I'm reading from Luke chapter 16 and verse 19, almost unbelievable words from the mouth of the Lord Jesus.
Notice he said there was a certain rich man which was clothed in purple and fine linen and paired sumptuously every day.
Then there was a certain baker named Lazarus which was laid at his gate full of swords,
and desiring to be prepared with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table,
more of the dogs came and licked his sword.
In a cave the pass of the baker died and was carried by angels into Abraham's bosom,
or into paradise, or into Hades, or into the unseen world, easy to understand.
Into heaven, now pick up the story, the rich man also died and was buried,
and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments and see of Abraham afar off of Lazarus in his bosom,
and he cried and said,
Father Abraham, have mercy on me,
and said Lazarus, and he dipped the tip of his finger in water and cooled my tongue,
for I am tormented in this roaring flame.
It says in the Greek language, look up from your Bibles, this is the story of two beggars,
one that begged in this life and one that begged in the afterlife.
This is a story about an unsaved soul that went to a place called hell,
where there is real flame, where he suffered the pain of flame even as you suffered here on earth.
Dr. Joseph Cook, one of the great intellects of the past, had this to say,
let the churches banish from their pulpits the doctrine of hell for a hundred years, it'll come right back.
For not only is it a cardinal doctrine in the Bible, but it's in the very nature of things,
for every person must be either pardoned or punished.
Two hundred and sixty chapters, or rather 262 chapters in the New Testament,
and 234 of them teach about a place called hell.
Now I believe for a reason. Jesus taught much about heaven.
He talked about the second coming. He talked about the resurrection.
He talked about all the doctrines, but he taught ten times more about hell than he did heaven,
I believe for a reason. You do.
I believe that Jesus taught ten times more about hell than he did heaven because he didn't want anyone to go there.
Do you have scripture proof for that? Yes, I do, in Matthew 25, 41.
Then he shall say unto them on the left hand, depart from me, cursed and doomed.
Everlasting fire prepared for the devil is angels, and God does not want you to go to hell.
If you go to hell, you'll stumble over the prayers of countless thousands of people the world over,
because God doesn't want you to go to hell.
In fact, in 1 Timothy 2, 3, and 4, for this is good and acceptable to the sight of God our Savior,
who will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth.
God doesn't want you to go to hell.
He won't do God for you, but God doesn't want you to go to hell.
In fact, in John 3, 17, the Bible says, God sent not his Son in the world to condemn the world,
but that the world through him might be saved.
God does not want you to go to hell.
If you go to hell, you'll have to stumble over the blood-stained body of the lovely Lord Jesus.
But God does not want you to go to hell.
In fact, in 2 Peter 3, 9, the Lord is not slack concerning his promises.
Some men count slackness, but as longsuffering to us were not willing that any should perish,
but that all should come to repentance.
And God does not want you to go to hell.
But because there is so much scripture, page after page, not only in the New Testament, but in the Old,
because there is so much scripture in the Bible about a place called hell,
I want you tonight to take a walk with me down through the halls of hell.
Begin the descent downward.
As we move along, I want you to see carefully that, first of all, it's a place of perpetual horror.
I say that for three reasons, and here's the first one.
Because of the torment of toilsome chains, chains, yes, in Jude 6.
And the angels that kept not their first estate, but left their own abattation, have been reserved in everlasting chains.
One of the first places I ever preached when I went away to school to study for the ministry was in a chain gang.
I preached there, oh, I suppose, six weeks.
Find that the jailer got the idea he could trust us and let us go in and sit on the bedside
and talk to those prisoners on Sunday afternoon.
One Sunday afternoon, I was talking to a prisoner who had been marvelously saved, who, by the way, is now preaching.
He said, you know, Brother Shump, since I got saved, this old hard bed here is beginning to feel soft.
I don't mind the 14 hours we got to work every day, and even the bad food here is beginning to taste good.
But there's one thing that really bugs me. What's that?
He said, see that long chain that runs the length of this barracks? I see it.
So you see that little chain down here with the clamp on the end of it? Yes.
He said, at night, they put that clamp around my ankle and chained me to this bed, and that really bugs me.
And I thought, oh, God, to be chained in hell forever.
For in 2 Peter 2, 4, God spared not the angels sin but cast them down into hell
and had delivered them into everlasting chains.
Have you ever been in that position?
I mean, where you couldn't move around much.
Back in World War II, I fired a machine gun for some two and a half years over the top of those Italian hills,
and one day we pushed up the side of a mountain, and they said, dig in.
I'll tell you, when they said dig in, we dug down through the rocks and everything,
sometimes 10 or 12 foxholes a day until the blood ran out of your hands.
We dug halfway in, and suddenly the mortars came over the top of the hill, and we got down as low as we could,
but you couldn't get clear down without bending, and we did that.
Twenty hours, you could move from this side or to the other side, but you couldn't straighten up.
Finally, a platoon came over here, another platoon here, and knocked out that mortar barrage,
and we were able to get out of those holes.
I was a young man then, but it took me nearly two hours to straighten completely up straight.
Wait a minute. You say the torment of toils have changed, but I want you to see the torment of total darkness,
what the Bible teaches in Jude 13.
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out of their own shade,
watering stars of whom the blackness of darkness is reserved forever.
Oh, it's different here on earth.
If you sit tonight under the sound of my voice, and your heart and life are not dominated by the Lord Jesus Christ,
then I know what you do.
You stumble off the world to try to find some kind of freedom from your terrible frustration.
Maybe you wander in the arms of some degenerated lover,
or into some darkened bar to try to drink yourself into oblivion.
Sleep won't come at night if you go to the drug cabinet and get some kind of drug that'll put you into beautiful sleep,
but when you go to hell, you'll never sleep again.
Or take another drink, or dance another step, and the only arms you will reveal will be the arms of fire.
Look, the Bible teaches in 2 Peter 2.17,
These are wells without water, clouds that are carried out without temperature,
to whom the midst of darkness is reserved forever.
Dr. Jack Kyle said he and his wife went down into the Cave of Winds.
Now that's the deepest cave in the Americas.
When they got down there he said, the speaker came off and said,
Now we're going to take a hold of hands.
We're going to turn out the lights and let you experience total darkness.
Now please take a hold of hands because it's frightening.
So he said we did.
And the lights went out.
Now in a moment he said,
Pick up my wife's silhouette and couldn't see her.
I struggled to get my hand loose, but did.
I said, I'll see my hand, and couldn't see it.
Put my fingers up in the front of my eye, but couldn't see them.
No wonder then in Matthew 8.12,
But the children of the kingdom shall be cast into outer darkness.
And there shall be weary, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Outer darkness.
You know what that really means?
Here's a man in a gay party where
he bounces to Jude's chandelier and back down to the cup where the wine is being poured.
Laughter is gay when suddenly two strong armed guards come in from the side room
and grab this man and take him forcibly out into the desert.
Down into a dungeon there they chain him to the wall
and leave him until his body dies and the flesh rots off his bones.
And that's exactly what the author's trying to teach when he calls it outer darkness.
It's a place of perpetual darkness.
It's a place where there's a torment of toilsome shame.
And I want you to see this.
It's a place of perpetual horror because of the torment of turbulent memories.
For here in Luke 12, 4, and 5 the Bible says,
But I forewarn you whom ye shall hear.
Fear him which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell.
I remember some years ago I read those two verses
and I believed that God reached down with a holy hand
and took a whole little lid to the pit of hell and lifted it up
and let me look down inside into hell.
I saw a great river of fire.
You could hardly see from one side to the other.
It moved along endlessly.
The screams so loud that you couldn't hear yourself think.
It would move along, bounce against great piles of brimstone
and that fire would dance a thousand feet into the air
playing grotesque shadows against the walls of hell.
Maybe when that flame drags into the air some terrible demon from hell
jumps up on a pile of brimstone and begins to cackle.
I forewarn you.
I can almost hear you.
I forewarn you!
And going down the halls of hell and coming down to beat against you,
here comes forever and you'll remember.
For in Luke 16, 25, what Abraham said,
Son, remember that thou my lifetime receiveth good things and life my slashers evil things.
Oh, you'll remember all right.
You'll remember right now as I pulled across your memory pattern.
The Christmas dinner and the whole family's there.
Smile.
You've had a sweet dinner with the friends that you love.
You've mowed the lawn.
It's 90 degrees.
The wife meets you with a glass of ice water at the door.
But when you go to hell, do you need any ice?
You know more mother's smiles than the feel of anything but fire around your neck.
You've got to be a fool if you go to hell and not come to Christ.
For the Bible teaches in Isaiah 57, 20,
But the wicked are like the troubled, see, they cannot rest.
There's no rest, says the Lord to the wicked.
I tell you that hell is a place of perpetual horror,
but take the steps that are necessary as we go on downward and walking through the halls of hell.
I want you to see, second of all, it's a place of perpetual fire.
That's F-I-R-E.
For here in Isaiah 30, in verse 33, the Bible says,
For hell is ordained of old, and God hath made it deep and large,
and the pile thereof is fire and much wood,
and the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth intellect.
That's not the Baptist idea, nor the Baptist.
That's Bible, clear and simple.
Joe Henry Hagen, does that ring a bell?
They used to call him the weeping prophet.
He lived to be way past 80.
I believe he preached even when he was in his 80s.
But when he was a little boy up in town, they were building a huge building, and he wanted to see that.
They finished the foundation, pushed the debris in the middle of that.
Some careless workmen poured gasoline on top of that and threw a match.
That explosion picked up little Joe Henry Hagen, putting him clear across the road, 90% of his body burned.
They picked him up, rushed him to the hospital, and put him in a hammock affair,
because his body couldn't stand the clothing.
The family was called.
Mother was by the hammock.
The doctor comes out the door and said,
You'd better go in, all at will.
He's not gone but about 10 minutes.
The family of the room, he went deeper and deeper into that coma.
All of a sudden something snapped. He started out of the coma.
Then the feelings came into his body. He tried to scream.
Then the coma started to take over again. He started to go into it, and he said,
Mother, what time is it?
She said, Joe, it's 10 o'clock at night, weeping.
Then he said this, Mother, won't the night ever end?
It ended for Joe Henry Hagen.
And God brought him back alive, scarred but to preach the gospel to his fast 80.
But when you go to hell, you feel every second of pain that Joe Henry Hagen's found in its intensity.
Wherever and ever have you got to be a fool if you go to hell and uncover Christ?
In Luke 16, 24.
And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me.
And he said, Lasses, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,
for I am tormented in this roaring flame.
Flame? Put your finger over a flame for 30 seconds.
I can't.
Three seconds? No!
But when you go to hell, you'll be engulfed in flame with no relief in sight for all eternity.
The Bible teaches in Matthew 13, 42,
And God shall cast him into a furnace of fire, and there shall be weeping and wailing and magic attained.
Furnace?
Here's a man that has a congregation of 2,000 preachers in England.
One day, he goes down to visit one of his parishioners who owns a great glass factory.
He's not here, so he leaves.
Here comes the vice president, watching now, tripping up behind him.
Wait a minute, sir.
He said, Pastor, the boss will be back in 10 minutes.
Have you ever seen one of our great glass furnaces in action?
Never have. Follow me.
Down the long, long walk, and there came two huge black doors,
and the vice president reaches over and opens those two black doors,
and just as he does, the man attending that furnace opens the door,
and the blue-yellow flames start clear to the top of the furnace.
The pastor, shielding his heart in that heat, said,
Dear God, what must hell be like?
He stood Sunday morning preaching to 2,000 people.
He hadn't preached but two minutes when a great, big, 220-pound man
came running all the way down to the front of the church.
My good man, what meaneth this?
Oh, he said, Preacher, you don't know who I am, but I know who you are.
I was the man telling that furnace, and I heard you say,
Dear God, what must hell be like?
And after you left, I said, God, it feels like inside that furnace.
I've got to go there.
And if you let me get down to church Sunday morning, I'll be the first one saved.
The preacher stopped the whole service and melted down on that carpeted floor
and let that man go to Jesus.
Oh, look here.
In Jude 7, even as Sodom and Gomorrah and cities round about them,
giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh.
You know what that means?
Homosexuality!
I understand the latest figures in America are 25 million.
Homosexuality.
Look up here at me.
If that exists in your body, you have any tendency towards that, are you ever?
And what is that?
When you go before God, you will get stuck in the hell,
unless you've taken care of that here on earth through the Lord Jesus Christ.
What about it?
Even as Sodom and Gomorrah and cities round about them in like manner,
giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh,
have God set forth to be an example,
suffering the vengeance of an eternal fire.
Eternal.
Suppose the bird could pick up a grain of sand and take it to the moon and then come back and get another one and so forth.
And if the whole world were made of nothing but sand by the time the bird got all the sand of the moon,
eternity would not yet be beginning.
Now listen.
On the day of 3314, who among us shall dwell with devouring fire?
Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?
See the bomb bay doors open up.
A bomb drop big enough for you to carry if you're strong enough and misses the target by 200 yards.
When that bomb burst a hundred thousand Japanese people, Japanese people died.
Some didn't because of first outing fingers and behind hills and mountains some of those holes even were protected.
One man who lived behind a great hill, a great bridge out in front of him stood on his porch in complete shock.
He could move not a muscle except his eyes.
He said suddenly as he stood there for many hours, he heard something up on top of the hill yelling
and he looked up and over the top of the hill came hundreds of colored people.
And he said, not only am I in shock but I've lost my mind there were colored people in Japan.
Down the hill they come. Some would fall and others would trample them to death.
Some got to the bridge and stood on the bridge and cursed and jumped in the water committing suicide.
Oh, he said it's when they cursed that I came out of my shock.
These weren't black people.
They were one old Japanese people charged black by that terrible bomb.
And if you miss all the other hundreds of words that Jesus spoke about hell, I don't want you to miss these found in Martin 943.
Jesus said if your right hand offends you, cut it off.
For it's better for you to enter like mean than having two hands to go into hell's fire where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.
The fire is not quenched. The fire is not quenched.
Back in World War II we were pushing through a great wooded area.
Our command was to go at almost double time.
We had to come out to an open area where there was a great grass field and then over here was Hill 216.
We had to get back and secure it.
We came out of that woods on the run.
We scattered down along that grass and headed across that grass area when suddenly a machine gun firing from cement and steel opened fire on us.
We headed for the ditch.
You'd stick your head up and he'd blow it off the machine gun.
We stayed down the ditch but I knew it wouldn't be long until they called for the mortars and they'd read the mortars and that ditch didn't kill every one of us.
When I saw our man get on the phone and call back for the flame thrower, I'd never seen one really in action.
I saw that man come crawling up behind a rock.
He got that nozzle placed right at that machine gun nest.
And at the right time he pulled the trigger.
The flame dashed out and went right on that machine gun nest and all you heard was,
HA!
In absolute silence.
Nobody moved a muscle.
It seemed like an hour.
Final lieutenant said, go.
And we rushed up the side of that hill, everybody running.
And the hot tears were coming down my face.
And I said, go.
As long as I live, I'm going to go preach on hell.
It was like inside there, I can't preach it.
It's too horrible!
I'm not doing God!
And down through the years, God's had to whip me around good and proper to get me to preach on the dock of hell.
I think it's a place of perpetual horror, a place of perpetual fire.
Stop!
Go down these steps with me deeper.
Oh, I know it's hot, but come on.
As we walk through the halls of hell, I want you to see that it's a place of perpetual punishment.
What's that mean?
In Matthew 25, 46, and these shall go away, too.
Everlasting punishment by the righteous in the life eternal.
Everlasting.
After preaching the Greek penitentiary, 600 men sat out there.
Some of them were doctors and lawyers.
I gave the invitation to 100 men to the spot.
I had to deal with them about 20 here and then 13 here and maybe 24 over here in little bunches.
It took me nearly three hours.
Unbeknownst to me, the warden was watching me three floors up above through a little slit.
He sat for me.
I went through that door and he asked me to sit down.
The warden left.
He went to speak to me and couldn't do it.
Tried again.
Then all of a sudden, he buried his face in his hand and began to weep.
He said, brother, shut up.
After a while, several of the guards and myself had been praying that God send revival in this penitentiary.
And we believe today it's common.
We talked and the warden brought some coffee.
I said, warden, with whom do you have the most trouble with in this great penitentiary?
I said, that's easy.
It's the lifers.
The lifers?
Oh, yes.
He said, you see, they get in here a couple of years and then they realize they're going to be here forever.
They're always dreaming up some new way to commit suicide.
But there'll be no suicides at all.
You cry for rocks and mountains.
The screaming will be so loud you can't make yourself heard.
You beg God that there's no help.
Look at here.
In Second Thessalonians 1, 9, these shall be punished with everlasting destruction.
In case you thought that death ended it all, or somehow you can get out of hell, this destroys it.
You know what that means?
Everlasting destruction?
Run to a pit of destruction and never cast over.
Well, there's such excruciating torment it can't be fully scratched and turning and twisting and pulling
to get one finger out of the fires of hell for five seconds.
Your best friend will be right next to you.
There'll be no such thing as friendship.
You'll never be alone.
There'll be no comas in hell.
No drugs.
No love.
No sex.
No compassion.
No friendship.
You've got to be a fool to go to hell, not come to Christ.
In fact, in Matthew 22, 13, that he said to the servants,
Buy them a hand that's put and cast them into horror darkness, and they should be weaving it away and gnashing the teeth.
When I was a little boy up in Freeport, Illinois, they were building an oil station up in the corner
to lean in West Street.
I don't want to see that.
So I started up this West Street, which is pretty steep, and suddenly there's a tremendous explosion.
Knocks me off my feet and breaks a lot of the windows on West Street, and I get up and start running.
I can hear a man screaming.
By the time I get up the top of West Street, he's just moaning, and the crowd is gathered around him.
He's moaning now.
So I moved home and looked at that man.
Those big men, they all pulled me back.
I kept trying to go in there.
Then, suddenly, the wheel of an ambulance.
And some man turned his head a little, and I ran in under his elbow to look at him.
Look at that man.
They were carrying him over to the ambulance.
His hair was gone.
The watches on his body is slowly burned away.
Then, suddenly, it stopped.
They didn't even get him into the ambulance before he was dead.
When you go to hell, you will die.
Not one head on your head will be burned away.
But you'll suffer the same kind of pain that that man felt in its intensity.
Every moment.
Forever and ever.
My friends, I beg you not to go to hell but to come to Christ.
Look here.
In Revelation 20, verse 10,
And the devil that deceived them was cast to the lake of fire in Brimstone,
where the beast and the ball's prophet are, and they shall be tormented.
Day and night.
Forever and ever.
Don't miss this. In Luke 13, 28,
There shall be weeping and waning and gnashing of teeth,
when thou shalt see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
In the kingdom.
And ye, yourself, trust thou.
Never to be alone again.
Never to have any kind of freedom of choice.
Never to breathe anything but bars.
I remember reading about a lady worth over ten million dollars.
The doctor left her room.
Called for the old son who was the caretaker of the great estate.
She hasn't got much time.
She wants the relatives that will come.
The phone calls and the telegrams when out 17 relatives gather in one room.
This is a Christian lady that's dying.
And over this room, every person in that room is a born-again Christian,
except the youngest son who was a lady.
A rotten atheist.
They come in, they prop that dear lady up from the bed and fix her hair.
Then they come over and kneel and they talk to mother. There are tears.
They get up to go and she says,
Good night, son. Good night, daughter. I'll see you in the morning.
Same with the grandsons and the granddaughters.
They go through the door. Finally the old son turned and he shh.
Wipers over.
Kneels down beside mother, but when he kneels and starts talking,
there are tears. It's his mother.
He gets up to go and she says, Goodbye, son.
So he goes and takes a hold of the handle of the door and goes out and stops.
He comes back and he says, Now, mother, I know you're ill.
But I've got something I'd like to ask you.
Every person in that little area, when they left, you said, Good night, son. Good night, daughter.
And when I kneel here, you tell me goodbye. Now I'm going to let you say that.
Here she started down her face with no expression.
My son, she said, You're the only one that's never come to Christ.
We're going to heaven and you're going to have to go to hell.
We'll never see you again, so it's goodbye, son.
He'd made him so angry he didn't know what to do.
He turned and dropped the handle of that door.
Then turned it loose and came back and fell across the bottom of that bed and wept and wept.
And the last thing that godly lady did that day before she died was lead her to heaven with the other son, Jesus Christ.
Listen, you'll go to hell.