I FOUND HIM IN HELL

By Rick Mathes

Mr. Carnal was a professing Christian that lived an exemplary life. He was a deacon in his church and taught Sunday school Bible study. All the congregation looked up to him and the pattern he set for others to follow. On the outside, the side all could see, he was the husband and father that all the women wished that their man would become. Unknown to everyone was the real truth that on the inside he confessed that Jesus is Lord but never became obedient to His lordship. He was living a lie that finally caught up with him in a sudden and unexpected death!

He died and went straight to hell.

As he looked out over the glowing lake of liquid flames, the abhorrence and inexpressible torture he witnessed was more than his damned soul could bear. As far as he could see was a holocaust of screaming human beings thrashing about in the white blistering conflagration, begging to die and escape this deathless tribulation.

Silently, Satan himself slithered up and rasped, “I have you!” He responded, “I know. I never confessed Jesus AS my Lord,” and began to sob. Through tears he pleaded, “I beg you, give me 24 hours more before you throw me into that lake of fire.” Satan smiled a toothless smirk and growled, “Granted!”

He hesitated and then began trudging along the steamy shoreline while flames licked at his exposed carcass. Reaching down from time to time to hoist up to eye level one wretched body after another, he looked them full in the face and cursed with all his pent up venom of loathing. Again and again he would choose and grip an anguished cadaver to curse as he eventually found his way around the smoking abyss, counterclockwise to where he began his twenty-four tedious hours before. He was totally spent and lacking the strength left to stand in front of the immoral one who had patiently waited for his prey to return.

As he collapsed on that smoldering shore, Lucifer quietly approached and hissed, “Your time is up! But before I cast your body and soul into the black inferno, I must ask you just one last question. Why were you doing that?”

The condemned looked up and gasped, “I was looking for that preacher that told me I was saved!”

Satan’s twisted features gleamed with pride as he snarled, “That was me who told you that you were saved!”