In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the seriousness of idle words and their consequences in the judgment. He passionately expresses his concern for the listeners, urging them to recognize the gravity of their actions. The preacher also addresses the question of the fairness of eternal punishment for sin, explaining that it is justified because sin is ultimately against God. He shares a personal story of witnessing his wife's agony and relates it to God's forsaking of Jesus on the cross. The sermon highlights the need for repentance and the importance of understanding the weight of our words and actions.

The thing we need to understand, hell is no slap on the wrist. It is fearsome. The horrors are real. Eternity, that's the thing, eternity, it is utter, utter hopelessness. Spurgeon says that about it. In hell, there is no hope. They have not even the hope of dying, the hope of being annihilated. They are forever, forever, forever lost. On every chain in hell, there is written forever. In the fires there blaze out the words forever. Up above their heads, they read forever. Their eyes are galled and their hearts are pained with the thought that it is forever. Oh, if I could tell you tonight that hell would one day be burned out and that those who were lost might be saved, there would be such jubilee in hell at the very thought of it, but it cannot be. It is forever. They are cast out into utter darkness forever. And we look at that. That's the severity. It's the longevity. Burnings? Yes. It talks about fiery furnace. It talks about the hell of fire. But more, who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings? Unquenchable fire, eternal fire. Are there torments? Yes. It says we're tormented by that fire and by that sulfur, but it goes beyond that. Tormented day and night forever. Is there punishment? Yes. God's Word says He will repay you to your face if you die in your sin. He will. He will hate you. He will deal with you according to your sin. Face to face. But more, it's called eternal punishment. The punishment of eternal destruction. Is there wrath? Is there fury? Is there vengeance? Yes. He says, I will gather you and blow on you with the fire of My wrath. That's a text out of Ezekiel. Again in Ezekiel, therefore, I will act in wrath. My eye will not spare, nor will I have pity. And though they cry in My ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them. In Daniel, it says everlasting contempt. Do you know what contempt means? It means you are everlastingly an object of God's contempt, of God's abhorrence, of God's hatred. When God says that He will punish you to your face, and He will blow upon you with the wrath of His breath, it is a picture of God's perfect hatred. God will hate you. God will not pity you. You are eternally an object of defiled wretchedness. And God looks at that with total disgust. That is the picture forever. Forever. That is the ultimate horror of hell. Now, you guys know Jonathan Edwards. I think I quake more when I read him than anything. Consider what it is to suffer extreme torment forever and ever. And I want you to consider it. Let your minds go wild here. I want you to be filled with a sense of this and to suffer it day and night. From one year to another. From one age to another. And from 1,000 ages to another. So adding age to age and thousands to thousands in pain, in wailing, and lamenting, groaning, and shrieking, and gnashing your teeth with your souls full of dreadful grief and horror, your bodies full of wracking torture without any possibility of getting ease, without any possibility of moving God to pity you by your cries, without any possibility of hiding yourselves from Him, without any possibility of diverting your thoughts from your pain. Consider how dreadful despair will be in such torment. To know assuredly that you never, never, never, never shall be delivered from them. To have no hope. When you shall wish that you might be turned into nothing, but you have no hope of it. When you would rejoice if you might but have any relief after you have endured these torments millions of ages, but shall have no hope of it. After you shall have worn out the age of the sun, the moon, and the stars without rest day and night or one minute's ease, yet you shall have no hope of ever being delivered. After you have worn a thousand more ages, you shall have no hope, but that still there are the same groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries incessantly to be made, not just in your hearing, but made by you. And that the smoke of your torment shall still ascend up forever and ever. The more the damned in hell think of eternity, of their torments, the more amazing will it appear to them. And alas, they will not be able to keep it out of their minds. Their tortures will not divert them from the thought of eternity, but will fix their attention to it. Oh, how dreadful will eternity appear to them after they shall have been thinking on it for ages together and shall have so long an experience of their torments. The damned in hell will have two infinities perpetually to terrify them and swallow them up. One is the infinite God whose wrath they will bear and in whom they will uphold their perfect and irreconcilable enemy. The other is the infinite duration of their torment. There the sinner will clearly see what a God he has offended, what a Savior he has neglected, what a heaven he has lost, and into what a hell he has plunged himself. All the sins which he has committed with all their aggravations and consequences, all the Sabbaths he enjoyed, the sermons which he heard, the warnings and invitations which he slighted, the opportunities which he misimproved, the serious impressions which he banished will be set in order before him and overwhelm him with mountains of conscious guilt. And oh, the keen, unutterable pangs of remorse, the bitter self-reproaches the unavailing regrets, the fruitless wishes that he had pursued a different course which will be thus excited in his breast. The word remorse is derived from a Latin word which signifies to gnaw again or to gnaw repeatedly and surely no term can more properly describe the sufferings which are inflicted by an accusing conscience. Well then, may such a conscience when it is now sleeping energy shall be wakened by the light of eternity, be compared to a gnawing worm. The heathen made use of a similar figure to describe it. They represented a wicked man as chained to a rock in hell where an immortal vulture constantly preyed upon his vitals which grew again as fast as they were devoured. Nor is this representation at all too strong. You just come with me, you just come with me. There you are standing and you're watching one after another after another. He is calling his angels, come, bind them hand and foot. You watch that one go and be cast into the lake of fire. One after another they've fallen. They've been cast into hell. Now you're up, sinner friend, you're up. And there you are pleading away. Oh Christ, have mercy. I didn't mean it. I really did want to serve you. The tears are freely flowing perhaps because you see what's awaiting you. The smoke is rising up and you know in just a moment of time you're going to be cast there. And you've pled with all your soul. And the Lord simply says, bind them hand and foot. Cast them into the lake of fire. No regret. There will be no one to pity you there that day. No one to shed a tear for you. What does Jesus mean by that expression? It'll be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah and for Chorazin and Bethsaida. What he means of course is this, that in comparison with the punishment which will actually light up all the light which you have of the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Another way by which Jesus Christ indicates these varying degrees of punishment is that startling expression in the twelfth chapter. Every idle word shall be brought into the judgment. Let it go, we say. We're prone to overlook. We want to turn the other way. According to Jesus Christ every... The point is that the thing is so frightfully unimportant. What could be more trifling than an idle word? If Jesus Christ says that even an idle word... What about other sins? If an idle word is not going to escape the judgment, do you think a gossiping word is? If an idle word isn't going to escape the judgment, do you think a cruel word is? If an idle word won't escape God's fire at the last day, do you suppose that... If an idle word is going to be brought into judgment, what do you... One person has expressed his truth this way. The differing degrees of divine judgment of sinners in the world to come is going to be so awful that a sinner in hell, were he able, would give the whole world that the number of his sins be one less. The differing degrees of divine punishment in the world are going to be so terrible that a sinner, were he able, would give the whole world that the number of his sins should have been just one less. One less. The greatest picture of the suffering that men will endure in hell is found in Emmanuel's orphan Christ. Here is what the anguish of hell is. Here is what the very essence of hell is. Here is what the law of God demands. And the penalty of breaking God's law is finally to be utterly forsaken by almighty God. Oh my Lord, when he is hanging there, not for his own sins but for mine, utterly rejected, utterly forsaken, he cried out of the agony of his heart, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? My wife will not sleep well tonight, but sometimes when she's with me, which is not often, I tell of the only time in our experience where we were able to understand just a little bit of the agony and the heartbreak and the helplessness and the hopelessness and the forsakenness of that awful cry when God's well-beloved and his only begotten Son forsaken by a people on earth despised and rejected of men hanging on a cursed tree in the agony of his soul looked up into God's face and said, why, why have you forsaken me? I was away from home, of course, when our firstborn child got sick unto death. They told me, and I drove many miles. And when I got home, the doctor had gone and left the nurse, and she met me, and she said, you may go in. She hadn't but a little while, three and a half years old, the only child. My wife was in there. I sat on one side of the bed, and she said, what's up, daddy baby? And I sat there, and my wife, my wife sort of lost control while the baby died. I would have helped her if I could. And his son looked up into his face and said, my God, my God, why, why has thou forsaken me? And the earth, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent asunder. Did what I had to do, watch his well-beloved child. Brother, if you go on and you're a baby, and if there's any harm, he wasn't forsaken. He is forsaken because this thing's so desperate. You ought to burn in hell, and there's another aspect, there isn't any flesh in his memory, was there? And is unchangeably the same. He must forever be displeased with sinners, and be constantly present with them. In other words, the fire of his anger must burn. It is a fire which cannot be quenched unless God should change or cease to exist. It is this which constitutes the most terrible ingredient of that cup which impenitent sinners must drink. Dreadful as will be their sufferings, they would be comparatively light were there any hope of their termination. But of this, there will be no hope. Everything will conspire to force upon the sinner's mind a full conviction that his existence and his sufferings must continue forever. That they will be without mitigation and without end. And this conviction will, above all things, wither his courage and his strength. It will banish all thought of summoning up patience and fortitude to endure his wretchedness, and cause him to sink down under it in the faintness of despair. My hearers, if any of you think I exaggerate or color too highly, listen to the plain unadulterated language of God himself. The wicked shall be turned into hell, even all that forget God. They that know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power. In the hand of Jehovah is a cup, and the wine is red, and he poureth out the same. But the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the earth, shall wring them out and drink them. They shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation, and shall be tormented with fire in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the lamb, and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever. Will anyone on hearing these passages reply, my feelings revolt at such statements. I will not, cannot believe them. Then you must reject the Bible, for it is full of such statements, and every fact, every doctrine confirms them. The incarnation of the Son of God, the tears which he shed for sinners, the blood which he poured out for sinners, the joy which angels feel when one sinner repents, and the unutterable anxiety which inspired men felt for the conversion of sinners, all conspire to prove that the fate of those who die without repentance, without conversion, must be inconceivably dreadful. Will you then say, such a punishment cannot be just. It is impossible that I should deserve it. But remember that you know nothing of your sins or of what sin deserves. Were you properly acquainted with your own sinfulness, you would feel convinced that it is just. All true penitents feel and acknowledge that it would have been perfectly just to inflict this punishment upon them. Were not you impenitent, you would feel the same. Besides, this punishment, dreadful as it is, is nothing more than the natural, necessary consequence of persisting in sin. The corroding passions, the remorse of conscience, and the displeasure of God, which will constitute the misery of sinners, are all the result of sin. Every sinner has the seeds of hell already sown in his breast. The sparks, which are to kindle the flames of hell, are already glowing within him. Christ now offers to extinguish these sparks. He shed his blood to quench them. He offers to pour out his spirit as water to quench them. But sinners will not accept his offer. They rather fan the sparks and add fuel to the fire. How then can they justly complain when the fire shall break out into an unquenchable conflagration and burn forever? As well might a man who should put vipers into his bosom complain of God because they stung him. As well might a man who has kindled a fire and thrown himself into it complain of God because the flames scorched him. But I can spend no more time in answering objections or in defending the justice of God against the complaints of his creatures. I cannot stand here coolly arguing and reasoning while I see the pit of destruction, as it were, open before me and more than half my hearers apparently rushing into it. I feel impelled rather to fly and throw myself before you in the fatal path, to grasp your hands, to cling to your feet, to make even convulsive efforts to arrest your progress and pluck you as brands out of the burning. Oh, but sin, sin is such a small thing. I mean, if I commit sin for 70 years of my life here, how is it God can torment me forever in hell? Doesn't there seem like there's some disproportionate dealing with the sin there? But not at all once we realize who our sin is against ultimately. And who the God is that we sin against. What He is. You know, it's one thing. It's one thing if we squash a fire ant or we swat a mosquito. But you know, it's another thing altogether. If you find your child out in the yard rather than stepping on ants, he's out there taking living cats and mutilating them in your yard, you would probably respond differently. You know why? Because you attach greater significance to a cat. There's greater worth in your estimation. And it would be even different if you saw somebody brutally killing a child. In your estimation, the sin would be much greater. Because the one the sin is against has greater worth. But how do you measure sin that is committed against an infinitely holy God? Even the smallest sin committed against an infinitely holy God. It is infinite. It is infinitely wicked. When we hear forever, forever, forever, hell is reasonable. When we see in the one who is sentenced to that place wickedness, that is infinite.