This week we are looking at the Christian teaching that God is a judge and a judge who consigns people to hell. There are number of forms, and we’ll look at a couple of them, different forms and concerns about that teaching but basically I think the understandable objection goes like this, “how, the person says, can you possibly reconcile the concept of judgement in hell with the idea of a loving God. The judgement of hell, loving God? They just don’t go together!” What do we say about that? I’ll tell, one of the things I have said over the years because I’m a minister, some people ask me: what do you believe about hell? And one of the things that I say, well one thing I believe is that probably the biblical imagery of hell fire probably that’s metaphorical. And the people go: “Whewww!” Then I always say: “It’s metaphorical for something that is infinitely worse than fire.” And then they go: “Huh?” I like to argue that the Christian understanding of hell is crucial, that’s something infinitely worse than fire, that something is crucial for understanding your own heart, for living at peace in the world and knowing the love of God. Understanding what the bible says about hell is crucial for understanding your own heart, for living in peace in the world and for knowing the love of God. I know those three things are very counterintuitive and each one gets more counterintuitive than the others so let’s go, ah and the first point or the first topic is the longest and the other two we will build on it.
First of all, understanding hell is crucial to understand your own heart. This parable, has two characters, a rich man and a poor man and one of the things that the commentators said for years is that, one remarkable feature is the only parable in which a character, a poor man, has a proper name. If you look at all of the rest of Jesus’ parable, no one has a proper name assigned to them except this poor man named whose name is Lazarus. But if the one character have a name, surely if Jesus’ is going to use that approach, the other character should have a name but he doesn’t. There’s a name, character, and a nameless character and the contrast is deliberate. What does it mean? In Israel at that time, the rich man almost could not have possibly been an atheist or a pagan. The rich man would have believed in the God of the bible, prayed to the God of the bible, he would’ve obeyed to the laws of the God of the bible but is in hell without a name. Why? Verse 25, Abraham said, “remember that in your lifetime, you had your good things, you already had them, your highest, your best things, things that you built your life upon, you had them.” Philosophers for many years talked about what they called, summum bonum, the highest good of your life. What is your highest good? What is the thing you really live for? What is the thing that is your ultimate value? What is that which gives meaning to your life? What is it that gives you a sense of who you are? Whatever your best thing, the highest thing, the ultimate value, that gives you an identity. This man now, had his good things. It’s past tense. Status and wealth, was the basis for his identity. And now that the status and wealth is gone, there’s no him left. He was a rich man or nothing! See. He has no identity! It’s gone! He’s nameless. Because when you take away, everything! Like wealth and status, he has no identity. Well you say, “if somebody takes everything, hell is where everything is taken away, what is the alternative?” Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, wrote a book called Sickness Unto Death, pretty much the only book that I have read of his that I only understand actually. But I have really have understood it. In that book, he wrestles with the definition of sin and he defines sin as building your identity on anything but God. He in the book, he wrestles with a good definition, and he knows the traditional definition of sin is breaking God’s law. And of course he agrees that breaking God’s law is wrong, it’s a sin, but he wonders if that’s a sufficient definition. And the reason is, pharisees! He says, “here’s pharisees, they are following all the law fastidiously and yet they’re lost, why?” When the pharisees, we talked about this last week, when the pharisees served as their own savior and lord, because they are seeking to earn their own salvation, they are trying to put God, in the position, where because of they’re so good, God has to bless them and He has to answer their prayers and He has to give them a good life and He has to take them to heaven. When pharisees, by obeying the law, do that, earning their own salvation, they are actually building their own identity not on God, but on their moral performance. They’re getting their pride, they’re getting their self-worth out of morality and their religiosity and it’s destroying their character. Inside they are filled with pride and self-righteousness and ravening and rigidity, outside they are reeking havoc, why? Because the best definition of sin, and I think he is absolutely right here, is building your identity on anything, besides God. Good things, turning them into ultimate things. Now, Kierkegaard, I think he’s being radically biblical especially, he’s following Romans 6 which we are going to look at later in the fall. And what Kierkegaard is saying is this, if you take a good thing, and you make it into an ultimate thing. If you look at anything in this life and say, “if I had that, then I have importance and value, if I had that, but if I don’t have that I’m nothing!” If you look at money, career, your talents, your looks, if you look at a relationship, if you look at parents, if you look at your children, if you look at power, approval, comfort, control, if you look at anything of these things, and make them more fundamental than your significance and your security, then the love and knowledge of God, then though you may believe in the God of the bible, you may pray to the God of the bible, you may obey the laws of the God of the bible, but your faith, the justification of your life, the roots of your identity, what you really worship in other words, is something else. And that starts in your heart, a spiritual cosmic fire, that’s what the metaphor for fire is about. And you say, “what are you talking about, it causes a fire?” We know a lot about the devastation of addiction. We know about the inward, outward, devastation that addiction reeks. And it consists of things like this: first of all there’s the “disintegration” that happens in addiction because as addiction precedes, you need more and more of the addictive substance, to get less and less of the kick, of the high of the satisfaction. So you need more and more of the substance, and you do everything to get it, to get less and less of the satisfaction and that leads into disintegration and another part of the addiction is “isolation”. You have to lie, you have to defend yourself and of course you are always blaming everyone else, and you are always blaming everything else for the problems. And you say, “nobody understands me! and everybody is against me! and of course that’s all part of denial.” There’s disintegration, there’s isolation and there’s denial. The inability to increasing to see what’s really happening. Getting more and more out of touch with reality. Ah yes you know, in fact everybody probably in this room says, “I know, of course I know first hand, second hand, at the most third hand, the devastation of those poor people that get addicted to substances.” Ah but wait, what if the Iron Giant is right? Now since most of you look like you are older than ten years old, you may not seen the movie Iron Giant, but I would suggest that you would watch it because it’s because maybe the best animated movie I’ve ever seen. I love the Iron Giant and if you watch the Iron Giant there’s one place where the Iron Giant says, “souls don’t die. Souls can’t die.” And of course, if he’s right, and that’s what the bible says, the soul after death goes on forever, your personal consciousness, goes on forever, if the Iron Giant is right, and Kierkegaard is right too; that is that every single person, religious or irreligious, moral or immoral, is addicted as it were, grounding your very identity, taking your very self, from something besides God that can never give you the satisfaction that you hope that will give you. If we are addicted, all of us addicted, in the ultimate sense, and our souls going on forever, what does that mean? C.S. Lewis puts together and says this, he says “Christianity ascerts that we are going to go on forever and that must either be true or false, now there are good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only eighty years or so, but which I had better bother about if I’m going to go on living forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy is getting worse, so gradually that the increase in my lifetime will not be very noticeable, but it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for it. Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others, but you are so distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you can stop it but there may come a day when you can no longer do so. Then there would be no you left to criticize or even to enjoy the mood but just the grumble itself, going on and on forever like a machine.” So it’s not, a question of whether God sends us quote on quote, to hell, everyone one of us there’s something growing up which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud. Fire. You watch a log in the fire, it’s falling apart. It’s one thing to love a career but if you build your identity on a career and something goes wrong in your career, you’re not just wounded and hurt which you should be, your devastated, your worth, you feel worthless, you’ll throw yourself off a bridge. Disintegration. It’s ok to love somebody and to be want to be loved but if you build your entire identity on that, and there’s the a problem in your relational life, you won’t just be hurt and wounded like you should be. But you would be devastated! You’ll feel worthless, you want to throw yourself off a bridge. Your good things, enslave, they are starting to disintegrate you, they are starting to isolate you, so that when something gets in the way of them instead of just being afraid, you’re paralyzed. Instead of just being angry, you are implacably bitter. Instead of being despondent, you endlessly hate yourself forever and ever. This is the fire. Do you not see it in yourself? Do you not see where it’s going? And most of all denial. The denial. Now C.S. Lewis is constantly saying whenever he depicts hell, that the doors of hell is locked from the inside. That’s the whole idea behind hell. Because more and more you would say I wouldn’t never, well you say “this isn’t very good”, people in the middle of addiction feel like that. “This isn’t very good, I can’t imagine being somewhere else and everybody else knows and nobody understands. It’s not as bad as you say and I can really handle it.” That’s hell! And that’s hell. It’s hell and that’s hell. If that’s the case and I think it is, we have confirmation here in this text. Look at the insanity, look at the out of touch with reality, that characterizes people in hell. Commentators have noted for a long time that the rich man, is astonishingly blind and in denial and filled with blame shifting. So for example notice, that even though here’s Lazarus up in heaven, look at where he is, he’s in hell, he’s still ordering Lazarus around. He still wants Lazarus to come and cool his tongue, he still expects him to be his servant. And notice something else, he does not ask to get out of hell, he just tries to get Lazarus in. He doesn’t ask to get out, and he strongly insinuates that God didn’t give enough information. You know now go to my five brothers and give them the information, now what’s that, hint hint, “I didn’t get enough information, nobody understands and I shouldn’t even really be here and besides that, it’s not so bad, I really don’t want to be up there with that you know, all that humbug up there, whatever you’re doing up there but would you please send somebody down here to give me a little break.” Summary, hell is just a freely chosen identity based on something else besides God going on forever. Hell is just your freely chosen identity based on something else besides God going on forever. Disintegrating, disintegrating, disintegrating, refusing to admit what it is to me. That’s the reason why the idea that you might have in mind that people give you and that God is a God who sort of throws people into hell, and he sort of throws them into a pit and they are climbing up the sides saying, “please no let me out!” and God is saying, “No! It’s too late now! It’s hell for you!” C.S. Lewis puts it like this: he says “in the long run, the answer to those who reject to the doctrine of hell is itself a question. What are you asking God to do? To wipe out past sins and at all costs give them a fresh start? He did on calvary. To forgive them but they don’t ask for forgiveness. To leave them alone? That’s what hell is. There are only two kinds of people in the end, those who say to God, “thy will be done”, and those to whom God says in the end, “thy will be done”. All that are in hell choose it. Without that self choice, it wouldn’t be hell.” Let me also say, as a kind of application at this point, told you that it was the longest one, that understanding the nature of hell has been incredibly important to me personally. Seeing myself and you by the way, as a spiritual addicts, apart from the innovating grace of God, all addicts, it is crucial to knowing how to deal what’s going on with your life. You have to see the seriousness of it. You have to see the seriousness. I mean what you really do as a Christian, most of your life, is that you watch the fire start to come up, then you (blowing sound*), and that’s basically it. You say I’ve got to deal with that and you can deal with it with the gospel, you deal with it with grace, but it's constantly coming back up again. But it’s awfully helpful to know what that is. What that’s made of. What will extinguish it. Who are you really? Have you got a core identity, a name, based in what God has done for you in Jesus, what God thinks of you in Jesus, based in being the child of the King, based in the mission of getting to the new heavens and the new earth. Have you got a fundamental core identity that’s there no matter what the circumstances, no matter what happens, no matter what happens you know who you are! Stability, have you got that? Or are you just a businessman? Are you just a businesswoman? Are you just an artist? Are you just a mother? Are you just a father? Are you willing to look as deep into yourself as this doctrine is calling you to look? So, without the doctrine of hell, you can’t really understand I don’t think, your own heart.
Secondly, without the doctrine of hell, I don’t think you can live in peace in this world. Well I should put it as in another way of saying, the doctrine of hell is a great way to do it. You say, “what?” yes. Now I’m going to be real brief about this particular one because if you were here in the end of August, we actually talked about it in, we were looking at Mark 13, this very thing and the second coming of Christ and yet I can’t not treat it, under this heading. There are many people who really get afraid that if you believe in the God of judgement and in the doctrine of hell, it means you will disdain classes of people, and you will oppress them. So Wendy Kaminer in The Nation, she had just had an interview with Rick Warren, who wrote the Purpose Driven Life book and Wendy Kaminer liked him personally but still said this about his beliefs, she said that his faith “is inherently divisive. At the end of the day, non-Christians however devote, are lost. What are the prospects of equal citizenship for those of us damned by our refusal to be born again.” “What are the prospects of equal citizenship for those of us damned by our unwillingness to be born again.” And so what she is saying is, you can’t treat us as equal citizens if you think we are lost and been judged and we are damned? You are going to oppress us, you are going to disdain us and feel alright to marginalize us. Well you see now, this objection, though again I can say it’s understandable, but it’s certainly does not understand what the bible says about hell at all! Because if we seem right here, it’s not something imposed by God at all is it? In fact, I find it intriguing to me, verse 25, and other commentators too, that when Abraham looks down from heaven and into hell and speaks to this stupid rich man, this absolutely out of touch with reality, still you know, in hell rich man, what does he call him? “You evil sinner!”? What does he say? “Son. Teknon.” The commentators say, there is pathos here. There is sadness here. There’s a sense of tragedy here. Jesus, Abraham, God, anyone who believes the bible, does not look at people, who are on their way to that fire. It’s almost impossible to know who exactly especially if you understand how to see it in yourself and how we are going to say who’s going to get there, who’s not. But the point is, even if you did know, there would be no sense in which you would disdain them. No if you understand this but besides that, even more so, this objection does not understand what Miroslav Volf said in that fascinating chapter in his book, Exclusion and Embrace, which I quote every year or so, do I not, because it’s so important. Miroslav Volf says, as a Croatian, he had first-hand experience and acquaintance and a terrible violence in the Balkans. And there he saw people going on for years and years and years, locked into a cycle of vengeance and retaliation. “You did this to us, we are going to do this to you. You did this to us, we are going to do this to you.” But he says in his book that the cycle of retaliation is not fueled in a belief in a God of judgement, but it is fueled by a lack of belief of a God of judgement. And he says and this is remarkable. He says, “If God were not at injustice, that God would not be worthy of worship. The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence ourself is to insist the judgement is legitimate only when it comes from God. My thesis, that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many but, it takes a quiet of a suburban home to believe that human nonviolence, results from a belief in God’s refusal to judge. In a land soaked in the blood of the innocent it will invariably die without other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. Now here’s what he is saying is this. If you talk to some people who have seen their homes burned, and seen their family members killed and raped, how are going to keep them from picking up the sword and being sucked into the cycle of violence and retaliation? What are you going to say? Are you going to say, “well you know violence doesn’t solve anything.” Not only will such moralizing not touch their hearts, but it doesn’t, it shows no concern for justice and anybody who’s been wrong like that, justice has to be done! Volf says, “the only resource he knows, is powerful enough to both pacify the human heart for justice and at the same time keep us from getting sucked into that cycle of blood and vengeance is to say that there is a God and he will put everything right. Everything right.” And Volf says, “if you don’t think, if you think not believing in God, not believing in a God of judgement is going to keep people from being sucked into the cycle of violence, you are wrong! If you don’t believe somebody that is going to make everything right, you will pick up the sword, and you will get sucked in.” And therefore he says, “if you don’t believe that the doctrine of God’s judgement, if you don’t believe that, that is not powerful resources for living a peace on earth, you had a sheltered life. You have not experienced this. Belief in the God of judgement is crucial, he says it’s about the only thing, only resource strong enough, to help me, he was saying as a Croatian, to live at peace on Earth.” So hell’s necessary to understand your heart, hell’s necessary for living a peace on earth, and the doctrine of hell is necessary for knowing the love of God. “Say what?! Wait a minute?!” Somebody says, “this is the worse one of all!” “The whole idea of a God of judgement and hell seemed opposed to the idea of a God of love.” It’s not. You’re wrong, with all due respect.
Look at the end of this passage. What does the rich man ask of Abraham. For his brother, his five brothers. I want a miracle. Send Lazarus back! Now of course if Lazarus actually does, you know they know Lazarus is dead, if Lazarus suddenly comes up out of the ground, you know in front of the five brothers, that’s a miracle, that’s a naked, spectacular miracle. Raise, somebody raised from the dead, can you imagine? Lazarus rises up and goes “oh my gosh, it’s Lazarus!” “There is a hell!” What are they going to say? No? Of course they are going to say yes. “Oh my gosh, I better live a really good life, I don’t want to go to hell.” Abraham says, “that will never work.” He says “they won’t be convinced”, and that word by the way means more than rationality. Of course they would be convinced in a sense of, “oh my gosh, I didn’t realize there was a hell. Here’s a letter from our brother, oh my gosh, he says, look out!” It doesn’t mean, Abraham is saying, fear, fear of hell, fear of damnation, will never change the fundamental structures of your heart. It won’t work. And ironically fear of hell will never keep you out of it. It won’t put out the fire. Well what is the fire? What’s wrong with you and me? What’s wrong with us, what’ wrong with the world? Self-centeredness! Self-absorption! Me, me, me, me! Rather than you. Me over you. Me on top of you. Me instead of you. That’s what’s wrong. And when you scare people; when people say “I better be good because of fear of hell. I better be good because the fear of damnation.” Why are they being good? Are they being good for goodness sake? Are they being good for God’s sake just to please him? They are being good for their sake. It’s just more selfishness. It’s moral selfishness but it’s selfishness. And not only that, are they doing it for God’s sake, just to please him, just to delight in him? No, they are using God and saying “well if I really live a really good enough life, God will have to give me the things that I’m basing my identity on.” Give me success, give me a family, give me a man or a woman of my dreams, take me to heaven, all that sort of thing. In other words, God is still a means to an end to get the things that you really building your identity on. And so just to suddenly get really moral and go to church and read your bible, and do all these good things out of fear of hell, you’re just turning up the flames. You are kind of rearranging the selfishness and the pride and the evil of your heart inside your moral life. You are jury rigging the evil of your heart, to make you a moral person. If you are not doing a thing about it. What will change, the fundamental structures of the heart? Love. Radical love. Radical, unconditional love is the only thing that will take off our mistrustful, in denial, conniving little hearts and shock them into whole new way of living and being. Love. Well, where are we going to get that kind of love that changes our heart? Well Jesus actually tells us indirectly. What they say is, what this guys says is, “if I had a person raised from the dead, a naked miracle. If we sent that to those guys, then everything would be ok.” And Abraham says “no.” But you see that’s almost supposed to make you think of something. What is that? “Didn’t Jesus rise from the dead?” “Didn’t Jesus rise from the dead? Sure he did. Isn’t Jesus rising from the dead enough? No!” If Jesus suddenly blows out on the top of the mountain and shows up, that would just create fear! That would just create fear. “Oh my gosh, he must be the Lord, what do I have to do? Where do I have to sign?” See. “How do I avoid hell?!” Jesus says, “no the key is, you have to know why I died.” “And you know where you find that? Moses and the prophets.” “You have to know why I died and rose and what does it say, in Moses and the Prophets?” See that’s the only place where you are going to find that love. It’s understanding why?! And the answer is, “it was God’s will to crush him. So he looked upon him and were appalled. He was disfigured beyond human appearance and his form marred beyond human likeness. For the Lord made him a guilt offering but the results of his suffering he will see and be satisfied.” You do not know, how much Jesus loves you unless you see how much Jesus suffered. What did he suffer on the cross? David Martyn Lloyd Jones little sermon illustration I had read years ago, I forget where but it’s really helped me for years. “Imagine that a friend of mine comes to see me and says, “Hey I was at your house the other day and a bill came due and you weren’t there so I paid it.” and David Martyn Lloyd Jones says, he says how should I respond, and says “I have no idea to respond until I know how big that bill was. Was it just postage due? You know and you pay another 20 cents, and you would say “Thank you!” but what if the IRS finally found you. What if it was the ten years of back taxes? What if it was an enormous debt?”” See Lloyd Jones says until I know how much he paid, I don’t know whether to shake his hand or fall down on the ground and kiss his feet. What had Jesus Christ actually experience on the cross? Unless you believe in Hell, you will never know how much he loved you. You will never know how much he values you. Your heart will never know unless you believe in hell and you say why? Why did Jesus Christ, speak more about hell than anybody else in the bible put together? Because on the cross, he took it. The fire fell down into his heart. The Apostle’s Creed says, “he descended into hell”. Well what do you mean he descended into hell? When he said “Father? Why have you forsaken me?” “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” To lose the love of a friend hurts. To lose the love of a spouse hurts more. The deeper and greater the relationships, the more devastating and agonizing the lose of love. And I know this is beyond finding out, but on the cross when Jesus Christ lost, when the son lost the eternal love of the Father, he experienced an agony into disintegration. He experienced an isolation. Infinitely greater than you and I experience in an eternity in Hell. He took the isolation and disintegration that we deserve, and he took it on himself. Why? He loves you and unless you see He didn’t just experience physical pain, or some kind of emotional pain on the cross, unless you understand, unless you believe in hell, you’ll never know how much he loved you! You’ll never know how much he cares. Never. Ironically, people by getting rid of the idea of judgement in hell, try to make God more loving and they make him less. And if somebody says to me, “oh I believe in God of love, I don’t believe in hell, I don’t believe in judgement or anything like that”, I always say, “what did it cost your god to love you?” and they say “I don’t know if it cost him anything, he just loves everybody!” If God just loves everybody and it doesn’t cost him at all, I can honor a God like that, I can glad for a God like that, I’m sure it affects me in some ways but if I want to be transformed. If I want to sense his wild love around me, if I want wonder love and praise, if I want boldness and humility, if I want transformation, if I want to be able to sing, love so amazing so divine demands my soul my life my all, I got to believe in hell. The biblical doctrine of hell, if you don’t really understand it or hear about it in pieces, you can twist it to create a pre-text to cruelty. But to really read it, but to really understand how all of the plot-lines of the bible, regarding justice come together on Jesus Christ who is the judge of the earth, who came not to bring judgement but to bear judgement and to go to hell for his enemies. If you understand that, if you grasp that, it’s going to equip you to live in peace, with other people, with God, who did this for you and with yourself.
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