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varying degrees there is a foul, nauseating repugnant odor of burning, decaying flesh that
characterizes the stench of death. Her Hell is never silent from the screams and moans of the
damned in their agony and despair.
The constant burning was a standard feature in different sections of her Hellin the pits of
fire, cells, and lake of fire. In the lake of fire people were chained together, all burning, while
being dragged under its surface. The pits of fire were each four feet across and three feet deep.
One person was in each pit. Each persons flesh was painfully burnt away, leaving a skeletal
frame with a misty gray soul within it. Worms were crawling all through the skeleton. The
constant restoration and reburning of the flesh produced excruciating agony and deep depression.
Time and time again the damned in their agony desperately cried out to Jesus, pleading
for the opportunity to repent and to be saved from their intolerable torment, and promising to
proclaim the gospel while living godly lives. Each time without exception, with tears flowing
from His eyes, Jesus lovingly informed them that their opportunity to repent had died when they
had died. Their doom in Hell had been sealed forever. They were simply TOO LATE! They then
showed their true nature by expressing their rage against Him.
Many times Baxter expressed her compassion for the damned in their agony, even asking
Jesus to release them. Each time He corrected her, explaining that it was too late to prevent their
torment from lasting forever.
These experiences prompted Baxter to give a passionate, urgent invitation to her readers
to repent, turning to the Lord Jesus Christ in faith, receiving forgiveness of sins, salvation from
endless torment, and eternal life that only He can provide. This she did often.
In view of all of these considerations, she also urged Christians to preach the gospel in
order to give people an opportunity to be saved from the horrors of Hell. She also exhorted them
to remain faithful to their Lord.
Like the earlier Tours of Hell, Baxters vivid imagery of some details of torment went
way beyond what the Bible has to say about them. Yet her general picture of Hell as involving
torment, being unchangeable, inescapable, and lasting forever is Biblical. She is clearly a
traditionalist.
It was not unusual for authors of earlier Tours of Hell to express compassion for the
sufferers in Hell and even to ask for their releaseonly to have their request rejected. Yet Baxters
contributions to this genre were her repeated exhortations to repent, turning to Jesus, and her
urging Christians to spread the gospel. For her, fearful concern for the awful doom in Hell for the
lost is and should well be a trigger for evangelisma trigger that needs to be fired.
E. CONCLUSION
The Christian writings in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha contain developments from
Judaism in the Tours of Hell. These include bizarre descriptions of punishments connected with
specific sins. Writings surveyed include 2 Enoch, the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, and the Vision
of Ezra. They express the writers compassion for the damned and exhortations to do right in this
life.
Christian Tours of Hell in the New Testament Apocrypha were especially vivid in
picturing grisly punishments that were somehow related to the sins of which the damned had