In this sermon, the preacher shares a personal experience of receiving a message from God. He describes feeling a sense of annoyance and then suddenly receiving a message in his mind. The message is a warning about the consequences of indulging in worldly desires and actions. The preacher emphasizes that God will bring judgment upon those who do not heed this warning. He also discusses the importance of understanding and dealing with the temptations and challenges of the world through the anointing of God.

Let's look to the Lord in prayer. I want to talk today on the subject of God is love, why is there a hell? Now, Heavenly Father, we praise you for your presence here in this building. We look to you again to teach us this morning. Realize that every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of mercy, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning. We look to you, Lord, the Father of light. We praise you that you can shed your light in our hearts, that this light set us free from the darkness. Now we look to you on a difficult subject. If you are our love, why is there a hell? Many young people have asked us that question. Today we pray that you'll open up our book and speak to our hearts and show us just how much your love has been injured and why there is a hell. For Jesus' sake, we pray. Amen. The question about if God is love, why is there a hell is actually a larger question. It involves also, if God is love, why is there evil in the world? If God is love, why is there evil in the world? And I want to show you, first of all, some things that have come out of man's disobedience and rebellion. Yesterday we spent about an hour showing you how that man had made some very foolish choices. Which one? The end one? Let's have a look at it. Is it self-destructing? Hmm. It is. Press the button. Press that middle button. That's the one we need. So. All right. Everything in order again. I want to show you some of the things that have come out of man's selfish choices first. And then we're going to do a Bible study on hell. The words used for hell. And to see what God has to say about hell. First of all, I want you to see some of the problems that have come out of man's physical depravity. Remember, I said that Adam sinned two ways. I appreciate that God loves me. Remember, I said that two things happened to Adam. He experienced two kinds of death. Remember, one was spiritual. And what was the other one? Physical. And just as there are two kinds of death, there are two kinds of depravity. Now, I believe in the total depravity of man. But I believe that there are two forms of depravity. One inherited, which is physical depravity. And one committed by each individual moral agent, which is moral depravity or spiritual. Depravity is simply a word made up of two Latin words. Praebus, which means crooked. And the word Dei, which means intensive or very. So when we say man is depraved, we mean simply this, man is pretty crooked. That's what we mean. Very crooked or intensely crooked. We just say man is a crook when we say that he is depraved. And some people have felt that both spiritual and physical depravity are transmitted. I don't believe that. I believe that physical depravity is transmitted. It is an inherited result of Adam's sin. It results in physical death. But it is individual choices that God holds man responsible for. It is for those individual choices that God has to sentence a man. Now, let us see, first of all, the results of what physical depravity has done to man. This is something, by the way, that man cannot help having. Physical depravity is not sin itself. It is, however, that which gives sin power. It gives, if you like, man a bias in his life towards selfishness. And it is the inherited result of Adam's sin. Four major things come from physical depravity. First is dullness. Our senses, our mental faculties, our eyes, our ears, our physical bodies do not have the same intense perception and strength that the original man and woman had. In other words, the bodies that we now have before us are not as sharp and as intensive in their perceptions as they could have been. Now, some of you who have used drugs have found that when certain things are broken down, colors and sometimes lights take on great intensity. Can you imagine what the early, the original parents had of the tremendous intensity of perception? They could really see colors and really hear sounds. And these senses have been dulled somewhat as a result of sin. I had a very beautiful story once, I've forgotten, about a young man who was growing roses. And he really loved roses. And he saw this, he had this specially fine strain of rose that he'd just bred. And the Lord spoke to him and said, Son, you really love roses, don't you? And he said, Yes, Lord. He thought the Lord was going to get on his case for loving roses too much. And the Lord said to him, Son, you're looking at a rose that has come from an earth that has been cursed by sin. And you wait till you see a rose from my new garden, and then you will have seen a rose. And his mind started, hmm, like this. And then the Lord said to him, Son, you're looking at a rose that has come from an earth cursed by sin with eyes that belong to a body of death. You wait till you see a rose from my new gardens with your new eyes. And then you can say, I have seen a rose. So we have a problem, this is Adam's fault, dullness of faculty. All of us have this dullness of faculties. Not all of us have our senses as sharp as they could be. Second, another thing that is Adam's fault, a deterioration of health. Now this, of course, is aggravated by our own particular problems today. We'll get a little later on to this and what sin has done to the world. Ecology problems and pollution, of course. Man always seems to think up something that can create new forms of openness to disease. But there are no really perfect health in the world. All of us then inherit bodies that are subject to sickness and to death. And sickness, if you like, is ultimately a result of Adam's sin. You all know how that sickness can very often follow sin. You can just sit down and list the number of sins that usually result in sickness. Often addiction will result in jaundice or something like this, if you're a heroin user. You can get yellow jaundice. You mess around sexually. You can get venereal disease. There's all kinds of sin that follows. You smoke a great deal. You can get lung cancer. There's all kinds of sicknesses that can follow sin. But ultimately, sickness is a result of Adam's sin. In the Garden of Eden, there was no sickness. There was no real health. There was never any death before sin came into the world. So you see, sin brings with it a great deal of consequences. And not always is it the result of the person's sin immediately. It could be way back in the family someplace. Somebody in the family way back then could have broken some laws of God and then by genetic transmission could inherit deterioration of health. But however, God is good to us. These old bodies are broken down. Every now and then He heals them just to keep them going for a little while. But He's going to give us new bodies. That's one of the most important things in the Bible. The Bible promise is not just eternal life, which in itself is a fantastic thing, but a very special thing called immortality. And they are different. Immortality is not eternal life. Eternal life, and you'll see these by the way in the book of Romans, if you have a look at Romans now. Romans, chapter 2, verse 6, who will render to every man according to his deeds, to them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life. Now the distinction is immortality has to refer to the physical body. God is going to give us an immortal body. You all know the program, The Immortal. A guy whose body could not, that's what, immortality, no death to the physical body. And God is going to give us a new body. That's what the resurrection is all about. A brand new body that will be a spiritual body. When the Bible talks about spiritual body, it does not mean a ghostly body. It means a physical material being that is under control of the spirit. In other words, this physical being is under the control of our whole spiritual natures and by simply deciding some things we can alter the physical structure of our bodies with this new body we have. Yeah, we could walk through walls, rearrange our molecules and go through, travel vast distances in a moment of time just by thinking about it. See this, the new body is a fantastic thing. It is a deathless, non-sick body. It never gets sick, it never dies, it does not need nourishment. It's a fantastic new physical being and it is completely under the control of the spirit. And this is a gift from God for his children. The resurrection takes place, we get brand new bodies. Look at your bodies, think little bear, you know, you get a very good body. Cheer up, you'll get another one in the new world. And just think of your physical body as a frame at the moment in which God is painting a picture. And it's important to God that he gets the picture right. It's just an old frame that he's painting the picture in. Do you see that? One day he'll put a frame on that matches the picture. And the moment, the important thing is what is inside the frame and not the frame itself. matter of fact, it's kind of a put down on the painter if somebody comes up and looks at the picture and says, wow, what a heavy frame that is. See, that's, God isn't concerned too much about our external bodies. And I've seen a lot of beautiful people and it's not the exterior that makes them beautiful. It's the inside, see that, and that's what God is concerned about. So remember this gift. It's important. You can read about it in Corinthians. God says, we're looking for the resurrection of, you know, Paul talks about, we're looking for the resurrection of the body. Jesus rose from the dead. He had a, you know, a spirit body that could walk, think of the things that Jesus could do. He could walk through walls, he could do all kinds of things in his new body. We'll have bodies like this, spiritual bodies. Sown in weakness, scripture says, it is raised in strength. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in power. See, all of these beautiful things. And eternal life has to do with the soul. It has to do with our personalities. Eternal life. Okay, that's that. Now, let's look at a second, third thing here. And this is another tragedy of sin. The defamation of innocent children. So many people ask, if God is a God of love, why are children born deformed? The answer to this is that is sin. Not necessarily the parent's sin. Genetic damage takes place because of the results of sin. Ultimately, Adam's sin. And begins to play games with the little genes that direct and control the formation of the child. And you know yourself how many defamations have taken place because of people introducing drugs or substances into the body and that they didn't understand fully the results of. For instance, so many years ago there was thalidomide. A terrible thalidomide scare. Thalidomide was a drug that was used often pregnant women took it until suddenly a rash of misshapen babies were born. Some without arms, without legs. You know, just a complete mess. And they found that the thalidomide they were taking, which is apparently a safe drug, it actually altered the genetic mechanisms and it was beginning to create all these misshapen misformed children. Now, I don't know today what other drugs that man has introduced into his being can deform children. We don't know all the results of those things. We don't know just how much damaged acid and marijuana and other new drugs are doing genetically to children. But understand the defamation of innocent children is a natural result of selfishness. It is that which has come. Not always the immediate parent selfishness either. It could be back further and it's taken two or three generations to hit. But do you see this? This is not something God sat down and planned and said, I'm going to have a deformed child here. This is a horrible picture of God. This is a result of man's fooling around with God's creation. I'm not sure of all the drugs that people introduce into their systems and I don't know the results of them. But I do know this. We can't fool with God's mechanisms when we don't understand. And now, today, men are beginning to fool with the genetics themselves, produce new clothing where they're trying to produce kids exactly alike from the same genetic molecule trying to grow a strain of exactly identical people and grow them in test tubes. The frightening thing of, who was your parent? A test tube. And then the machine has come full circle. Four, disease and sickness worldwide. This is another result and it is interesting. Disease and sickness act as automatic limiters to curb selfishness. It's really a strange thing. Have you ever thought, when you're really messing somebody's, people's lives up and then you get sick, you can't, you can't be as active as you were before in your sin. It automatically limits. And you see, some nations, they turn away from God. They reject the true and living God. They begin to worship idols. Disease builds up and the population decimates and then in comes an awakening. The people get cleaned up spiritually and then their physical conditions change. Their environments get cleaned up and then health becomes, comes back again. You see, it's automatic limiters to selfishness. As the gospel has come in, moral purity has often resulted in social changes. And so many times in the Bible, you know, when Jesus said, Be whole, then he talks about the whole being. So many times sicknesses, somebody said about 80% to 90% of sicknesses today, what they call psychosomatic. It means it's connected directly with the personality. You get, you feel guilty, you're angry, you get, you know, hypertension and heart attacks and all this kind of thing. If you overeat, you get another bunch of things. And if you, if you do this kind of sin or that kind of sin, it results in physical changes in the body. See, our beings are tied together. If you feel sick, you know, how often your soul feels rotten. You feel, I just want to die, you know, that kind of thing. All right? So that will, those are the results then ultimately of Adam's inherited depravity. That's something you can point back at Adam and say, it's your dumb fault for that, see. And kick him if you find him, but, however, we want to see now what sin has done to society and to the world. And to do this, we're going to take Luke 2.52 and to see a well-balanced life. Jesus, the Bible tells us the only description of Jesus as teenage, he is Jesus increased in wisdom, fierce, in stature, in favor with God, and man. Here we have four different divisions which sin can affect. We have the personality, the soul, we can have the physical body, we can have our spiritual lives affected, and we can have our worlds affected, our society affected. And let's look what sin has done to those four areas. First of all, our bodies, let's look at those. Bodies have two problems. This bias that we call intemperance, again as a result of Adam's sin, and very often can be helped along by our own selfish choices. I want you to think of something. Now, about this thing we mentioned yesterday, about how God visits the parents' sin onto the children to the third and fourth generation. See, God designed the genetic laws. He set them up. It was his idea. He invented these things. So when, when a person sins, they actually hurt, not just themselves, they hurt other people along the line. And I know some people have got saved and they're going to have kids and they had to really pray that God would spare their children because of all the... You know, a selfish man doesn't really care about his kids. He says, well, who cares, you know? The only important thing is what I feel now. And then down the line, he could care less what happens down the line. When a person gets saved, they start to think about other people as well as themselves. And I know a lot of people come out of a, like a drug background or something like this and they've had to really pray, God, spare my kid. I know some people took two or three hundred trips on acid and then mother's going to have a baby and she prayed like crazy and she had a really beautiful kid. It was just the Lord, you know, because this, this thing here is very important to see. And now, attached to our physical bodies, of course, we have these other two things, our environment and our ecology. A lot of people have, matter of fact, people say today the reason why our ecology is in a mess is because of the Christians. Do you know they said that? They said the Christians had this idea that the earth was something to be raped and used and, and that, you know, it says conquer the earth. That's what the Bible says. Do you know that the ecology problems of the world have come because of a violation of the very first commandment God ever gave man? I want you to look in the book of Genesis and you'll see what the real command was that God gave. Genesis chapter one, verse twenty-eight. And God blessed them and God said to them be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it. See, it's not just subdue it, it's replenish first. First command. Be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth. Number one command in the Bible. First one broken and now after many, many hundreds and hundreds of years the cycle has come full circle and man's environment begins to turn in on him and locks him in in an ever decreasing spiral of judgment. Isn't that interesting? You cannot mess with God's book and not pay a price. There's just no way you can. And do you realize why there is such a great problem of ecology today? It is this. It's because selfish men are committed to making money over and above preserving their environment. Ecological problems of this country could be cleaned up within two years. But it would cost a great deal of money and some people would have to just shell out. That's where it's at. But they're not willing to do that. They don't want to lose that much money to preserve their planet and they'd rather collect their buck and split someplace if they can find a convenient planet in some other place that's not polluted yet. So here we have a whole bunch of problems and this of course has become a big issue now. Preserve Mother Nature at all costs. Where's it started? Man's selfishness. Do you wonder why God gets so angry at men sometimes? What he's done he gives them a beautiful world and then man wrecks it. Then secondly let's look at the soul. The soul is afflicted with two major problems. Pride and belief. Edmund Burke said this many years ago. It's a very powerful thing. He said men qualify for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetite. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power is put somewhere on will and appetite and the less of it there is within the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. And you saw last night how those three physical drives go booming right out of control. All of the physical drives get pushed right up out of control because the soul has turned away from God. By the way I'll give you a definition of these two things. Pride is the refusal to acknowledge or accept yourself as you are. Yourself as you really are. That's what pride is. And it doesn't always mean that you put yourself up. Sometimes it means that you put yourself down. Every now and then you find a person who goes around calling himself a worm, see. And he never takes any responsibility. He just says, I'm a nothing, I'm a nobody. God will never be able to use me. I'm a useless nothing, you know. And he says this so often that he begins to put down God's creation which is his body. Now the Bible has never taught to put yourself down. It says accept yourself for what you are and let God change your life. It's not a sort of an asceticism where people are going around seeing if they can self-destruct in order that God may be all. Do you see, it's not that. It's that you real Christian humility, if you want to call it, is not putting yourself down. It is forgetting yourself. That's what humility is. Some people think if I'm really humble I'll go around constantly saying self-deprecating things. I'll say, well, I'm nobody really and I'm nothing. You're talking too much about yourself. Not I am nothing and I am nobody and I am, see, it's just the real person who's learned humility has forgotten about himself. He's just interested in doing what God wants him to do and interested in other people. He's forgotten about himself. You can always tell a proud man because he's got eye trouble. I mean, he has eye trouble. His speech is filled with, either I can't do this or I will do this. The true Christian simply accepts himself. And this is a hard thing for some people to learn. Pride is the refusal to accept yourself as God says. You look at yourself in the mirror and you say, oh, that's me. It's not too cool. It's not too fantastic. It's also, God has given me this body and this personality as good as I have at the moment. So I praise the Lord for what I am. They asked George Whitefield after he had been preaching all these years. They said, listen, do you, uh, they said, how is it with your soul brother today? He said, I forgot I had one. And that's, that's the Christian. He's not thinking about himself all the time. You always tell a backslider. They're always praying for themselves, prayer meetings. Oh, help me, Lord, help me again, help me. Instead of praying for myself, I'm praying for myself. I'm praying for I'm praying for myself. I'm praying for myself. I'm praying for myself. myself. Unbelief is moral. Disbelief is lack of knowledge. Do you see the difference? And God says, come on, bring your questions. That's disbelief. He doesn't mind disbelievers. It's unbelievers that God gets uptight about, because they know and they're not going to do anything about it. That's that. You'll find that all attack in the soul basically stems out of those two things, the roots of pride and unbelief. And then the spiritual part of our lives, our spirits. Remember God gave us a spirit to put us in contact with the spiritual world? What do you think has happened because of sin? Two things. One, darkness. When you talk to a person who's not saved, have you ever wondered why he doesn't just get it immediately? Sometimes it's really hard to get through. They just do not understand. I want you to look in the book of Corinthians and you'll see why this is. 1 Corinthians, maybe it's 2nd, let me check, yes, 2nd Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 3, If our gospel be hid, 2nd Corinthians 4, it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the God of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus, the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. So here's the thing, when you're talking to a person, if you could imagine a spiritual cloud over his mind, and Satan has no fear of light, providing he can rob the victim of sight. And what is that which removes that cloud? Two things. Complete honesty on our side, and prayer. And in prayer, we put the power of God against that cloud on the mind. You can actually bind that force that surrounds the mind, and resist the power of the enemy to cloud the mind. And how many of you have known cases of where you've talked to kids that were spaced out, or that they couldn't understand, and you prayed, and suddenly their minds cleared. I had a kid, he put a whole case of beer away, and he was standing there like this, walking around. And I started, I just felt constrained to talk. I very rarely talk to a person that's drunk or high. I just felt constrained to do it. And as I talked, suddenly he was stone cold sober. The guy just sobered him up, and I led him to Christ. His friend was standing there laughing all the time, he thought he was going through just a drunk thing. And the guy was sober as anything. He gave his life to Christ, friend standing there laughing all the time while he was praying. And when he finished, he looked up and he said goodbye to his friend and walked away. That really blew his mind. But he still got on for the Lord. But see, it requires honesty on our part. If we have any dishonesty in our lives, then we can't break that blind. There'll be an instinctive loss. You'll see here in Corinthians these words. We have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, in verse 2, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully. We don't use the Bible to try and put across our own particular opinions. We just use the word of God as God wants it to be used. And then it says by manifestation of the truth, by actually showing people the truth, we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. And I am excited when I talk to a sinner, I know I've got an ally right inside his soul and it's his conscience. And I'm aiming at that dude in there, see. This is an important thing to remember when you're witnessing. A lot of people will throw up blind. Satan will help them. See, you'll find they get geniuses in thinking up excuses. And think back to your own life when you ran off, you know, some Christian or somebody religious that tried to get on your case about Jesus. And think of all the brilliant excuses you could make up. Hey, people talk to me, you know, and they'd lay all this thing on me and then I'd throw out a question to them and then while they're trying to answer that question I was busy thinking up another one. I could care less what they answered. You know, I just wanted to find another question and keep them freaked out so they couldn't get on my case. But what happens, see, you can, you can throw this up and, and usually sinners only have about six standard questions. If you can blow those, you can blow everything. Most of them may throw it out and the Christians say, well, you know, there's some things we can't understand and they just, you know, that's a handy out. We're hopefully being able to give you some, some exploders to just blow up these things and it's a lot of fun to have, to know there's about six questions they're going to ask and you can just go in, boom, the next one, boom, you know, boom. Some of you in this place you got saved because somebody blew up your six questions and you never had them blown before. See, that's the exciting thing about this. And, uh, the important thing to remember about this is that we are dealing with a satanic force that blinds the mind. So, we have to work with God, the Holy Spirit, and often when you're witnessing, a guy may be giving you all these hassles, you pray inside, you pray that God will bind the spirit that's on his mind. See that? And it's quite funny to see sometimes their words run out, you know, they're getting all the satanic anointing and you're binding, see, and then suddenly, uh, well, you know, and their minds go blank and you come in, wham, wham, wham, collapse in flames, you know, and you say, but it's just, it's a lot of fun to see that. But that doesn't mean that you'll fall on your knees while they're talking and say, oh, oh, oh, you know, you don't have to do that, you can do it under your breath and, and, uh, just do it quietly. But remember that we're not just dealing with, our battle is not just with, with, uh, human intellect, we're dealing sometimes with satanic anointing and we need to understand it. Those of you who've ever heard of satanic the satanic anointing that comes on the singing and, and you get a, and a, a supernatural thing comes on you to do it. Now the same thing can happen in defense. Some kids' minds are just bound by, by Satan and they get really satanic words of wisdom and you've got to come back and blow them up with the truth. The exciting thing about this is when you understand this darkness on the mind you can go right through and blow up the core of it because you do not have to answer always the objections. You can hit right at the core of the thing. And so a kid says to you, well, what do you mean God? I don't believe in God. And so I understand why you say that, because you're running away from God. And the guy says, well God, I don't believe there's a God. I used to say that too, but God got on my case. You know, wham, you're just blowing right into all the smoke signals and coming right into the center of the heart. Do you see this? What's that? That's right, yeah, that's all the, uh, the Romanian Christians, funny, you know, they said, why do you believe in a God? He says, well, when Russia went off to fight the, you know, whoever they fought, they sent up a big army, and I knew that there was that country there because of the army they sent off. And he says, well, I see all your active propagandists against God. I know there must be a God because you're working so hard to block him. And that's a really interesting little thing. Keep that in mind though. The Bible uses a very interesting word. It says we must take captive the thoughts of men for Jesus Christ. It's like a net. You throw their thoughts and bring them into Christ. And that takes intelligent witnessing, and it is a thing of the spirit. It's amazing how God will give you words that really cut right through the darkness. And, uh, I remember preaching one time in an open air meeting, and a guy came up, you know, and he's standing there, and he started calling these things out, and it was just like a, like an attack, you know. I was preaching, everybody's listening, there was a real silence except for this guy coming out. You know, these words coming out from this young guy standing there, just like this, you know. And it just felt like a niggling. I felt all this anointing, this little niggling coming out like that. And I remember turning around, and just word, God dropped a scripture in my mind. It came out like a machine gun. I said, rejoice, young man, in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart, in the sight of your eyes. But you know, for all these things, God will bring you into judgment. And he's melting. It just came out like a machine gun bullet. It went, and that was the end. He didn't say a word after that. God will give you an anointing to understand and to deal with these things. When we get to street meetings, we're going to put a trailer together and go out in the streets. You'll have your own experiences here, Brendan. All right, now, man and the world. Let's look at this and we'll come back to our original question. I had to show you some of the things that are not God's fault. Man, you can see what a mess the world is. And then society has become degenerate because of what is called worldliness, which is the spirit of the secular, and lust, which is that committal to gratification of selfish desire. And the very things that God designed to help man forge in his happiness have become tools to help man of selfishness. Friendship, see, affection, when God gave, there are two men born, one is Cain and one is Abel. Sin comes in and one becomes a murderer. See that? And then sexual immorality comes, and the beautiful relationship God designed, and companionship in marriage, and all of these things. The word flesh is a word for us to think about here. And an emotional connotation, if you could think about cut off that H and write it backwards, that's what it is. It is selfishness. It is the concentration on gratifying the emotions by the five senses. That's what flesh means in the moral sense. All right? Okay, let's look at all that, and now we're going to come back to, if God is love, why is there a hell? And I'll give you a few things to remember about this. First of all, God did not design hell for man. Hell was never meant for man. Never. Hell was made for the devil and his angels. When a man aligns his life with the devil, he chooses hell. God never sends anybody to hell. Secondly, we're going to look at some of the Bible words on hell, because some people don't believe hell exists. They say, if God really was love, there would not be a hell. Well, God really is love, and there is a hell. But I think some people have a very poor conception, either of what love means or what hell is. Now, the Bible is very plain. There are a lot of words used to describe the agony of separation from God, because basically that's what death is. Death is separation from God. Physical death is separation from our environment. Spiritual death is separation from God. And there are not just two deaths in the Bible, but actually four. Minimum four. There is physical, which is dying to the world around you. There is spiritual, which is basically sin. The Bible says, she that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. And then there's the awful result of these two that is called endless death. This is what Romans 6, 23, the wages of sin is. Death. That's what this is. It corresponds to the death penalty in human life. It cuts the offender forever off from fellowship, from the benefits and privileges of the society he has refused to be a part of. That's what endless death is. The fourth death, one, two, three, four, is death to sin through Christ. So the Christian experience is a death in order to have life. That's why we have that little thing, born once, die twice. Born twice, die once. There's a death and a rebirth. It's not reincarnation, which is you must be born again and again and again and again and again. You must be born again. Now let's look at a few of the words used to describe this in the scriptures. Now the word death is used, Ezekiel 18, 30 to 32. You just write these down in Romans 6, 23. Romans 6, 23 and Ezekiel 18, 30 to 32. Then separation from God, Revelation 22, 11. Yeah, this is continued sinfulness. This is continued sinfulness. Revelation 22, 11. Darkness is used in Matthew 8, 11 to 12. Darkness, Matthew 8, 11 to 12. And Jude 12 to 13. And then the word lost. That's a very important word today, lost. It really means something today to a lot of kids, the word lost. You'll find this in John 3, 15 to 16. Perish. Should not perish. That's John 3, 15 to 16. And Matthew 7, 13 to 14 is the word destruction. John 3, 36. The wrath of God. Now, let me ask a question here. Is it possible to be angry and still love somebody? Yes, it is. Can you think of anybody that you've been angry with, and the very reason why you've been angry with them is because you really cared about them? Alright? There is one person that you do that with all the time, and that's yourself. And think about that. If you do something stupid or foolish, you are angry with yourself. You don't even want to talk to anybody because you're so mad about yourself. You stomp out and go, I don't want to talk to anybody. And the very reason why you're angry with yourself is because you really do care about yourself. Now, God gets angry in direct proportion to how much he cares about people. And he really cares about people, so he can really get angry. And when the Bible talks about God's anger, it is really a burning anger because he really does care. Listen, some people have this idea, if you're a Christian, you will never feel any feelings of anger. They think, you know, if a Christian gets slapped on the face, see, just someone comes up and slaps them on the face, the more spiritual it gets, the more you want that to happen, see. Somebody comes up, slaps you on the face, you go, oh, praise the Lord, do it again on this side. See, that's not the Christian life. Feelings of anger will happen to anybody. It is what you do with those feelings that determine whether you're a Christian or not. The non-Christian reacts, the Christian acts. There's the difference. God feels angry, but God never reacts to his anger. If he did, that would be the end of the world, maybe about 6,000 years ago. God always weighs what he must do and then acts wisely on the basis of that. And he usually goes right against his own feelings. He never gets bitter, and that's a powerful thing. But listen, if you saw somebody take a dog, tie a rope around its neck and drag it off down the road until its pelt peeled off behind a car, and you didn't feel angry, there'd be something wrong with you. A famous old Scottish preacher said, anger is a sinew of the soul, and he that does not have it has a maimed mind. So you, have you ever been really angry with a person because you love them? I remember taking some kids and they were really messing their lives up, and I really got angry with them, not because they have offended me, but because they are hurting, breaking their own lives, breaking somebody else's, breaking God's heart. And there is an anger, you can feel the love underneath it, and God has that kind of anger. You can feel that. Alright, write this one down. The word punished, or punishment. There's a lot of scriptures here. Matthew 25, and verse 46, 2nd Thessalonians, 1 Matthew 25, and 2 Peter 2, 9. Hebrews 10, 29, and 2 Peter 2, 9. Then let's look at the word torment for a second. This is also a Bible word, torment. Revelation 14, verses 10 to 11, and Luke 16, verse 23, and 28. Revelation 14, 11 is no rest. Have you ever gone without sleep for two days? Do you know how you feel? That's another Bible word for hell, no rest. Some scary things here. What about this one? Isaiah 66, and verse 24. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Now, do you know what a teeth gnashing sounds like? It's the sounds like this. Can you imagine that? When you gnash your teeth, when you're really angry or really hurt, you know, and there's this kind of grind, grind, grind. Can you imagine in the darkness a whole bunch of teeth going grind, grind, grind. So it's one of the words used for hell. Matthew 22, 13, and then Mark 9, 48. I think these are figurative expressions that people I don't know whether the fire of hell is literal or figurative. I think it is a literal, I think it is a figurative expression that describes great anguish or agony. Whatever it is, whether it is literal or physical, I doubt whether it's literal because of the non-physical nature of torment. See? But the Bible uses these words in Mark 9, 48 and Isaiah 66, 24. Like fire, and the gnawing of worms. Now, these are the words used. Like fire, and the gnawing of worms. And these are very scary words about hell. Now, there is a lot of words used in the Bible, and I'm going to leave these down here for you to write them out, but I'll just give you a couple of the names of hell that are used. There are some words used for hell. Sheol was an old word called underworld, it meant. Those of you who have been in gangs, come from Sheol. Psalm 9, 7. 9, 17, I think it is. And then Hades, Luke, 16. Different words used for hell. Luke, 16. They're all translated to hell in the King James Version, 1623. It's a similar word, only it's an New Testament word. But these two words here, understand, these two words here apparently refer to an intermediate state, and both the saved and the unsaved. This is not the punishment necessarily. They mean the grave. It has that content, you know, to die and to be in the grave. Yeah, right, it's this kind of idea. And apparently before the crucifixion of Christ, these were the same. They were both, you know, essentially, one was an Old Testament, one was a New Testament word. But then there is another word used, and it is the word Gehenna. Let me see if I can spell it right here. Ge- henna. Ge- henna. And Gehenna was a very scary place when Jesus used it. It was a valley near Jerusalem, where garbage was dumped, and they kept the constant fire burning. That was, and people knew where Gehenna was, like saying go down to the local garbage dump, see. And that's one of the words Jesus used. As you walked there, you'd see all the garbage that people had all thrown down there, and you'd see fires burning constantly. And it would be a very powerful illustration that Jesus used it. Now, this word, Gehenna, was used in 2 Chronicles, the equivalent is used in 2 Chronicles 28.3, and then as a place of punishment, Matthew 5.22, verses 29 and 30 also, Mark 9, verses 43 to 47, Luke 12.5, and James 3.6. Now, those of you who are interested, I have a great chunk of studies on this, it would take us all day to read them out, so I'll just leave them down here. You can come and copy them out if you need some more, or want to photocopy. I want to get a little on to the background of this before we close up here. Just to give you two or three things about how. First of all, God has done everything possible to stop a man from going there. God has done all he can. And thirdly, agony is in proportion to guilt. Agony is proportional to guilt. Now, I'm going to give you an illustration that may help you to understand two things. First of all, imagine that you were fixing a shot of heroin in your arm. What, you've got a physical body? Your soul, it's a weird thing, doctors tell us you can chop your finger off, it's a weird thing, you can chop your finger off and throw it, you know, and lose it, or your arm, and it is possible many years after your finger or arm has been amputated, to feel itchy where your arm used to be. To feel an itch where your hand, you haven't got a hand there anymore, it's just a stump, but out here where it used to be, there's an itch. Now, they call that phantom limb or ghost arm. Now, that tells me something about the personality, tells me a complete record of your whole being is kept back here in your mind, in your soul. So, when you lose your physical body, you do not lose the feelings that were once part of it. As a matter of fact, sinus can cut the top of your head off, reach in there, and touch with a tiny electrical current, touch various parts of your brain, and you will have a replay of whole things and experiences of your life, even to the seeing the colors and smelling the smells and hearing the sounds. There's a complete record of video, audio, olfactory record of your whole life inside your head, see? And the scary thing this tells me is this. If it is possible to lose my arm and still itch out there, it is possible to lose my body and have the same feelings. Now, can you imagine a man fixing a shot into his arm and he's got this real strong habit he's got to feed, and he dies, and he's got no body. Suddenly his body is gone. And he's got the same desire for drugs. And now he's got nothing to fix it into. Just the feelings. And it's like that forever. And where does he turn to? I think when a man dies, his spirit returns to God. Saved or unsaved, his spirit, remember, is not him. It's just that gift God gave him to put him in contact with that world. His spirit goes back to God. His body drops off in the grave, and depending whether he's Christian or not, his soul either goes back with the spirit to be with God and await the resurrection of the body, or it is cut off from God. And that's a scary thing. Can you imagine a man who all his life has lived for one thing, a girl who all her life has lived for this particular guy, and she dies, and he's not there? People say, oh, I don't mind going to hell, all my friends are there. No, they're not. There are no friendships in hell, there is no communication in hell. I don't even think you see anybody in hell. Hell is a place of loneliness without God. Do you know what the Marxists use in some Marxist countries to break a man's personality? They put him in what they call a hole, a complete darkness, completely insulated from sight or from sound. They put him in there and they close the top of him. And they leave him in there for as long as it takes to break him without seeing anybody. You remember the torture? That they fill a hole thing up, they block over your ears, and you can breathe, that's all. And they put this sort of a plastic form-fitting thing and they float you in a tank full of liquid that is kept at exact body temperature so you don't feel anything, you can't smell anything, you can't hear anything and you can't see anything. And they keep you there for a day and at the end of that time your mind is absolutely gone, completely disorientated and falling apart inside. Can you imagine what it's like to be cut off? Communication and love comes from God. There are no friendships in hell. And can you imagine what that is like? Not for a day, or for a year, or for a century, but forever. And when a man says to God, stay out of my life, I don't want you or anything that you've got. Stay out forever. The tragedy is that God in sadness will sometimes answer that prayer and leave him there. And I believe in a hell after death because I've seen hell here. And I tell you something, if there was no hell after death, God would have to make one. For some of the people I've seen that have got away with things in this life, there will be a day of reckoning. And the tragedy is this. Agony is proportional to guilt. And guilt is proportional to knowledge. Rejected. In the Bible, knowledge always equals responsibility. The scriptures tell us, to him that knows to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin. Jesus dying on the cross said, Father forgive them, for they know not what they do. Saying to the scribes and the Pharisees, if you were blind you would have no sin. But now you say, we see, therefore you soon remain it. Knowledge rejected equals guilt. And I'm going to give you a little illustration now that may help you to see this. Imagine there's a guy at a party. And one of his friends comes to him and says, where are you going? He says, I'm going to drive home. He says, you're not going on the freeway are you? The guy says, yeah sure. He says, listen, that freeway is closed. It's all covered with ice and there's been some very dangerous accidents. A lot of people have been killed so they just simply roped it off. He says, I don't care, I'm still going to drive home on it. He hits the car accelerator, he slaps the guy in the face, runs out, jumps in his car and takes off down the freeway. Swirling around the corner, 50 miles, 60 miles an hour, he hits a patch of ice, he skids, car somersaults, flips him out, blows up and he comes to in a hospital bed with his spine broken in five or six places, being fed by tubes and the doctor says, I'm sorry, this is going to be the way it is until the way you die. There's no way to put you together. So he lies there, can't move, he's just being fed, like a vegetable. All he can do is think. Let me ask you, what do you think he thinks about? What do you think is the last voice he thinks about? The guy who told him, don't go on the freeway. How many times does it come back to his mind? How many times can he remember with vivid clarity exactly the way the guy said it? Every single thing, he runs it through his mind. That's once. Now I take you back. Kids have said this, are there different places in hell for worse sinners? No, there's only one hell. But the degree of agony is proportional to the guilt. Watch. Same place, but this time, fifteen or twenty people come up. One of them gives him a little tract that has on it a description of the ice patches. He rips it up. Another guy is standing there at the party and he's lecturing on the dangers of that particular freeway. He sticks his hands in his ears and he runs out of the room. A very close friend comes to him and says, Man, what are you doing? You're not going to drive on that freeway, are you? He curses him, spits in his face and says, Of course I am, you fool. And finally his best friend runs out in the driveway and tries to stop him. He stands there with his hands held up like this in front of the car and the guy runs him over. The last thing he sees is a big sign. No exit. Turn back. He smashes through the sign. He hits the same patch of ice, the same swerve, the same somersault, the same accident, the same explosion. He wakes up in the same hospital with exactly the same broken. Now instead of one voice. How many voices does he hear? Now instead of one memory. How many memories does he have? And that my friend is how. A man who has much life. I think the worst agony in hell would be the man who sat in church and never surrendered. Be happy for the man who only knew a little bit about God and rejected that. Weep more intensely for the man who was a preacher who never got that. Boy, Charles Finney has some freaky descriptions of hell. I don't know whether I should read you one out. He mightn't finish this session. I think I will. Finney tells a story of a young man who's sitting in prison. He has really done wrong. He's been sentenced and his parents love this kid. So they go and they beg and they plead with the governor for a pardon. They bring the pardon to the kid. They show it to him. Great love in their hearts. They say, son, we got you a pardon. He says, thank you. They say, he must be mad. The prison man has unhinged his mind. They come back in there. They listen. They hear somebody singing. They think, oh, our son must be really afflicted to hear somebody singing like that next door in the prison. Singing all these songs of merriment when he's about to die. They go and they say, who's that singing? The guy says, it's your son. He says, I can't believe that. He has no idea of being executed. He swears he will burn down the governor's house. They say, we will get one more pardon. We'll show him the pardon and tell him how the governor feels. We are sure this will change him. He cannot withstand such kindness and compassion. They come to the door. They go and admit him and show him the pardon. They tell him how much it has cost him and how tenderly the governor feels in the case. He grabs it, tears it to pieces and tramples it under his feet. Oh, he must be mad, they say. Suppose it is only, they go home doubly saddened that he should both deserve to die for his original crimes and also for a yet greater crime of refusing the pardon. Suddenly the day of execution arrives and a messenger rushes up and says, you have torn one pardon up, but here is yet one more. Will you have this? With proud disdain, he spurns even this, the last offer of pardon, and now where are the sympathies of the land? Do they say how cruel to hang such a young man and only for such a crime? Ah no, they see the need for law, for justice. They know that the law is so outraged it must allow it to vindicate itself on the culprit's execution. Now the sheriff proclaims fifteen minutes to live and he spends even the last fifteen minutes of his life insulting and abusing the governor. Even those aged parents do not have a word of complaint. They say, we did think he would accept the pardon, but since he would not, let him be accursed. We love the government, we love the blessings of order and the society more than we love inequity and crime. He was indeed our son, but he was also the son of the devil. Let us attend the execution of some of the sinners from our own congregation. You are sent to come out for the execution. We see the messenger, we hear the fatal sentence read. We see that your fatal hour has come. Shall we turn and curse God? No, no, no. We shall do no such a thing. When your drop falls and you gasp and die and your guilty terror-stricken soul goes wailing down the sides of the pit, shall we go away to complain of God and his justice? No, why not? Because God waited on you long, but you only became in heart more fully set to do evil. The universe looks on and sees the facts of the case, and with one voice that rings through the vast arches of heaven they cry, just and righteous art thou and all thy wives they must holy God. Who says this is cruel? When the universe gathers together around the great white throne, and the dread sentence goes forth, depart from me, you accursed. And the way they move in vast and dense masses, as if the old ocean has begun to flow off down, down, they sink to the depths of their home. But the saints with firm step, its solemn heart proclaim, God's law is vindicated, the insulted majesty of both law and mercy. It is upheld in honor and all is right. Heaven is solemn, saints are solemn, yet they cannot rejoice in their heavenly Father. See the crowds of masses as they move up to heaven. They look back over the plains of Sodom and see the smoke of a burning ascend up like the smoke of a great furnace. But they pronounce it just, and have not one word of complaint to utter. To the yet living sinner I have to say today, the hour of your execution has not yet arrived. Once more the bleeding hand offers mercy. Think a moment. Your Savior now offers you mercy. Come or come now and accept it. What will you say? I'll go on still in my sins? And all we can say is that the heart of divine love has deeply moved for you. That God has done all he can to save you, that he can wisely do. God's people have felt a deep and agonizing interest in you and are ready now to cry. How can we give them up? Suppose an angel comes down in robes pure and white, unfolds his papers and pronounces a pardon in your name filled with Jesus' own blood. He opens a sacred book and reads the very passage that reveals the love of God and asks you, Will you believe and embrace it? What will you do? And now what shall I say to my divine master when I come to report the matter? Must I bear testimony that you did not hear? Will you still spurn his love and dare his injured justice? Can you imagine sitting there after two and a half hours of preaching on that? Now listen, friend. One other thing. Hell comes out of God's love. That's probably the freakiest statement we'll say. But hell is the kindest place God can think of to put a sinner who does not love God. Have you ever wondered how uncomfortable a sinner feels in the presence of Christians? Can you imagine what a sinner would feel like in heaven where everybody loves God? Where everybody worships God? Where everybody's chief delight is to do the will of God? You take a bum from underneath a bridge covered in vomit with his whole thing and put him in the middle of a presidential ball and you tell me which one he feels more comfortable in. Hell is the kindest place God could find in the universe. Someplace, the sinner has said, God, I don't want you anywhere near me. I want to be as far away from you as possible. I don't want to worship you. I don't want to be anywhere near your people. I don't want to enjoy you. I want to live for myself and be someplace where I can be king. And God, in great kindness and with a breaking heart, gives that man the kindest place he can think of. A place where he can be on his own. Where he doesn't have to worship God. Where he can just live and be king of his own kingdom forever. Hell comes out of the love of God. And heaven would be five million times worse than hell for the sinner. Do you see the kindness of God? He does everything he can to stop a man from the fate he forges himself. God is love and there is a hell. And it comes from his love. Let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the pit that you have rescued us from. We see the hell that we made in our own lives. We look back at those dark moments. We have a little glimpse of what it must be like to be cut off from you forever. And we pray, O God, that you will not answer quickly the prayers of the man who says, Stay out of my life, O God. We pray, Father, that in mercy you will yet again extend your loving hand and just bring one more pardon. So many times we have come as your children and offered pardon to men in your name. See them tear it up, throw it down on the street, and walk away from you, love. God, they do not understand the destiny they forge for themselves with bands of steel. Give us compassion to understand the danger of what it means to be cut off from you. Help us to remember the pit from which we were plucked. We may not know the heart and the tenderness and the compassion of God. Give us, as William Booth said, a glimpse into hell, that we may know what you called us from and you long to see other men delivered from. Show young people who have turned their backs on you how they ally themselves with Satan. His destination is fire. And we pray you will give us a ministry of deliverance, to pluck men from the burning by the power of the living Christ. For this is the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.