that manuscript—“Is Hell Really Going to Happen?”—I had exegeted every verse in the entire New Testament on the subject.)
When I asked the Lord that morning whether or not I should preach about hell at the aforementioned church, I clearly heard Him say…
“You may if you wish. My people need to hear sermons on the subject. Pastors rarely preach about it. They don’t because it is an embarrassment to them. They think they are more humane than I am. That they are more loving and kind than I am. That they could run the universe better than I can. My people have little or no awareness of the reality of hell, no sense of its horror. I am grieved that my people don’t believe me about the subject. They argue about the type of language I used to reveal it. If they knew what I know about hell, what sort of language would they have used? Had I spoken its true reality they have no language of sufficient power to convey that reality and they would have been slain under the impact of the knowledge; they couldn’t have stood it. Is what my Son said about it not enough in itself? They argue about how long it will last and desire for those in hell simply to cease to exist at some point. I could ask them fifty questions they couldn’t answer (about the subject), but I ask only one: how shallow is it of them to hope that the best thing that can ever happen to a human is that he or she simply ceases to exist? Is that man’s highest hope for somebody? How shallow is it that they rather choose to want that and not that a human being should sit about my throne for eternity and enjoy all that heaven is? Which, by the way, is another subject they cannot possibly fathom, either, but they immediately believe whatever I said about it without question. All of it grieves me.”
See my ebook, “Is Hell Really Going to Happen?”