Jeremy Taylor was a pastor who'd been born two years after the KJV. In our circles, he's the author of the oft-misquoted and seldom-sourced statement, God "threatens terrible things to us if we would not be happy." Actually, it's "He threatened horrible things to us if we would not be happy," and the source is this sermon.
Though that is the quotation that brought me to read the sermon, it isn't what I'm bringing to you. In the sermon, Taylor takes a clear-eyed, sober, terrifying read of judgment to come. He's at great pains to see to it that no man take lightly the stroke that is about to fall, at any moment, on God's enemies.
In imagining the miseries of Hell, he does a brilliant and fearful thing. He slows time down. Taylor brings us to seize on that moment — those seconds, that split-second — after someone has been caught in a sin, and before he has invented a pretext falsely to shield and comfort himself.
Hear how Taylor does this, and what use he makes of it:
We may guess at the severity of the Judge by the lesser strokes of that judgment which He is pleased to send upon sinners in this world, to make them afraid of the horrible pains of doomsday–I mean the torments of an unquiet conscience, the amazement and confusions of some sins and some persons. For I have sometimes seen persons surprised in a base action, and taken in the circumstances of crafty theft and secret injustices, before their excuse was ready. They have changed their color, their speech hath faltered, their tongue stammered, their eyes did wander and fix nowhere, till shame made them sink into their hollow eye-pits to retreat from the images and circumstances of discovery; their wits are lost, their reason useless, the whole order of their soul is decomposed, and they neither see, nor feel, nor think, as they used to do, but they are broken into disorder by a stroke of damnation and a lesser stripe of hell; but then if you come to observe a guilty and a base murderer, a condemned traitor, and see him harassed first by an evil conscience, and then pulled in pieces by the hangman’s hooks, or broken upon sorrows and the wheel, we may then guess (as well as we can in this life) what the pains of that day shall be to accurst souls. But those we shall consider afterward in their properYou see? Taylor takes that sickening moment of fear and guilt, and freeze-frames it long before the invention of the freeze-frame. He says, "Imagine existing like that forever. Imagine that sense of guilt and shame, of panic and nakedness — forever."
scene; now only we are to estimate the severity of our Judge by the intolerableness of an evil conscience; if guilt will make a man despair–and despair will make a man mad, confounded, and dissolved in all the regions of his senses and more noble faculties, that he shall neither feel, nor hear, nor see anything but specters and illusions, devils and frightful dreams, and hear noises, and shriek fearfully, and look pale and distracted, like a hopeless man from the horrors and confusions of a lost battle, upon which all his hopes did stand–then the wicked must at the day of judgment expect strange things and fearful, and such which now no language can express, and then no patience can endure. Then only it can truly be said that he is inflexible and inexorable. No prayers then can move Him, no groans can cause Him to pity thee; therefore pity thyself in time, that when the Judge comes thou mayest be one of the sons of everlasting mercy, to whom pity belongs as part of thine inheritance, for all else shall without any remorse (except His own) be condemned by the horrible sentence.
For will that not be Hell? Not The Great Divorce's image of sophisticated reprobates lost in self-deception, but of a mass of humanity whose "secrets" have been exposed, stripped naked, and judged, whose every rationalization has been blown away like the faintest wisp of steam, who now find themselves before the Judge's pitiless eye and under His condemnation for an hour, then another, then another, in endless succession, never nearer the end than at the start.
Brilliant picture, and all the more so if it sent (and sends!) one sinner flying to Christ and the Gospel for grace and refuge while it may still be had.
ach age would fain have its own gospel, and the present is not behind hand in the desire to be its own prophet. Many are ready to help in this presumptuous design.
f you really long to save men's souls, you must tell them a great deal of disagreeable truth.
'm not generally a fan of daily devotionals. The readings tend to be like bite-size shortbread biscuits—a verse or two of Scripture appended to a paragraph with a corny anecdote. My appetite runs more to things like rare steak, 9 ounces or more. So when I'm reading devotionally (devoting time to God, and listening to Him), my preference is to read straight Scripture, at least a chapter or two at a time, without prefabricated what-do-you-think-about this-style questions, thoughts-of-the-day, fortune-cookie quotes, cutsie human-interest stories, or any of the other standard daily-devotional gimmicks.
h my brothers and sisters in Christ, if sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees, imploring them to stay, and not madly to destroy themselves. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for.
egarding the shortness and misery of this life, Moses wrote, "All our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away" (Psalm 90:9-10).
This is a common theme in Scripture: our days are few and full of trouble (Job 14:1). In case you have wondered, it's not just you; we all experience misery and affliction. That's the nature of earthly life. The earth itself is cursed. Moses gives a nod to that fact in the phrase "all our days pass away under [God's] wrath." In the King James Version, the second half of that verse says, "We spend our years as a tale that is told." The Hebrew expression actually means, "We finish our years like a groan."
Instead, with the nation gathered before him, Moses went into a rage: "Hear now, you rebels: shall we bring water for you out of this rock?" And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice" (vv. 10-11). As a result, Moses was forbidden to lead the nation into the promised land (v. 12). Aaron likewise was kept out of Canaan and died immediately after the incident at Meribah (vv. 23-29).
In other words, Give us blessing at least equal to our trouble. "Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!" (vv. 16-17).
That's the whole point of Psalm 90. We are dying creatures. Our earthly comforts are few and they are only temporary. This life is going to end shortly. And even if you die of old age, it's a long process of decline to get to that point. The very best you can hope for is that your life will end like a drawn-out groan.
he wrath of God and the judgment of the day of the Lord cannot be a trifling matter. How emphatically are we told in Scripture, that it is "a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Upon such a subject we cannot afford to trifle.
But I want to get over this as quickly as I can; for who can bear to talk thus to his fellow-creatures? What is it that the lost are doing? They are "weeping and gnashing their teeth." Do you gnash you teeth now? You would not do it except you were in pain and agony. Well, in hell there is always gnashing of teeth. And do you know why? There is one gnashing his teeth at his companion, and mutters, "I was led into hell by you; you led me astray, you taught me to drink the first time." And the other gnashes his teeth and says, "What if I did? You made me worse than I should have been in after times." There is a child who looks at her mother, and says, "Mother, you trained me up to vice." And the mother gnashes her teeth again at the child, and says, "I have no pity for you, for you excelled me in it, and led me into deeper sin." Fathers gnash their teeth at their sons, and sons at their fathers. And, methinks, if there are any who will have to gnash their teeth more than others, it will be seducers, when they see those whom they have led from the paths of virtue, and hear them saying, "Ah! we are glad you are in hell with us, you deserve it, for you led us here." Have any of you, to-night, upon your consciences the fact that you have led others to the pit? O, may sovereign grace forgive you. "We have gone astray like lost sheep," said David. Now a lost sheep never goes astray alone, if it is one of a flock. I lately read of a sheep that leaped over the parapet of a bridge, and was followed by every one of the flock. So, if one man goes astray, he leads others with him. Some of you will have to account for others' sins when you get to hell, as well as your own. Oh, what "weeping and gnashing of teeth" there will be in that pit!
've grouped two of our atheist friends' 
The 
new god has been lately set up among men, the god of modern Christianity, the god of modern thought, a god made of honey or sugar or lead. He is all leniency, gentleness, mildness, and indifference in the matter of sin. Justice is not in him, and as for the punishment of sin, he knows it not.
