The Place That No one Likes To Talk About

Have you ever watched the news, or read the newspaper, and after seeing all the war and destruction, all the blood shed in other countries, you thought to yourself?, “I am glad I live in a country where there is no constant battle going on.” It is good for us to be thankful that there is no public bloodshed going on in our land, but make no mistake! There is a constant battle that rages every day in our land.

It is a battle for our minds!

Satan, the enemy of mankind’s good, is an unrelenting war general…he continually bombards us everyday with his ‘mind’ attacks! And know this, he doesn’t fight fair, he doesn’t play by the rules. He uses his lies and half truths to mislead and destroy! Satan is a brilliant strategist and his propaganda is so persuasive that his lies lured one third of God’s angels out of heaven, and also plunged the human race into sin’s darkness.

Satan and his fallen angels are already damned, there is no hope for them. He realizes that the battle ground for the human soul is won or lost, here and now. But he doesn’t want you to think like this about yourself or for your neighbor. Satan wants to put people to sleep with his lies, he wants them to trust in his faulty, emotionally fueled arguments…instead of the solid truth that is revealed in God’s unerring Word!

With his lies, Satan wants you to wrongfully ‘think’ that how you live today will not matter in eternity…just live for today…or as Trooper wrote many years ago and still sings today, “we’re here for a good time, not a long time”

My friends, every person alive on planet earth today is going to have to give an account of their lives…to the God that IS! We will answer to the Living God who has revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures [Bible]…we should busy ourselves shaping our beliefs and practices to God’s will…instead of trying to shape and mold His will to our beliefs and practices…[He is not a lifeless idol…He will speak and Judge for Himself]

One of the lies that Satan is trying very hard to popularize today is that there is not going to be eternal [unending] punishment for those who do not trust and follow Jesus. Remember, Satan isn’t afraid of church! The Bible teaches that one of Satan’s disguises is that of an angel of “light”. Satan knows that if he can begin to get his toe in the church, begin to trickle in his lies, then he will water down the churches ‘saltiness’, making it less of an effective witness to the lost and dying world around it.

The reason why many people struggle with the Bible’s teaching about eternal punishment is because, 1. Their understanding of Who God is, is very small, 2. Their understanding of who man is has been horribly distorted & exalted.

After cutting God off at the knees [in our thinking] and at the same time raising man up on an extension ladder…so both are at eye level…looking each other in the face…as equals…then after this is accomplished…people begin to bring forth their objections to hell…

I do not defend the Bible’s teaching on hell because I find it so soothing to my emotional psyche. It is a teaching that is very terrifying indeed! When my children were all very little we would play hide and seek…and in their immature minds, that were very inward focused, they actually believed if they covered their eyes so that they could not see me, that the opposite must also be true. We live in a day that we have been led to believe that we are the constructors of reality. If we don’t believe in hell, then viola, hell doesn’t exist.

My friends, if God has prepared a place for rebels…then covering your eyes will not make it go away…only turning from your rebellion and trusting in Jesus will make it go away…for you!

When we rightfully understand who God is, and who man is, then all the objections to hell fall lifeless to the ground.

Over the next few days I would like to go over a passage of Scripture that points us to the afterlife…as we look at this passage I would like to bring up some of the objections I have heard from people [over the last 20 years] regarding eternal punishment.