Hell by Anthony DeStefano

Author:Anthony DeStefano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Activities in Hell: Part I

Enslavement to the Demons

What do demons look like?

In describing the end of the world, the book of Revelation says that when the fifth angel blows his trumpet, a great, smoking, furnace-like pit known as the “abyss” will open, and a horde of demonic locusts with the power to sting like scorpions will rise out of it and torture all those who do not bear the seal of God.1

This is symbolic language, of course, for the book of Revelation is written in the form of a prophetic dream of the apostle John. No one really believes that demons look like locusts or scorpions. In fact, there really isn’t much in the way of physical descriptions of either the devil or the demons anywhere in Scripture. And there is good reason for this. Demons, as we said earlier, are pure spirits. By definition, they are nonphysical and possess neither faces nor bodies nor anything material on which we might base physical descriptions. It’s true, at certain times, they’ve had the power to assume shapes visible to the human eye, but that’s really only an illusion. In their nature, they are totally noncorporeal.

Yet the world’s great literature is filled with highly detailed descriptions of these pure spirits. In his epic poem The Inferno, Dante portrays the devil as a grotesque, hulking monster with three faces, each slowly chewing on an infamous sinner. His gargantuan, bat-like wings steadily blow freezing cold winds throughout the nine circles of hell, causing him to remain frozen at the bottom of hell forever.

Again, such horrific descriptions are not meant to be taken literally. But that doesn’t mean they don’t contain a good deal of truth. The book of Revelation’s representation of demons as a swarm of locusts conveys the truth that the number of demons is legion and they are repulsive, aggressive, and harmful to human beings. Dante’s eerie depiction of the devil conveys the idea of a massive, immovable evil that feeds on human beings, slowly grinding them up and mutilating them. His description of physical wings, which are used by the devil, not to escape hell, but rather to freeze himself into place, illustrates a concept already familiar to us: demons and humans go to hell because of their own free, cold, immutable choice.

Putting symbolic truth aside, though, it’s accurate to say that demons don’t look like anything, at least nothing we can compare them to on earth. There is one thing about their appearance, however, that we can say with certitude: if God is the source of all beauty, and there is an absolute minimum of beauty in hell, then at the very least, the presence of demons must be hideously ugly and repulsive. Indeed, it must be the very opposite of beautiful.

Somehow this ugliness of being must be made manifest in some way to the humans who live in hell. How that manifestation takes place we can’t say for sure. Will demons only be known to human reprobates through their

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