By the Editor
A Question for Today
NO prophet lips ever framed a more solemn question than this. It is a question for all mankind. When next your family gather around you, look from one to the other — the devoted wife, the loved and loving children — and say, “Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?” When my beloved father was dying, his wife and four sons, and four daughters, and three sons-in-law were around his bed. He looked at each one in turn, and as he looked, his lips moved, and he said, “Forever, altogether! Forever, altogether!” He thought of the future, the eternal future; he thought of those he was leaving, and his yearning prayer for all was that heaven should be their home forever.
An infidel said to a half-witted man, “There’s no God, no hell, that’s the religion for me.” The reply was, “You’ll know there’s a God when you are dead.” A few days after the infidel died, and the cry of the half-witted man was, “He knows there’s a God now he’s dead.”
Reader, you know there is something after death. It is that something that makes you nervous. What is it? You ask the question sometimes, “Where shall I be when I am dead? What shall I see?” Yes in a moment you may be gone the lamp of your life may be blown out by the breath of death; the last sand may be running in the hour glass of your life; your heart strings may snap beneath the grasp of death, and all the music of your life be stilled in a moment; all the flowers of hope and love and desire may wither, fade and die in an instant; the weights may run down in the clock of earthly life. Then when the light has faded from your eyes, and the bloom has left your cheeks, when desire has ceased, and the “silver cord is loosed, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern,” where will your spirit go? Remember hell was not prepared for sinners; it was prepared for those who fell without a tempter. If you go there it will be in the face of all God’s invitations and promises. You will pass the cross on your way to hell, and the outstretched arms of Christ and the gate of mercy. God says, “Flee from the wrath to come,” and “because there is wrath, beware lest He take thee away with His stroke.”
In this number of Message I shall give instances of the certainty of hell and God’s dealings with people who mock and laugh at His judgments.