the Nearness of Hell

Deuteronomy 32:35 - Vengeance is Mine, and retribution, in due time their foot will slip; for the day of their calamity is near, And the impending things are hastening upon them.

I recently heard a sermon (check it out, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards) and am considerably blown away when reading this verse to think about the dangerous situation that the unrepentant, unregenerate person finds himself in. For unbelieving sinners, "in due time their foot will slip." It's a slippery slope that those in the world find themselves on. It's simply a matter of time before they slip and fall. It will come suddenly without warning. There is no need for someone to push them over, they will fall completely of their own weight. Furthermore, the only reason they have not fallen is because the "due time" has not yet come. If it were not for God's appointed "due time" sinners would already find themselves fallen into the pits of hell, face to face with God's everlasting, just, furious wrath. It is by the Lord's grace and good pleasure that those in the world live to see another day.

Yet the gates of hell are open wide underneath the lost sinner, you are but floating in the air. All that keeps you from falling into its terrible depths is but air. There is no resistance in air. It is the Lord who keeps you from falling by His grace. Yet how could He? He is angry with sinners (Psalm 5:5). How can His upright justice stand to spare you for even a second? Do not presume on the Lord's grace, do not presume that you even have days left, let alone months and years. The time to turn from your ways is now, repent for judgment is coming (Matthew 3:2). Turn to Jesus by faith and trust in the necessity of His death as the only means by which you can stand justified and forgiven.

If you have turned by faith to God... how sweet it is to be the object of the Lord's grace, to know that Christ's death was for you, to be plucked from certain death, and carried to the glorious riches of eternal life with God. Completely undeserved, absolutely necessary, there is no other way to be justified except through Christ's substitutionary atonement.

Or are you that lost sinner relying on your own schemes to gain eternal life? Your righteous deeds are like filthy rags to God (Isaiah 64:6). You cannot work your way to heaven, you cannot even climb an inch closer.

Or maybe you're the kind of person who does not believe in hell? Then you find yourself in a precarious situation today. Hell is open wide, the Lord keeps you up, but once He lets go, all you have to blame for your great plummet is your own weight... and the weight of your sin will drop you to the greatest of depths, you cannot climb out of hell's fiery furnace. Regardless of what you believe now, you will be convinced that hell is very real and by then it'll be too late.