![]() Without being bogged down in doctrinal issues, let us just deal with the facts. However, what does the Bible really teach? Like Edwards, many other Catholic and Protestant preachers, say that God has this eternal place in the offing for the wicked. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Known for his fiery sermons, clergyman Jonathan Edwards helped start the Great Awakening, an American religious revival of the 1740s. Probably the most famous hellfire and brimstone preacher was Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), used to put the fear of God into the hearts and minds of the 18th-century Colonial Americans with detail, explicit, lifelike, word pictures of hell. Opinions range from holding the pains of hell to be no more than the remorse of conscience to the traditional belief that the “pain of loss” (the consciousness of having forfeited the vision of God and the happiness of heaven) is combined with the “pain of sense” (actual physical torment). The question about the nature of the punishment of hell is equally controversial. The same encyclopedia goes on to say, “In modern times the belief in physical punishment after death and the endless duration of this punishment has been rejected by many. However, it would seem that hellfire and brimstone have lost their spark. Belief in a hell was widespread in antiquity and is found in most religions of the world today.” The doctrine of the existence of hell is derived from the principle of the necessity for the vindication of divine justice, combined with the human experience that evildoers do not always appear to be punished adequately in their lifetime. More strictly, the term is applied to the place or state of eternal punishment of the damned, whether angels or human beings. According to the Encarta Encyclopedia, “Hell, in theology, any place or state of punishment and privation for human souls after death. ![]() Hundreds of millions of both Catholic and Protest Christians have long held that hell is a place of eternal torment for the damned. ![]() Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV). ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House.
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