Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
Character Check In what area of my life have I put up the shutters against God's grace?
In Business Terms People need to know that human beings are not built to last forever, that endless existence is a gift that only the horn-again receive, and that those who don't qualify for heaven simply get snuffed out. It's a form of annihilationism.
My concept of hell is owed to C. S. Lewis, whose key thought is that what you have chosen to be in this world comes back at you as your eternal destiny; if you have chosen to have your back, rather than your face, to God-if you've chosen to put up the shutters against his grace rather than to receive it-that's how you will spend eternity. Hell is to live in a state apart from God, where all of the good things in this world no longer remain for you. All that remains is to be shut up in yourself.
In Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit, four people are in a room they can't leave, and they can't get away from one another. What Sartre presents is the ongoing, endless destruction of each person by the others. Though Sartre was an atheist, his nightmare vision of this process makes substantial sense to me as an image of hell.
—J. I. Packer
Something to Think About The one principle of hell is, "I am my own!"– George MacDonald
