God of terror

"Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord..."

2 Corinthians 5:11

I could find no image to represent the main thought of this message; the reality belongs to another dimension, one that far surpasses our ability to comprehend, much less to appreciate.

When was the last time you heard anyone use the above text--from the Bible--as the theme of a sermon?  In all my years as a Christian, I have never heard it used.

The world today is confronted with acts of 'terrorism' which are intended to shock the mind and instill fear.  Yet, as brutal and barbaric as any of those acts may be, they absolutely pale by comparison with the eternal fate of those who stubbornly and foolishly reject the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  The most horrific tortures which man can conceive and inflict upon another person necessarily come to an end in the death of the victim.

But the "terror of the Lord" shall never have an end.  Although apparently few understand why that must be so, yet the reason is rather simple to understand.  Every spirit which God brings into existence--whether it be an angel or a human being--is in some sense indestructible (I think it must have something to do with the nature of spirit, such that persistence of self-consciousness cannot be extinguished).

I cannot in the limited context of a blog adequately explain the difference between soul and spirit.  Suffice it to say, that all self-awareness--which includes all processes of thought, emotion and, importantly, of sensation--consist in the spirit: the essence of which is 'mind'.  In a very real sense, as I believe, much (if not all) of the eternal torments of hell and of the Biblical "lake of fire", occur in the mind of those who are eternally damned.  But that is not at all to say that those sufferings are not therefore 'real'.  For, everyone who dies without Christ is really, and eternally, separated from the beneficent power and influences of God.  Yet, their own self-awareness continues.

In that state of mind, the damned person--though now existing as a disembodied spirit--remains keenly aware of his or her own, continuing existence.  The mind must be furiously active: rapidly moving from thoughts of the impossibility of escape; now to thoughts of horror, being utterly and eternally ALONE in this, what the Scripture calls, "thick darkness", "outer darkness"; now to memories of what once was, and what could have been, if only God's Word had been taken seriously; now to sensations of thirst and hunger, and of longing for companionship--where the only companions may be the spirits of monstrous demons.  But never shall such minds--entirely separated from God and from His Creation--ever know even one moment of peace, of rest, much less of pleasurable existence.  We are not capable of comprehending such a reality.  Madness; insanity; perfect isolation; fear--of a kind unknown to any living person; utter hopelessness; pain--unending, unrelenting pain: all of that is but a foreshadowing of the "terror of the Lord", alluded to in the Bible.

God has prepared a 'place', a realm, specially created to be a prison and a place of punishments--devoid of any mercy, wherein Satan and his angels shall be tormented for ever and ever.  Neither hell nor the lake of fire was created for man.  Nevertheless, because that human persons willfully reject the goodness and mercy of God in Jesus Christ and, so, they align themselves with the spirit of antichrist: therefore, all such human persons too must be confined to that everlasting abode fitted uniquely to imprison God's intransigent enemies, "who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power" (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

People who end up in hell, do so because they don't take God seriously.

And then it's too late.