Please note. The passage for this talk is Matthew 25:31-46, however the main focus of the talk is v.46.
Part 4: What happens if we reject Jesus?
Today we have the fourth and last talk in my series on the gospel. We’re thinking about the question, ‘What happens if we reject Jesus?’
Quite a number of things either happen – or don’t happen – if we reject Jesus. Last week I used the analogy of a garden to talk about what changes if we ACCEPT Jesus. The garden of our lives comes under new ownership. The new owner, Jesus, takes care of the plants that are there and he tackles weeds and gets rid of rubbish. If we REJECT Jesus, that doesn’t happen. Isaiah talks about people whose hearts are ‘calloused.’ Some versions use the word ‘dull’ and a few versions have ‘insensitive.’ When a person hears God’s voice and ignores it, his heart gradually because calloused or dull or insensitive. So, if you hear God calling to you now, don’t delay! If you reject Jesus now, you may not hear God’s voice clearly in the future.
But today I really want to talk about what happens in the life to come if we reject Jesus. It’s a difficult subject to talk about but I believe it’s really important that we do. Apart from anything else, Jesus talked about it. That means that we need to.
In the passage Jo read for us, Jesus talked about ‘eternal punishment.’ We’ve probably grown up with that teaching and so we aren’t shocked by it any more. But when we think about it, it IS shocking.
David Clotfelter is a pastor in California. He’d become a Christian when he was a student. He then woke up to the Bible’s teaching on eternal punishment. He didn’t like it. But what made it even less palatable was the fact that God would choose who would be saved. Clotfelter wrote a book in which he defends the traditional Christian view. He described what he thought of it as a student:
"…what now bothered me was the evidence, from the Bible, that God Himself brings suffering on people, and that in the case of the impenitent He intends to continue doing so FOREVER. Worse yet, I found passages in the Scriptures that appeared to state that it is God who ultimately determines who will and who will not believe and be saved. This was staggering. Could it really be possible that God brings certain human beings into this world for the sole purpose of damning them?"
Clotfelter later rejects THAT idea. But let’s continue with Clotfelter’s account:
"I had had a taste of God’s goodness and a glimpse of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ; I knew that He is incapable of doing wrong. Yet there were times early in my Christian life when I was so horrified by the doctrines of hell and predestination that I found myself near despair."
So Clotfelter didn’t like the doctrine as a student. Did he come to like it better later on? Later in his book he wrote:
"…the doctrine of eternal punishment shatters me and reduces me to confusion and embarrassment."
Clotfelter wrote his book to defend the doctrine. But he clearly struggles with it.
Some years ago, I met someone called Michael. He helps lead university missions. We talked about a range of things. Among other things he commented that when he’s talking about the Christian faith, the three key questions that people in Western Europe ask concern suffering, hell, and sexuality. The doctrine of eternal punishment is part of the Christian teaching on hell. It isn’t just Clotfelter who struggles with it. Lots of people struggle with it. We just can’t get our minds around it.
One of the most basic reasons why we struggle with it is that is seems unjust. It even seems to contravene God’s principle of justice. God gave the ancient Israelites the law. One of the most basic principles that God set out for those ancient Israelites is called in Latin ‘lex talionis.’ We often refer to it as ‘an eye for an eye.’ Some people think that this principle is barbaric. It isn’t. It’s a key statement that punishment must fit the crime. In 18th century England a person could be hanged for all sorts of crimes – stealing a horse, for example. That doesn’t correspond to ‘lex talionis.’ The punishment isn’t proportionate to the crime. So, God set out the principle of ‘lex talionis’ or proportionality. Let’s apply that to our passage.
In the passage Jo read to us, Jesus separates people. In v.34 Jesus places some people on his right. Good things are coming their way. In v.35 Jesus explains why. It’s because of what they have DONE. In the Bible, salvation is by faith; judgement is on the basis of deeds.
Now let’s turn to those who remain. Jesus doesn’t need to place them on his left. Having moved a group of people to his right, the remaining people are on his left. He tells this group, ‘Depart from me.’ ‘Go away,’ in other words. This group isn’t made up of murderers or child-molesters or fraudsters. They aren’t there because of what they DID. They are there because of what they DIDN’T do. At the end of this, Jesus doesn’t deliver a sentence. He simply observes: ‘And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.’
The traditional teaching of the church is that what Jesus means is that this group of people will experience conscious eternal torment in hell. Does that correspond to ‘lex talionis’? Is the punishment proportionate to the crime?
Over a period of thirty or forty years, perhaps, the people in this group have not given food to the hungry or a drink to the thirsty. They have not welcomed the stranger. They have not clothed the naked and they have not visited the prisoner. That’s the crime. Now here’s the punishment: they will experience conscious eternal torment. It doesn’t seem just. It doesn’t seem to fit with the principle which God himself instituted, of ‘lex talionis’, the punishment must be proportionate to the crime.
As I mentioned, Clotfelter doesn’t like this Bible teaching. But he thinks that it’s what the Bible teaches, so he defends it.
I’ve been aware that this is a troublesome part of Christian teaching. Priscilla and I read the Bible together every morning. Quite often, if I see that a verse relates to this subject, I make a note of it. I’ve probably been doing that for five years or so and I’ve noted thirty or more verses. These verses paint a consistent picture. They use words such as ‘destruction’, ‘destroy’, ‘death’, ‘consume’ and ‘perish.’ These verses DON’T say that a person will experience conscious eternal torment. They say that life will come to an end. There are plenty of verses which say that everyone will be judged by God. So, this view doesn’t mean that a person will not experience judgement. The person will experience judgement, and it won’t be a happy experience for the person who’s rejected God. Within Christianity this view is called ‘annihilation.’
I don’t want to take you through thirty or so verses that make this point, and I don’t have time to. But I can at least give you a taste of what they tell us. Let’s start with a few verses from the Old Testament. This is David, in Psalm 37:20:
"But the wicked will perish;
the enemies of the Lord are like the glory of the pastures
THEY VANISH—LIKE SMOKE THEY VANISH AWAY."
David isn’t expecting the wicked to experience eternal punishment. He’s expecting them to vanish away.
We’ll have one from Isaiah. This is Isaiah 1:28
"But rebels and sinners shall be broken together,
and those who forsake the Lord SHALL BE CONSUMED."
Isaiah isn’t expecting the wicked to experience eternal punishment. He’s expecting the wicked to be consumed.
Let’s move to the New Testament. Here’s Jesus in Matthew 10:28:
"And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."
Jesus isn’t telling us to fear eternal punishment. He’s telling us to fear the one who can bring about our total destruction, destruction of soul and body.
John tells us the same. Here’s John 3:16, the best-known verse in the Bible:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him SHOULD NOT PERISH but have eternal life."
According to John, perishing is the result if we don’t put our faith in Jesus. He doesn’t mention conscious eternal torment.
Paul says the same. Here’s Romans 6:23:
"For the wages of sin IS DEATH, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Paul tells us that ‘the wages of sin is death.’ Let me make a rather obvious point. If you’re experiencing conscious eternal torment in hell, you aren’t dead.
Here’s Paul again, in 2 Thessalonians 1:9:
"They will suffer the punishment of ETERNAL DESTRUCTION, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…"
We’ll come back to this verse later. I hope we’re getting the idea. As I looked through scripture, I found verse after verse which tell us that the wicked will be destroyed; they will not continue to exist.
So, we have a problem.
There is a small group of verses, such as the verse at the end of our passage in Matthew 25 and two verses in Revelation, which apparently show that the unsaved will go to hell and experience torment forever.
There is a large group of verses, such as the ones I’ve just mentioned, which apparently show that the unsaved will perish.
I use the word ‘apparently’ deliberately. One of these interpretations must be wrong. We can’t have it both ways. Either the unsaved will go to hell and experience torment forever or they will perish. If the Bible is giving a consistent message then they can’t both be right.
Is there a solution? It would be very nice if conscious eternal torment was out of the picture. But we must respect scripture. Is there a way which we can understand the verses which talk about eternal punishment so that they don’t contradict the verses which talk about vanishing, being destroyed, perishing?
I don’t have time now to look at all the verses, but I’ll try to at least answer the question for Matthew 25:46. This is a key verse that has shaped the church’s traditional teaching on this subject.
To explain what I think the solution is, let’s go back to 2 Thessalonians 1:9. We looked briefly at this verse before. Paul wrote: "They [that is, the godless and disobedient] will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction." Here Paul uses the same Greek word for eternal as we have in Matthew. What does Paul mean by ‘eternal destruction’? Does he mean that there will be destruction continuing all through eternity? Or does he mean that the disobedient are destroyed in single event, but the effect of that event will be felt all through eternity? A developer knocks a house down, and then it’s gone. He can’t knock it down every year. The punishment of eternal destruction must mean an event – destruction – which will have a consequence for eternity.
Jesus talks about eternal punishment. I believe that in the same way he means a punishment that will happen once, but its effect will be felt through all eternity. What is that punishment? Paul wrote in Romans that ‘the wages of sin is death.’ If a court imposes a death sentence, the punishment is that a person is deprived of life. The punishment that the Bible envisages for sin is death. So, it’s reasonable to suppose that when Jesus speaks of eternal punishment, the punishment he has in mind is death. We will all die physically – unless Jesus comes back in our lifetime! But those who have rejected Jesus will also die spiritually. This punishment is an eternal punishment. It will have an effect for eternity. There won’t be any coming back from it.
When I was training in Bristol to become a minister, we had a course on preaching. One piece of advice that was given is that a talk should always be ‘good news.’ Jesus’ teaching here in Matthew might not seem like ‘good news.’ But I believe that actually it is good news.
First, Jesus is giving a warning. He will separate the sheep and the goats. Warnings are helpful. We say ‘thank you’ to people who give us a timely warning.
Second, if we take it that those who are not saved perish, it resolves two real difficulties in the church’s traditional teaching.
The first difficulty is that many verses refer to death, perishing, being consumed, destruction and so on. If those who reject Jesus experience conscious eternal torment then all these verses are wrong. You cannot experience conscious eternal torment if you are dead. So that’s a difficulty.
The second difficulty is the matter of God’s justice. How can a punishment of conscious eternal torment be just? I said that Clotfelter defended the church’s traditional position. He wrote, under the heading, ‘The Infinite Evil of Sin’:
"The third—and in my view the strongest—explanation of hell’s eternity is one first used by the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury and most clearly expressed by Jonathan Edwards. This is the argument that because God is a Being of infinite worth, to whom we owe an infinite obligation, sin against God is an infinite evil requiring an infinite punishment."
Clotfleter used the expression ‘an infinite evil’ to describe sin against God. Edwards used the expression ‘infinitely heinous.’ Let’s see how this works in practice in Matthew 25. You’re in front of Jesus, on his left. He explains why: ‘You did not visit me in prison. You did not feed me when I was hungry.’ Now for the consequence: ‘That is an infinitely heinous crime. Therefore, I sentence you to eternal conscious punishment.’ I hope that seems just to you. If it doesn’t, you have a difficulty.
Both of these difficulties are resolved if we take the view that the unsaved perish.
Third, if we believe that the unsaved will perish, many of us can have much more peace. We may have family and friends who have passed away who didn’t have a faith. Maybe Jesus won’t receive them. But it’s easier to accept that they will perish than to think they will suffer in hell for all eternity.
One of the most outstanding Christian leaders over the past half century or more was John Stott. He took the position that people who reject Jesus perish. He presented his ideas in a book that was published in 1989. After explaining his view, he wrote the following:
"I do not dogmatise about the position to which I have come. I hold it tentatively. But I do plead for frank dialogue among Evangelicals on the basis of Scripture. I also believe that the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically-founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment."
Stott wasn’t saying, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’ He’s saying, ‘Let this be a position which Evangelical (that is, Bible-believing) Christians can be allowed to hold.’
Like Stott, I don’t which to say dogmatically that it’s correct. But I think that the position that those who reject Jesus perish, rather than experience conscious eternal torment, is true to Scripture and is consistent with God’s justice.
In this talk I wanted to answer the question of what happens if we reject Jesus. As far as the life to come is concerned, scripture tells us that we will all face judgement. To those who remain on Jesus’ left, Jesus will say, ‘Depart from me.’ They will be thrown into outer darkness, where they will perish.
But we thank God that he doesn't want anyone to perish, and there is no need for that to happen. Jesus has opened the way to eternal life to us.
Talk given at Rosebery Park Baptist Church, Bournemouth, UK, 22nd November 2020
