She cannot leave well enough alone

kw: books, religion, false prophets

A friend loaned me a book asking for my opinion: Mary K. Baxter's A Divine Revelation of Hell, originally published in 1993; this was a recent paperback edition.

I read the book through very quickly. There was no need to peruse it in detail. This is not a review, but an assessment: The book is false. Period. The author is a false prophet. She has ten titles in print, most beginning with A Divine Revelation… All are products of an overactive imagination.

The book about hell owes more to Dante Alighieri and John Milton than to the Bible. A majority of those individuals that the author "interviewed" (actually, what she recorded are imagined dialogs between various lost souls and Jesus), are backslidden Christians of various kinds. Nobody depicted in the book seems to come from a non-Christian tradition or religion.

There is a simple matter of faith being attacked here: whether a genuine child of God could perish. Jesus declared not so, "Nobody can take them out of My hands." A disobedient child is still a child. Nobody who has been born again can become "unborn". God has a way to deal with disobedient children, and it is not Hell. Warning passages about God's discipline of His children are frequently mis-applied; none of them actually refers to Hell. Hell is for Satan and his angels; any human souls who wind up there chose to follow sin and Satan and reject God.

A book like this works against those who teach an accurate understanding of Hell. There really is a Satan, and there really is a Hell, but neither the devil, nor demons, nor Hell are anything like the gross distortions found in this book. The best course of action for God's people is still the old formula: teach what the Bible teaches, and where the Bible is silent, be silent.