11 Sermon Illustrations on Hell And Sin

On one side of Jerusalem was a deep gorge called the Valley of Hinnom. It was a place where cruel and idolatrous rites were celebrated. Human sacrifices were offered here. Drums were beaten to drown the cries of those murdered in sacrifice, hence the name Tophet. King Josiah defiled the place. It became the receptacle of all the filth and refuse of the city, and fires were kept constantly burning to consume it. The worm never failed of its prey there. This was the Jewish type of the place of the lost. The Scriptures refer to the place of future punishment as a “lake of fire,” a place of torment eternal, and this is all or nearly all revealed concerning it.

If you were to spend a whole life and never be separated from the vile and loathsome a single instant, what a gloom would spread over you! Hell is the place where there are many such, yea, where all the inhabitants are such. “Without are dogs, sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” Oh! tell us not of the fire and the worm and the blackness and darkness of Hell. There is Hell enough in this, that it is the common sewer of all that is abominable and abandoned and depraved, the one common cesspool where is gathered together everything in human character that is wretched, false, cruel and vile.

One thing is certain, there is a Hell, a place of punishment for those who reject salvation. It is the Lake of Fire, the abode of the damned, that Jesus warns us against; be that Hell place or condition, the punishment corporal or mental, it will be the doom of lost souls. He who, instead of coming merely to deceive with idle tales, came to “seek and to save the lost,” most emphatically warns of punishment for the wicked in this solemn language: “Everlasting fire,”—”Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,”—”Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” We can dispose of Hell for the unsaved only by saying that Christ did not mean what He said.

Whether or not the fire referred to is to be literal may be a question, but certainly God could give the mind or spirit such a degree of mental anguish and suffering as could equal, or even exceed, the pangs of mere literal misery. To be forever shut out from all that is good, and pure, and true, would, of itself be a fearful Hell. “Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”—Revelation 22:15. Hell will be where the inhabitants will be such. It will be the vast cesspool of all that is vile, abandoned, profane, false, cruel, reckless, God-hating, murderers, depraved, and filthy.

As Miss A., of Georgia, who had lived in the pleasures of sin and the fashions of the world, came to the close of her life, she called her father to her bedside and said: “Your heart is as black as Hell. If you had taught me to live for God I might have been saved.” Then she cried: “Oh! the Devil is coming to drag my soul down to Hell! I am lost, lost forever!”—then died.

An infidel in Michigan who had hated the cause of Christ came down to his deathbed. With a look of despair he said: “I see a great high wall rising around me, and am finding, when it is too late, that it is easier to get into Hell than it will be to get out.” In a few moments his spirit was gone.