“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9 NLT)
We typically think of God not being in hell, and we’re correct to believe that, but hell isn’t just for dead people. Randy Alcorn wrote: “Wherever God is not, there is hell.”
We see many who don’t know or have any desire to know the Lord, yet they have an abundance of what the world declares to be “of value!” “Where is hell in that?” Hell is the eternal pursuit of things that can never satisfy.
That’s why Jesus boldly announced in Matthew 16:26: “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” With the clear implication – “Absolutely not!” He then goes into a pronouncement of His return and future judgment. But He also says something that can be easily misunderstood. In verse 28 He says: “And I tell you the truth, some standing here right now will not die before they see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom.”
Obviously, they wouldn’t still be alive when He returned a second time, so what was He talking about? He was speaking of His eternal presence in the hearts and lives of everyone who then believed and who would believe at any point in the future. His Kingdom is not of this world, in the sense that it cannot be experienced by a human being who hasn’t been “born again.”
It’s a mystery that is only seen with the eye of faith of the one who has received God’s gift of eternal life that can only come by faith in the One who paid the penalty for our sin, then rose from the dead to conquer sin, death, and the grave. Here’s the bottom line: God’s Kingdom is invisible except by the eye of faith because He lives in the hearts and minds of those who are redeemed by His shed blood.
We can never see God except through His physical presence in and through the life of Jesus. Of course, those of us who are alive today can see Him only with the eyes of our faith, but since He lives in us the only way lost people will ever see Him is as He reveals Himself supernaturally or by seeing Him lived out in and through those of us who know Him.
Think about that for a second. If hell is everywhere God is not, that means that hell exists in the hearts and minds of those who are lost. What are the implications? Mainly that as we march to the heartbeat of our Savior, a lost person can only walk to the heartbeat of their “master,” Satan. They must do what their lost and fallen nature dictates.
We can never expect someone who doesn’t know Jesus to live like they do know Him. I think of the Pharisees and other religious leaders who sought to live inviable lives to gain recognition and acclaim because of their own goodness and worth. But Jesus described them as “whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity.”
Shouldn’t knowing that lost people are already experiencing “hell” motivate us to help them to understand their “condition” before it’s eternally too late? And yes, of course, we have our work cut out for us, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that prayer is the work, then God works.
Who are you praying for everyday who doesn’t yet know Jesus? That’s where it starts, then we submit our wills to God’s and do whatever – WHATEVER! – He instructs us to do. Why? Because we have the opportunity to storm the gates of hell, and we already know they will not prevail against us!
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 