SPEAKER_00: Good morning, Spring Lake.
SPEAKER_00: How are we doing this morning?
SPEAKER_00: Good, good.
SPEAKER_00: If we haven't many, my name is Ryan.
SPEAKER_00: I am the pastor of family ministries, and it's always a delight to be back at the downtown campus.
SPEAKER_00: Uh when I was in high school, I lived in Stevens Point, Go Dogs, and the town over from us, or a little bit away from us, had a local church that every year hosted an event around October, around Halloween, called The Nightmare.
SPEAKER_00: And the radio ads for the nightmare sounded like this Coming this October.
SPEAKER_00: The nightmare.
SPEAKER_00: All right, and it was creepy music playing in the background, and it was sort of like a Christian haunted house.
SPEAKER_00: Don't raise your hand if you've ever been to something like this.
SPEAKER_00: But I never wanted to go as a high schooler.
SPEAKER_00: I was rightfully terrified, didn't seem interesting to me.
SPEAKER_00: Then I got into college at Stevens Point, Go Dogs, and I thought, you know what, I'm I'm tough enough, I'm old enough now, and a couple of my buddies and I decide to go to the nightmare.
SPEAKER_00: So we stand in line for too long, it felt like there's creepy music playing, and we're kind of getting, you know, all amped up, and we get into what is sort of like a warehouse that has been, you know, uh reused and and created these different scenes and and and settings, and we were kind of walked through these different rooms by this like drill sergeant who's like yelling at us and telling us that, you know, these are all performers, but we go from scene to scene through this warehouse, and we watched people, these actors, um, die in kind of gruesome and graphic and surprising ways.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them were engaged in like illicit or dangerous activity, and we watched them die.
SPEAKER_00: Then you'd kind of move to the next scene and you'd see someone else die, and eventually you're kind of guided through and get into one of the last rooms where you are supposed to be in hell itself.
SPEAKER_00: And we're sitting in the middle of this room, and around the outsides of the room are people, performers, in cages, like screaming and yelling and reaching out through the bars at us, and there were like, you know, kind of flames depicted and kind of demonic, you know, creatures, and it was it was terrifying.
SPEAKER_00: And then we were guided into a final room where we were shown a video with like the gospel message of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That if you believe in Jesus, then you don't have to be worried about any of this.
SPEAKER_00: You can give your life to him and be spared from hell.
SPEAKER_00: And I gotta be honest with you, the whole thing made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: Uncomfortable at the tactic itself, and I'll say a little bit about that, but also uncomfortable at the thought of hell, of people suffering for eternity in hell.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe you grew up in a church that talked about heaven and hell like that, where that was sort of the main way that the good news about Jesus was preached was sort of a fear-driven message about not going to hell.
SPEAKER_00: And for those of us who did grow up in that kind of context, or maybe even came to Jesus in that kind of a church environment, sometimes what can happen is we can swing the pendulum the other way quite a ways.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I I think that's true for me sometimes, that like I don't like talking about hell.
SPEAKER_00: I don't like thinking about hell.
SPEAKER_00: And I would say, even as a church, like we don't talk about hell a ton.
SPEAKER_00: If you're here on weekend services, you won't hear people standing up here and banging the pulpit and telling people that they are going to hell.
SPEAKER_00: But because of that desire not to use a fear tactic, we know that fear of hell doesn't sustain a lifelong relationship with Jesus, and we want to emphasize the love of God and the blessing of a relationship with Him for eternity.
SPEAKER_00: Because of that, I think sometimes we de-emphasize hell and we don't talk a ton about it.
SPEAKER_00: Which is why as we're getting ready for this series on uncomfortable, I thought, well, hell makes me uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: And it probably makes you uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible speaks very clearly about hell.
SPEAKER_00: And so if we're gonna understand the God of the Bible and Jesus who's revealed in the scripture, then we need to grapple with what is true about hell.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, Jesus speaks most often about hell as a part as opposed to other parts of the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus talks a lot about hell.
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're gonna be diving into this morning.
SPEAKER_00: And before we jump in, I want to just offer one caveat that we should never speak flippantly about hell.
SPEAKER_00: I should never use it as a curse word, we should never take light of it or make jokes about it.
SPEAKER_00: It's a serious, it's like a grave issue, and we should never take joy or delight in the thought of others uh going to hell.
SPEAKER_00: And so we don't talk about this with glee or with excitement, but with seriousness.
SPEAKER_00: This this is what scripture teaches, and so we want to know what is really true.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to summarize the Bible's teaching on hell.
SPEAKER_00: If you have the uh UVersion Bible app, you can open it up.
SPEAKER_00: There are um notes in there, you can follow along with the scriptures on the screen, but because this is a topical message, compiling a number of different scriptures together, we're gonna move pretty rapidly from scripture to scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So you can try and follow along in a physical Bible if you want, but the scriptures will also be up on the screen.
SPEAKER_00: Let me begin by summarizing the storyline of scripture and how hell fits into that storyline.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture begins in Genesis 1 and 2 with God creating everything good.
SPEAKER_00: The entire world is his creation, and he creates human beings in his image to rule alongside with him, and he intends to give them eternal life, that they would live forever with him, reigning and ruling in his good world.
SPEAKER_00: But the first humans, Adam and Eve, they rebel against God, they disobey him, and they decide to go their own way, which plunges all of the world into sin and chaos and death.
SPEAKER_00: So that after Adam and Eve, all are sort of banished from the life, giving presence of God and subject to death and decay.
SPEAKER_00: God's good world is ruined by sin and death.
SPEAKER_00: So God enacts a rescue plan through this one guy, Abraham and his family, and says, I'm gonna restore things to the way that they ought to be.
SPEAKER_00: That family grows into a nation of Israel, and God carries out his plan of salvation through one Israelite, Jesus, who is actually God and man, and Jesus comes and he lives the perfect life that we ought to have lived.
SPEAKER_00: He dies the death that we deserve to die for our sin, and he offers rescue, salvation for all who believe in him.
SPEAKER_00: Then the Bible says that one day God is gonna set everything right.
SPEAKER_00: This world is messed up, it's corrupted, it's distorted, there's wickedness, there's injustice.
SPEAKER_00: But God is gonna do away with all of that, and he's gonna bring about a new heavens and a new earth, a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: So for those who believe in Jesus, they will get to spend eternity with God in a new creation, forever with him.
SPEAKER_00: But those who are opposed to Jesus, stand against God in his ways, they will be cast into hell.
SPEAKER_00: So this is the teaching of the Bible about hell.
SPEAKER_00: And the idea of God's judgment, of people suffering, especially for eternity, is uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: So it has caused some people to modify or I would say twist the biblical teaching on hell in a few different ways.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to show you a slide that has three different uh views on it.
SPEAKER_00: That I believe the first two are distortions of what scripture clearly teaches about hell.
SPEAKER_00: The first distortion I believe is called universalism.
SPEAKER_00: Universalism is the idea that everyone will eventually be saved.
SPEAKER_00: That if you were to zoom a million years into the future, eventually every single being would be reconciled to God, which is sometimes why this view is called universal reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00: Or it can also be called post-mortem salvation, the idea that people can be saved even after death.
SPEAKER_00: If you were paying attention in the early 2010s, you might remember Rob Bell's book, Love Wins, where he raised these questions.
SPEAKER_00: What if the traditional teaching on hell is wrong and eventually everyone might be saved?
SPEAKER_00: Or you might remember the book, The Shack, which sort of had universalist leanings.
SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to podcasts or you're watching YouTube videos about people who would say that they are ex-vangelicals or deconstructing their faith, oftentimes a part of that journey is a rejection of the biblical teaching on hell and a move towards some sort of universalism, that one day all people will be reconciled to God.
SPEAKER_00: And you can see why this is an attractive position.
SPEAKER_00: It seems to comport with the idea that God is love, but again, it's nowhere taught in Scripture and it ignores clear passages about God's judgment and the finality of death.
SPEAKER_00: The second, I think, distortion of the biblical teaching is called annihilationism.
SPEAKER_00: Annihilationism is the idea that those who die apart from Christ will cease to exist.
SPEAKER_00: They will be, again, they will eventually just die and then they will have no more existence.
SPEAKER_00: This is sometimes also called conditional immortality.
SPEAKER_00: The idea being that we are not inherently immortal by virtue of being human, but that God grants immortality to those who believe in him.
SPEAKER_00: Those who don't believe in Jesus, they just don't go on existing forever.
SPEAKER_00: They cease to exist.
SPEAKER_00: This is the official position of Seventh-day Adventists.
SPEAKER_00: So if you know people in that, the uh Church of Latter-day Saints, um, or Jehovah's Witnesses also would hold to a form of annihilation, annihilationism.
SPEAKER_00: And I would say there's a growing uh number of people who would identify as evangelical who are gravitating towards evangelicalism.
SPEAKER_00: Or gravitating towards annihilationism.
SPEAKER_00: Um if you saw Kirk Cameron got into a little bit of a scuffle online a couple months ago where he was talking about annihilationism and said that kind of is where he's leaning at this point.
SPEAKER_00: There was a debate that spun off of that.
SPEAKER_00: They called it Hellgate.
SPEAKER_00: There's a video about this on online, and I think there's a number of folks who would say, yeah, I think that position seems like it is uh attractive to me.
SPEAKER_00: And you can see why that would be the case.
SPEAKER_00: It seems a little bit easier to understand.
SPEAKER_00: Uh God just, you know, punishes people maybe for a short period of time in hell, and then they cease to exist.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it grabs onto language in the Bible of destruction or death.
SPEAKER_00: But I think this too is a twisting or an ignoring of clear passages that speak about everlasting punishment.
SPEAKER_00: And so the way the view that we hold to as a church, that our members, our staff hold to, is the historic traditional position of the church, which is eternal conscious punishment.
SPEAKER_00: That those who die apart from Christ will suffer for eternity in hell.
SPEAKER_00: It's the idea that hell is never ending, that those in hell are aware of what's happening to them, and that hell is the just consequence for their sin and rebellion against God.
SPEAKER_00: So, according to this view, hell is a real place.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a figment of our imaginations, it's not a mental state or a sort of perception.
SPEAKER_00: It is real, and yet, unlike later Christian writings about hell, like Dante's Inferno or more cartoonish depictions of hell, the Bible actually gives us very sparse details about hell.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, what it gives us are images, these kind of symbolic depictions of hell, and they are communicating a true reality, but they're doing so in images.
SPEAKER_00: And so I want to give you, I want to show you the three main images for hell in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Number one is this, the image of destruction.
SPEAKER_00: You'll see this throughout the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe the most common depiction of hell is that of destruction.
SPEAKER_00: You also see language of perishing or dying or being ruined or being destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, in Psalm 1 verse 6, it says this says, The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction, leads to destruction.
SPEAKER_00: Or a well-known verse, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't say those who believe in him will not suffer for eternity in hell.
SPEAKER_00: It says those who believe in him will not perish, but have eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: Or in Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death.
SPEAKER_00: It's death, but the gift of God is eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: Or we see this in 2 Peter 3, verse 7.
SPEAKER_00: It says, by the same word, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment, and the destruction of the ungodly.
SPEAKER_00: So again, that language has caused some people to gravitate towards annihilationism.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, maybe the wicked, those who don't believe, are just simply destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: But if you pay attention to the way that we use the language of destruction today, you can see that destruction doesn't necessarily communicate ceasing to exist.
SPEAKER_00: So, for instance, if you were talking about a house fire, this house just burned to the ground, you might say that the house was completely destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: It was utterly destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: And what you mean by that is not that the molecules popped out of existence and that there was nothing left.
SPEAKER_00: What you mean is that it was reduced to a pile of charred ashes, that for all intents and purposes, this house is gone.
SPEAKER_00: It no longer exists as a house.
SPEAKER_00: It's now ruined, beyond repair, and unusable.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's what the image of destruction is communicating about hell as well.
SPEAKER_00: It's the idea that God is the ultimate source of life, of flourishing, of abundance.
SPEAKER_00: And his original design is that we would live in communion with him forever, imaging him, flourishing, thriving.
SPEAKER_00: But when we rebel against him, we cut ourselves off from that source of life.
SPEAKER_00: Now, often when scripture talks about God destroying the wicked, it's talking on the physical plane of this life.
SPEAKER_00: The wicked are killed, they die.
SPEAKER_00: But especially in the New Testament, the concept of destruction or perishing is usually referring to eschatological judgment or end times judgment.
SPEAKER_00: And that's how we should think about hell as destruction.
SPEAKER_00: Those in hell are cut off from God's life.
SPEAKER_00: They are ruined and corrupted to the point that they no longer image God as they ought to.
SPEAKER_00: C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis, a famous Christian writer, often talked about how the choices that we make in this life are making us into more of his language, like making us more of a heavenly being or a more of a hellish being, this sort of character solidification that you become more like one or the other.
SPEAKER_00: And uh Tim Keller, picking up on Lewis's uh language like that in a book called Re The Reason for God, says this about hell.
SPEAKER_00: He's trying to explain hell as this destruction that goes on for eternity.
SPEAKER_00: He says, even in this life, we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates.
SPEAKER_00: We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them.
SPEAKER_00: Now I ask the question: what if when we die we don't end?
SPEAKER_00: But spiritually, our life extends on into eternity.
SPEAKER_00: Hell then is the trajectory of a soul living a self-absorbed, self-centered life going on and on forever.
SPEAKER_00: In short, hell is simply one's freely chosen identity apart from God, on a trajectory into infinity.
SPEAKER_00: It is an eternal destruction, an eternal ruining.
SPEAKER_00: So that is the first main image for hell in Scripture, that it is destruction.
SPEAKER_00: The second main image we see is that of torment.
SPEAKER_00: Hell is depicted as torment.
SPEAKER_00: And so we see fire, images of fire, or a fiery lake of burning sulfur.
SPEAKER_00: We hear the language of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
SPEAKER_00: I would say one of the most significant passages for our understanding of hell in the New Testament comes from Matthew chapter 25.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is telling the parable of the sheep and the goats, and as he gets to the end of the parable, he says this, beginning in verse 41.
SPEAKER_00: Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
SPEAKER_00: For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat.
SPEAKER_00: I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.
SPEAKER_00: I was a stranger and you did not invite me in.
SPEAKER_00: I needed clothes, and you did not clothe me.
SPEAKER_00: I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.
SPEAKER_00: They will also answer, Lord, when do we see you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or needing clothes, or sick or in prison, and did not help you?
SPEAKER_00: And he will reply, Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
SPEAKER_00: Then they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: So notice here hell is called the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels, and then in verse forty-six, we see a contrast between eternal punishment and eternal life.
SPEAKER_00: The same word eternal there is used for both eternal life and punishment.
SPEAKER_00: So whatever eternal life is, ongoing existence with God, the same is true of hell.
SPEAKER_00: That is eternal, ongoing, everlasting punishment.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus will also say this about hell in Matthew 13.
SPEAKER_00: Again, he's coming to the end of a parable, the parable of the weeds, and in verse 40 of chapter 13, he says this As the weeds are pulled up and burn in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age.
SPEAKER_00: The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin, and all who do evil.
SPEAKER_00: And they will throw them into the blazing furnace, where they will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
SPEAKER_00: Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father.
SPEAKER_00: Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.
SPEAKER_00: So we see it described as a blazing furnace, and then we see weeping and gnashing of teeth.
SPEAKER_00: Now weeping communicates this like recognition of how terrible hell is, and then we see gnashing of teeth.
SPEAKER_00: And I always thought that gnashing of teeth is meant to communicate agony, pain.
SPEAKER_00: Like you're just so gritting your teeth because you're in so much pain.
SPEAKER_00: But if you look up that phrasing in the Old Testament and you see where gnashing of teeth shows up, there's a couple places where it's like a king that's been conquered is gnashing their teeth at the king that's conquered them.
SPEAKER_00: So it's more of a communication of like anger and resentment and bitterness.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's meant to communicate that those in hell hate God.
SPEAKER_00: They're angry at him, they're resentful, they're bitter.
SPEAKER_00: Which is why uh there's this also this idea that those in hell are continuing, in a sense, to sin, to reject God, to rebel against him.
SPEAKER_00: In probably the longest parable that deals with hell, in Luke chapter 18, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, we see this depiction of the rich man and in hell or Hades and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom.
SPEAKER_00: And even in hell, the rich man is kind of like bossing Abraham around.
SPEAKER_00: He wants to boss the you know um the Lazarus around as well.
SPEAKER_00: He's kind of still arrogant, not really repentant.
SPEAKER_00: And again, it has led theologians and Bible scholars to say perhaps it is the case that even in hell, people just continue to go on sinning.
SPEAKER_00: Which helps me at least understand why hell is eternal.
SPEAKER_00: Because it doesn't really compute to me to think, well, why should a person be punished for an infinite amount of time for like 80 years of sin or 80 years of rejecting Jesus however long they live?
SPEAKER_00: But what if every single moment in hell people continue to be idolaters and hating God and rebelling against him, and they become more and more selfish and greedy and idolatrous for eternity?
SPEAKER_00: Well, then it would make sense why their punishment would be everlasting.
SPEAKER_00: We see in Revelation 14 describes the smoke of their torment going up.
SPEAKER_00: In Revelation 20, we get the lake of fire, and that image shows up again and again, the l the image of fire, to describe this image of torment.
SPEAKER_00: Now, fire is a really powerful image, and it helps us in a couple ways.
SPEAKER_00: Fire can be a good thing, right?
SPEAKER_00: Fire helps us cook, you know, it uh creates heat, it creates light.
SPEAKER_00: Fire is a great thing, but in the right context, it's good.
SPEAKER_00: In the wrong context, it is dangerous.
SPEAKER_00: Or if you don't have the proper protection, then you get damaged by fire.
SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes in the Bible, fire symbolizes the very presence of God himself.
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's partly what the image of fire is doing when it comes to hell as well.
SPEAKER_00: That those in hell experience not the presence of God in a blessing sense, but they experience the judicial, condemning the presence of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, again, Dante's inferno and maybe some more cartoonish depictions of hell, I think take the image too far and interpret it literalistically, but it is describing something real.
SPEAKER_00: And so, what will hell be like?
SPEAKER_00: It will be like being on fire.
SPEAKER_00: It will be psychological and physical torment.
SPEAKER_00: And yet, this is the clear picture that Jesus gives us is that it is torment.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the second depiction.
SPEAKER_00: Hell is destruction, hell is torment, and then finally hell is depicted as exile or banishment from God's presence.
SPEAKER_00: You see language of outer darkness.
SPEAKER_00: Or being outside.
SPEAKER_00: A number of different places, Jesus describes the fate of the wicked as outside or in the darkness.
SPEAKER_00: So you'll get this in Matthew chapter 8, verse 12, says this.
SPEAKER_00: While the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into the outer darkness.
SPEAKER_00: And in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
SPEAKER_00: Those are Jewish people who reject Jesus as the Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: Now you can see why these are images.
SPEAKER_00: It's fire, but it's also dark.
SPEAKER_00: Now the darkness is communicating, again, this being separated in a sense from God's blessing, his presence of his blessing.
SPEAKER_00: We have to understand God is omnipresent, so he's everywhere, but hell can be described as the absence of his covenantal presence or his presence of blessing.
SPEAKER_00: Revelation 21 and 22, some of my favorite chapters in the Bible describe this new creation that God is going to bring about when Jesus returns, that there will be an Eden restored, and God will dwell with his people.
SPEAKER_00: But then it says this after depicting the new creation as the new Jerusalem, this new city.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 14 and 15 of chapter 22 say, Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to go to the tree of life, and they may enter, or they may go through the gates into the city.
SPEAKER_00: Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
SPEAKER_00: So it's described as being outside.
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, in a passage that brings a few of these images together, 2 Thessalonians chapter 1, verses 8 and 9, says this.
SPEAKER_00: Then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.
SPEAKER_00: Ooh, I'm reading the wrong passage here.
SPEAKER_00: First, oh wrong chapter.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, chapter 1, verse 8 and 9.
SPEAKER_00: He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: They will be punished with an everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.
SPEAKER_00: So you can see a few of those threads coming together.
SPEAKER_00: There's punishment.
SPEAKER_00: It's described as destruction and being separated from the presence of God Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I have three little kids.
SPEAKER_00: They get older every year, obviously, but when they were really, really little, um, they were really connected tightly to their mom.
SPEAKER_00: They just always wanted to be around mom.
SPEAKER_00: And I just spent a week with mom away on a mission trip with uh Pastor Garrett, actually.
SPEAKER_00: And there were nights where it was it was tough for the kids.
SPEAKER_00: They missed their mom.
SPEAKER_00: But especially when they were little, there'd be times where she would hand you know them off to me and they would just freak out, mommy! You know, she'd have to leave the room to like go to the bathroom or you know, go grocery shopping, or whatever it was, and I'd be with the kids, and it was just like they lost their mind.
SPEAKER_00: Like her presence to them was this amazing blessing, and her absence was a curse.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I won't say what that says about my presence, you know, in their in their lives.
SPEAKER_00: But it was clear, like they were comforted by her presence, and to lose, you know, her presence was this awful, awful experience.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the way this image of hell as exile works.
SPEAKER_00: That God's very life was meant to be communicated to us through his presence.
SPEAKER_00: That was his plan all along, to dwell with him.
SPEAKER_00: And just as Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, just as Israel was exiled from the promised land, so those who reject Jesus in this life face an eternal exile, banished outside the new creation, cut off from the presence of God.
SPEAKER_00: So hell is destruction, it's torment and its exile.
SPEAKER_00: Now I know all this raises just tons of questions, and hopefully you're feeling uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: I'm uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sweating.
SPEAKER_00: It raises questions about like how much does a person need to know in order to be accountable to God and be sent to hell?
SPEAKER_00: Who is in hell?
SPEAKER_00: It raises all kinds of questions, and I hear that.
SPEAKER_00: Don't hear me like dismissing any of those.
SPEAKER_00: There's only so much you know we can cover in this message.
SPEAKER_00: But I would say the most common question that gets raised when we start talking about hell is this how can a loving God send people to hell?
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't the Bible say that God is love?
SPEAKER_00: How is it how can it be the case then that God, who is love, can send people to hell?
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're wrestling with that question, it is a good question.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be dismissive, and like if you were to ask me that in the lobby, we would sit down and we'd talk about it for a while, and I'd ask questions, and there'd be follow-up and it'd be a dialogue.
SPEAKER_00: But since you know you're there and I'm I'm here, eventually I'd want to offer a response or two.
SPEAKER_00: One response would sound a little bit like something a teacher friend said to me uh once.
SPEAKER_00: She was nearing the end of the semester, and she had a student come up to her and accuse her and say, Why are you being so mean to me?
SPEAKER_00: Why do you hate me?
SPEAKER_00: Why are you failing me in this class?
SPEAKER_00: Like, don't you know I'm gonna have to repeat this class?
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna be able to start in basketball next year.
SPEAKER_00: This is gonna like really set me back.
SPEAKER_00: Why are you doing this to me?
SPEAKER_00: Why do you, you know, why are you being so mean to me?
SPEAKER_00: And she responded to this student, I am not failing you.
SPEAKER_00: I've given you every opportunity to come in for help.
SPEAKER_00: You have not turned your assignments in on time, you've not retaken the tests like I've offered, you haven't come to my office for help with any of this.
SPEAKER_00: I am not failing you.
SPEAKER_00: You are choosing to fail my class.
SPEAKER_00: And at some level, that is a similar response to the question of what why does God send people to hell?
SPEAKER_00: The answer is God, in a sense, does not send people to hell.
SPEAKER_00: We are all headed towards hell because of our choices, because of our sin, because of our rebellion against God, our self-centeredness.
SPEAKER_00: We are headed towards hell, and God offers us a way out.
SPEAKER_00: He offers us rescue.
SPEAKER_00: More than that, he offers us love, a relationship with Him, union with Christ, transformation into the kind of humans that we know we ought to be, and eternal life in a new creation.
SPEAKER_00: That's on offer.
SPEAKER_00: But we have to choose it.
SPEAKER_00: We have to go to him and say, I receive that free gift that you are offering me.
SPEAKER_00: So, in a sense, we send ourselves to hell.
SPEAKER_00: Second response might be as you ask, well, how can a loving God also send people to hell?
SPEAKER_00: That question is pitting two attributes of God against one another.
SPEAKER_00: It's pitting God's love against his justice.
SPEAKER_00: And in scripture, God is depicted as being consistent within his own character.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't sometimes act in love and sometimes act in this way.
SPEAKER_00: He's always all of his attributes, he always acts consistently within his nature.
SPEAKER_00: He's righteous and just.
SPEAKER_00: And so his justice leads him to do the right thing and punish sin for eternity.
SPEAKER_00: His love honors each person's choice and gives them what they ultimately want.
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SPEAKER_00: Lewis again talked about hell and said that hell will be locked from the inside.
SPEAKER_00: What he meant by that is all who are in hell ultimately are getting what they want.
SPEAKER_00: And he said this in a book called The Great Divorce.
SPEAKER_00: He said there are only two kinds of people, those who say, Thy will be done to God, or those to whom God in the end says, Thy will be done.
SPEAKER_00: All that are in hell, choose it.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, if you spend your life saying, I want to do things my way, I don't want to submit to God, I don't want to worship him, I want to be the center of my life, I want to be in charge, I'm good enough, I'm satisfied enough, I'm doing just fine on my own.
SPEAKER_00: I don't need you, God, I don't want you.
SPEAKER_00: Then at the end of the day, God will finally say to you, okay, if that's what you want, then that's what you will get for eternity.
SPEAKER_00: And so, in a sense, God's love, again, honors each person's choice and gives them what they want.
SPEAKER_00: Again, this is difficult, this is uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00: What do we do with this teaching, this clear teaching in scripture on hell?
SPEAKER_00: Let me offer just a few responses.
SPEAKER_00: Number one is this if you're here and you would say that you're a follower of Jesus, then our response is to humble ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: That if thinking about the doctrine of hell, if reading about the doctrine of hell, if hearing sermons about the doctrine of hell brings any sort of puffed up righteousness in you or judgmentalism that you know where everyone else is going and you're pointing your finger at everyone else, and you're like, yeah, get them, Pastor! Like, talk to them about hell.
SPEAKER_00: Holy cow.
SPEAKER_00: Chances are, if that's welling up inside your heart, then you have not wrestled deeply enough with the doctrine of hell.
SPEAKER_00: It should drive us to our knees to say, I deserve to go to hell.
SPEAKER_00: I deserve God's just condemnation for my sin, for my wickedness.
SPEAKER_00: So we need to humble ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: It should also cause us to check our hearts, to examine our own hearts.
SPEAKER_00: If you're here and you have said, yeah, I'm a follower of Jesus, but there's no evidence in your life that that's the case, that there's nothing pointing to the fact that you really, he really is your Lord and your Savior, that maybe actually you're just kind of pretending at church, kind of pretending at Christianity, then I just have to tell you the stakes are extremely high.
SPEAKER_00: This is serious stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And to check your heart and examine have I really given my life to Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: He loves you.
SPEAKER_00: He is waiting for you, his grace is free, his love is free.
SPEAKER_00: But you have to choose it.
SPEAKER_00: Another response for those of us who are followers of Jesus is that we have to tell people about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: If this is what the people we love who don't know Christ, if this is what they're headed towards, then we have to tell them about Him.
SPEAKER_00: And I have to just confess to you that too often I can be really complacent about the eternal destiny of people in my life who don't know Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: I can be in a situation and just think partly to myself, like, you know what, they're gonna be fine.
SPEAKER_00: They'll probably be fine, you know?
SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't wanna be uncomfortable, I don't want to be weird and like bring it up, or we're gonna live in this neighborhood for a while, I don't want to like alienate them, or I don't want to be a weirdo, you know, so just like won't say anything.
SPEAKER_00: But if hell is real and we love people, then we have to tell them about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And so I want you to check your heart and wrestle with what's the proper response to this terrifying but true reality.
SPEAKER_00: And especially this morning, if you're here and you have not yet given your life to Jesus, I want to give you the opportunity to do so this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Each and every one of us are headed towards hell.
SPEAKER_00: But God sent his son, Jesus, because he loves you.
SPEAKER_00: Again, Jesus loved or lived a life that we could never live.
SPEAKER_00: He died the death on the cross that we deserve to die.
SPEAKER_00: So on the cross, Jesus takes upon himself the destruction, the death that we deserve.
SPEAKER_00: On the cross, Jesus takes upon himself the wrath of God, the torment that we deserve.
SPEAKER_00: On the cross, Jesus cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_00: He experiences the banishment, the exile from the presence of God in a sense, so that we do not have to if we believe in him, if we trust in him.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you've never done that this morning, I want to give you a chance to respond to him, to just say, I'm sorry for going my own way.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry for my sin, I've turned to you.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to invite you to bow your heads, close your eyes.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna make you raise your hand, I'm not gonna invite you to stand.
SPEAKER_00: But if you're here this morning and you've realized, man, I'm headed towards hell.
SPEAKER_00: Today could be the day that you turn.
SPEAKER_00: But would you just talk to God right now and say, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry for how I've lived for myself, how selfish I've been.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry for the way that I've hurt others.
SPEAKER_00: I've broken your commandments, I've broken your heart.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for sending Jesus to die for my sins.
SPEAKER_00: I turn my life over to you.
SPEAKER_00: I need your forgiveness.
SPEAKER_00: Would you forgive me and then give me your Holy Spirit and transform me from the inside out?
SPEAKER_00: I want a relationship with you now and for eternity.
SPEAKER_00: If that's you this morning and you have said yes to Jesus, maybe for the first time, please do not leave without talking to someone.
SPEAKER_00: We would love to walk with you and help you understand what it looks like to live a life of faithfulness with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Let me also pray for my brothers and my sisters in Christ tonight.
SPEAKER_00: Father, we are sobered by this reality.
SPEAKER_00: That apart from you, we are destined for hell.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're sorry, Lord, for the times when we don't take this reality seriously, the way when we're cowards, when I'm a coward, Lord, and I'm not bold with our faith.
SPEAKER_00: Would you deepen our gratitude for the salvation we have in Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Would you fill our hearts with joy as we sing about Jesus, our only hope?
SPEAKER_00: And would you give us courage to share your love and message of salvation with all who need it?
SPEAKER_00: We love you.
SPEAKER_00: Pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody said, Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.