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What is hell, anyway? Is it here?
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What is hell, anyway?
It’s important to remember what hell is, according to the Bible: what you experience when you persist in sin. Now, theologians and scholars do debate what all that includes and when it happens. But Romans 1 suggests that it is—in part—”getting what you want when what you want is bad.”
Watching porn is a sin. It’s first a sin against yourself—it’s actually bad for your soul, mind, and body. It’s also a sin against other people. Porn objectifies people rather than loving them and honoring them as bearers of God’s image.
So, there’s a very real sense in which watching porn is its own hell. Spare the jokes about wanting to go to hell because that’s where all the fun is—hear me out first.
There are at least three ways that giving in to porn is its own hell, and they relate to the three ways that porn is a sin: It hurts you, it hurts your relationships with other people, and it ultimately hurts your relationship with God.
Porn makes life hell by hurting you.
It’s true many people enjoy porn, and it seems like a harmless pastime. However, a growing mountain of evidence indicates that porn has wide-ranging negative effects on its viewers.
- Porn negatively impacts the brain.
- Porn can lead to depression and anxiety.
- Porn can cause erectile dysfunction.
- Porn can lead to addictio Whether you realize it or not, watching porn inflicts harm on you.
Porn makes life hell by hurting other people. Even if you’re only sinning against yourself, it’s still sin (1 Corinthians 6:18). However, porn hurts more than just the person watching it. It dehumanizes the people portrayed on the screen, and every participant in watching porn contributes to a culture of objectification.
Furthermore, a lot of research shows that porn impacts the personal relationships of the people viewing it. It hurts dating, marriages, and families, and it can even hinder friendships from developing normally.
Porn makes life hell by distancing you from God. Not everyone experiences the negative impact of porn on their own life, and many don’t notice much effect on their relationships either. Even so, it’s a mistake to think you can escape the hell of porn and blissfully keep watching. Because the real damage of pornography is that it distances you from God. People eventually start to realize recognize that porn hurts their relationship with God, and they want to quit. Hebrews 12:14 teaches that seeing God requires holiness. Jesus says you should give up sin, even if it means sacrificing a valuable part of yourself, rather than be thrown into hell (Matthew 18:9). In other words, however painful and difficult it is, get rid of the thing that’s separating you from God—including things that lead you to porn.
If you’re stuck in porn and don’t care, that is deeply concerning. That means you haven’t realized the hell that porn creates, and that means you don’t have any desire to choose God rather than porn.
But if you do care, the good news is that you can find freedom from porn and the hell that it puts you in—more on that in a moment.
You may feel absolutely terrified of God’s judgment but still keep slipping back into porn. Why is that? The apostle Paul recognized this struggle in Romans 7—sometimes the thing we don’t want to do we do. Sometimes sin has its hooks deep in our hearts and it takes time to work them free.
However, there’s more than that. Romans 2:4 says that God’s kindness leads us to repentance. We need more than fear of punishment to escape the pull of sin. 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment.” We need to experience something better than the sin that captivates us. We need to experience God’s love. As Christians, God calls and equips us to live free of the hell of pornography. Galatians 5:1 says, “For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery.” In other words, the Christian life is much better, richer, and freer than the life of porn! Not only that, but the Holy Spirit empowers people to put away the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5:16).
But don’t sit around waiting for the Holy Spirit—he will empower you by giving you the desire to follow God’s Word and produce godly fruit. You must put that desire into action. If you’re serious about quitting porn and renewing your relationship with God, you need to take advantage of the resources he has provided. Christians today have more tools than ever to fight the temptations of pornography!
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Posted on : May 8, 2023
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Commented on May 10, 2023
"There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses." - Ezekiel 23:30
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Commented on May 9, 2023
All sins are the same in the sense that each renders a person guilty and worthy of God’s wrath. The root of all sin is autonomy and replacement of God with self. However small a sin may seem, it is an assertion that the person is acting independently of God. Eating fruit from a tree in a garden, like Adam and Eve did, might not seem immoral and may seem minor compared to other crimes, but it was an act of iniquity that had grave consequences for the human race. Breaking any command is an assault against the divine Lawgiver. James declared, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:10–11). Grudem is correct that “in terms of our legal standing before God, any one sin, even what may seem to be a very small one, makes us legally guilty before God and therefore worthy of eternal punishment.”1 Even one sin against an infinitely holy God demands an infinite punishment.
At the same time, Scripture does speak of the reality that some sins are considered greater than others. When being shown abominations in the temple, Ezekiel was told, “You will see still greater abominations that they commit” (Ezek. 8:13). Here some abominations were “greater” than others. Jesus explained that those who delivered him to Pilate committed “the greater sin” (John 19:11). In Matthew 11:20–24, Jesus said that the Jewish cities that heard the kingdom message would fare worse on judgment day than the Gentile cities that did not. Greater knowledge brings greater responsibility. In Luke 12:47–48, Jesus taught that a servant who knew the Master’s will but did not do it would be treated more harshly than one who did not know the Master’s will. Also, James said that a stricter judgment awaits teachers: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). These two biblical realities are harmonized by considering that there is both a quantitative and a qualitative aspect to sin and punishment. All mankind is guilty of sinning against an infinitely holy God. Therefore, all who die without repenting and trusting in Christ face the same quantitatively eternal punishment for their sins. And yet, because God is strictly just, he will punish those who have committed qualitatively greater offenses with a qualitatively greater punishment. The character of their suffering will be exactly proportional to the crimes they’ve committed (e.g., 2 Pet. 2:17; Jude 13). Jesus says that there is a sin that will never be forgiven:
Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. (Matt. 12:31–32)
What is this unforgivable or unpardonable sin? The context for Jesus’s statement is his confrontations with the contentious Pharisees in Matthew 12. In Matthew 12:1–21, Jesus was accused of acting unlawfully on the Sabbath, and in answering the Pharisees, he declared that he had authority over the Sabbath because he was the Lord of the Sabbath (Matt. 12:8). In Matthew 12:22–24, the Pharisees accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Satan. Jesus responded on several levels. First, he noted that if he cast out demons by Satan, then Satan would be working against himself. Not only did this strategy make no sense, it was also doomed to failure (Matt. 12:25–26). Second, Jewish exorcists also cast out demons (Matt. 12:27). So why did the Jewish leaders accept these exorcists but not Jesus? Third, the truth was that Jesus cast out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit to demonstrate that the kingdom had come upon the people (Matt. 12:28). This was the correct significance of his miracles. Casting out demons by the Holy Spirit showed that God’s kingdom was at work through the Messiah.
Jesus then spoke of the unforgivable sin (Matt. 12:30–32), which involved blaspheming the Holy Spirit. This sin could not be forgiven either in the present age or in the coming age. This sin was more than making offhand, derogatory statements about Jesus or the Holy Spirit from a distance or from ignorance. It involved disparaging the clear works that the Holy Spirit was doing through the Son of God. The unpardonable sin, therefore, is the willful and final rejection of the Holy Spirit who is working through Jesus, by attributing God’s work in Christ to Satan. For the hostile religious leaders in Matthew 12, this was a determined and final unbelief in the face of clear revelation. After seeing firsthand what the Lord had done and hearing his teaching, these leaders made the final conclusion that he was Satanic—exactly the opposite of the truth. Such terminal rejection could not be pardoned. Since the conditions necessary for committing the unpardonable sin were limited to Jesus’s earthly ministry, the sin itself was restricted to the time period of his career on earth.
But is there any parallel to the unpardonable sin beyond Jesus’s earthly ministry? The answer could be yes. The main issue with the unpardonable sin was hardened and willful unbelief in spite of the clear testimony of the Holy Spirit. Hebrews 6:4–6 refers to those who have “once been enlightened” and have been made “partakers of the Holy Spirit.” Yet they are warned against falling away from the faith, since “it is impossible to renew them again to repentance.” This passage refers to people who had great knowledge of the Holy Spirit. They saw the Spirit work miracles through the apostles (Heb. 2:3–4), but they stopped short of committing to Jesus. By persisting in unbelief, they were in danger of reaching a point of no return. Even today, it is possible for people to know the gospel and continually reject it. Such people are apostates who are beyond repentance and grace (Heb. 10:26–31). The reality is that all who reject the Lord Jesus in this life, never embracing him in saving faith, cannot be pardoned, since forgiveness is only offered to those who believe in him. Though the unpardonable sin described in Matthew 12 involved final hardness of heart against Jesus when he was on earth, the unrepentant rejection of the Lord Jesus Christ is always a sin that remains unforgiven, since forgiveness is found only through repentant faith in Christ. Conversely, anyone who comes to Christ in true repentance and genuine faith will be forgiven (cf. John 6:37; Rom. 10:9).
In 1 John 5:16, the apostle mentions two types of sin concerning a fellow Christian (“brother”). First, he says that there is a sin that does not lead to death. And second, he speaks of a sin that does lead to death:
If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that.
Of particular interest is the “sin that leads to death.” What sin is this? One answer offered is that John is referring to a professing believer who demonstrates through habitual sin that he is not an authentic Christian (1 John 3:6). So the sin in question concerns an unbeliever’s sin that leads to eternal death. Such a rejection of Jesus has the same consequence as that committed by the Jewish leaders who attributed Jesus’s miracles to the power of Satan (Matt. 12:31–32). Apostasy is unforgivable. Praying for restoration in this case is futile because God has already set the rejecter’s future (Heb. 6:6).
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Commented on May 9, 2023
Longitudinal studies find pornography use predicts later sexually violent attitudes and behaviours, including sexual aggression and sexual harassment. Pornography is a powerful and unhealthy sexual influence for youth and adults alike. The truth is, porn, sexual exploitation, and sex trafficking are more closely linked than the average consumer may realize. So no, this is not just a porn site my friend, it’s a pit to emotional and spiritual death. Porn use over an extended period of time has many negative effects on consumer. It encourages hate, anger, isolation, and self destruction . Im sorry my friend but I cannot and will not stand by and let a loved one fall without sacrificing my own soul to save his. Call me silly, I call it unconditional love. May you find lightness to escape your darkness my friend.
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Commented on May 9, 2023
No my friend, that is not biblical correct. One sin is no greater, or lesser of another sin. I’m sorry it you see it that way. We can discuss it if you like but only if it is backed up with scripture.
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Commented on May 8, 2023
The Bible has far less to say about sex than it does about greed and arrogance. Sin is turning away from God, but pleasure enhances our experience of creation. Be more concerned about people being abused and neglected because they don’t have the wealth or political authority to resist. If anything, porn provides relief and release from situations created by abusive politicians or corporate executives
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