TOPIC:“The Truth We Try to Soften”
by Rev. Dr. Reg Dunlap
“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalms 9:17)
I desire to begin this message with two statements by two great ministers. The first is by a famous preacher of the past, the second by a famous preacher of the recent past.
Robert Murray M'Cheyne of Dundee, Scotland, who died in the prime of life, at the age of thirty, once wrote: “A preacher ought never to preach on the subject of hell except with the greatest of sadness.” Robert Shuler, distinguished minister of the Methodist Church, wrote in one of his books: “Side-stepping the unpleasant reality of hell is one of the great feats of this generation.” Let us keep these two statements in mind as we develop our theme.
Thousands of people will not face up to the truth about Hell. They shrink from the very thought of it. They push the reality of it aside. They water it down by trying to make it nothing more than a figment of the imagination. They soften the truth of it by believing that it is not real but only an idea hatched in the minds of some misguided theologians of the first century.
But let us face it - Hell can never be voted out of existence so far as the Bible is concerned. If we face up to the accuracy of the Word of God, we can't deny the reality of Hell nor dispute the eternity of Hell. It is all very well to speak about our home in Heaven, but let us never forget the horror of Hell. For whether we realize it or not, Christ spoke more about Hell than He did about Heaven. He referred more times to the fate of the wicked than the destiny of the righteous.
So I say, we must not soften the truth of Hell, neither must we shun it. But we must honestly and realistically face up to the awfulness of it, the reality of it, the hopelessness of it and the endlessness of it. Let us then dip into the pages of the Bible and there behold something about the destiny of the wicked.