Welcome to Friday's edition of Things Unseen. This week we've been thinking about the

four last things, death and judgement and heaven, and now today about hell. That's the

traditional order and we've stuck to it, I suppose many of us would rather have reversed

the last two. People sometimes say that we don't know much about heaven, but there's

no strictly true. We haven't experienced much of it for sure, but the Bible is a lot

to say about it. We could say we know even less about hell, which is true. Nevertheless,

the Bible does have quite a lot to say about it, and it's often said with some degree of

truth that Jesus spoke more often about it than anyone else in the Bible. The fact

that our loving Lord Jesus did so is a very sobering fact about a very sobering truth,

but He said it because He loves us. I once heard a story that a member of the British

Royal family asked a member of the clergy of the Church of England if there was a hell,

and the clergyman apparently replied, Your Highness, the Bible says so, Jesus taught

so, and the articles of the Church of England affirmed so, to which the member of the Royal

family was reported to respond, then why in God's name? Do you not tell us about it?

But what is hell? The Bible doesn't try to answer that question and subtle philosophical

terms, rather it paints pictures because its basic concern is to tell us how to avoid

it, and it tells us why we need to avoid it, because it means to be separated from all

the privileges and blessings, not only of God's saving grace, but of God's common grace.

And what that means can't fully be described in terms we can understand, it's too awful

to understand. All we know actually is a world in which God is present and kind in His

common grace, even to rebels against Him. That's why our Lord paints these pictures for

us, pictures we can understand and feel and sometimes almost smell.

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