May I interject here, and this is not to trivialize the suffering of our brothers who are incarcerated and tortured for their faith, that those who hold them captive are bound by a more cruel bondage than are they!

There is an eternal bondage, that if it is not broken by the freeing, cleansing blood of Christ, will relegate the one who is bound--by false religion by secular humanism, by every futile way contrived in the imagination of man or in the demonic mind of satan--to a Christ-less eternity where, as the Lord tells us, "There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth," Luke 13:28.

There is also a 'worm of regret' that Jesus speaks of in Mark 9:44, 46, 48 that conveys to us the very real anguish of the one who finds himself in hell and has all of eternity to lament the opportunities he had to receive the Lord as Savior but declined them.