Johnny Cash said in an interview clip shown after his death that he made no apologies for singing so often about death and hell.

Knowing he was a Christian, I took what he said to mean he believed in people risking hell after death and was determined to sing about the subject no matter how unpleasant or uncomfortable some found it.

While I don’t know much of his music, I agree with the principle that hell can never be brought up too much. As my pastor says, “Failing to mention hell and preach it can almost be as bad as not believing in it—if you just keep it stuck away and never communicate it, pretty soon you’ll find a whole lot of followers don’t believe in it.”

Satan’s trick is to make people think there’s nothing we can really know about the hereafter, so we should just hope for the best, helping our chances by being good and doing good things.

Just the other night I heard David Letterman say about life, as part of a short tribute to a comic friend who had just died, “You don’t need to know anything more than you’re supposed to know.” Imagine if you took that attitude when you entered college or started your own business.

If hell isn’t treated as an unknown not to be contemplated, it’s made light of as a farce--a fairy tale or literary device created for the sake of a plot line.

For some who do kinda-sorta believe in hell but don’t believe in Jesus Christ, there’s often the flippant resignation, “I’ll have plenty of company down there and it sounds a hell of a lot more fun than hanging out on clouds, playing the harp with a bunch of Goody Two-Shoes.”

“I’ve heard smart alecks—people with more brains than they’ve got common sense--say, ‘Well, I’m going to hell, but I’ll have a lot of friends down there,’ ” says my pastor in a sermon I have on tape. “Don’t you know you’re going to get some reception down there? Just imagine some of your old drinking buddies and your old cussing buddies and your old religious buddies and your old lying buddies and the buddies who patted you on the back and made you think it was all going to be all right. You both die and go to hell down there. I mean, I wonder who’s going to cuss the other one out first! Don’t you realize that! You’ll look at that buddy and say, ‘You sorry rascal. If it hadn’t been for you I would have trusted Jesus Christ as my Savior.’ Boy, don’t you know there’s going to be some reception!”

Hell is defined in the Bible as a bottomless pit of everlasting fire and brimstone created by God as eternal punishment for Satan and his followers. Anyone who rejects Jesus Christ and God’s gift of salvation will face going down into it for an eternity of physical and psychological torment.

While many preachers today avoid the subject of God’s wrath and judgment against sin (instead pushing a human-oriented message about how God’s here to please us with whatever our fleshly lusts desire), the Bible makes it abundantly clear God is a supreme judge who acts in that capacity.

From the first book of the Bible to the last book, there are references to God being a judge. In Genesis 18:25, He is called, “the Judge of all the earth.”

In Rev. 20: 12-13, we are informed by revelation, “And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
What even some Christians don’t like to acknowledge is that no one spoke more about hellfire and damnation in the Bible than Jesus Christ.

Even in the Sermon on the Mount, the passage non-Christians most like to quote to try and prove Jesus Christ’s message was simply that we should love one another, Christ talks about a person’s body being “cast into hell”:

“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Matt. 5:29

Whether anyone likes it or not, the No. 1 issue with God is the satisfaction of His justice.

“God cannot be gracious to you; He cannot respond to you in a positive manner until His justice has been satisfied,” explains my pastor. “God’s justice has been offended and His holiness has been thumbed at and that’s got to be satisfied. God’s love and God’s grace are not free to flow to you until that justice is satisfied and that’s why Jesus Christ died at Calvary. Christ died for us in order that God might be just and the justifier. Just first and the justifier to them that believe in Jesus Christ.”