The Diffinitive On Hell….

If there is a Hell, a place of confinement, a prison for the incorrigibly wicked, the nature of it doesn’t matter, it will be a place of torment.
Under the most humane conditions possible in this century in which we are living, a prison is a prison, and it is horrible even to contemplate.

What we want in this discussion is to know what the Word of God teaches in regard to the state of the wicked after death.  It may be interesting for us to notice this, that Hell is the jail where the wicked are locked up when under indictment until the court sits and their sentences are passed on them; then they go into what is called in Revelation the Lake of Fire, the Gehenna of the New Testament.  The Lake of Fire is the Federal Prison of Eternity; Hell is simply the County Jail.

No one has yet been put into the Lake of Fire.  The wicked angels and wicked men are both locked up today in Hell, awaiting the resurrection of the wicked and the judgment, after which they go to the Federal Prison.

You know that Heaven is not the permanent abode of the Believers; it is merely a tentative place to which the disembodied spirit goes to await the return of the Lord Jesus and the first resurrection when the Believer will receive his immortal body. He is then ready to enter into the New Heavens and the New Earth, where he will dwell in an immortal, physical body with his beloved ones through Eternity.

When the sinner dies today, he, in his spiritual form, goes to Hell to remain there until the Second Resurrection when his old body will be raised full of sin, disease, and corruption.

He will enter it again and stand in that physical body before the great White Throne of God. Jesus Christ will be judge. Then the dread sentence will be passed according to the Court’s findings, and he will be sent away with the Devil, the False Prophet, and the fallen angels into the Federal Prison of Eternity.  The reason for Hell and the Lake of Fire is apparent to every thinking man.

Eternal Criminals.  Man is an Eternal Being. He belongs to the same class as God.  If he dies a criminal, then he enters Eternity as an eternal criminal.  There must be a prison; the criminals must be segregated.

If they were permitted to roam indiscriminately through Eternity, they would demoralize the New Heavens and the New Earth.  We have jails, State Prisons, and Federal Prisons for time criminals who break the laws of man.  Who can challenge that reason of God if He has a prison in which are incarcerated the people who violate the laws of Heaven, and who are eternal criminals?  Virtually every culture throughout the history of man has believed in some kind of Hell and place of confinement for punishment after death, and this testimony is not easily ruled out of court.  There is no type of testimony so convincing to a jury and judge as the testimony of universal human consciousness.

There must be some basis of fact for this universal belief.  All primitive peoples believe that the Good go to some kind of Heaven and that the Evil go into confinement.  We may believe in a literal Lake of Fire and Brimstone or that the term is only used to illustrate the torture and misery of confinement and separation from God.

A Prison is a Prison. The fact is: to be locked up in a Federal prison away from your loved ones with the loss of freedom and with a consciousness that all your mortal days are to be spent behind those walls, knowing that God’s great big out-of-doors is forever closed to you, that no longer can you go where you wish or come when you please, that you have lost the power of volition and of action and that a guard with a gun walks up and down the concrete corridor before your steel-barred doors in a uniform that becomes hateful to you is Hell enough for any man.

If this is to last through Eternity, God help me, I want to evade it.  I don’t need the fumes of sulphur, nor the creeping, biting, burning worms of Hell described in the Scripture.  To be shut in with the incorrigibly wicked through Eternity, to be associated with the blasphemers and murderers, with the whore¬mongers, the liar, the thief the dissolute women of all ages, never to see a precious face again, never to hear a baby’s prattle, never to hear a hymn o£ praise or the folklore songs of love, to hear nothing but bitter, biting, hideous blasphemy, the gnawing of the tongue, the gnashing of teeth, the biting agony of long confinement is all that is necessary to make it Hell for me.  As for me, let me escape it; let me never be in danger of it.

The word for Hell in the Hebrew is Sheol.  There are many synonyms as Rephaim, the Shades, the Pit, the Lowest Deeps, but the word “Sheol” occurs seventy-six times in the Old Testament.

The Greek word of the New Testament is Hades; there are several synonyms used in the Greek meaning the same place .

The Hebrew word means “Mansion of the Dead,” “the Invisible Abode,” and “Place of Punishment,” “the lowest place or state,” or, as another puts it, “the prisons of the Incorrigible,” “the place of restraint.”

The reason for Hell has been suggested in my introduction; let me state it again.  Man is eternal; angels are eternal.  When men and angels become criminals, they become eternal criminals.  Since man is an eternal criminal, there must be a place for eternal restraint.

Man is a spirit, and there must be a spirit home for man.
Since man is a criminal, and traitor, a jail is imperative, and after Judgment the Federal prison is a necessity.  Hell was not made for man.  It was prepared for the Devil and his angels.  Heaven and earth were the places prepared for man.

God has been compelled through man’s sin to build, in spite of love, a place of confinement for Eternity’s criminals.  God intended originally that man should live on the earth eternally. It was made for this purpose, and man was made with an eternal body; but when he sinned and became mortal, Hell had to be fitted for his confinement.

God did not intend originally to ever separate man from his body; so Heaven can never be considered man’s final Home.  Man’s final home must be a place where he can dwell in a physical body eternally either in confinement or blissful liberty.

Hell and the Grave. There are some teachers who have said that Hell and the Grave were synonymous terms.  They are sincere, but the reason for this error is that the King James Version erroneously translates the word “Sheol” thirty-five times as “Grave.”  When those reformers and many 19th century teachers translated it, there was not the knowledge of the Hebrew language that we have aquired in this last century.

We know that there are many errors in this translation that have made it imperative that a new translation be given to the world, and I look upon the American Revision as the very best, and recommend it to every zealous Bible reader to use in preference to the King James Version.

The use of a word in either the Hebrew, the Greek, or in our English, determines its meaning, and it will be interesting to notice how the word “Sheol” is used in its seventy-six places in the Old Testament.  We wish to compare it with the word “Queber” which means Grave or Sepulcher, and by this comparison it will be very easy to determine whether the two words can be used interchangeably or not.

A Vital Contrast. The word “Sheol” is never used in the plural: the word “Queber” is used in the plural twenty-nine times.

The word “Sheol” is never located on the surface of the earth; “Queber” is located on the surface of the earth thirty-two times.

Bodies are never put into “Sheol” by man, but bodies are put into “Queber” thirty-seven times.

No individual has 3 “Sheol” of his own, but individuals have “Quebers” forty-four times.

Man never puts another man into “Sheol,” but man puts man into his Grave or “Queber” thirty-three times.

Man never digs a “Sheol”; man digs a “Queber” six times.

Man never touches “Sheol,” but it speaks of man’s touching “Queber” five times.

By this we see that the word “Sheol” is never used interchange¬ably nor in the sense of Grave where the human body is placed by man.

It is never used synonymously with the word that we translate grave or sepulcher, and by its use it is very clear that “Sheol” and “Queber” are not the same, and that “Sheol” cannot be translated grave.

The translators of our American Revision saw this, and instead of translating the word at all, they simply put it in the English untranslated.

The one who tells you that the Grave and Hell are synonymously used is either ignorant of the use of the words and their meanings in the Scripture, or else he is dishonest.  I would prefer to feel that he is ignorant.

The Nature of Hell. A very vivid picture of Hell is given in the 14th of Isaiah where it describes the death of Nebuchadnezzar, the great Emperor of Babylon, and his descent into Hell.

“Sheol from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.” Isaiah 14:9.

It would seem that Satan was preparing a great reception for the world Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar, that he had raised up the thrones of all the kings and they sat upon them with their officers and slaves gathered about them in Oriental splendor.

Then down from the upper world is brought the great Nebuchadnezzar, the world’s greatest Ruler.  He is suddenly ushered into the presence of these kings and princes sitting upon their mock thrones.  They all answer with one cry, “What? Hast thou fallen as low as we? Is the majesty of thy greatness and the music of thy singers brought down to Hell? Art thou as weak as we?”

This wail of lost men, of kings and princes, of generals and great financiers, sitting on their mock thrones in pitiable agony and helplessness meets the ear.

“The worm is spread under thee,” they cry, “and worms cover thee,” crawling fiery serpents, coiling and uncoiling about the spirit of the great Nebuchadnezzar.  He has made kingdoms desolate; he has slain the mother with her babe; he has crushed nation after nation; he has put out eyes of kings and princes; and now in a horrid Hell he writhes in agony, and his agony is witnessed by the assembled multitudes, many of whom he sent there.

In Isaiah 66:24, it speaks of Hell as a place where the “fire is not quenched, and the worm shall not die, an abhorrence to all flesh.”

Daniel tells us that the resurrection of the wicked shall he a resurrection of shame and contempt.

According to Matt. 25:41, 46, it is the home of the cursed, the eternal fire, which was prepared for the Devil and the rebellious angels. Now it has become the jail and home of the wicked human; it is called the place of eternal punishment or constraint; a place out of which no pardoned has yet gone or ever can go; no pardon can reach them, horrible as It may seem.

In 2 Peter 2:4, it is called the pit or prisons of punishment, and in Rev, 9:1-2, it is a place of fire of sulphuric fumes, the home of demons; but in Luke 16:19-31 Jesus gives us a picture of Hell that only He could give.

This is not a parable; it is not placed among the parables.  He says, “A certain rich man;” he is quoting history, and He gives a description of Hell and of torment, of conscious intelligible torment that surpasses Dante in his Inferno, or Milton in his Paradise Lost.

It would be well here to note this fact: that during the period from the fall of man until Christ ascended and look His place at the right hand of the Father on high after His resurrection, the Underworld was in two compartments with an impassable gulf separating them.

On one side were the Old Testament saints who had trusted in the Blood Covenant, the Abrahamic Blood Covenant; so it is called by Jesus “Abraham’s bosom.”  Across this impassable gulf the incorrigibly wicked were incarcerated awaiting the resurrection, and Judgment.  It would seem evident that when Jesus arose from the dead, and had carried His blood into the Holy of Holies in Heaven, and had satisfied the claims of Justice in the redemption of the transgressors under the first Covenant, that He again went back down into what is known as Paradise and preached to the souls waiting there, and carried to them the Good News of Redemption, and they with Him ascended up to Heaven, for as far as we know, no human beings had gone into Heaven, unless it was Elijah.

No one could go there, because the sin problem was not yet settled; they only had a Promise of Redemption written in the blood of bulls and goats.

Jesus came to die for the sinner under the first Covenant; so that they who were called should receive their portion of the inheritance.  So we can understand this picture in the 16th oF Luke.

“Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, faring sumptuously every day; and a certain beggar named Lazarus was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table, yea, even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and that he was carried away by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried.

“And in Hades lie lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

“And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tips of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish ID this flame.

“But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now here he is comforted, and thou art in anguish.

“And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they who would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross over from thence to us.

“And he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldst send him to my father’s house; for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

“But Abraham saith, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.

“And he said, Nay, father Abraham; but if one go to them from the dead, they will repent.

“And he said unto them, If they hear not Moses and the prophets neither will they be persuaded, if one rise from the dead.”

We understand this story to be a purely Jewish story. There is no Paradise today, but there is a Hell.  Paradise was emptied, and all its inhabitants taken to Heaven.  This rich man went to Hell, because he had broken the fundamental principles of the Mosaic Law: He did not love his neighbor as himself.

The whole law was summed up in this: Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself.  This he had broken and was paying the penalty for it.

Now I want you to notice some significant facts in regard to man as he goes to Hell.  “And in Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment.” Notice that he has all the faculties of the soul. Man is not a physical being, he is primarily a spirit.  His tongue was burning in that intense heat, “For I am in anguish in this flame.”

Whether we want to insist that this is purely figurative language or not, is beside the question.  The fact is that Jesus declared that this man was in torment in the flames.  If the flame was simply a burning conscience, then I think I might prefer literal fire,  “Son, remember;” the man remembered. So we know that memory lives in Hell.

Two things will haunt man in Hell and fill him with sleepless agony.

First, the sins that he has committed against God and man; and second, that he had an opportunity to escape it, but he resolutely preferred Hell to Heaven.  Hell is here a place of anguish, with the great gulf fixed so that there is no passing over from one to the other.  There is no opportunity for a second probation promised here.  The man who is guilty enough to be sent to Hell is guilty enough to stay in Hell.

Then we come to the most pathetic thing.  He said, “Will you not send Lazarus up to earth? I have five brothers there, lest they also come into this place of torment.”  The pathos of this hopeless request is daunting.  What a preacher a soul would make, if he could come back from the agonies of Hell. But men wouldn’t listen to his insane message.  But the answer came, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.” “Nay, father Abraham, but if one go from here up there, him they will listen to.” But did they?

Jesus went from Hell up to earth and gave His testimony, but have men heeded it?

A Lighter note…..