Do we really believe in hell? No doubt we hold proper Biblical doctrines concerning hell. But do we really believe hell is terrible, hell is eternal, and thousands of people around us are doomed to spend eternity there? Have we ever had an insight into what it will be like to spend eternity in the blackness of darkness, completely separated from God and from all light and all love?

It is rather ironic that the sects which claim that there is no hell (for example, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, and the Seventh-Day Adventists) are extremely active in evangelism, while many people who hold all the right doctrines seem content to let men go on to hell, since they make little or no effort to change the course of the unconverted.

We must have compassion on the lost. Where are the "weeping prophets" or "weeping preachers" for whom the thought of men and women in hell is so terrible that they will cry to God for the souls of the lost? We must rid ourselves of complacency. We must overcome inertia, fear, self-indulgence, or whatever is holding us back from telling to all we can their frightful danger.

We must pray. We must wrestle in prayer, for we are in conflict with a determined and desperate enemy. Satan knows his time is running out as well as time for lost men. He is using every possible weapon to ensnare men’s minds. Whereas in so-called Christian societies he may previously have worked mainly as an "angel of light," he is revealing his true nature_the power of darkness_in the present day. Men and women are yielding to his temptations as never before. We must ask the Lord to prevent Satan’s influence over those to whom we bring the gospel, for He it was who triumphed over the powers of darkness at the cross (Col. 2:15).

If we really believe in hell, let us act as if we believed. Proper doctrine without love, compassion, and action is a cold, useless thing, as offensive to God as to the world.

(Reprinted from Words of Truth, Vol. 16)