He was twenty minutes into the sermon when he heard the sound of a little girl’s voice in the congregation. She was speaking to her mother, who was desperately trying to tell her, quietly, not to speak. Then everyone one heard it: ‘But mummy, he used the word which you said we should never say’.  He thought back for a moment at what he had just said, and wishing to take away the mother’s now very public embarrassment, he addressed the little girl:

My dear, he said, you are quite right, and your mummy is quite right also, we should never use that word. It is all too often used in quite the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. Let me explain to you, and to everyone else here why that is, but first of all I must say that we must not forget that the place described here really does exist and we have to give it a name, otherwise either no-one would know what we are talking about or we would have to use a very long-winded name for it which would be quite a mouthful to use as I hope shortly you will understand, and also understand why your mother said that you must never use it.

Let me first of all describe it, and the deprivations that all who go there would feel and know, and then I shall tell you why we should not use the word.

The Bible is not afraid to speak of that place, and the Lord himself gave us a number of descriptions of it, but I would like first of all to remind you of some words which you will have heard here which to me provide, perhaps quite unexpectedly to some, one of the most terrifying descriptions of what that place is like. It is found in Psalm 129, which is one of those Psalm that the children of Israel would sing as the made their way up to Jerusalem for one of their feasts. It closes with the words: The blessing of the Lord be upon you; We bless you in the name of the Lord!

You know that we enjoy many blessing from the Lord in this world. He gives us our daily bread. He gives us homes, and families, people who love us and care for us, and whom we love and for whom we care. He gives us friends, and a place in our community. He gives us sunshine and rain, seed-time and harvest-time. He clothes the fields with flowers, the trees with blossom, and provides such beauty as we see all-around us. He gives us the ability to make beautiful things, and to enjoy them, to have some understanding of the world around us and to influence it. He gives us his Word, by which we learn about him, and people in his church who will teach us, and point us to Jesus. Above all else he has given us Jesus, who died on a Roman cross in our place.

These are but a few of the countless blessings that we enjoy from the hand of God our Maker and Saviour, from the Lord our God. Where would we be without them? What would life be like if all of his blessings were taken away from us. It is unthinkable, is it not, that we should have to live without them for even one hour? What if the sun were darkened for one hour? I have heard that even in the few minutes that an eclipse takes we start to feel the cold. The hottest desert becomes at night a cold bleak place. What if this blessing were removed for ever? Could we bear it? But even still this is only the removal of one of his blessings.

What if he removed all of his blessings for one hour? Could we bear that? Perhaps we could for we would have some hope that after the hour had ended they would be restored to us. But what if they were removed for ever without any hope of restoration?

You may lose one of your favourite toys and find that it has gone forever, but you have another, you take comfort in that which is left; but if all of them are removed and you are told you shall never have another what then? What loss do you feel? You may sometimes find yourself alone in the shop and start to be afraid – but mummy and daddy are actually there still watching you – what relief you have when your parents come back into your view.

The blessings of the Lord, are countless, innumerable and manifold. How good he is to us. The absence of his blessing is intolerable for us. Our situation becomes hopeless.

Now consider, what appears to be the blessing of this psalm is not in fact a blessing it is an imprecation: Let not those who pass them by say: The blessing of the Lord be upon you.

We enjoy the blessings of the Lord because he has put them upon us. If they had not been put upon us we could not enjoy them, they would be far away out of our reach. This psalm is talking about those who hate Zion. Now Zion is the house of the Lord. To hate the place where God lives is to hate God. So the psalm is about those who hate God. We read about them here and elsewhere, perhaps more famously where the psalmist says: Why do the nations rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing? In Psalm 2. Here in psalm 129 the Lord tells his people they are not to put the blessing of the Lord upon those who hate Zion. The blessings of the Lord are not for the wicked, as we read in Psalm 1, who are like the chaff which the winds blows away.  

This is why the description is so terrifying. The blessings, that we all here today enjoy, will one day be taken away from the wicked. They shall no more know the blessings of the Lord upon them, and never have any hope that they shall ever even have one smallest drop of those blessings to cool their tongue.

Can you, my dear, imagine such a place as that, where you have no hope that anything good will ever happen again?

There are many other descriptions of that place, but this one that tells us that it is a place where all of the blessings of God are absent is terrifying enough. The Lord Jesus provides us with a great deal of information, as we may read in the Gospels, about that place.

So, we should not say that anything is like that place. There is no other place like it at all, just as there is no place like heaven: eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart, the imaginations, of men, what God has prepared for those whom he loves. There is nothing like it and nothing can be compared with it. But it can be compared to other things, even though all of those comparisons are inadequate. Comparisons do not always work in two directions. You can say that an elephant’s legs are like trees, but to say that trees are like elephant’s legs simply does not work.

Nether should we wish that anyone should go to that place, or even suggest that they go there, for when we do, do we not forget that we are just as equally deserving, if not more deserving, to be sent there as anyone else? Do we really want the person who made us angry, or has upset us, to suffer the deprivations that I have described? We may feel that they deserve it, but do they deserve it any more than you do? Remember what the apostle said: How can a man say he loves God whom he has not seen if he does not love his brother whom he has seen? If we do not love God, then we are haters of God, and fall under the imprecation in this psalm.

So, you see, it is quite right that we should not use that word in our everyday speech. We should not tell people to go there, nor should we say that this is like it. The place is one of indescribable deprivation and suffering. My attempt to describe it, it is quite inadequate. The comparisons that I have made, and that we find in the Bible, all in some way fall short of what it is really is, but every one of them tells us something of what the place is like. A great preacher once met with another preacher one Monday, Monday being a day of rest for them. They knew each other well. ‘On what did you preach yesterday?’ one asked the other. ‘On the place of death and misery’ he replied. ‘And you did that with tears in your eyes, my brother?’.

There is no other way to use this word that to use it with tears in your eyes. Tears that it is necessary for such a place to exist, and tears that there are those who will find their way there having chosen to walk on the broad road that leads to destruction, and tears that they have refused the free offer of a place in the kingdom of God purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ who on the cross suffered all of the deprivations of hell including the abandonment of the goodness of God, so that he cried out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Should you ever find you need to use this word, little one, and you shall have need to use it, let the tears roll down your cheeks as you warn your friend by telling her what it really means, why you would never want anyone to go there and that there is no place on this earth that is as dreadful as it is. Then remind her that there is a way to avoid it. Go to Jesus, he will keep you safe from it.