What an exchange for those who die without Christ hell will be! as it is written, "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." (Psa. 9) The rich man of Luke 16, when alive upon earth, was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. But, tremendous fact, he died, and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment! Oh, what an exchange was this! from his palace, his purple, his fine linen, his sumptuous board, to the flames of an eternal hell! Not, indeed, because he had been rich, but because he had lived and died without God; he had shut out God, and lavished his abundant riches upon himself. Oh, what a mistake, eternal in its consequences, was his! And thus shall it be with all who live and die as he did. To live without God is to die without Him; and to die without Him is to spend an eternity banished from His blessed presence. "They shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.”
My reader, which course have you taken? which road are you on? The one that leads to heaven, or the one that leads to hell? Often people say, there will be plenty of company in hell. But this is a dreadful mistake. Satan will stand in his own intense individuality, and the most miserable wretch there; and so with the rich man, and so with each and all. Each one will stand in his own world of self-earned and eternal misery. No window of hope, no beam of light, no refreshing stream to slake the burning thirst or cool the parched tongue—but the rolling billows of divine wrath flowing on and over the souls of the damned, through one eternal night. May God arrest thee at once, my reader, may He, in His boundless mercy, create in your soul a deep sense of your danger, of this terrible eternity.
Reader, you have sinned against God, you are a sinner before Him, to die unpardoned is to ensure a place in hell. Thy world there shall be a world of woe, thy eternity an eternity the very opposite of blessedness. The cross alone will avail for you. Behold, then, the Lamb of God bleeding there. See, the "Just One" suffers in the stead of the unjust, the Sinless One for the sinner. Would you be on the opposite side of the eternally fixed gulf to that of the rich man?—he is in hell; would you be in heaven? Then you must know the cross, naught but that will meet thy desperate case as a sinner. Apart from the sacrifice of Jesus the God of holiness, cannot pardon thee, cannot save thy precious, immortal soul. His holiness forbids the thought of your entering heaven with your sins unpardoned. Oh, then, hell must engulf you if you are found in that day without Christ, and that forever. Be not a dupe to folly, let not Satan blind thee any longer; view matters, I beseech thee, in their right light. One word from God calls thee hence, and then, oh, what then? I beseech thee, by all that is dear and precious to thee, to come to Christ and be saved. Surely, there is argument enough in the fact of your being a sinner, of your having to do with the God of holiness, of your having to live for eternity, of eternal damnation, or of eternal glory, to move thee to come to Christ, to put simple faith in Him who died for such as thee, and rose again for the everlasting justification of all those who believe on Him. Come with all your sins, your guilt, and He will pardon your sins, and purge away your guilt by His precious blood, for The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin " (1 John 1:77But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7)). See, then, that you make not the tremendous mistake of stepping from time into eternity unprepared,—from this earth into the flames of hell. E. A.