Scripture teaches that judgment comes in two stages. First of all there is death, the separation of soul and body. The light of this world goes out and the light of another world comes on, and if we have rejected God and we are due for judgment, the light that comes on is a horrible light. It is an experience of alarm and terror, because you realize you have passed across from life to death. You have gone from time into eternity, and you have left it too late because you have disregarded God’s message. You have dismissed it all your life. Your body is left behind, but you are conscious and you realize instinctively and very deeply that all that lies before you is judgment. God has to deal with you. You cannot be forgiven now. You cannot be helped now. It is too late. You have passed beyond the opportunity for mercy, the time in which you could be saved. You will be gripped with awful shame. You may be furious but it won't make your situation any better. There may be great bitterness and remorse in you. Shame will well up within you and yet self-justification and anger and resentment may well up also, but it's too late. You have gone over the border, over the boundary into eternity. All your dreams are ended. All your ambitions on earth are ended. All your communications on earth are over and finished. If you have never been forgiven, if you have never been saved, you will have such a sinking despair, and you will know there is no hope.
But then at the last day, the day of the end of earth’s history, there will be a great change even in the prison house of lost souls. Everyone comes forth, and there is the final Day of Judgment. The great video of your life will be played through in your mind at lightning speed. Every sin ever committed, every word and act against God, even your lost opportunities to come to the Lord, will be remembered by you. Your conscience will suddenly come to life. It will speak against you. ‘I warned you. I warned you’, it will say, even as you see all the reasons why God in his righteous indignation and perfect judgment must now act.
There are people who are nature's bullies, but when they cross into eternity they will be laid in the dust, and no doubt terrified also. There will be high and mighty people, who have been utterly spoiled and never been reproved in their lives. They have had either the money or the station or the power, to thrust any reproof from them, and now they are in eternity and they know they are going to be humbled under the frown of God.
There will be people who have been violent. There's no capacity for violence now. They are ready for judgment. People who are hypocrites, people who pretended to have faith, but never did. They knew within themselves that they were not genuine, that they were professing things that were untrue. All that is ended. Prayer is impossible now. They receive the initial judgment of God, and are reserved in the place of torment in a prison house for lost souls. They will be reserved until the time of the final judgment. They are in eternity as condemned sinners ready for the greater assize at the end of time when this whole present phase of the world's existence comes to an end at the return of Christ. That is what happens to you at death. You are already in Hades as a soul without a body. There are no visits from people on earth or from people in heaven. There is no bridge that links hell to heaven. Heaven is protected and set far apart. There is no appeal against God’s verdict.
Some of the most haunting verses in the Bible are in the Book of Revelation and chapter 18: the plight of lost souls under the figure of the judgment of Babylon. You cannot describe the horror and the forsakenness of lost souls after death as all joy and all happiness and all possessions and all good things and all culture and all crafts and all activities are withdrawn, never to be returned, never to be known again. For what do we throw away our souls? What is there in this world that could possibly be worth the throwing away of the soul? says the Lord. ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ (Matthew 16:26). If you have forfeited your soul by denying God and rejecting him, what have you got that can possibly buy it back? You have nothing that will purchase back the soul. You look back on life, and ask, ‘What was it was worth?’
What brings us to conversion is a sight of the mercy and the kindness of God, and the lengths to which the eternal judge himself has gone to bring about our forgiveness and our release from condemnation. We must grasp the price he has paid for souls, exactly what Christ has done for sinners like us in going to the cross to suffer and die for us. These are the things that the Holy Spirit uses to break our hearts and to bring us to truly seek him and find him. We then come to know him, and his transforming power. He hears our prayers, and blesses us and guides us and uses us throughout life's remaining journey. It is not fear that brings somebody to conversion. It may be that fear and awe of God and of his final judgment, that causes us to think, that opens our minds, but that is not actually what brings us to salvation. However, it is something must be preached and declared.