Heb 5:8-10 Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation, being designated by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek 
	We are currently in the process of our consideration of the Biblical doctrines of heaven and hell. We are using Dr. Donnelly’s scriptural studies as the framework around which we are looking to the Lord’s Word for what He tells us of these two places in His creation. Our Lord has very much to say about hell, and we are looking at that aspect of eternity. As Jesus is our only source of eternal salvation, we need to know what He has to say about hell. We must be careful to do so only within the details as given in the Word of God. 
	There are several aspects that we must keep in mind as we proceed. First is that we recognize that the reality of hell is very far beyond our language to adequately describe. There are many aspects of our spiritual life that are beyond our capability to fully explain. The words of man are utterly inadequate to relate all the spiritual truths of God. How does one express the great love with which we have been so richly loved in Jesus Christ? How does one describe the comprehensive meaning of eternal life? How does one proclaim the riches of God shed upon us in His Word, by the living Holy Spirit? We can not even begin to tell what it means to love another human being, much less the depth of God’s plan and purpose in Christ? So language is an issue in the course of our description of both heaven and hell.
	As a result, we find that we are looking at symbolic representations as given in the Bible. That does not diminish our consideration, because a true understanding of the use of symbols revolves around the fact that the symbol is less than the reality. The reality behind the symbol is always more. When we read the scriptural description of what hell will be like, we must remind ourselves that it will be far worse than the most terrifying symbolic passages. In the same way, the scriptural description of heaven will be far more glorious than the greatest expressive symbol. 
	Another consideration is for those who have loved ones who have died without apparent salvation in Christ. This will be a very hard and heart wrenching ordeal. We choose to endure it for anyone who might yet be saved as a result of these studies. We count on the Lord to comfort and to keep, as well as to convict and to call forth a response to His Word. 	
Today, we begin to consider what hell will be like for the unsaved. We do so to the best of our ability and understanding. We will consider it under four headings, two this morning and the other two when we continue our discussion. We will look at hell as absolute poverty, agonizing pain, an angry presence, and an appalling prospect. Even as we begin, the headings alone should cause us to recognize that there is very much at stake in these studies. These are not just something to discuss and then forget. We should find that our minds are seared with the reality of hell to such an extent that if we do not know Jesus Christ, we would be afraid to go to sleep without believing upon Him. Yes, these studies should scare us into the only way of salvation.
As we read in our morning’s text, Jesus Christ is the only source and means of eternal salvation. If we do know Him as our Lord and Savior, these studies should so affect our thoughts and minds that we must share Him with our family and friends. We must not be content to sit idly by as our loved ones and associates are traveling the road to hell. We must be moved to want to show them the love of God that desires no man to be lost. That should be the very heart of the church, and be so in such depth that we make it our daily prayer and purpose to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are to do so in a living and fruitful manner in our homes, in our offices, in our places of study, in our places of respite, in all the areas of our lives.
	Continuing, then, hell is Absolute Poverty. It is absolute poverty in the fact that it means a separation from God. 2 Thess 1:8+9, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. And these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.  Those who are not His people will be banished by His decree as we have recently read many times in Matt 25:41. 
Because those who refuse to believe upon Jesus Christ will be separated from Him, cast into hell, it is often referred to as a place of darkness. 1 John 1:5, And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. And as we read in Matt 8:12, but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into the outer darkness… Therefore, being thrown into hell means a distinct separation from the light of God’s presence. 
	There may be those among us who look at this prospect with little concern. There are those who claim to be separated from God, now, at this time. They do not recognize Him in their lives and refusing Him as having any portion in their day to day dealings. But that stems from a complete blindness as to the fact that God is very active in the affairs of this world. Whether He is recognized or acknowledged or not, He holds all things together in his Goodness and Grace. Matt 5:45 …for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 
	No one lives without God. He gives every breath that is breathed. He is the One Who keeps the universe in place by the power of His Word. His natural laws operate in our lives and it is by His hand that anyone has life. He is the One who sends the sun and the rain, the growth of crops and the cool breeze. His gracious gifts are seen in the love that we all experience, the cry of a newborn child, the friendships that we value and the parents and children of our families. All that is ours to appreciate in art and music and literature and natural beauty and those things that bring joy and satisfaction into our lives all come from God. The health, exercise, athletic endeavors, good food, nutrition, laughter, enjoyment, family times, stimulation of hobbies, rest and relaxation, refreshment of cool streams of water, all these are the products of God’s blessing on mankind. We are indebted to God for everything that makes life bearable and worth living. His hand rules and overrules in the day to day affairs of our lives. 
	In hell, however, this will all be taken away. Quote, Everyone you love, everything you value will be removed from your experience. No sun will shine. No flower will bloom. There will be no laughter, no excitement, no fulfillment of any kind. These things are from God and to be separated from Him is to be separated from all His gifts. You take them for granted now; your never thank the Giver and you have no idea of the extent of your indebtedness to Him. But, when they are taken away, what poverty! End quote.
	More than that, your personality, the real you will be forever deteriorating. All dignity that you had will be stripped away by God. All your humanity will rot away; all your value will be lost. The New Testament word, in 2 Thess. 1:9, is destruction, the ruin of all that is worthwhile. And these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.
	Quote, To perish means that you, as a being, will become ever more degraded, more contemptible, more lonely. You will be surrounded by devils and by damned and wicked humans. They will hate you and you will hate them. Everything good in you will be taken away, and everything bad in you let loose. All your evil passions will burn, increasing and consuming you until you become utterly foul.
	Such will be your existence. How wretched! Nothing good, nothing worthwhile, a horrible monotonous dreariness, unenlivened by a single ray of light as you fester and stew in your loathsomeness. That is what will happen to you. Think of the most hopeless derelict in the gutter. His existence is paradise compared with the poverty of hell. End quote. 
	This brings us to the second heading, the fact that hell is the place of agonizing pain. Scripture most often refers to hell as a place of fire. Rev 21:8 "But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death." 
	Fire speaks of pain and, remember, that we are seeing that the reality is far, far worse than the symbol. As awful as fiery pain is, it pales in comparison to the agony of the pain that will be the portion of those in hell. Listen to the cries of the rich man in Luke 16:24 "And he cried out and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue; for I am in agony in this flame.'  
Rev 14:10+11 he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. "And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; and they have no rest day and night… Fire tortures in its pain and agony. 
	Even the smallest burn is torment for hour upon hour. How can we even begin to comprehend, in the slightest measure, the torment and the torture that the damned will experience for eternity in the searing flames of hell? Their entire body and soul will burn forever! No relief, no soothing ointment, no salve, just constant fiery, blistering, excruciating agony upon agony!
The wicked will burn and burn and never be consumed. The wording is specific as this is the vile counterpart of the bush that burned with fire but was not consumed, as described in Ex 3:2, And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. And it gets worse!
	In Mark Chapter 9, Our Lord uses an expression that is exceedingly horrific as He describes what will happen to those who do not set aside the sin of this age and find their salvation in Him. Mark 9:43-48 "And if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire, [where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.]  "And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame, than having your two feet, to be cast into hell, [where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.] "And if your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes, to be cast into hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched… where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched. 
	Christ is quoting the last verse of the Book of Isaiah, chapter 66, verse 24. We will begin reading from verse 22. "For just as the new heavens and the new earth Which I make will endure before Me," declares the Lord, "So your offspring and your name will endure. "And it shall be from new moon to new moon And from sabbath to sabbath, All mankind will come to bow down before Me," says the Lord. "Then they shall go forth and look On the corpses of the men Who have transgressed against Me. For their worm shall not die, And their fire shall not be quenched; And they shall be an abhorrence to all mankind." 
This was a particularly gruesome image to the ancient world. To leave an enemy body unburied after battle was the greatest disgrace that could be heaped upon the dead. It was the ultimate humiliation. At least the fires of the heaped dead would eventually die down when the fuel was exhausted and the maggots would die, in their turn, when the flesh was finally stripped from the bones. But this picture indicates that the fire will never cease and the worm will never die. This was so ghastly an image, that the Jews transpose these last verses so as not to have a public reading end on that dreadfully appalling note.  
	The undying worm is something foul, endlessly gnawing at the damned, eating at them with no relief. It probably refers to the consciences of the guilty. We know how our consciences pain us in this life. It can be an awful experience when we are haunted by the thoughts of our sins and evilness. Much of today’s madness, suicide, depression, and social disorder can be traced to consciences that are seared with anguish, distress, and guilt.
	But this pales in relation to the anguish that these consciences will register in hell. As John Flavel writes, Conscience, which should have been the sinner’s curb on earth, becomes the whip that must lash his soul in hell. Neither is there any faculty or power belonging to the soul of man so fit and able to do it as his own conscience. That which was the seat and center of all guilt, now becomes the seat and center of all torments. End quote.
The conscience in hell will be the reproach of the sinner. Every opportunity to turn to Christ will be replayed and replayed with no relief, no possibility of change, and no opportunity to be soothed or settled. It will be endless torment as the worm of conscience eats away at the mind of the damned for eternity after eternity. Think of the worst battle of conscience you have ever endured. It will pale and be absolutely insignificant in the scale of the torment of its excruciating work in hell!
	And yet there is more. As we read in Matt 8:12 …in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." How awful this will be as it is Christ’s most frequent description of the hideous and horrendous experience of those in hell. Matt 13:41+42 "The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, and will cast them into the furnace of fire; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matt 22:13, “Then the king said to the servants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' Matt 24:50+51, the master of that slave will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour which he does not know, and shall cut him in pieces and assign him a place with the hypocrites; weeping shall be there and the gnashing of teeth. And in Matt 25:30, "And cast out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 
	Quote, Think of it! Jesus says that tears will pour down your cheeks in hell and that your body will be racked with uncontrollable sobbing. Sorrow of the most bitter kind will fill you, and not merely the sorrow of grief, but of guilt and of self-disgust. If all the tears shed on earth since Eden could be gathered together, they would not begin to compare with the tears of one individual in hell. You will weep far more than all the world has ever known. You will weep and weep forever. End quote.
	We know of moments of this type of gut wrenching sobbing. When we have lost a loved one, in our grief and agony, our entire body is wracked with the depth of our sorrow. Every muscle convulses and contracts in anguish as the tears flow in streams from our eyes. Our intense sobbing shudders through our body and is physically expressed and excruciatingly endured.  
	Not only will the damned be wracked with inconsolable misery and wailing in endless and convulsive weeping, but there will be ceaseless gnashing of teeth. It is the picture of rage or insanity, as a rabid dog gnashes its teeth in its madness. Ps 37:12, The wicked plots against the righteous, And gnashes at him with his teeth. Lam 2:16a All your enemies Have opened their mouths wide against you; They hiss and gnash their teeth. The inhabitants of hell will be grinding their teeth in furious rage and endless hatred at each other, at themselves, at their sin, and at God, Himself. It will be an endless picture as foreshadowed in the demon possessed boy in Mark 9:18, and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him to the ground and he foams at the mouth, and grinds his teeth, and stiffens out. 
	Who can imagine the utter agony and everlasting torment and torture of the damned in hell? It will be an endless agony of scorching and searing fire, the inner anguish of a devouring worm, the enraged, bitter, ceaseless sobbing, and the insane hissing and the enraged gnashing of teeth. Agonizing pain, beyond any comprehension, and it gets worse, far worse as we will see.
	As we leave it until then, let us once more consider the fact that we do not have to suffer this fate. We are able to avoid this torment if we will but believe in Jesus Christ. He will save all who call upon Him. Do not wait any longer, if you have never called out to Him. Ask Him to save you, to save you now. He will if that is your heart’s desire. We are never too young or too old to call out to Him. Just ask and He will save you from these torments that will be absolutely deserved by all those who refuse to seek the salvation so freely offered by God in His Only Begotten Son. 
	Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation, being designated by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. Amen

This morning’s benediction is Heb 4:14-16 Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and may find grace to help in time of need. Amen.