HELL-HORRORS

I must feel the truth that once I was as close to hell as I am to the chair I am sitting on – even closer. Its darkness, like vapor, had entered my soul and was luring me down. Its views were my views. I was a son of hell (Matt. 23:15), a child of the Devil (John 8:44) and of wrath (Eph. 2:3). I belonged to the viper’s brood (Matt. 3:7), without hope and without God (Eph. 2:12). I must believe that just as a rock climber, having slipped, hangs over the deadly cliff by his fingertips, so I once hung over hell and was a heartbeat away from eternal torment. I say it slowly, eternal torment!

John Piper

Brothers, We are not Professionals, Desiring God Foundation, 2002, p. 114.

Eternity is a sea without bottom and banks. After millions of years, there is not one minute in eternity wasted; and the damned must be ever burning, but never consuming, always dying, but never dead. The fire of hell is such, as multitudes of tears will not quench it, length of time will not finish it; the vial of God’s wrath will always be dropping upon a sinner. As long as God is eternal, He lives to be avenged upon the wicked. Oh eternity! Eternity! Who can fathom it? Mariners have their plummets to measure the depths of the sea; but what line or plummet shall we use to fathom the depth of eternity? The breath of the Lord kindles the infernal lake (Isa 30:33), and where shall we have engines or buckets to quench that fire? O eternity! If all the body of the earth and sea were turned to sand, and all the air up to the starry heaven were nothing but sand, and a little bird should come every thousand years, and fetch away in her bill but the tenth part of a grain of all that heap of sand, what numberless years would be spent before that vast heap of sand would be fetched away! Yet, if at the end of all that time, the sinner might come out of hell, there would be some hope; but that word “Forever” breaks the heart. “The smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever.” What a terror is this to the wicked, enough to put them into a cold sweat, to think, as long as God is eternal, He lives forever to be avenged upon them!

Thomas Watson

Body of Divinity, p. 63.

Wicked men will hereafter earnestly wish to be turned to nothing and forever cease to be that they may escape the wrath of God.

Jonathan Edwards

Sermon, Revelation 6:15-16.

The blessedness of Heaven is so glorious that when the saints arrive there they will look back upon their earthly pilgrimage, however wonderful their life in Christ was then, as a veritable Hell. Just as truly, on the other hand, will those who perish in Hell look back on the life in this world, however miserable it may have been, as veritable Heaven.

Jonathan Edwards

You and I can never imagine all the depths of hell. Shut out from us by a black veil of darkness, we cannot tell the horrors of that dismal dungeon of lost souls. Happily, the wailings of the damned have never startled us, for a thousand tempests were but a maidens whisper, compared with one wail of a damned spirit. It is not possible for us to see the tortures of those souls who dwell eternally within an anguish that knows no alleviation. These eyes would become sightless balls of darkness if they were permitted for an instant to look into that ghastly shrine of torment. Hell is horrible, for we may say of it, eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the horrors which God hath prepared for them that hate Him.

C.H. Spurgeon

The Sympathy of the Two Worlds, Sermon, Luke 15:10.

The hell of hells will be the thought that is forever. The soul sees written over its head, "You are damned forever." It hears howlings that are to be perpetual; it sees flames which are unquenchable; it knows pains that are unmitigated.

C.H. Spurgeon

As long as a man is alive and out of hell, he cannot have any cause to complain.

C.H. Spurgeon

If there be one thing in hell worse than another, it will be seeing the saints in heaven… Husband, there is your wife in heaven and you are among the damned. And do you see your father? Your child is before the throne, and you accursed of God and man are in hell.

C.H. Spurgeon

Now, do not begin telling me that that is metaphorical fire: who cares for that? If a man were to threaten to give me a metaphorical blow on the head, I should care very little about it; he would be welcome to give me as many as he pleased. And what say the wicked? “We do not care about metaphorical fires.” But they are real, sir – yes, as real as yourself. There is a real fire in hell, as truly as you have now a real body.

C.H. Spurgeon

The New Park Street Pulpit, Baker, 2:104.

I cannot preach on hell unless I preach with tears.

D.L. Moody

The whole extent of hell, the present suffering, the bitter recollection of the past, the hopeless prospect of the future, will never be thoroughly known except by those who go there.

J.C. Ryle

Fire. Fire!

Do you believe the Bible? Then depend upon it, hell is eternal. It must be eternal, or words have no meaning at all. “Forever and ever,” “everlasting,” “unquenchable,” “never-dying” all these are expressions used about hell, and expressions that cannot be explained away. It must be eternal, or the very foundations of heaven are cast down. If hell has an end, heaven has an end too. They both stand or fall together. It must be eternal, or every doctrine of the gospel is undermined. If a man may escape hell at length without faith in Christ, or sanctification of the Spirit, sin is no longer an infinite evil, and there was no such great need of Christ’s making an atonement. And where is the warrant for saying that hell can ever change a heart, or make it fit for heaven? It must be eternal, or hell would cease to be hell altogether. Give a man hope, and he will bear anything. Grant a hope of deliverance, however distant, and hell is but a drop of water.

J.C. Ryle

Fire. Fire!

Hell is full of the Divine holiness; holiness in the manifestation of justice; holiness in its most glorious exercise. How fearfully are the lost now learning this truth! Think it not a trifling matter, unconverted reader, to look into the bottomless pit, and to know that there is but a step and you are there! You walk to the end of the treacherous plank, and you are gone! O solemn thought! but one step between you and the quenchless flame! but one step between you and endless torment! Throughout eternity the lost soul will be testifying to this truth: "God is holy; I was a sinner; I rejected His salvation, I turned my back upon His gospel, I despised His Son, I hated God Himself, I lived in my sins, I loved my sins, I died in my sins, and now I am lost! to all eternity lost! And God is righteous in my condemnation!"

Octavius Winslow

Holiness, the Fruit of the Chastening of Love.

Who can describe the miseries of a lost soul, when the door of the bottomless pit has closed upon it forever?

David Harsha

The tendency of modern times has been to take punishment out of eternity or eternity out of punishment.

John H. Gerstner
Theology for Everyman, Moody, 1965, Chapter 10.

Is the fire spoken of literal fire? It is an accepted law of language that a figure of speech is less intense than the reality. If “fire” is merely a figurative expression, it must stand for some great reality, and if the reality is more intense than the figure, what an awful thing the punishment symbolized by fire must be.

William E. Evans

The Great Doctrines of the Bible, Moody, p. 262.

[It] will [not] be possible to transfer from one region to another. No matter how endless the ages, no matter how heartfelt the cries, no matter how intense the suffering, your travel plans are limited to your present abode. Those who find themselves in the lower gloomy regions shall never enter the gates that lead to endless light and ecstasy. They will discover that the beautiful words spoken in their eulogy bear no resemblance to the reality that now confronts them. If only their friends could see them now!

Erwin Lutzer

Taken from One Minute After You Die by Erwin Lutzer, Moody Publishers, 1997, p. 10.

Such, in brief, is the portion awaiting the lost – eternal separation from the Fount of all goodness; everlasting punishment; torment of soul and body; endless existence in the Lake of Fire, in association with the vilest of the vile; every ray of hope excluded; utterly crushed and overwhelmed by the wrath of a sin-avenging God!

A.W. Pink

Eternal Punishment.

[In hell] perpetually burning lusts never subside, and the tortured conscience aches but is never sedated. There will be increased desire with decreased satisfaction. In Proverbs, we read of the insatiable desires of both the nether world and a man’s lusts: “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, nor are the eyes of a man ever satisfied” (Proverbs 27:20).

Erwin Lutzer

Taken from One Minute After You Die by Erwin Lutzer, Moody Publishers, 1997, p. 37.

Because aionios (“eternal”) modifies both punishment and life in Matthew 25:46, it stands to reason that the same quality and temporal connotations are in view. That is to say, however long the life extends is how long the punishment lasts; the durations are identical. It is grammatically unsuitable to drive a wedge between the two uses of the term eternal in Matthew 25:46, suggesting that one refers to endlessness (eternal) and the other to temporal limitation (aeonial)… Since it is clear to say that the eternal life is temporarily unlimited it follows that eternal punishment is also temporarily unlimited.

Scot McKnight

Eternal Consequences or Eternal Consciousness, Baker, 1991, p. 154.

This does not mean that God will be completely absent from hell. He is and will remain omnipresent (Ps. 139:7-8). To be separated from the Lord and cast into hell does not mean that a person will finally be free of God. That person will remain eternally accountable to Him. He will remain Lord over the person’s existence. But in hell, a person will be forever separated from God in His kindness, mercy, grace, and goodness. He will be consigned to deal with Him in His holy wrath.

Tom Ascol

The Horror of Hell, Tabletalk, October 2008, p. 55. Used by Permission of Ligonier Ministries.

There is no way to describe hell. Nothing on earth can compare with it. No living person has any real idea of it. No madman in wildest flights of insanity ever beheld its horror. No man in delirium ever pictured a place so utterly terrible as this. No nightmare racing across a fevered mind ever produces a terror to match that of the mildest hell. No murder scene with splashed blood and oozing wound ever suggested a revulsion that could touch the border lands of hell.

Author Unknown

There’s no way to describe hell. Nothing on earth can compare with it. No living person can really comprehend it. No madman in the wildest flights of insanity ever beheld the borders of hell. No man in delirium’s ever pictured a place so utterly terrible. No nightmare racing across a fevered mind ever produced a terror to match that of the mildest hell. No murder scene with splattered blood and mutilated bodies could ever suggest the revulsion that one glimpse of hell could suggest; and our Lord saw that...and He was moved...to reach out to people.

John MacArthur

The fiery oven is ignited merely by the unbearable appearance of God and endures eternally. For the Day of Judgment will not last for a moment only but will stand throughout eternity and will thereafter never come to an end. Constantly the damned will be judged, constantly they will suffer pain, and constantly they will be a fiery oven, that is, they will be tortured within by supreme distress and tribulation.

Martin Luther

Cited in: Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment by Robert Peterson, P&R Publishers, 1995, p. 110.

[It is not] as though the ungodly see God and His appearance as the godly will see Him; but they will feel the power of His presence, which they will not be able to bear, and yet will be forced to bear.

Martin Luther

If we take literally the image of hell as fire, it clashes with the other images of hell, for example, hell as darkness, or hell as the wicked being cut to pieces (Mt. 24:51). Rather than giving us literal pictures of the fate of the wicked, God uses dreaded pictures from this world to present the terrible reality of hell in the next world. I stand with the majority of contemporary conservative scholars in understanding the biblical imagery of hell metaphorically rather than literally.

Robert A. Peterson

Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment, P&R Publishers, 1995, p. 192. Used by permission.

Now, because no description can deal adequately with the gravity of God’s vengeance against the wicked, their torments and tortures are figuratively expressed to us by physical things, that is, by darkness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth (Mt. 8:12; 22:13), unquenchable fire (Mt. 3:12; Mk. 9:43; Isa. 66:24), an undying worm gnawing at the heart (Isa. 66:24). By such expressions the Holy Spirit certainly intended to confound all our senses with dread.

John Calvin

Institutes.

If both [heaven and hell] are “eternal,” it follows necessarily that either both are to be taken as long-lasting but finite, or both as endless and perpetual. The phrases “eternal punishment” and “eternal life” are parallel and it would be absurd to use them in one and the same sentence to mean: “Eternal life will be infinite, while eternal punishment will have an end.” Hence, because the eternal life of the saints will be endless, the eternal punishment also, for those condemned to it, will assuredly have no end.

Augustine

The City of God, 1001-2 (21.23).