Let us look in the 12th verse: “ These are spots in your feasts of charity [or love], when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear.” They come to the communion service and there is no fear of consequences. They act as if they are Christians when they are not; they are hypocrites. The next verse states, “ Clouds they are without water, car ried about of winds.” These clouds look as if they are going to bring us rains of refreshing, but in stead they bring us smog. “Trees whose fruit with- ereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots” : boasting, fruitless lives. “ Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever”—energized toward evil, and cut free from the gravity of God’s love. God could never empty Hell into Heaven for a very simple reason: The people in Hell wouldn’t want to go there. Let me quote C. S. Lewis again: “ For a damned soul there is nearly nothing. It is shrunk, shut up in itself. God beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat upon the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First, they will not, in the end they cannot, open their mouths for food.” Jeremy Tay lor, in his great sermon on “The Punishment of God,” says, “ The progress of sin may be mercifully slow, but it is certain at last, if unhindered, to bring the sinner to the irrevocable doom. At first sin star tles the sinner, then becomes pleasing, then fre quent, then habitual, then confirmed. Then the sin ner becomes impenitent, then obstinate, then deter mined never to repent, and then he perishes.” He goes out in a confirmed state of irrecovery. Let me ask you in the words of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, what is your attitude toward the witness of God as He brings His Holy Spirit to bear upon the sensitiveness of your nature ? Listen to His words in Luke 12:10: “ And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven.” Will you respond with the response of your soul to the love of God? Is it, “ I don’t need Your love,” or is it, “God, be merciful to me a sinner” ? One of these days we are going to be standing in one of two groups at the end of things where one group will be saying, “Not my will, but Thine,” and the Lord will be saying to the other group, “Not My will, but thine.” Where do you stand today? God would empty Hell into Heaven if He could. God would love to empty Hell into Heav en, but He can’t, because when we choose to go there, as Jeremy Taylor says, we choose to go over the broken body o f Christ, and we choose it because we don’t want Heaven. Q b ]
memory. Jesus tells us of a man who died and went to Hades. When he asked to have Lazarus sent across the gap, that he might dip his finger in the water and put it on his tongue, Abraham said, “ Son, remember. . . .” Memory is the cruelest thing I know. Remember! There came a time in my life when I thought if I could just go back in my life and erase the memory of all the harsh things I have said, of all the things I have thought, o f all the things that I have been, what a Heaven it would be! Then one day I found a way of washing away all of the dross. I came face to face with the reality of God in Jesus Christ, and He washed away my Hell! I put my Hell on Him. This is the choice that we have to make if we are to be delivered from Hell. What is Hell ? Hell is the complete moving into eternity in a confirmed state of rebellion against the will of God. You don’t have to die to go to Hell; if you don’t know Christ, you are living in it right now. Jesus said, “He that hath the Son hath life, he that hath not the Son hath not life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.” You say that the Bible says it’s fiery. “ Fiery” - I don’t know how you would express it. I remem ber when I was a youngster I lied to my father and got my brother in trouble. He received a severe punishment, and I lived in hell! It was fiery-burn ing! I would have put my fist into a bucket of scalding water if I could have recalled the words. The pain of the sensitive soul who lies or cheats is worse than any fire that ever burned. I do not know what the Lake of Fire is, but it cannot be less severe than we can imagine. There are two sections of Jude we should con sider. Verse 6: “ And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrha . . .” These people, who had sold themselves to sexual perversion, will forever have that burning lust in their souls and will be unable to fulfill the lust in the exercise o f the flesh. Have you ever sat and listened to two old codgers, un godly men, as they talked about their lives in the past? They acted as though they had just gone through some kind of contest. They marked off the various evil things which they had done. They look around and eyed the young girls and they go through all of the titterings and gigglings o f some teenager, but in their bodies you know they are just as dead as a doornail. Think of the misery and the hell of such people, having to exist throughout eter nity in this kind of a burning, consuming fire. This is what is seen in Sodom and Gomorrha. Hell, then, is the confirmed state of existence in rebellion against God.
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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