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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

To Hell and Back

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

It seems to me that many people have a strange relationship with hell, an odd sort of relationship.

I mean, think of the way people talk about hell, The way people refer to it.

You can debate the appropriateness of a statement like that, but think of what it means.

It means that as bad as hell might be, It's not as bad as an angry woman.

Now I know we can't afford to take these phrases literally, but it really sounds like people aren't taking hell seriously.

The man was hell-bent on doing something.

I don't even know what that means to be honest with you, although we know it means he was determined.

It isn't going to happen, come hell or high water.

Which is 5 more words that don't logically mean anything at all, but we interpret that to mean that something just isn't going to happen no matter what.

Oh look, it really wasn't, But we get the point.

And typically that's said in connection with something really very bad.

Living with the injury as a result of that accident was a living hell.

It was looking tense and then all hell broke loose.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

You've got to follow through on your promises and your plans.

The saying indicates that there'll be people who don't make it into heaven, who had every intention of getting things sorted out between them and God, but never happened.

When it said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that's really a bit of a philosophical statement intended to help people to see the need to take serious things seriously.

But there's 1 saying about hell that we're actually going to see through today.

Have you ever heard it said that somebody went to hell and back?

Well, today on It Is Written, we're actually going to go to hell and back.

I don't mean that figuratively, and I'm not trying to be funny.

We really are gonna go to hell and we'll really come back.

Now, if I were to tell you that today we are going to go to hell, you shouldn't be all that surprised about that.

There are some people who have claimed that they have visited hell.

They've then come back from hell, written books about it, and spoken about it.

The remarkable thing is, they've even been taken seriously.

My wife and I were driving across northern Idaho a good number of years ago, and because we needed to make a phone call, we stopped at a payphone.

Now if you're a little younger and you're not sure what a payphone is, ask someone 30 years of age or older and they'll be able to fill you in.

There used to be 2 million of them in the United States, but that number has dropped by about 90%.

In some states, there's only 2% or so of the payphones there used to be.

Then came cell phones and payphones started disappearing.

And now you don't see them lining the walls of train stations and airports.

So we stopped at a payphone in Idaho, and as I approached the phone I noticed that little phone booth was festooned with small pink pieces of paper.

They were everywhere, tucked into every crack that they could possibly be tucked into.

Now, even though curiosity killed the cat, I bravely took 1 of the pink papers and with some interest, looked to see what it said.

Whoever had written this had, well, they claimed, visited hell.

These were little homemade tracts that had been stuck all over this little payphone booth.

I have no idea who wrote them or who wrote the excerpt.

Somebody suggested to me these might be excerpts from a book written by somebody.

Written by somebody who claimed to have been to hell.

Jesus is acting as a tour guide and is chaperoning this individual around hell.

Hell is shaped like a body and is in the center of the earth.

This person says that just as there is a body of Christ, hell is shaped like a body.

And then the description goes on, of brimstone pits, and people whose flesh is being melted away by the heat and the flames.

There are rats, and there are snakes, and there are angels, fallen angels the size of grizzly bears with wings that are broken down at the back, pushing people back into the pits who would be trying to escape.

What strikes me as strange about this is that hell doesn't seem to destroy snakes and rats.

A lot of people would hope that those things would be among the first things to be destroyed.

Tracts like this make the devil out to be in charge of hell.

Sinners suffer while the devil is in cahoots with God.

He's helping God by causing the lost to suffer.

Have we forgotten that Jesus said in Matthew 25, 41 that hell is prepared for the devil and his angels?

And not in the sense that it's prepared for them to do their business.

Well, I told you a moment ago that we would go to hell and back and we're almost there.

1 of the most serious subjects in the Bible is hell.

What does the Bible really say about hell?

Today's free offer is Understanding Hell.

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To donate, please visit our special website, itiswritten.com forward slash Eyes for India, or call us.

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To Hell and Back

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