Additional Text: Genesis 15:1-18
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)
Is Hell Real? Our vision of a loving God makes the idea of a punitive Hell very unnerving for us. Jesus speaks of God’s love, but he also tells us in the Gospels about God’s punishment for sinners.
The discussion of punishment makes us uncomfortable. Not just us, though. Throughout time, the idea has been difficult to come to grips with. For example, in our Old Testament reading today (Gen 15:1-12, 17-18), the lectionary deliberately excludes the middle verses about God’s punishment of the Egyptians and the Amorites. (Gen 15:13-16) I included them today so we would have the full context the author intended.
Even our Gospel reading today was optionally purged of punishment. The entire Narrow Door section (Luke 13:22-30) is an optional reading. But without the context of the Narrow Door, the importance of Jesus longing to be able to gather the people of Jerusalem, the Jews who believed they had salvation just by being part of Abraham’s offspring, makes little sense. Without the narrow door passage, we can believe that things will still be OK when Jesus returns on Judgment Day, because everyone will recognize him as the savior, and say “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.”
The Narrow Door passage tells us, and the people of Jerusalem, that many people who thought they were saved because they had all the right boxes checked off on their “Requirements for Salvation List” will be stunned that they actually are not welcome in Heaven, while a bunch of Gentiles will be allowed in. Most Jews counted on their privileged position as descendants of Abraham to guarantee their entry into God’s Kingdom.
But in the Narrow Door passage, Jesus shows that salvation is a personal, not corporate, event. Heaven is not an HMO, or Holy Maintenance Organization, where the requirements for entry into the plan are reduced if we’re able to get a large enough group to participate.
Salvation is an individual experience that has individual requirements with individual results based on individual decisions.
Sharing meals together was a very high, spiritual level of fellowship. Remember, the Pharisees really criticized Jesus heavily for eating and drinking with sinners. So to have shared meals with Jesus, in their minds, meant an unbreakable guarantee that they would be part of any future celebration.
But we can associate with Jesus and then reject him. We do it all the time. We meet for church services each week, and then spend the other 166 hours doing whatever we feel like, often the exact opposite of what Jesus wants us to do.
The simpler term for doing what we want to do instead of what God wants us to do is “sin.” We don’t like to use that word because it sounds so judgmental, so we come up with all sorts of euphemisms like “alternative lifestyle,” or “pro-choice,” or “situational ethics,” to name just a few.
But Jesus states clearly in this passage — that the church’s hierarchy would prefer we not read — that sinners will not get into Heaven and will be sent away in terrible sorrow and misery. Without Jesus, that means all of us. Only with Jesus are we declared sinless and welcomed into the Father’s Heaven. It’s not our Heaven that we have some kind of right to inhabit.
I think that’s become an unfortunate by-product of our democratic form of government. For all its benefits — and I believe we have the best form of government existing today — the “me-ism” has grown way out of proportion in the past few decades.
We have become so convinced that we have all sorts of rights that no one has the authority to take away — like the right to offend others but not be offended by them, the right to free healthcare and prescriptions, a right to not be bothered by someone smoking a cigarette, and so on.
All these supposed “rights” lead us to an entitlement mentality by which we have actually become convinced that we are entitled to be in Heaven because God created us and that, whether we believe in him or not, he is obligated to let us be in there because we think it would be wrong for him to not let us in.
And since we think Heaven is OK, but Hell is wrong, God is not allowed to have a Hell, but if he decides to have one anyway, he is forbidden by human sensibilities from ever sending us there.
It amazes me that we can post “No Trespassing” signs all over our own earthly property and yet believe that God has to let us into His Heaven.
The major reason that the people in Jesus’ parable were refused entry was given by Jesus in verse 34: “You were not willing.”
Intellectually, they had heard and understood the Word (verse 26), and their hearts had been moved by his miracles, but they were willful instead of willing. You can’t enter through a Narrow Door if you’re not willing.
The NIV translation of “make every effort” is translated as “strive” in other versions. We don’t use the word “strive” much anymore, but it means the same thing as “make every effort.” The Greek word that the Gospel uses for those terms stems from the word (ag-oh-NEE-ah) “agonia,” which was used to describe an athlete giving his best to win the contest. It also appears in Luke’s description of Christ’s struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest and crucifixion. It’s where we get the English word, “agony.”
If we put as much effort into our spiritual lives as we do for our athletic events, if we read the Bible as much as we read the Sports Page, we would be much better off.
We need to continually surge forward spiritually, to prevent sliding backward. I discovered recently that the Australian coat of arms has a picture of an emu and a kangaroo. They chose those particular animals because they both share a common trait that appealed to the Australian forefathers. Emus and kangaroos can only move forward. They cannot move backward. The three-toed foot of the emu makes it fall if the emu steps back, and the kangaroo’s large tail prevents it from moving backward. People who choose to really follow Jesus and be his disciple become like the emu and the kangaroo, moving forward only, and never backward.
By accepting Jesus and moving forward with him through the action of the Holy Spirit within us, we are brought into his kingdom. We can’t get there on our own.
But we only get two choices: Heaven or Hell. There’s no third meandering existence outside of those choices where we can hang out with our other friends who didn’t choose Heaven, but avoid the unpleasantness of Hell.
All four major views of Hell are unpleasant. And there is biblical support for each view. They are literal, metaphorical, purgatorial, and conditional.
In the Literal view, Hell is a place with fire and pain and demonic torturers. Jesus described Hell, using the term Gehenna, which was the burning dumpsite outside town, where human sacrifices, including children, were burned on altars to the God Molech 10 to 15 centuries before, referenced in Joshua (15:18 and 18:16) and finally destroyed by Josiah in 2 Kings (23:10). Many near-death experiences describe this view.
Dr. Maurice Rawlings, is a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga, and his colleagues are constantly treating emergency patients, many of whom have had near-death experiences. A study of these cases by Dr. Rawlings was reported in Omni magazine.
According to the article, it is no longer unusual to hear about people who have almost died who speak of seeing a bright light, lush green meadows, rows of smiling relatives and experiencing a deep sense of peace. However, Rawlings obtains additional information from his patients by interviewing them immediately following resuscitation while they are very much in touch with their experience.
Rawlings says that nearly 50 percent of the 300 people that he has interviewed have reported lakes of fire, devil-like figures and other sights reflecting the darkness of hell. Rawlings says that these people later change their story because they don’t want to admit where they’ve been, not even to their families. “Just listening to these patients has changed my whole life. There is a life after death, and if I don’t know where I’m going, it’s not safe to die."
Rawlings, who was a devout atheist, “considered all religion ‘hocus-pocus’ and death nothing more than a painless extinction.” But something happened in 1977 that brought a dramatic change in his life. He was resuscitating a man, terrified and screaming.
“Each time he regained heartbeat and respiration, the patient screamed, ‘I am in hell!’ He was terrified and pleaded with me to help him. I was scared to death … Then I noticed a genuinely alarmed look on his face. He had a terrified look worse than the expression seen in death! This patient had a grotesque grimace expressing sheer horror! His pupils were dilated, and he was perspiring and trembling — he looked as if his hair was ‘on end.’
“Then still another strange thing happened. He said, “Don’t you understand? I am in hell …Don’t let me go back to hell!” …the man was serious, and it finally occurred to me that he was indeed in trouble. He was in a panic like I had never seen before.” Rawlings said, no one, who could have heard his screams and saw the look of terror on his face could doubt for a single minute that he was actually in a place called hell!
The Metaphorical view states that Jesus and the Gospel writers often used hyperbole and illustrations to warn of impending doom. Hell may not consist of actual fire, just as the “worm that never dies” may not be an actual worm. This doesn’t reduce the severity of Hell. In fact, it makes it even more gruesome, placing it beyond what we are even able to comprehend on this earthly plane. This view was the one espoused by theologians like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Charles Hodge, and J.I Packer who cautions, “Do not try to imagine what it is like to be in Hell… The mistake is to take such pictures as physical descriptions, when in fact they are imagery symbolizing realities … far worse than the symbols themselves.”
In the Purgatorial view, Hell has an antechamber chamber called purgatory, through which some people can be cleansed sufficiently to someday emerge and be restored to God’s grace in Heaven. Others, however, will be there eternally.
The difficulty with this view is that it denies the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice for us. Calvary alone is insufficient in this view. We must add to it somehow. Hence the additional focus on works as a requirement for salvation instead of being evidence of salvation.
The fourth, or conditional, view is also known as “Annihilation.” It’s the belief that unrepentant sinners die a final, second death. This view is poised between the idea of Hell as everlasting, conscious punishment and “Universalism,” in which there is no Hell, and everyone gets to go to Heaven because Christ died for us, regardless of whether we accept it or not.
Universalism violates the notion of free will, however. If we’re not free to reject or accept God, we’re not really free. Annihilation describes hell as a final, irreversible, and thus eternal punishment — rather than as an eternal punishing.
All four views share a common characteristic that should be noticed. They each recognize that any existence outside of Heaven is a horrible one. And whether we believe we know the exact details in store there — or feel better leaving those particulars to the Almighty — we recognize that Jesus thought Hell was terrible enough to save us from it.
Unforgiven sin guarantees our banishment from Heaven. But we tend to dismiss sin as almost irrelevant in discussing God’s obligation to us. That’s how we often view it right, as his obligation to us, instead of thinking about our obligation to him?
According to John Stott, “We need to rid our minds of the medieval caricature of Satan. Dispensing with the horns, the hooves, and the tail, we are left with the biblical portrait of a spiritual being, highly intelligent, immensely powerful and utterly unscrupulous. Jesus himself not only believed in his existence, but warned us of his power. He called him ‘the prince of this world,’ much as Paul called him ‘the ruler of the kingdom of the air,’ He has therefore a throne and a kingdom, and under his command is an army of malignant spirits who are described in Scripture as ‘the powers of this dark world,’ and ‘the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ (John 12:31; Eph. 6:12)” (Authentic Christianity, P. 397)
In the LifeShapes program, Mike Breen shows that there are seven principles of life that apply to all living things, including God’s people. The acronym “MRS GREN” can help you learn how to grow spiritually. It’s the same acronym taught in high school science classes to understand what constitutes a living organism. Since most of us ignored it then, I thought I’d repeat them for the non-science majors in the room: Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition.
Of all those elements of life, the part we least want to see or focus on is excretion. Like the sewer lines in our homes that we keep buried underground, and try not to ever look inside. No matter how well we clean our house those pipes remain filthy inside. If they don’t get flushed out, they eventually back up and contaminate everything in the house. You wouldn’t want any of that stuff on your floors, carpets, or furniture.
Sin is the excrement of our soul. I’m not trying to be gross, but as much as our physical excrement may disgust us, our spiritual excrement disgusts God even more.
We sin every day, even when we try our best not to do so. We sin less than we did before, and when we let Jesus into our lives, we recognize our sins for what they are, but still we sin and in so doing, we soil our soul. If we don’t excrete our sins from our souls, sin just continues to build up, and our spiritual life deteriorates until we finally reject God and any hope for life with him.
Our kidneys process the poisons that accumulate in our bodies, and eliminate them. Without that process, we poison ourselves. Humans die from kidney failure every day. The poisons in our bodies can’t be processed out, and those poisons eventually backup into our bloodstream and kill us.
The Center for Disease Control states that nearly 17 percent of adults in the United States aged 20 and older have kidney disease. That rises to 40 percent for Americans over age 60.
Each year kidney failure sends about 400,000 Americans into treatment.
Most of those people had no idea that they had a kidney problem, that their bodies were slowly killing them by not excreting the poisons that were building up inside.
When doctors told them about the problem, most of them accepted their doctor’s advice, and the required treatment. They want to live, so they follow the treatment plan, and continue living.
Many of those same people, as well as the rest of us, are told through the Bible, our pastors, or even our own consciences, that our accumulated sins will kill us, but that God will cleanse us of those sins and restore us to the sinless state he designed for us originally.
The required treatment is merely to accept his grace through his son, Jesus Christ, who will fill us with his cleansing spirit. You might even think of it as spiritual dialysis. We say that we want to live, but we reject the only treatment plan and guarantee our own spiritual deaths.
Only Jesus can purge the sin from our souls through his sacrifice for us.
And that’s the importance of Lent. To draw closer to Jesus and let him purge the sins from our souls each day so we can continue to move forward with him into his kingdom. He has saved us from Hell, if we will only accept his sacrifice and follow him in our lives.
We will experience part of the Kingdom while on earth, and the rest of it on the next plane. When the time comes, he will welcome us home.
Anne Graham Lotz wrote about a missionary named Samuel Morrison who had been serving in Africa for 25 years:
He was coming home on the same ocean liner that brought Teddy Roosevelt back from an African hunting expedition. The dock where the great ship pulled into New York Harbor was jammed with what looked like the entire population of New York City. Bands were playing, banners were waving, choirs of children were singing, multicolored balloons were floating, and newsreel cameras were poised to record the return of the President.
Mr. Roosevelt stepped down the gangplank to thunderous cheers, applause, and a shower of confetti and ticker tape. If ropes and police had not restrained the crowd, he would have been mobbed!
At the same time, Samuel Morrison quietly walked off the boat. No one was there to greet him; he slipped through the crowd alone. Because of the crush of people there to welcome the President, Morrison couldn’t even find a cab. He began to complain in his heart:
“Lord, the President has been in Africa killing animals for three weeks and the whole world turns out to welcome him home. I’ve given 25 years of my life in Africa, serving You, and no one has greeted me or even knows that I’m here.”
In the quietness of missionary Samuel Morrison’s heart, a gentle, loving voice whispered, “But my dear child, you’re not home yet!”
Our collect today, or gathering prayer, is “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son…”
Mercy and grace for those who have strayed, which is all of us; but it requires that we bring with us penitent hearts and steadfast faith in order to embrace and cling to the unchangeable truth of Jesus Christ.
Hell was created for Satan and his demons; not for us. But we are free to choose to go there instead of heaven. Our hearts will tell God whether we are saying “thy will be done” or “my will be done.”
The cost was worth it to Jesus to save each of us. Use this time of Lent to draw closer to him and accept his sacrifice on your behalf.
I have never in my life met someone who regretted drawing closer to Jesus. But just being here isn’t enough. Let him clean your soul.
God bless you.
