It started with just a few things out of place and scattered around in the little house. Little by little bits and pieces of broken things began to pile up, and at last it was beyond the power of the owner, 74year-old Gordon Stewart, to get it all in order again.
No one seems to know why, but finally he began adding to the accumulation. Day after day the neighbors would see him coming home on his bicycle carrying bags and boxes of broken and discarded things. As the piles of rubbish reached the ceiling it became difficult to move around in the house. He began making a system of tunnels through the trash.
After ten years of collecting and storing trash and building his tunnels, the day came when he evidently lost his way in the mess and was unable to find the way out. The police officers who crawled through the tunnels searching for him said that he had died in the tunnels — died of dehydration.
One can hardly bear to think of the old man dying alone — dying of thirst — surrounded by all the trash he had spent his life to collect. What a waste of his life!
What a sad way to end his life — that is, to end his life on earth — life as we know it. We have summer and winter, seed time and harvest, trees and flowers, and rivers and lakes and oceans of water — a wonderful, marvelous earth. It is sad indeed to think of leaving all that in such a way, but what follows? Remember the man who in hell prayed for just one drop of water to cool his tongue?
Imagination stops short at the thought, but it is real — terribly, dreadfully real. And there is no promise anywhere in the Bible (the Word of God) of any relief to those who suffer there — never — ever.
Do you want to risk that? Do you want to spend your life gathering more and more of the rubbish of this world, and find at the last that it cost your eternal life?
Please don’t! Please, please don’t!
“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew l6:26).