Last Monday I went to Hell posted some cards from Hell Post Office, and bought a key ring reading “Welcome to Hell, Grand Cayman.” Hell is a very popular tourist attraction in Grand Cayman. In fact I myself was a tourist, on a two-day visit to the Cayman Islands. Several thousand tourists a day go there. The town of Hell is a very classy up-scale residential place, having big ranch-style houses with green lawns and swimming pools. But one section is a weird, bizarre landscape of blasted, jagged rocks that truly looks like what I used to picture, when I was a child, Gehenna to be. That is why the place is called Hell.
Of course, Hell is a big joke in Cayman, as well as a big tourist trap making lots and lots of money. Just the name does it. People think it’s funny to send a letter from Hell. You can be photographed “burning” in the fire, and send the picture to your family.
But few people accept that there really will be a hell of fire that will “burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evil doer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire…not a root or a branch will be left to them” (Mal. 4:1). That hell (which is the grave, a place of total destruction and not the fictitious place of eternal torment) will not be a joke.
I thought when I saw all those laughing, sun-tanned tourists wearing Hell tee-shirts, that Jesus tells us clearly who will be going to hell. “Anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of hell fire” (Matt. 5:22). “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell” (Mk. 9:47). “At the end of the age…the Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. And they will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:41-42). That will not be a laughing matter at all.
Some people in the town of Hell must want the tourists to remember the reality of things, because they have put up a big sign as you leave the area: Remember! The real Hell has no tourists.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One