Dear Bill

Chapter twenty

Everyone, saved and unsaved, has heard of, thought about and fretted over heaven and hell. Thus issue # four: Heaven and Hell: The Big Controversy.

There seems to be a law of opposites: Heaven is as blissful as hell is hideous. Or: Hell is as hideous as heaven is blissful.

By presenting both the reality of heaven and the reality of hell, I think I brought the readers to a place whereby they could make an educated decision as to their eternal dwelling.

An aged brother from somewhere in the prairies, having read The Main Issue, sent me a box of his tracts that told of his visitation to both hells, Hades and Gehenna. The tract was extremely vivid and extremely scary. I mean really, really scary….

Hell [sheol-hades] is an area in the spiritual world of outer darkness. The dark is so intense it seems to have a pressure per square inch. It is an extremely black, dismal, desolate, heavy, pressurized type of darkness. It gives the individual a crushing, despondent feeling of loneliness. The heat is a dry, dehydrating type of heat. Your eyeballs are so dry they feel like red hot coals in their sockets. Your tongue and lips are parched and cracked with the intense heat. The breath from your nostrils as well as the air you breathe feels like a blast from a hot furnace. The exterior of your body feels as if it were encased within a white hot stove. The interior of your body has a sensation of scorching hot air being forced through it. The agony and loneliness of hell cannot be expressed clearly for proper understanding to the human soul, it has to be experienced, but unfortunately the soul in hell has reached the point of no return. The sad, horrible fact is that the worst is yet to come, for there is a one way road from hell [sheol-hades] to the Lake of Fire [Gehenna].

The agony that is experienced in the Lake of Fire is far more horrible than that which is experienced in Hell. God says that at some future time, Hell and all those therein shall be cast into the Lake of Fire. The angelic being once again said to me, “Come”, and we entered this other area of outer darkness called the Lake of Fire. This will be the final resting place for the Devil and his Angels and all those who reject God. The souls who think they have suffered in Hell will have a change of mind when in the Lake of Fire.

Being in the Lake of Fire is like being submerged into a lake of molten lava. It is a lake of liquid fire just as the term indicates. The liquid fire fills your eye sockets ….

Okay, okay, I’ll stop there. I know how uncomfortable this is.

So I was faced with a dilemma…. should I print this in “Heaven and Hell: The Big Controversy” or should I not print it? Was the tract exaggerating the awfulness of hell or was it factual. How could I know?

So I decided to publish it in full; better to warn the unsaved of the place they were headed than not to. And I’m not ashamed to say I was quite scared. We had received complaints and even a few threats because of the first three issues, but they were tame compared to this one. I fully expected an uproar.

About ten the morning of delivery I phoned Richard from the electrical wholesaler. Poor Richard, I thought, left alone to take all the nasty calls. But there were no calls! None! Noon, same thing, no calls. All day long, no calls, not one. I thought somehow the papers hadn’t been delivered. (But they were.)

My only explanation is that the public was so shocked by that tract and the entire subject of hell that they had little strength for objection.

Bill, I think this is a good time to pause and say this is why I call the awful evangelical tithe the awful evangelical tithe. This christianized embezzlement is the chief cause why so many will perish in that place we get queazy thinking about. Trust us, the pastor says to the congregation. We know how to spend your giving much better than you do. Remember, we can do more together.

And can you see why I hate the salary? That salary costs more than money; it costs millions, perhaps billions of perishing people. This aged brother’s tract as a backdrop, how pathetic is the defence of a salary that has no bible precedence. How weak the argument, “The labourer is worthy of his wages”.

My brother, I take you back to chapter two: “Perhaps the sadness I felt [regarding your salary] was the sadness Jesus feels for His people being coerced to fund salaries He never sanctioned.” I am certain the sorrow I felt was not a Larry Jones sorrow; that’s not me. Perhaps it was the distress of Lord Jesus Himself as He beholds multitudes falling into everlasting remorse and many thousands of salaried ‘shepherds’ placing their own needs, even their comfort and convenience, above their horrific plight.

The salaried may be wise to ask themselves, this side of “the judgement seat of Christ”, who gave them permission to receive a salary. They must know it wasn’t the bible that gives them that permission…. and not the Lord Jesus. Hmmm, who could it be?

Bill, your salary is not extravagant compared to most offered by mega churches. But can you see that you, by example, are sanctioning the principle of salaries?