Just as the world can be so beautiful as to give us a glimpse of heaven, it can also be so ugly that it gives us a glimpse of hell.

I just got done watching the documentary on the Jewish Holocaust produced by Simon Wiesenthal, who is a holocaust survivor himself. Although I have seen many footages and even visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., it is still haunting to see people – dead people – bulldozed into a mass grave and then burned. Little girls and boys dead and strewn about in the streets of ghettos and no one paying attention because death was everywhere. Men and women being hanged in the public gallows, and their only crime was being Jewish or hiding the Jews…

One of the places that I want to visit is the concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland, where a million people had been slaughtered and incinerated. I want to picture myself being there on one of the wooden beds along with 100 other inmates, diseased and emaciated, waiting to die. I have read a book by Victor Frankl, who also was a holocaust survivor, that when his friend was apparently having a nightmare next to him on that cold wooden bed, he didn’t wake him up because whatever the nightmare was, the reality was even worse… A glimpse of hell!

Yet, even they had hope that one day the war will be over and they will be liberated. That is what kept the survivors going. But there is no such hope of deliverance in hell. It is a never ending despair, torment, darkness, and depression. No hope of deliverance…

“Alas for the day!

For the day of the Lord is near,

and as destruction from the Almighty it comes.

Is not the food cut off 

before our eyes,

joy and gladness

from the house of our God?”

Joel 1:15-16

Two reactions to this: 1) Be glad that you are not going there. Whatever troubles or hardships you are in, it is far far better than hell. Christ saved you from it. 2) Lament over and have compassion for those who are headed that way. Your loved ones are headed there unless they know Christ. Warn them. Love them. Do whatever you can to let them not go there!

PH