Episode 68: Hell

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. You were up early this morning, Eddie.

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I can tell. Yeah, this is the one day of the week. Well, there's two days of the week that I get up early.

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They are the Lord's Day and Wednesday, which I guess in modern America, Wednesday is like the little one.

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Wednesday is the Baptist second Lord's Day. It's like the hobbits. That's the Lord's Day. What about second

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Lord's Day? Yeah. That's Baptist. Hey, and I'm saying that.

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I'm saying that proudly. I like that we have midweek together. Yes, me too. I love it.

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You know, this last week, we missed ours because of the weather. I'll tell you, my wife, all day

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Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, she was like, I feel like I need to go to church. Welcome to the

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Rural Church Podcast. I'm your co -host, Allen Nelson, pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas.

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The sultry sound of the other voice you heard is Eddie Ragsdale, pastor of First Baptist Church in Marshall, Arkansas.

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Earl, let me ask you this question. Go ahead. Is it muddy down there on the

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Arkansas River right now? Yeah, that's the worst thing about snow being over. It's just mud everywhere.

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Oh, yeah. Everybody was complaining when everything was frozen, and I told several people,

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I said, the frozen week is not the week that you need to complain. It'll be next week when everything thaws and there's three foot of mud everywhere.

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And then on top of that, and this is the Arkansas winter. It's raining. Now it's raining.

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Like today, the high is like almost 60 and it's raining. Right. And when it rained all day,

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I couldn't even run yesterday. I was like, usually I'm like, I'm going to find a break in the rain. Maybe they'll slow down a little bit, but it pretty much rained hard all day yesterday.

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Yeah, it was slicker. I've got a very, so for all of our listeners, I've got a very steep, long driveway, and it was slicker getting off of my heel down to the highway in the mud than it was in the snow and ice.

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Yeah. Because it was my driveway just is falling apart. So, okay. After the weather report.

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Yeah. Now let's talk about something serious. I'm going to read from Luke 16, verse 19.

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There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.

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And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus covered with sores who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table.

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Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side.

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The rich man also died and was buried. And in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw

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Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send

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Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue for I'm in anguish in this flame.

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But Abraham said, child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things and Lazarus in like manner, bad things.

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But now he is comforted here and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you, a great chasm has been fixed in order that those who had passed from here to you may not be able and none may cross from there to us.

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And he said, then I beg you, Father, to send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

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But Abraham said, they have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. He said, no,

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Father Abraham. But if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. He said to him, they do not hear

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Moses and the prophets. Neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.

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And what we want to talk about on this episode of the Rural Church podcast is the doctrine of hell, as well as the idea of the necessity of the preaching in hell.

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So a preaching of hell, preaching this doctrine, not just when you come to it in a text, but also periodically remembering those who don't trust

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Christ and believe that they are consigned to a place of eternal conscious torment.

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So we'll start out the conversation, I guess, there. I think rural churches used to, anyway, kind of had the reputation of, boy, if you go there, they're going to preach hellfire and brimstone.

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What does that mean? Yeah, I think it really meant, well, it probably means two things.

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I think there was a time when it was, it just meant that when you go there, they're going to preach about the judgment,

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God's righteous judgment of sin. Yeah. I think that's where it came from. It came from a genuine place of godly pastors proclaiming

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God's righteous judgment of sin. And then I think over time, and I don't want to throw any particular movement under the bus or anything like that, but I do think over time, it really became almost a badge of honor of how could you frighten people?

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Could you even manipulate people with scaring them in some way?

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Could you get them to respond or react the way that you wanted if you preached, if you scared them, if you gave vivid imagery?

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But we know, even going as far back as the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the

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Hands of an Angry God, it paints the perilous picture of God's judgment. And I think that comes from a right place that we need to warn people.

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We need to warn people that there really is judgment to come. And the only way to preach grace, to preach salvation, to preach the hope of the glorious good news of Jesus Christ is that people understand that God will justly and righteously judge sinners.

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Yeah. And I've even seen you posted something on Facebook today. I know this will be in the past for our listeners, but just pointing out that God is faithful and righteous, both when he saves people and when he justly condemns people.

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Yeah, that's right. You know, you and I were in a text group yesterday.

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I sent it to you because someone sent it to me. But this guy was preaching about, you better not have a beard.

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It's not apostolic. You're worldly. Of course, that hits right at home with me and you.

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But that's the kind of sense of some people mean today of Hellfire and Brimstone.

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They might see something like that, you know, preaching about not using caffeine or not smoking a pipe or you better wear a white shirt when you preach or women have to wear dresses or whatever the case may be.

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That's kind of seen as Hellfire and Brimstone maybe today. Whereas what we're trying to recover is a true

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Hellfire and Brimstone preaching more in the lines of Jonathan Edwards. You're not trying to frighten.

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Your goal is not to frighten or manipulate people. Your goal is to bring them the truth.

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Now, you hope to any reasonable person that should frighten them. But your goal is not, let me see how

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I can scare these people. Your goal is I need to paint for you a vivid picture of the reality of the coming judgment and the reality of those who refuse

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Christ. So let's do it this way. First, let's talk a little bit about the doctrine of Hell and then let's talk about preaching because we're certainly not saying every sermon needs to be filled with this.

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But let's get to that in just a second. First, let's talk about the doctrine of Hell. In this passage, notice,

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Eddie, from the ESV, it says in verse 23 that the rich man went to Hades.

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So we need to differentiate a little bit. I think there's probably in people's mind when the doctrine of Hell, there is a

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Hell and then there's a Hell. And so you want to talk about it a little bit or you want me to keep going?

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I can. Yeah. So the way I interpret it, I would say no one is in Hell proper now.

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Hell proper is the lake of fire and that comes at the final judgment. Yeah. When people die today, if they are outside of the salvation that is provided in Jesus Christ, they do not have the righteousness of Christ, they go to this same place where the rich man went, this

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Hades. It's Hell. I mean, it's bad. It's hot and it's horrible.

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But it is the place where the ungodly go to await the final judgment.

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Yeah. Let me just make a couple of comments just to be clear about that because I'm in agreement with all that. But remember,

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I'm reading Luke 16, 23. And in Hades, being in torment. I'm just going to read you a lexical definition there of this word.

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Severe pain associated with torture and torment.

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And then he says in verse 24, at the end of verse 24, he says,

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I am in anguish. So, again, I'm just going to read, you know, a gloss here.

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To suffer greatly, to be in great pain, especially of severe sudden pains due to a wound.

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That's just reading the lexical definition. So, when you hear

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Eddie say, and he's right, this man is not yet in hell proper, you don't think to yourself, oh, yeah, he's just chilling.

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It's not that bad. Yeah. It's very bad. Yeah. Go ahead. I was just making that clear from the text.

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Go ahead. Right. Right. Yeah. So, I think the right way for us to understand what

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Jesus is instructing here is that, you know, in the old covenant, under the old covenant, when people died, everyone went down.

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Yeah, to Sheol. Everyone went down. They went to Sheol, went to the place of the dead. And that's what's being described here.

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And so, both the rich man goes to the bad part of the place of the dead. Yeah. And Lazarus goes to the good part,

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Abraham's bosom or paradise. It's the good place of the place of the dead. But that was before Christ's death, burial, and resurrection.

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That's right. I would say now, because Paul tells us that to be absent of the body is to be present with the

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Lord, people who die in Christ and all the believers from the old covenant period, all believers are with the

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Lord now in heaven. Today, when people die, if they die away from the Lord, they go down to the place of the dead, to this bad place, because that's all there is.

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Or they go to be with God awaiting glorified bodies in the, you know, the new heavens, new earth, the world to come.

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So, this is totally off topic, but it is relatable, and you'll see. Have you read, I can't remember the title of it, and I'm going to butcher it because it's like in Latin, but Sam Renahan's book,

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I think it's Crux Moids, something. Anyway, it's -

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No, but I did listen to a discussion where he was interviewed on this topic.

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It's the doctrine of the descent of Christ, you know. I would commend that.

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Obviously, I didn't really help y 'all, but you could Google that and find it. But I read it, and it's good. It's got a lot to help you.

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But really what would be helpful for the discussion we're in is the understanding. No matter what your understanding of the descent of Christ, of the soul of Christ, the point here is that the

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Old Testament understanding is Sheol is the realm of the dead.

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You know, even Jacob. You remember, you're probably in your Bible -reading plan right now, and you're probably somewhere close to this, about Jacob saying, you'll bring my gray hairs down to Sheol if they go to Egypt and they don't bring

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Benjamin back. So Jacob says, he knows I'm going to Sheol. Why?

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Because Sheol is the realm of the dead. Now, it had two compartments, essentially, the realm of punishment and the realm of where the

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Old Testament saints were, if you will. But anyway, the point is, if a person today dies, apart from Christ, they go to this place, which

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I'm fine calling it hell. I'm fine calling it hell, too. I don't think there's any sense of what we're going to say about hell that is not true of this, with the only exception being there is going to be a change when they're casting a lake of fire.

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But it's all going to be bad, and it's all going to be bad forever. It's almost impossible to imagine, but it's going to be worse.

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Right. Yeah, yeah. This is worse than anything you can imagine, and the lake of fire will be worse.

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Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about this place. Jesus talks about it. I don't have it up in front of me. You can cite it if you want.

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But Jesus talks about how it is the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.

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It is a place the Bible talks about of outer darkness. So one of the things that we want to be clear about the doctrine of hell is this is a place of not of annihilation.

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No. This is a place of eternal conscious torment.

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Right. Eternal conscious torment. Yeah. Weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is not like, oh,

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I'm so sorry, you know, I'm sorry, God, or whatever. It's more of raging against God, anger, hatred.

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You say to people, or I've heard people say, well, if at least I go to hell, I want to be in good company.

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There's a smidgen of truth in that. There will be others in hell with you, but I don't know that you'll be able to even understand that they're there in terms of I know who that person is.

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But secondly, just their very presence there will only add to your torment.

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The darkness, the screaming, the horror, the torment, the pain.

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The rich man says, I am in anguish in this flame.

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Could you just send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and touch my tongue?

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Now, what would that do? Like you think right now, what if someone came in, dipped their finger in water and touched your tongue? What would that do?

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It would do nothing. But this man is in such anguish in the flames of torment that he is pleading.

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And it's hard to get it from a text. You know how from a text sometimes you can read a text and it's hard to get the sense sometimes.

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I think we miss the sense of this text. We just kind of read it nonchalantly. This man is screaming in anguish.

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Anything else you want to add about that? Because I do have one other point I need to bring up. Yeah, yeah. So thinking about this agony that they're in and like you said, they're just screaming out, they're weeping, they're gnashing their teeth.

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It's wholly insufficient. There is nothing that we've ever experienced that will be like this.

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But I remember back during the worst part of COVID, everything was locked down.

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There were videos coming out of China where they had literally locked people into these apartment buildings for weeks.

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And there were videos and you could just hear the screams of these people literally starving to death in their apartment buildings in China.

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And I remember hearing that and thinking that has got to be, I mean, one millionth of a percent.

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It's not anywhere near as bad as what hell is going to be. And it was horrible.

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And I thought if you were in one of those apartment buildings hearing those screams, you would not have been comforted other people here with you.

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Yeah, yeah. You would not have been comforted. Yeah. And so if it was that bad to be in an apartment in China during COVID, well, hell will be infinitely worse than that.

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Yeah. To hear those screams. And you know, another idea that we need to think about, people often say how can

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God punish people eternally for sins committed? Yeah, that's where I want to get you.

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Yeah, that's where I want to get you. One of the things is they don't stop sinning. They still hate

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God. They rail against him. Yeah, that's the thing. So that's the topic that we need to discuss.

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God doesn't send anyone to hell. That's what people say. You know, false. Okay. False.

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Every person that's in hell, God has sent them there because it is what they deserve.

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Now you say to yourself, how could they deserve that? This is a silly illustration, but it's one of the better ones

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I've heard that kind of helps, you know, think through this. So if I wake up in the morning and I'm having a bad morning, my cat's in the way and I kick the cat, and I tell you that, the listeners and you, you laugh.

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You're like, ha -ha, whatever. But if I say same action, I kick my wife, you know, you guys would be like,

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I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't have done that. If I walk outside, I kick a police officer. You know, maybe

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I'm going to get a fine or something. Or if I walk up and as much as you would like to do this, Eddie, I kick the president of the

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United States. You shouldn't kick elderly people who have dementia.

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That's just one of my life principles. Don't kick people with dementia. But it's the same action.

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Same action. What's the difference? The difference is who it is that I have sinned against.

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Now, that's, again, silly, minor illustration. But think through that for a second.

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The reason hell is so horrible is because God is so great. That's right. When we lessen that, here's the thing.

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A lot of people think, they think when we come up with some way to lessen the penalty, some way to have the eternal penalty be conditioned down.

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I know that there are those that hold to a view called conditionalism, which it's not exactly annihilationism, but it's the idea that it is temporary in some sense.

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But the problem with that is then you're also lessening the holiness and greatness of God.

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There's no way to lessen the penalty for sin without lessening the holiness and greatness of God.

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They are inextricably linked. The one we have sinned against is eternal.

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Therefore, our punishment is eternal. And holy. And holy and righteous and deserving.

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And as you said, we don't ever from day one begin to even make up for the punishment.

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It's not like, okay, you've got to serve 20 years in prison, and after you've served one year, you're like, okay, now you've only got 19 years left because you did your service.

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You served one year. Right. But that never happens in hell. No. Because as you say, we continue in the state of rebellion and hatred against a good and holy

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God. One other thing doctrinally that I want to mention just from this passage, and then we got to get to a point of talking about preaching this stuff.

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But it's interesting, is it not? At the end, I find this fascinating that this rich man, he says in verse 27,

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I beg you, Father, to send him to my father's house. Which, by the way,

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I think as R .C. Sproul said at one time, there's no such thing. We think of the doctrine of justification by death.

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We believe that, but it's not a real doctrine. That's right. It's not. I'm going to say something very sobering to you, to our listeners.

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There are people in your life that you know, that you know personally, that have closed their eyes in death and at that very moment have entered into this place of everlasting torment.

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If you were to see them two seconds after they had perished, you wouldn't recognize them.

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That's right. Because the anguish and the pain and the torment and the fires are unimaginable to our finite mind.

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But the point is, so it's not just anyone dies and you go to heaven. This is a real place.

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And this man says, okay, so send Lazarus to my father's house. The idea is if this guy comes back from the dead and warns these people, oh, they'll flee hell.

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But what does Abraham say? They've got, essentially, they've got the Bible. They've got the Bible. That's right. And not only that,

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Andy Stanley, they've got the Old Testament. Yes. So before you say, let's unhitch from the

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Old Testament, Abraham believes that the Old Testament is sufficient to warn people of the coming judgment and how they can avoid it.

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Yeah. So the early church had the Bible, by the way. They had the Old Testament plus, you know, as the letters came in.

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But anyway, he says, let them hear them. And so Lazarus has a pushback. You know, that's what, of course, you know, a little rebellious heart in hell would push back.

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He says, no, if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. Now, that seems a plausible argument.

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In fact, we may even, if we didn't have this clear, we may even believe that. We may even be like, you know what?

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I guess, yeah. In Perryville, Arkansas, if somebody for sure came back from the dead, walked down the streets and warned them, then they would repent.

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Abraham says no. If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead, which, by the way,

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I'll just give a plug here. This is why I think these afterlife books are dumb. They're worthless. Number one,

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I don't believe them. Number one, I'm calling foul there. Number two, according to this passage, even if they are real and they're not, best case scenario, they're worthless.

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Yes. Why? If they don't listen to the scriptures, they're not going to be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.

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Right. And I think that's, well, and I think there are two things we need to notice about that. One, Jesus is going to rise from the dead.

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Boom. The people that wouldn't believe, Jesus is saying the people who aren't willing, who are not going to believe aren't going to believe no matter what.

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They're not going to believe God. And if you're not going to believe God, then you're not going to believe. I think the other thing we need to note about this,

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Jesus is essentially saying people are not made believers by miraculous signs.

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They're made believers through the Holy Spirit, working through the preaching of the word of God. I think a lot of times we think, well, maybe if this guy came and there was a healing service, then there'd be people would come to faith.

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But what we notice in the scripture, even the Lord Jesus, most of the people that followed him when he was feeding or when he was healing, if they followed for those reasons, they went away.

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It was the people who believed that continued to follow after his teachings would become hard.

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And so I think we need to note that what's being pointed out here is people are not made believers by signs.

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Signs were help. They were good for the believers to build their faith, but they didn't make faith in the unbelievers.

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Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, the word of Christ. So they're not made believers by the signs.

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And I think that's what's being pointed out here about Jesus. They won't believe the scriptures. One other thing

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I want to point out here. I was teaching yesterday, just teaching on the gospel. And we were in 1

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Corinthians 15. And Paul is saying there that it's of first importance.

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And he points out the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. And he says he died according to the scriptures and he was raised according to the scriptures.

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And one of the people in the class, they asked, they said, what scriptures? And this person was kind of amazed because I said, well, the

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Old Testament. He's talking about the Old Testament. And they said, the Old Testament tells about Jesus' death, burial and resurrection.

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And yeah. And we went and showed them a couple of different places, you know, where it was explicitly pointing forward to Jesus' death, burial and resurrection.

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And this person who is a babe in Christ, you know, just starting out in their faith, was just amazed to see that, oh, the gospel is not just in the new covenant, in the

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New Testament. But it was promised in the old. And so that was a beautiful thing to see.

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But yeah, Moses and the prophets, God promised the gospel even then. Everyone that was saved was saved by believing that promise.

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You have the sign of Jonah. You have Psalm 16. You'll not let your

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Holy One see corruption. That's exactly what Peter preaches, you know, the day of Pentecost or whatever.

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But yeah, you know, I think that's good, brother. Someone has risen from the dead.

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And this may be a little bit off topic. Well, I don't know. It's kind of slide us into this application here.

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But, you know, that's what we're so oriented towards signs and wonders.

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We just think if God just did some sort of signs and wonders, people would believe. I think it misunderstands the depravity of the human heart.

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Men and women are like Pharaoh. All signs and wonders do to the unregenerate heart apart from grace is harden it.

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Do you think it's also that we are prone to the things that are external?

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Like we can't see the gospel working on the heart inside a person.

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We like signs and wonders. Or modern day, we like decisions or cards filled out because we can count.

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Maybe we like those things because they're external and there's something you can say. We had 50 people healed or 50 people saved as opposed to.

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I think sometimes you go out and you preach at harps and you don't come up.

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You've you've preached the gospel. We have no idea how God's going to bless that. But you don't come away with the external validation that maybe we sometimes wish maybe in our flesh.

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We're desiring something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think obviously Roman Catholicism, I think, is proof that we're really prone to the external.

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Romans 1 is proof that we're really prone to the external. We really want images and worship created things.

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And that's a thing. And it can be in charismatic circles, but it doesn't have to be charismatic circles.

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It's other, you know, like, yeah, yeah. The gospel is great. But let me tell you about this thing that happened. And and it's like we want something else to point to to validate the truth of the scripture.

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This happens all the time. And like evidential apologetics, you know, like they found Noah's Ark, you know, or whatever. It's like, hey, guess what?

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I don't need that. I got Moses in the prophets. You know, and so so preaching the scriptures is the way that we teach people about hell and warn them of how to flee this place of judgment, which is the gospel, which is

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Christ, who suffered the wrath of God on our behalf and then rose again the third day so that all who repent and believe should not perish but have everlasting life.

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And God will send you to hell if you refuse his grace because of his justice.

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Yeah, he will righteously, you know, and the people in heaven. I can't explain it all.

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I know God says he'll wipe every tear from our eye. But I will say this. I know that in Revelation, they're singing because of the judgment of Babylon.

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Like hell is not something we're embarrassed by as the saints. We worship God because of hell, because there will not be a single sin that goes unpunished.

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It will either have been punished righteously and sufficiently in our Savior, Jesus Christ, or it will be forever punished.

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All secret sins, all wrongdoings, all the wicked things Hitler did, you know, Stalin did all.

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But all the wicked things your precious little grandmother did, all the while refusing

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Christ. All these things will come to light and all these things will be punished and they will be punished righteously.

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Yeah, you know, as a point of application, thinking about how we preach, you know, we said earlier, we're not saying that every sermon, the topic of the sermon,

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I can tell every week, you know, but every week we want to be preaching

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God's grace. And I don't believe we can preach God's grace rightly from any passage of scripture without also preaching

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God's justice. So while hell may not be the topic, it might not be the point.

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God being a just judge is always going to be a part of Christian preaching because God's gracious saving of sinners is always going to be a part of Christian preaching.

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And those two things cannot, they always go together. Yeah, yeah,

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I think, you know, if your sermons are always this explicit about hell,

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I mean, first of all, it takes that, that takes a lot of your sermon, you know, to talk, you know, like this much about it.

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But I would say if it's always this, that's a problem. If it's never this, that's a problem.

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That's right. There has to be a good balance and faithful preachers warn of the judge. And we're not, we're not embarrassed by an eternal conscious hell.

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Why? Because we're not embarrassed by God, because we love the justice and holiness and goodness and glory of God.

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Hell exists for the glory of God. That's right. So, you know,

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I think what we'll do is, Lord willing, we'll see things change sometimes in our week. I think what we'll do is, in the next episode, we'll talk more about preaching this and preaching hard things, because that kind of goes together when something difficult in the text comes up.

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Anything you want to, hey man, I've been edified and encouraged by this episode, brother. I hope you have in our listeners.

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Anything you feel like you should add here? No, just, I know that for me, this passage that we were looking at in Luke 16 was, was really beneficial to me thinking through really just the importance of the scriptures.

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You know, that really transformed things for me, coming to see just how powerfully

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Jesus drives home the importance of the scriptures. I also want to say this.

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This isn't the only motivation or the highest, you know, the highest motivation for evangelism is the glory of Christ.

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That's right. He's worthy to be preached. But this ought to be a motivation for evangelism.

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You have potentially, I was reading a message by Bunyan, a sermon that he preached, but essentially there are people that, you know, even now, perhaps that are like this rich man in Hades, who potentially saying, well, send someone back, you know, well, you are that person.

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Why don't you share the gospel with those around us to save them from this wretched and awful place?

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And you must do that with faithfulness to the scriptures. So whatever it is that you want to say about hell and about heaven and about Christ and about the gospel, they better be what the scriptures teach because Abraham teaches us here.

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Jesus teaches us here. You know, this is Jesus telling this story that Moses and the prophets are sufficient.

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And, of course, in the closing of the canon, the entire canon of scripture from Genesis to Revelation, it is our hope.

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It is our trust. It is sufficient to bring sinners from death to life as the spirit of God attends to teaching and preaching and sharing of his word.

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So. Hope this has been helpful to somebody and encouragement. Maybe it's warned somebody who needs to repent and believe the gospel.

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You want to close this out? Anything else you need to say? We'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemos, the masterpiece of God.