A Warning About Hell

Scripture reading: Jeremiah 23:16-18,24,39

• All roads lead to heaven.
• We can all just COEXIST.
• As long as I am a good person, God will accept me.
• I go to church every Sunday and Sunday school as often as I can, I believe I will go to heaven.
• I believe in God, wherever He is.
• There are no absolute truths; truth is relative. What is truth to me may not be truth to you.
• I cannot lose my salvation.

These are all phrases and statements we have no doubt heard and perhaps even pondered for ourselves. How much truth does each one hold? Is there truth in any of these statements?

The Scripture reading addresses each one of these statements. “They speak a vision of their own imagination, Not from the mouth of the LORD.”

“They keep saying to those who despise Me, ‘The LORD has said, You will have peace;’ And as for everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart, They say, ‘Calamity will not come upon you.’ But who has stood in the council of the LORD, That he should see and hear His word? Who has given heed to His word and listened?”

Who despises the Lord? This is answered, “Everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart.” The King James Version says it better, “Every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart.”

“Imagination” here is referring to a person’s good sense. In other words, whatever made sense to the person is what they did, and the false teachers to whom the Lord is speaking in Jeremiah 23 gave them the empty promise that “calamity will not come upon you.” Essentially, the false teachers were telling the people to live in whatever way pleased them, and the Lord would not do anything about it nor would they be judged by the Lord for their actions.

 There are some similar verses in the Bible that will perhaps make this more clear. 

• “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Judges 17:6
• “There is a way which seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death.” Proverbs 14:12
• “You shall not do at all what we are doing here today, every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes.” Deuteronomy 12:8
• “Every man’s way is right in his own eyes, But the LORD weighs the hearts.” Proverbs 21:2

We are not given the privilege from the Lord to do whatever we imagine is right.

Wait. That’s not exactly right. We can do whatever pleases us, but we are not told that we will find favor with the Lord if we do. We are told we will have favor only if we take care to follow what the Lord teaches and love Him completely with our whole being.

In verse 24 of Jeremiah chapter 23, we read the words of the Lord that His presence fills heaven and earth. We cannot escape Him. Simply because we cannot see Him and perceive that He is not actively stropping evil from coming into our lives some people have the misconception that there is no God or that this God thing is not all that it has cracked up to be. That does not change where we will find His presence.

Does His presence fill all existence? We are told that it does not. Verse 39 tells us that the Lord (speaking to the false teachers and the people living by their imaginations) that He will “forget you and cast you away from My presence.”

We are told very clearly that there is a place which is not filled with the Lord’s presence. In Jeremiah 23 this place is not defined. However, there are innumerable references throughout the Bible to this place which we have simply come to know as hell.

It may be a place of fire, I do not know. The Bible says it, but when the Bible speaks of concepts we do not understand and have never seen, the Bible often uses metaphors in language that we can understand. I can understand “lake of fire,” “burning,” and “anguish,” yet I can’t really. I know what it feels like for a small area of my skin to be burned or for a large area of my body to be sunburned.

Yet I cannot imagine this torture forever. I cannot imagine never being able to escape the torture or never having even just 5 minutes of relief.

Whether it is a literal place of fire is a question I cannot answer. Is the torture a metaphor for what it feels like to be separated from God’s presence? Here is a fact we take for granted everyday: The Lord’s presence holds back a lot of evil that we never know about, and the Lord’s presence draws us to Himself. We are, whether we consciously realize it or not, constantly being drawn to the Lord. That we are not turning to Him points to our lack of response, not to the lack of His presence. His presence fills heaven and earth.

Yes, you can do whatever you please. But you have been warned that it is not without consequence, and the consequences are eternal. Luke 16:20-25