Do not think that Hell is simply a place where a hard-hearted God confines people arbitrarily and heaps upon them suffering while He gloats over their pain. No, no! Hell is simply the mad-house of retribution which every sinner prepares for himself. The Scripture says, "The wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). The sinner who goes to Hell reaps exactly what he sowed. Hell is simply the wages of sin. Those who go to Heaven ride on a pass and enter into blessings that they never earned, for "the gift of God is eternal life." But all who go to Hell pay their own way. Hell is absolute justice. Men go to Hell because they are sinners, aliens, rebels, unreconciled and condemned sinners. Poor sinner, if you reject Christ and land in Hell, then and not until then will you really understand how terrible sin is! Sin will come home to the sinner in the fires of Hell! - John R. Rice [Revival Appeals, pg. 31]
Sinners love to blame God for Hell. But God has arranged it that every last sinner shall be dragged out of Hell and get a resurrection body, and then that he shall stand before God in the Great White Throne Judgment, pictured in Rev. 20:11-15. God has promised plainly that, "Every knee should bow ... and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:10, 11). So God will open His record books, and men will be judged according to their own works out of the things written in the books. There men will confess their own sins. There every witness in the universe of God will be brought forward to prove the guilt. There men shall give account of every idle word uttered. There the lusts of the heart, the desires that were never mentioned, the sins that never took place outwardly--all these will be brought to judgment then. Then every angel in Heaven, every demon in Hell, and all the assembled billions of the earth's population of all ages, will come to know what a sinner you are and have been! Then, surely, in the presence of every being God ever created, you may be sure that your sin will find you out! That judgment is only for unsaved sinners, sinners that die in their sin without repentance and without forgiveness. But, oh, what a horrible climax to a life of sin when Christ-rejecting sinners are found out by their sin at the judgment bar of Almighty God! - John R. Rice [Revival Appeals, pg. 31-32]
You who will not take Jesus Christ and flee to Him for refuge will find yourselves hounded and pursued by your own sins and so certain of eternal ruin. - John R. Rice [Revival Appeals, pg. 33]
The dying thief said about Jesus, "This man hath done nothing amiss." In that statement he admitted all that Jesus ever claimed for Himself. Jesus said to the rich young ruler, who wanted to have eternal life by doing good things, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God (Matt. 19:17). No one ever need call Jesus good who does not call Him what He is, God come in human form. - John R. Rice [Revival Appeals, pg. 105]
It is disgusting to hear people talk about Jesus as "the great teacher" who do not believe in His deity. The foolish prattle about "the Nazarene peasant" by those who deny His virgin birth is shameful and wicked. Those who boast about the wonderful example that Jesus gave and urge others to live as Jesus did, to follow "the Jesus way of life," who deny that He was the miracle-born Son of a virgin and deny that He was without a human father, that He was pre-existent God who created all things, are insincere hypocrites. No one ever got peace and forgiveness and salvation through Christ who did not admit His sinless deity. - John R. Rice [Revival Appeals, pg. 105]
There is a horrible moral guilt in anyone who will not admit the deity of Jesus Christ, because every sinner could KNOW about the deity of Christ if he honestly wanted to know, if he honestly followed what light he had. Jesus said in John 7:17, to certain doubters, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." Again He said in John 8:12, "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." I have no patience for the man who says, "I do not believe in the electric light," and will not try the switch to see for himself. And so any man who does not search the Scriptures, who does not honestly seek the Lord Jesus for himself, who does not put the matter of salvation to a test, is a dishonest sinner, condemned because he does not want to know the truth and does not follow on to know it. - John R. Rice [Revival Appeals, pg. 105-106]
We must remember that everybody who was ever saved was saved the same way--by faith in Christ. God has always had but one way of saving sinners. Those who were saved in Old Testament times were saved by faith in the coming Saviour. Those who are saved now are saved by faith in the Saviour who has already come. - John R. Rice [When A Christian Sins, pg. 18]
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