I have searched this Book of God through and through, over and over again, to find one ray of hope for one who leaves this world rejecting Christ, and I have never been able to find it. I have looked into all kinds of theories, and have read hundreds of volumes, some depicting the annihilation of all the wicked dead; some, like the wild dream of the so-called “Pastor Russell,” promising a second chance after death, but I have never found one statement in all these books (one based upon the Word of God) to give the slightest hope to the Christ-rejecter.
This is the only world in which God is offering salvation to Christless men; and if you refuse the message of His grace now, if you deliberately steel your heart against the convicting power of the Holy Spirit and die in your sins, you will be Christless for all eternity!
I think the most awful picture the Bible gives us of the doom of the lost is in the Epistle of Jude, which forms such a fitting preface to the book of Revelation. He speaks of those who make light of God’s salvation and who follow after unrighteousness, as “wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever” (Jude 13).
When I was a young boy in Canada, I remember how, night after night, a blazing comet appeared in the skies; and I heard older people say that this particular “night wonder” had not been seen before for some three hundred years. I asked in amazement where it had been, and for the first time in my young life I came up against the wonder of stellar space. I was told that that comet had been driving on with tremendous velocity millions of miles away from the sun for one hundred and fifty years, and that one hundred and fifty years ago it had gradually begun to come back toward the sun; that was why it was then visible. In a few weeks it passed out of sight to appear to us no more for another three hundred years.
I can recall pondering as to what would happen if that comet never came back! My friends, this is the appalling picture that Jude presents in the passage referred to. Those who turn the grace of God into lasciviousness, those who despise the boundless mercy He has bestowed upon them in His blessed Son, and persist in refusing His goodness, continuing in their sins, will be driven away from the Sun of Righteousness into the outer darkness, nevermore to find their way back into the presence of God. He is giving a little space now for repentance, but the day of His grace will be over when He rises to shake terribly the earth.
And how are you treating His offer of mercy?