"And in Hades [hell-A.V.]
he lifted up his eyes, being in torment" (Luke 16:23a).
Nowhere in the
Bible is clearer light thrown on the future plight of the lost than in the solemn
and serious record of Christ's words given to us in the Gospel according to Luke,
chapter sixteen and verses nineteen through thirty-one. That account reads as follows:
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury
every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing
to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his
sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's
side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he
looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him,
Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in
water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire. But Abraham replied,
Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus
received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides
all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want
to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us. He answered,
Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I had five brothers.
Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment. Abraham
replied, They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them. No, Father Abraham,
he said, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent. He said to
him, If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced
even if someone rises from the dead (NASB).
We shall here note the importance
of considering the future state of the lost. It is not the purpose of this message
to argue the etymological meaning of "hell," as the term appears in the
King James Version, or hades as in the American Revised and certain other versions.
However this may be with its varied interpretations, the real significance of this
record is that for a man to die without saving faith in God is to experience a state
of lostness beyond the present life where inexpressible suffering will characterize
him forever. If it should be allowed, as some doubtfully contend, that the Greek
word haides (Hades), or the Hebrew word Sheol, always and only mean the place of
departed spirits, or the grave, yet this admission would in no sense change the condition
of the state of the lost, as described by Christ in Luke 16:19-31. Such hopelessness
would be quite as unbearable in the grave, if consciousness existed, as if it were
in some other state or remote part of the universe. Furthermore, it is, in reality,
the spiritual personality, rather than the physical body, that suffers in the realm
of ultimate lostness. The real significance of Christ's teaching here concerns the
state of those ultimately lost, rather than the particular place or location in which
they suffer the agony of their lostness. The only possible evasion of the real significance
of the everlasting state of the doomed person, as depicted here by Christ, would
be to deny the genuineness of this passage, something critics have failed to do,
or deny the validity of Christ's teachings, which would be tantamount to denying
His divinity. To do this would be to completely wreck faith in the whole New Testament
and the Christian religion. The teaching of Christ must be reliable here as elsewhere.
It is absurd to credit the genuine teachings of CIinst on one subject while denying
His teachings on another point.
The reality of everlasting lostness is validated
by other New Testament writers, including Paul in Galatians 6:7, 8 and Second Thessalonians
1:7-9; by Peter in Second Peter 3:9, 10; and by John in Revelation 21:8. Many of
the world's greatest theologians have believed in and taught the scriptural doctrine
of the everlasting lostness of the souls of those who depart this world without the
saving grace of God. And many of the world's greatest literary artists have reflected
their belief in the everlasting lostness of men without God in the future life. Such
is true of Dante in his Divine Comedy, of Shakespeare, of Goethe, of Milton's Paradise
Lost; and it is true of Jean Paul Sartre, however unwittingly, in his play NO EXIT!,
notwithstanding his boastful claims toatheism. Some have argued that this record
in Luke is only a parable. Others with equal force have held that it is history.
Whether history or parable, the spiritual meaning of this account in Luke 16:19-31
is the same-if history, it is a record of what has happened; if a parable, it is
a teaching of what may happen. If it be allowed, wi~h Edersheim and others, that
it was not Christ's primary purpose to set forth the doctrine of the future life
of the lost in this record, yet it would have to be admitted that incidentally, if
not primarily, He did so. It is sometimes objected that the doctrine of hell is not
found in the Mosaic revelation; yet it must be admitted that the doctrine gradually
developed in Jewish thought and was clearly and firmly established in Jewish theology
by the time of Christ. Further, it is evident that Christ, the Son of God, accepted,
taught, and thus divinely validated this doctrine; otherwise He should have been
guilty of propagating a falsehood.
For nearly a half century the doctrine
of hell has been exceedingly unpopular in the pulpits of the Christian Church. Nor
has this unpopularity been limited to the liberal branch of Christianity. A large
percentage of the pulpits in various branches of the evangelical churches have evaded
anything more than a casual mention or reference to hell as the final state of the
lost. It may even be questioned whether many still believe in hell as depicted in
Luke 16. A sort of "modified universalism" characterizes the thinking of
a great many Christians, both in the pulpit and in the congregation.
The
noted Scottish Bible scholar and author, William Barclay, who is read widely by evangelicals,
declares himself to be a committed Universalist. He pointedly states: In one thing
I would go beyond strict orthodoxy. I am a convinced universalist. I believe that
in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God If one man remains outside
the love of God at the end of time, it means that that one man has defeated the love
of God-and that is impossible." Here Barclay fails to recognize human moral
freedom to shut one's self out of God's mercy. With Origen, Barclay believes in Hell
as a punitive correction for unbelievers, from which they will be won through divine
love to ultimate salvation-a sort of unorthodox Pro testant purgatory. This position
he supports with a series of exceedingly plausible arguments. The doctrine of the
future life is one of the most seriously neglected teachings of Bible truth in the
pulpit today. Seldom is there a sermon on the fate of the doomed; seldom do we read
in a religious periodical a sermon on hell. It is a tragically neglected theme. Many
of the ills that afffict the Church of Jesus Christ, and the world in which the Church
of Jesus Christ ministers today, are traceable to the neglect of the doctrine of
the future life, both of the blessed, and of the doomed.
This neglect has
given rise to a number of deplorable conditions within and outside of the Christian
community. Dr. Jan Karel Van Baalen, in his book The Chuos of Cults, has said that
"the modern cults represent the unpaid bills of the Christian Church."2
Russellism (Jehovah's Witnesses) and the Seventh-Day Adventist movements, with their
emphasis on "no-hellism" and "annihilationism," are largely
due to the fact that the Christian Church has failed to duly emphasize the doctrine
of the future life-to teach clearly the revelation of the Scriptures on this tragic
reality.
The Spiritualist cult, which is disposed to pry into the mysteries
of the unknown, is flourishing today in very large measure because the Christian
ministry has been entirely too silent on what the Bible has to say about the state
of the righteous, and the state of the unrighteous, in the after-life. In the absence
of clear teaching on the future life, Spiritualism and other cults of like nature
have attempted to find out what has not been clearly taught in the pulpit, by means
that are not legitimate. Thus, Russellism, Spiritualism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and
others of the modern cuts are, as Van Baalen has said, representations of the unpaid
debts of the Christian Church. Outside the religious community there are also devastating
results of the neglect of the doctrine of the future life, including moral relativity,
or no ultimate truth (ethical situationism), and, consequently, no final responsibility
of man to God. As a result, man may set up for himself a standard of truth by which
he may measure his life in the present, without regard to God or the future. Hence,
we have an ever-changing standard of truth, and we have, as the ancient Greek Sophists
put it, 'every man his own measure of truth.', Fearlessness to do wrong is evident
on every hand. The dai ly newspapers are replete with reports of crime, and such
accounts of crime are flashed on thousands of television screens throughout the land
every evening. Because people have ceased to fear the future, they are living only
in the light of the present, without any sense of responsibility to God or the life
beyond. They act as they are motivated, and, consequently, we are reaping an awful
harvest of crime and immorality largely because there has not been a due emphasis
on the doctrine of the future life and humanity's moral responsibility to God. The
shocking increase in suicides may be resultant in considerable measure from man's
lost sense of the future life, and thus any responsibility to God or the future.
Said the Apostle Paul: 'If we have only hope in Christ in this life, we are of all
men most to be pitied" (I Cor. 15:19) If there is no future life, no consequence
of sin, no reward for the nghteous, then in the unspeakable desperation of man's
mind and soul he may seem quite logical in taking his own life, for he sees it as
the easiest way out, since death ends all.
Many have thus reasoned and have
attempted to put an end to the miseries of life by suicide. A black custodian in
abuilding in New York was heard to say, as he stood on the street with a gathered
crowd of spectators and watched a desperate man leap to his death from a fifteenth
story window, "If a man has no God, nothing is left but to jump." This
neglect resolves itself into a form of humanism and goes directly hand in hand with
destructive higher criticism and unbridled liberalism in theology. Destructive criticism
and humanistic irresponsible liberalism would not exist had a proper emphasis been
kept on man's responsibility to God.for the future as well as the present, and had
there been kept in view a clear sense of the awful consequences of evil. Important
as the present life is, it can only be lived and evaluated properly as it is lived
in the light of, and in relation to, future responsibility before God. Heaven is
not only the reward of the righteous, it is also a condition making possible the
everlasting, unimpeded progress and development of redeemed personalities. Hell is,
on the other hand, both God's most merciful provision for the unrepentant sinner,
and the natural consequence of the sinner's willful course in the present life. The
charge so often made that a God of love and mercy is too good to cast His children
into hell is rendered invalid by the fact that unconverted people are not the children
of God by redemption, and that God does not cast these unconverted people into hell.
The doomed man has rejected the only means of salvation, offered in the person of
Jesus Christ, and has procured for himself the reward of his own choosing; he has
taken himself beyond the reach of God's mercy. Sinners experience hell of their
own free choice. Hell is the destination at the end of the road that willful sinners
follow. They procure it against God's will. Adam Clarke has significantly remarked:
"A Christian goes to heaven because Christ died for him; a sinners goes to hell
because he deserves to go there." Further, the idea of God in hell punishing
the doomed for their sins committed while they were on earth, is totally unworthy
of the Biblical revelation of God's person, purpose, and character. John declares
that the Christian God is love and that He is light (1 John 4:8; 1::5; cf. John 1:4-90.
The Bible represents sin as the works of darkness. and the final consequence of sin
as outer darkness (Matt. 8: 12: Eph 5:11; 6:12; Col. 1:12; 2 Pet. 2:4, 17; Jude 6,
13; Rev. 16:10, 11). Scripturally and logically hell is where God is not present.
It is outer darkness where the light of God never penetrates.It is the ultimate destiny
of the person who leaves the present life with his back toward God. Thus, the total
responsibility for ultimate lostness rests with the person who rejects Jesus Christ
and all that He has done to save that person.If our spiritual personalities are not
in danger of being everlastingly lost without the saving mercies of Christ, then
the death of Christ has lost its redemptive significance. Paul would have then been
entirely amiss when he wrote to the Thessalonians. "You turned . . . to wait
for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, that is Jesus, who delivers
us from the wrath to come" (1 Thess. 1:9, 10). The Scriptures are clear and
consistent in their teachings on sin. hell, salvation, and heaven. The Gospel has
signifcance only as it becomes clear that it is the good news of salvation from sin
and its awful and ultimate consequences helll. Many people never lift up their eyes
to heaven until they do so out of the hopelessness of hell. Many never lift up their
eyes toward heaven to pray until their prayers are ineffectual, until it is too late
for their prayers to be answered. Somewhere in his writings, Dr. John Paul tells
a most interesting story concerning a farmer and a pig. It seems that one bright
starry night a farmer discovered that his pig had gotten out of the pen. He succeeded
in apprehending it, but in the struggle that ensued the pig was thrown over on its
back. It struggled and squealed in an effort to free itself from its captor, and
then suddenly, says the story, the pig ceased to struggle and squeal. The farmer
carefully observed the animal, and then discovered that it evidently had its eyes
focused on something out yonder in the heavens. Then it occurred to the farmer that
the pig's eyes were so set in its head that while it stood on its four feet, it had
never seen anything but the earth beneath it, but now, when thrown over on its back,
for the first time in it's
life, it had caught a vision of the majestic starry heavens, and was so enraptured
with that vision that it forgot it was being held captive. The foregoing is only
a story, but sincerely, many people have never seen heaven with its inconiparable
bliss until they have viewed it out of the hopelessness of their doomed state. What
a tragedy that so many do not look up until it is too late to attain that glorious
vision-heaven!
Dr. G. L. Robinson, formerly Old Testament professor at McCormick
Theological Seminary, once told the story of an incident which he declared was the
most convincing argument for the existence of hell that he had ever encountered One
dark night as he stepped from his cab in front of his hotel in London, there staggered
up to him a half-drunken street-woman. Addressing herself to him, she said, in the
street language of a London underworldling, Meester, yr are a meenester, ain't ye?"
Dr. Robinson replied that he was, and then asked her how she knew he was a minister.
The woman replied: "I knowed ye was when I seed ye." Then she continued:
"Meester, when ye go back to yeer people, ye tell them that there is a hell
and ye tell them that I said there is a hell; and ye tell them that I know there
is a hell, because I have got it right inside here," pointing to her bosom.
Then she staggered away and lost herself in the darkness of London's underworld.
Said Dr. Robinson: "As I went to my hotel that night I did so more deeply convinced
of the reality of hell than I had ever.been in all of my life."
Likewise,
many people do not require an extended argument for the existence of hell. Many,
like the street-woman of London, could testify that they have already felt the pains
of hell in their own bosoms. The hell that lies beyond is an intensified continuation
of the hell that many experience in the present world. The Psalmist once exclaimed,
"The pains of hell got hold upon me" (Ps. 116:3 KJV). This text, in hell
he lifted up his eyes, immediately raises the question in the mind of the serious
reader: What did this doomed man see when he lifted up his eyes in hell? That question
is answered in Christ's own words in Luke chapter 16.
In rapid succession
it dawned upon the doomed man in hell that he had lost his final opportunity for
everlasting life; "In hell he lifted up his eyes"; that there was no mercy
in hell; that he was now utterly hopeless and h'.lpless; that he was possessed of
insatiable desires; that memory of lost opportunities plagued his consciojusness;
that he was incarcerated in in a prison of everlasting doom wiht no EXIT; that his
earthly life's influence upon others had been misspent; and that at last he was personally
morally responsible for the truth he had known on earth and neglected to his awful
peril. The real significance of hell is the soul's awful consciousness of its lostness~its
total loss of contact with God. That there are degrees of lostness in the present
life is evident, but that there is also the possibility of an ultimate total loss
of God from the spiritual consciousness of man, is equally real. Such a condition
is hell! It is a hell that many have initially experienced in the present life, some
even to the dethronement of reason. But it is a hell that will haunt the mind of
man who is ultimately lost through endless millennia in the world to come. Then
lost man will be utterly alone with no voice to be heard except the echo of his own
wail of woe, and no familiar landmark to establish his sense of personal identity
or give him direction. Whatever the biblical figures employed to describe the
horrors of hell may be, the real meaning is utter lostness, expressed by Christ as
"outer darkness" (Matt. 25:30).
Again, the meaning of hell is
ultimate and utter hopelessness. The soul that is lost in hell will be so by reason
of the willful rejection of God's provision of salvation in Christ Jesus. Thus man
in hell will have terminated there against God's will and at the expense of having
taken himself beyond God's reach. Hell is "outer darkness." "God is
light and in Him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Therefore hell is
outside of and beyond the presence and reach of God. Thus if man would, he could
not save himself, nor can God save him from the hell that is beyond this life and
outside of God, for the finally impenitent. If man will not be saved in this life,
he could not be saved in the life to come. One has significantly queried, concerning
the effects of hell on character: "Like the photographer's bath, may its effects
not be to develop and fix existing character, rather than to change it. With the
Apostle Paul, in faith we "wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from
the dead, that is Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come" (1 Thess.1:10).
It is as much ihe moral responsibility of the Christian minister to declare 'he awful
and solemn truth of the scriptural doctrine of hell, from which Christ died to deliver
man, as it is his moral duty to declare the glorious truth of God's love and mercy
expressed in Christ's redemptive work on the Cross. Redemption takes its meaning
from its power to deliver man from the ultimate consequence of sin, the awful ultimate
state of the lost, which is hell! The prophet Ezekiel saw this responsibility placed
upon the servant of God and said,
Now as for you, son of man, 1 have appointed
you a watchman for the house of Israel; so you will hear a message from My mouth,
and give them warning from Me. When I say to the wicked, "0 wicked man, you
shall surely die," and you do not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that
wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require from your hand.
But if you on your part warn a wicked man to turn from his way, and he does not turn
from his way, he will die in his iniquity; but you have delivered your life (Ezek.
33:7-9; cf.3:17-21).
However, it should be noted that the ideas of immortality,
or everlasting life, and of everlasting existence, are to be sharply distinguished
one from the other. Immortality belongs to the redeemed only, as it consists of the
life of God (zoe) imparted to the believer at the moment of his conversion to Christ.
Jesus said: "I give eternal life to them" (John10:28; cf. Rom. 6:23).
And
Paul wrote to Timothy that Christ "'alone possesses immortaity" (1 Tim.
6:16). Certainly the lost will have everlasting existence in the future state, but
they will not have immortality, for that belongs to God and those to whom He imparts
it in their salvation. Men may have their way; they may deny God's will for their
lives; they may realize their godiess ambitions; but they must remember that just
beyond this life without God is hell. "And in hell he lifted up his eyes being
in torments." Such need not be the doom of any soul. God has provided a way
of salvation-of escape fro in sin and hell for every man and woman. Hear those
gracious words of hope for all!
"For God so loved the world,
that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish,
but have eternal life" (John 3:16). Hear those gracious words of invitation
from the lips of the divine Son of God! "Come to Me, all who are weary and
heavy laden, and I will given you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from me
for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls"
(Matt. 11:28, 29).
Hear those gracious words of promise! "The one who
comes to Me I will certainly not cast out" (John 6:37). Hear those words of
divine urgency! "Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts"
(Heb. 4:7b).
But finally, hear that solemn question directed by the Spirit
of God! "How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?" (Heb.
2:3).
