Why Should Punishment
In Hell Be So Severe?
After I heard Bill
Wiese tell his testimony of being in hell for 23
minutes and how indescribably horrible it was, I
thought long and hard about all this. I wondered why
it was necessary for hell to be so bad. The way Bill
described it there was not one thing about hell that
wasn’t just terrible. For example, he said that
there was no air to breathe there. The temperature
was so hot that he thought he should be dead, even
disintegrated, but he didn’t die. The air was so
foul and polluted with toxic fumes that you could
not get a breath. It was like each and every breath
that you took required great effort and
determination. You then realized that even the air
that you breathed on earth was a gift from God
because it is a good thing and good things come from
God. Now that you are away from God, you don’t get
any good thing that comes from God. You also are
extremely thirsty in hell, but there is no water to
drink. You also are extremely tired and in need of
sleep but there is no way you can sleep. Even if you
are left alone long enough by the demons, the
constant loud, horrible screams of others would
never allow you to sleep. The Bible says that even
sleep is a gift from God.
Psalms
127:1. Except
the Lord build the house, they labour in vain
that build it: except the Lord keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain.
2. It is
vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late,
to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth
his beloved sleep.
Also the fear in
hell is so overwhelming. Every fearful thing that
you can imagine is there from giant spiders and
snakes and worms and rats, to indescribable demons
of every shape and size; creatures that have no
earthly counterpart with which to be compared. Many
are misshapen and deformed or disproportionate from
what we would think of as normal. But they all have
one thing in common, they hate mankind, because
every man is made in God’s image, and because every
soul in this place had a chance to go to heaven
instead but chose not to.
Because of all
this, the shame and the terror never ceases. You are
in a constant state of horrible dread about what is
next going to be done to you because you are
completely at the mercy of these horrible demons and
they have no mercy at all no matter how much you beg
and plead with them for some. They have sharp claws
that they use to shred your flesh off and you don’t
even bleed because there is no actual life in you
and the life of the flesh resides in the blood,
(Leviticus 17:11). Yet you feel the pain just as you
would on earth. He said every vile thing that you
could imagine them doing to you, they did.
Okay, I think you
get the picture enough for me to continue my thought
here. I wanted to know from God why hell had to be
this bad. After hearing Bill Wiese’s testimony about
this, I just had trouble understanding why it was
necessary for hell to be this bad. So
I asked God why. Why Lord, couldn’t you just have
made a place where people could be punished but not
so badly? His answer to me was one that I never
would have expected. I do not claim to fully
comprehend it so I won’t be able to explain it very
well, I’m afraid, but I’ll try.
God told me that it
was not possible for hell to not be
bad, because it was proportionately bad
compared to how good heaven is. In
other words, in order for hell to not be too bad, He
would have had to have only offered us a heaven that
would not really be all that good. But because of
how good things are in heaven, that every person in
hell could have had, and should have had, if they
would only have allowed God to have His way with
their life, but since they forfeited that good
place, it had to equal in badness however much
goodness they gave up. Am I making any sense to you
here? Heaven is being with God, and hell is being
separated from God. There is no heaven apart from
God. There is therefore no good thing apart from God
either, only evil things. The good that God created
us to enjoy with Him is what we turn
down in order to end up in hell. Therefore, how
could He force any of Himself and His good things on
us? That goodness is now withheld and every evil
thing that remains is the result. But it is evil
that is in some kind of opposite severity to the
good that was forfeited.
Knowing this, some
might say that this is not fair. They might argue
that most people never realize the severity of this
decision, making light of it all, but then the
consequence is way too severe, once they find out.
They should have been warned better, if it is this
important. Folks, how much time is enough? They have
their whole life to investigate these things. But
are they like I was when I was young, too busy
wanting what I wanted that was fun for the “here and
now” instead of bothering about those eternal
questions? Many choose to believe that there is
nothing wrong with them, just the way they are. They
have been told that they are good people and
entitled to whatever they want and have the right to
demand what they want out of life, and all that… To
deny that we are fallen does not make it so.
Remember, it all
begins with a fall. It’s like, which is worse, to
fall from a tree at 6 feet up; or to fall from a
plane at 30,000 feet up? Obviously, the higher up
you were when you started your fall, the more severe
the landing when you finally hit the ground.
Apparently, we fell a long way, and this determines
how bad and severe our consequences are. I can’t get
too specific here, as I know that there are degrees
of punishments and suffering in hell, and some
realms may be less severe than others, but I’m
speaking in broad terms for now.
To try and
illustrate what God was telling me, suppose you went
on a game show and had a chance to win $100 easy
cash, and all you had to do was correctly answer a
simple question and you knew that the right answer
was one of two possible answers and you took a guess
but you answered the question wrong and you lost.
How bad would you feel? Probably bad, but you’d get
over it. Now suppose that you had a chance to win
$10,000,000. (ten million) and you again had a
simple question to answer correctly, and you knew it
was one of two answers that would win the money, and
you keep going back and forth over which answer to
choose, and you almost picked the right one but
then, whoops, you chose the wrong one and you lose.
Now, how do you feel? It’s no longer a matter of
missing out on a few extra bucks with which you
could have gone out and had a nice meal and enjoy a
movie or something. This amount would have changed
your life, and you could have quit your job and
traveled the world or done so many things, but no,
you picked the wrong answer. Now, it is going to
bother you for the rest of your life, isn’t it?
Every day that you have to get up and go to work,
you will regret that you chose that answer instead
of the right one. Every time that a bill comes due
that you can’t afford to pay you will feel the burn
of that mistake.
Well, it’s a little
bit like that. It is an eternal mistake. It is not
the sort of thing that you can just shrug off and
say it doesn’t matter. Jesus said that what is at
stake is worth more than all the money in the whole
world. To miss this question is going to affect the
rest of your eternal existence. Yet most average
Americans probably put more effort and thought into
which car they will buy than in where they will
spend eternity.
But merely getting
the answer wrong is only part of the reason that one
would feel bad. It is also going to depend on what
were the chances that this person had to avail
himself of the correct answer that would have won
him the prize. Suppose that the correct answer to
this contest was openly displayed before this
contestant and the host of the game was eagerly
persuading this man to choose the correct answer.
But at the same time there was a detractor in the
game who was denying everything that the host was
saying. This detractor was to benefit if he could
convince the man to make the wrong decision. Now, we
see that it comes down to which one does the man
believe, right? And this is exactly where we find
ourselves. God told us that to disobey Him is death.
Satan says that to disobey God is to find freedom
and happiness. It is up to each of us to choose whom
to believe.