Is Hell Permanent?
“When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever.” (Psalm 92:7)
We have to understand that no man will ever go to hell if there is the slightest chance of him going to heaven. God knows what you are going to do ten years from now as well as what you are going to do tomorrow. If a man transgresses God and goes to hell, it means that God knew that if He had given that man one thousand years, he would never have made it to heaven. The man had made his choice and completed the destruction in his soul so that there was no place left for God. Why do people go to hell? People go to hell because they reject heaven, not because heaven rejects them.
I had a friend who began to teach that people are not going to burn forever, but that the fires of God are only for a time and at the end everybody is going to be saved. He would say that God made people and because of that, He could not send them to hell. They (my friend and those who preach this doctrine) seem to mix the thought of the fires of the Holy Ghost (which is to cleanse and sanctify the church) with the fires of judgment. However when a being, whom God has made to consist through Him, departs from Him and goes outside of His presence into darkness, then that being begins to suffer torment. It is something that happens automatically. The everlasting fires will burn outside of the presence of God. It is the presence of God that gives us peace and comfort and deliverance. If God says so, then we should believe it. We cannot live outside of Him. Scripture tells us that “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14a). This means that there is a place that is even further out of the presence of God than this present hell. Hell is eternal. Whatsoever is out of the presence of God is eternally in torment. I know that the thought of an eternal hell is something very, very difficult for us as children of God to conceive. There are things you can think about, but you can hardly comprehend eternity, much more think about a hell that continues on and on and on.
As this brother began to teach a false doctrine, ultimate reconciliation, it really hurt me. It was very painful, because he was a very dear brother to me. So, I fasted and prayed before God to find the truth. I wanted God to explain to me why doesn’t He Who is sovereign save all the people as well as fallen angels and put them again in heaven. I felt that God could do all things. He surely could save the devil and all lost men and women and purify them and put them into heaven. I wanted to know why there is hell forever. His answer to me was most vivid, most enlightening, and it did satisfy my soul. I believe that when I tell you what happened, you too will get that deliverance and satisfaction.
I prayed and immediately I fell into a vision, yet I did not know I was in a vision. It did not come unto me like a vision. I was on my knees asking God to show me the reason why there is eternal hell when suddenly, I noticed my door began to open. As it did, I saw someone come into my room who was surely a person of great power. He was in the shape of a man. When he stepped through the door and came in, I got the feeling that I was in the presence of some notable person. He did not carry the bearing of a commoner. He carried the bearing of a prince, a man who has authority and is accustomed to exercising it. As I watched him I knew instinctively that he was a fallen angel, a prince of devils. Of course, you do not know how you get the knowledge; it is just a word of knowledge.
When he came in, the first thought that came into my little mind was to see if I could deceive him and just pick a chat with him. So I said to him, “Howdy do?” He began to talk and said, “Let us cut out all the preamble. You know why I am here and I know why I am here. Just go right to it.” I said, “OK,” and asked him if he knew heaven. I did this because I did not want to reveal to him readily that I knew he was an evil spirit. He calmly said to me, “Where do you think I am from?” This made me know that he knew that I knew who he was. I said, “You have been in heaven and you know what it is to be in hell.” I next explained to him that I, and men like myself, wanted desperately to go to heaven, that life here meant nothing to us if we could but make heaven our home. Then I asked him how is it that he left heaven for this torment, and why he did not repent, since I felt that God would forgive him and take him back into heaven. I said to him, “I have a word of authority from God that whatsoever I ask Him, He will do for me. And so, if I ask Him to put you into heaven right now, He would have to do it according to His Word. I believe that I could ask Him, but only under one condition and that is for you to desire to want to go back. If you, then, desire to go back, you must ask me to pray for you that God may put you back there.”
As I looked at his face, it was like a storm suddenly came over the horizon. I could see the rage building in his face. His eyes glared and his face flushed. He got into a mad temper. He lifted himself up, stomped his foot on the floor, exploded into utterances of hate, and cursed God in a way I had never heard any thing curse God before. Then he said in a booming voice, “If He would forgive me of all that I have done to Him and take me back into heaven, I would return there for one purpose only – to destroy it!” He hated God, and heaven, and all things pertaining to God. I had never seen such a power of hate before or ever had to speak to anyone who had not the slightest touch of God’s nature in him as this creature I faced.
The demonstration was so frightening and horrible that I decided to rebuke him immediately to get him out of there. Before the thought could reach to my lips, or before I could give voice to it, he was gone. These beings are so fast that we do not have any computers to compare with the mind of a prince of devils. He knew what I was going to do and had such power that all I saw was his hand closing the door behind him. I rushed out after him through the door and said to myself, “I am going to rebuke him no matter what he does!” When I got outside, he had put on a cloke of affability and was like a loving uncle playing with the children. I knew I could not go up to him and rebuke him before the children. It would hurt them all. So I said, “My God, what shall I do?” The Lord replied to me, “Play ball with them in order to win them back out of his hand!” That means to say that we have to go down to the level of the children and deal with them to get the devils from taking ahold of them.
The lesson was conclusive. To paraphrase what this means is that, first of all, hell is permanent. It is not because God would not have mercy, or that God would not have pity, but because the people who are in hell are creatures of darkness, they have no desire for light, and they prefer hell to heaven. It is hard to conceive. We all want to be comfortable. We all want air conditioning when it is hot. We all want heat when it is cold. These creatures have reconstructed themselves. They have changed their natures from creatures of God into creatures of darkness and the light would hurt them. The darkness gives them some type of solace, although we say they will be in “the lake of fire.”
Hell is the extreme mercy of God. In God all things move, consist, live, and have their being. To live, one must be in God. In order to die one must get out of God. In other words, if God made you a creature of life and you want to partake of death, then you must recreate yourself into a creature of death by divesting yourself of God, for God is life. The great secret in those who depart from God not being able to return is in the fact that to wholly depart from God one must lose the nature of God within, and imbibe an alien nature. The alien nature cannot respond to God neither can it return to God as it is not of God and never was. Since the sin nature cannot divest itself of itself, there is nothing within fallen angels or Satan to take them back to God. Therefore, they do not want God and never will. Hell is provided for those who do not want to be in heaven. Here is a creature who had spent thousands, maybe millions of years in torment and he was now saying that if God would put him back into heaven, his only intention would be to go and do the same thing he did before. I knew definitely that God could not put that creature back into heaven for he had no desire, he had nothing in him to take him back to God.
The reason God forgives us when we sin and takes us back into His fellowship is because we were born in sin. It was not our will, nor was it our desire. Therefore, God must bring us into a place where our will will be asserted in order to decide where we want to be and where we will be. This creature had nothing of God. Man has the Holy Spirit with him and some of us even have the Holy Spirit in us. The Holy Spirit is always in the world, hovering around men, so that men have something to draw them back to God. Moreover, the spirit that God puts in man is a spirit to draw him back to God. Man can only go to hell if he rejects God, turns against Jesus Christ, and rejects every effort of God to save him up to a final effort. Then he has committed the unpardonable sin.
The question that I asked God was, “If you burn a person for a year, wouldn’t he want to say, ‘Let me out of here! I’ll do anything! I’ll repent! I’ll serve You, God!’” Not so. The more they burn, the harder they become, the more they hate God and there is nothing to bring them back to God.
It is indeed unfortunate that men will also go to hell because they reject Jesus Christ as Saviour. The Lord said that “this is the condemnation.” It is not that man has sinned, nor that man has done wickedly, nor that man has transgressed, nor that man has disobeyed, but that man has rejected Jesus Christ the Lord, the only way out of sin. The basis upon which men will go to hell is just one thing and one thing only: they refuse to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord – the only way out of sin, death, and hell.
Sonlight Devotional 