Today’s 333 Devotional: “Hell Is No Laughing Matter”

Hell is a place of eternal separation

In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Paul said that all those who do not know God nor obey the gospel of Jesus Christ that they “shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.”

This is probably the worst torment one can experience in hell. The only companionship a person will have in hell is their memory of rejecting God and His Son, Jesus Christ.

Hell is not some eternal sleep; rather it is a place where there’ll be no rest day or night (Revelation 14:11).

In Jesus’s story of the rich man and Lazarus we see the rich man pleading with Abraham, which means that everyone in hell will be conscious, never forgetting that they forever missed out on heaven and the presence of God.

Every moment for all eternity those in hell will be in mental anguish because they’ll remember every time the gospel was presented, and every time their family and/or friends told them of their need to accept Jesus Christ, and they didn’t. They will remember every excuse they ever used, every lie they ever accepted as truth, and they will be in agony over all their missed opportunities.

Hell is not a state of mind nor is it symbolic or a metaphoric description about anything that is hard or difficult. We say, “War is hell,” or something “hurts like hell,” or even traffic can be “hell.” If the reality of hell were truly understood, these would seem like heaven.

R.C. Sproul said, “If these images are indeed symbols, then we must conclude that the reality is worse than the symbol suggests. The function of symbols is to point beyond themselves to a higher or more intense state of actuality than the symbol itself can contain. That Jesus used the most awful symbols imaginable to describe hell is no comfort to those who see them simply as symbols.”