It is always good policy to rely on God's declarations rather than one's private opinions, but this becomes hugely important when considering spiritual events—events that one would deem to be uber-fantastic: the snatching away, the future glory of the body of Christ or, in our most recent considerations,
the lake of fire and the second death.
A lake of fire into which people are cast, by God, so as to keep the fifth eon from their experience is something so foreign to us that any normal person, upon hearing of it, would straightaway shut up and listen carefully as the very Author of the thing paused to explain it.
But no. For some reason, human beings, hearing of the lake of fire, are quite prone to (and strangely comfortable with) elbowing God out of the way (or just grabbing the microphone from Him) to tell the world what THEY think about it. ("Ladies and gentlemen, as you can plainly see, the Deity was primed and ready to lend us a firsthand explanation of the lake of fire, but, um, Freddy
here....")
And so the insanity begins.
My thing? Shutting up and letting God talk.
So here is my response to the man who wrote me after the Willard, OH conference—the man who was quite disappointed and extremely saddened by God's explanation of the lake of fire (it just didn't excite or amaze him), preferring the explanation of a guy from Corydon, Indiana named Phil Scranton, who sprinkled enough fairy dust and planted enough petunias around the lake of fire that it finally became, to the objector, a thing of beauty, desirability, and (let's not forget)
amazement.
