- Rob, you're up next in Fairfax, Virginia, listing on SiriusXM 131. Hi Rob.
- Thank you so-- hi! Thank you so much for taking my call.
- You're welcome.
- I do--Hank, I've been watching or, yeah-- YouTube videos about
people's testimonies - going to hell and their experience is that and I try to
keep an open mind. One of my questions is that I listen to their stories about how
demons relish and get excited over ripping bodies apart and torturing
people, and I just find that hard to conceptualize because I thought hell was
set aside to-- of a place where torment for the demons and Satan himself, and
that God could handle Hell by himself and not needing demons to punish or
torture or whatever. I'm not saying he's torturing people, but I was wondering if
you could add some insight on that.
- Yeah I think what you said is accurate. The devil and the fallen angels are
not going to be caretakers of hell. They're
going to be incarcerated in hell, and that's very, very clear in Scripture,
including in passages like Revelation chapter 20. So I think you're absolutely
right in your premise. The other thing I think that needs to be pointed out is
hell is not torture at all. It may be torment, but it's not torture. So the
pictures or the images that people come back with after they've had supposed
trips to hell and come back to tell about it are simply manufactured. They
don't correspond to reality. Ultimately hell is precisely what people have an
earnest of today - those who live apart from the goodness and grace and glory of
God that could be theirs are experiencing Hell in the present. But it
is an earnest of that which is to come. What happens ultimately is
separation, and that separation is shown in the intermediate state with a
rich man in Luke chapter 16. He's had all the fineries in life, but then the
rich man dies, and he ends up in torment. But again, that's an earnest of what is
to come, because that rich man ultimately will stand and give an account for what
he did in the flesh, and then death and Hades are thrown in the lake of fire, the
lake of fire is the second death, and that is a complete separation forever
from the glory and goodness of God. So remember that it's not torture, it's
torment. The torment is that you are separated from the very one that you
were created to have union with. So again, I think that hell is
misconstrued, and often times some of the metaphors that are used in popular books,
even the metaphors in Scripture are taken in a wooden literalistic fashion
as though people are going to be consumed or burned with fire that never
fully consumes them. Fire is a metaphor for the horror of being separated from
the goodness of God, from the very one who knit us together in our mother's
womb, and created us for fellowship with Him.