Life, Life cried Christian when leaving the city of destruction. "Pilgrim's Progress"
Proverbs 8:36
But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death.
In our day, death is a constant subject of entertainment.
I love that we were able to watch that episode of Sherlock, while you were 16.
That is my favorite age of memory. I am sorry that I haven’t any more children to keep me remembering 16 years old.
I had many responsibilities at 16 and much cumbersome emotional baggage. I knew a lot about Jesus, but not yet did I know Him, whom to know is life eternal. I often asked Him to show Himself to me, but I really didn’t know Him. I prayed a lot, then. I talked about Jesus and taught classes about Jesus and had memorized the documents of Vatican II and I still didn’t know Jesus.
Hell had a great hold on my soul. I meditated on death, as much as on Jesus. Bitterness and sullenness was the continued condition of my life. I couldn’t even find happiness in the greatest victories of my teens. Death seemed always to loom over my mind and emotion.
I think that the imagination of Sherlock entering into a locked room with his arch-nemesis, is one of the best human depictions of Hell, that I can imagine. It is eternal! And yet, he escaped that dark sentence! What should he have done? And yet there was no shock that He had missed an eternal flame, by a hair. Praise is in order, even if you don't know Him. Delay of the sentence, is no real and lasting comfort. To some, it emboldens them. Don't be one of them! The sentence of death is coming to us all, in some form or another, but the sentence of Hell is reserved for some. Don't be one of them!
God owes us Hell, if we don't make our calling and election sure on this earth! Jesus is the remedy!
Hell is the complete darkness and pain, mental and physical that anyone can imagine, and it is worse than that. We must remember that we have enjoyed the mercies of God for a lifetime, without any payment. So if we leave this life, having repudiated that greatness, we deserve every bit of it. That is what makes the pain of that Hell all the more excruciating. You could have taken the hand of the Good God that was right in front of you, your entire life.
But God was merciful and waiting. And God was amazingly gracious and we have been blessed with air and food and raiment and all good things and we despised it.
Our enemy had deceived us to make us think we deserved all of that. And if we believe him, we will be locked with him for eternity with no merciful hand of God to stand between us and his taunts and torments.
God has given the remedy. Jesus paid that price already! We need only trust in Him! Halleluia, for redemption by grace through faith in Jesus’ Name!
