Spurgeon uses the ancient prophecy against Babylon — consumed as stubble, leaving not a single coal for warmth — to build a three-part portrait of eternal punishment: first, that it will be easily inflicted, because sinners carry the materials of their own destruction within themselves, in a conscience that will finally be fully awake, a memory that will replay every sin and every rejected warning in perfect detail, and a knowledge that will only grow stronger as eternity rolls on, so that God needs no external instruments of torment when memory, conscience, and guilt will serve as their own executioner. Second, that it will be most searching and terrible — the fire image chosen precisely because fire reaches every part, and the punishment described as a "second death" in which the soul is perpetually dying without ever being extinguished, a horror no human language can adequately describe, with the added misery that the companions of the lost will only torment each other further, and that the sight of Heaven's glory above will make Hell's darkness the darker by contrast. Third, and most relentlessly, that there will be not a single coal for warmth in any direction — not in looking up to Heaven, not in looking around at fellow sufferers who will curse rather than comfort, not in God whose justice will be visibly undeniable, not in past pleasures now revealed as worthless trade-offs for eternal misery, not in present presumption or future hope — and he closes by turning the text's word "Behold" into a double summons: to believers, to be filled with gratitude and urgency for perishing sinners; and to the unconverted, to face the terror now while tears of penitence are still possible and the gate of mercy remains open.
A sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on April 13, 1862.