A Bloody Christmas

In Isaiah, 30, 33, we read of a terrible description of hell itself. Truly, it is a picture of a hell of hells with no comparison. For tough it is ordained of old, yea, for the king it is prepared.

He hath made it deep and large. The pile thereof is fire and much wood. The breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth candle it.

Hell is a bottomless pit, deep and large, where hundreds of millions of the souls of the damned suffer, as they are chained to pilings of fire that are stoked by the breath of the Lord, where his wrath is poured out on sin. Why did Christ come into the world but to redeem his people from their sins, to wash them in his own blood, to ransom them out of the grip of the devil, and to deliver them out of the kingdom of darkness, to keep them out of a hell of hells, that that baby in a manger was born, so that one day he would become the sacrifice for sin? Jesus Christ came to earth to redeem the elect and reconcile them back to God by his death and with his blood. Hell is prepared for the devil and his angels.

We see this in 2 Peter. For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, hell is a region of great darkness and a great void, for it is entirely void of God. Once you are shut up in hell, you are separated from God forever.

You are an object of the wrath of God in hell, where his fury and indignation for sin is continually poured out like gasoline on a fire, we read in Malachi. For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble. And the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that shall leave them neither root nor branch.

As believers, we should be eternally grateful to God for his grace in saving us, and we should be greatly concerned for the hell-bound around us, who perish by the minute and who are cast into that burning region of smoke and darkness their terrorists felt in Isaiah 33, 14. The sinners in Zion are afraid, fearfulness has surprised the hypocrites, who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire, who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings. We seldom think of eternity, and we spend too much time on the perishing things of this world.

It is ironic that the very people many of us put on a pedestal in worshiping life, Hollywood celebrities, that so many of them end up in hell. I challenge you, friends, to get on the internet and google celebrities that are atheists and celebrities that are Hindu or Buddhist, and you'll find a list of names like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Richard Gere, and others who will come up on that list who don't believe in the God of the Bible, yet we give them our money and we give them our time, we give them our affections. These false role models many try to emulate in life will only suffer the torments of a hell of hells.

Maybe we should turn off our TVs long enough to get on our knees and get in our Bibles and pray for the sins of our nation that has rejected the God of the Bible and who spurns and hates the very name of Jesus, who hates the Jesus of the manger, who hung on a bloody cross at Calvary so we can live. Christ came into the world to be a sacrifice for sin. Jesus declared, for this is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins.