Editor’s Note: We invite you to share your thoughts in the comment section below. Do you believe Judgment Houses can be effective, or is Moore onto something with his seven reasons?
7 Reasons Why Halloween Judgment Houses Often Miss the Mark
1. They’re not scary enough.
To speak of hell, Jesus used the imagery of a garbage dump overrun with worms, a place where babies were once sacrificed to demons (Mark 9:43-48). Teenagers in plastic red devil masks and Styrofoam pitchforks usually don’t convey what it means to “fall into the hands of the living God.” (Heb 10:31) The answer isn’t better technology, though, since nothing we could conjure up can convey the anguish of the damned walled off from relationship with God.
2. They assume people’s problem is that they don’t know about judgment.
But the Bible says they do. All of us have embedded within us a conscience that points us to the Day of Judgment (Rom 2:15-16). We have a “fearful expectation of judgment.” (Heb 10:27) The problem is we block it out of our minds, diverting ourselves with other things. The problem isn’t that lost people don’t hate hell enough. It’s that they don’t love Christ. Hell is the Abyss they run into in their flight from him.
3. They abstract judgment from the love of God.
I know most Judgment Houses present the gospel at the end. But in the Bible, the good news doesn’t come at the end. The prodigal son leaves the father’s house, but the father is eager to receive him back (Luke 16:11-31). The awful news of God’s judgment is always intertwined in Scripture with the message of the gospel of a loving, merciful God. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17)
