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Sermon on Hell (page three)

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You wouldn’t want to buy a book that I had written on how to repair your car. It wouldn’t even get printed, because I don’t know anything about repairing cars! I wouldn’t write a book on how to play the stock market either. Those are not my areas of expertise. I have no knowledge of such things.

  However, if the subject were New Testament Greek, you might learn something from me. I know Greek fairly well after 30 years of study. I do indeed.

  So when Jesus speaks to us about what happens after death, I have already settled the matter in my mind. I will accept whatever Jesus teaches, because Jesus is God. It’s not a question of, if I like it, I accept it. I’ve already accepted in advance whatever He teaches me about heavenly reality. Because I understand it’s God who is doing the teaching.

  Having settled the matter in advance that whatever Jesus teaches we accept as truth because it is God who is teaching us, what then is the truth about hell?

  Let me put before you one very basic truth about hell. I think it is probably the place to begin.   After death, we will be either in hell, or in heaven. We find these two ultimate destinations not only in this parable, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, but also in many of the other parables that Jesus teaches. Consider the parable in Matthew chapter 25 where Jesus talks about the division into sheep and goats. Jesus concludes with: “Then [the wicked] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

  What about the parable of the sower in Matthew 13? “A farmer went out to sow his seed.” Even though God is the sower, three of the four attempts to sow seed come to nothing. A pretty realistic parable! Three of the four seeds don’t come to fruition. A 75% failure rate! That’s stunning! That’s the reality of the world we live in, a world dominated by sin. That’s another word we don’t feel comfortable with as modern Christians: sin. Yet Jesus talked quite plainly about it.

  So if you look at all the parables, not just the one about the rich man and Lazarus,  what do you conclude? The first thing you conclude is this, and it is our basic starting point: death is the doorway to either heaven or hell. Death is not the end of our existence. We have our three score years and ten of earthly life, or if by reason of strength four score. My grandmother lived until she was past ninety. Amazing! But then the time came, when week after week, as I visited her, I could see her get frailer and frailer and weaker and weaker, until that last year, and then the last month and then the last day of her life. And then that doorway to eternity opened.

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