SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/11/2022 9:33 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “Peril”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 13:50
Message of the verse: “50 and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
We
begin this SD by talking about what Jesus had to say in “The Sermon On The
Mount” from Matthew 5:22 “"But I say to you that
everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and
whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the
supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go
into the fiery hell.” Now we will look
at verses 29-30 “"If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and
throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your
body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.” "If your right hand makes you stumble,
cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the
parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell. 8 "If your
hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; it
is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than to have two hands or two
feet and be cast into the eternal fire. 9 "If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck
it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye,
than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell” (Matt. 18:8-9). One more from Mark’s gospel and verse (9:43) “"If
your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life
crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable
fire.”
As we can see from this selection of verses that
Jesus had a lot to say about hell and who would occupy it.
John
MacArthur writes “Jesus declares that the wicked ‘sons of the kingdom shall be
cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and
gnashing of teeth’ (Matt. 8:12) and that unbelieving Capernaum would ‘descend
to Hades’ (11:23; cf. Luke 10:15). He
asked the evil and hypocritical scribes and Pharisees, ‘How shall you escape
the sentence of hell?’ (Matt. 23:33). On
many other occasions Jesus alludes to hell and warns about damnation (5L20l
7L13m 19m 23m 27l 10L28; 12:36; 16:18; 18:8-9; 21:43-44; 23:14-15; 24:40-41,
51; 25:30, 46; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:9-10, 46; 16:23; John 5:29; 15:6).” Many more verses speaking of hell, mostly in
the gospel of Matthew.
As
we study this place called “Hell” we can be sure that it is not merely the fate
of forever reliving bad memories or of going out into nothingness, as many
people believe this and even teach it, those false Pastors that we have in our
culture today. It is not a place where
sinners will continue their sinning, unrestrained and un-rebuked, no that certainly
is not the case. There will be
absolutely no pleasure at all in hell, not even the perverted pleasure of sin
as there will only be punishment there.
I
remember hearing this conversation while listening to the sermon that goes
along with this section by John MacArthur:
“When an interviewer asked a young punk rock singer what she was looking
forward to at the end of her career, she replied, ‘Death. I’m looking forward to death.’ When asked why, she said, ‘I want to go to
hell, because hell will be fun.’” I
suppose that she never read the verses that we are going over in this very
difficult section that teaches us about hell.
The
description that this young lady gave is tragic beyond words. There is nothing that could less describe
hell than fun. The human mind cannot
begin to conceive of the eternal horror that is hell. Even in the biblical figures related to hell
are only suggestive, because the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite
pain and the torment any more than it can comprehend infinite joy and bliss
that believers will experience in heaven.
However from God’s Word we can learn four basic truths about “the
furnace of fire” that will better help us to partially grasp its terror, and we
will begin to look at those four basic truths, Lord willing, in our SD
tomorrow.
5/11/2022 9:59 AM
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