Preaching hell for the comfort of angry people

For those who don't want to read the whole post, here's the executive summary:

To sum up: the idea that God will judge people and cast them into eternal destruction—hell—for all eternity is a great comfort to anyone who is angry about injustice. Those of us who teach the gospel or tell it to others have a wonderfully comforting message of damnation that will bring hope to all who put their trust in God. The more we speak of it, the more comfort we offer.

I hope you will go over and have a look, though, and add a comment if you feel so moved. I actually wrote it as a tangent from a discussion about praying to dead people, which you can also find if you click through on the link and read carefully enough.

Zechariah 14: A vision of heaven and hell.

Barry Webb discusses Zechariah 14; a vision not merely of God’s judgement upon the nations attacking earthly Jerusalem, and the rebellious inhabitants of Jerusalem, but of the final coming of the kingdom of God:

But the joy of salvation, in the Bible, never descends into sentimentality; it is always grounded in reality and truth. And so it is here, for the term survivor is a two-edged sword. Not everyone will survive; some will be overthrown by God’s judgment. And the reason is simple: not everyone will go up to Jerusalem to worship the King (17). They will maintain their defiance to the end; and for them there will be no victory, and no joy, but want (no rain), plague and punishment (17-19). Zechariah’s vision of the coming kingdom of God is wonderfully inclusive: it embraces people of all nations. But it is not universalist in a sentimental, truth-evading way. Belonging to the people of God is not merely a matter of survival, as though all that is required is to be alive; it is also, more fundamentally, a matter of personal decision. One must choose to come to the feast, and join the worshippers. And Zechariah is quite clear that not everyone—nor even the majority—will choose to do so.

There is hell as well as heaven.

[bold mine. The numbers in the text refer to the verses of Zechariah 14].

-Webb, Barry G. The Message of Zechariah, from The Bible Speaks Today series (London: IVP, 2003) pp. 181-182.

Images of Hell

By divine coincidence, I came across this description of God's terrible judgement as I was working my way through Tim McMahon's excellent studies on the book of Zechariah, which I'm editing at the moment:

And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.

That's Zechariah 14:12.

When I read passages like this, I wonder if our preaching of hell and judgement is somewhat weak and flaccid. I've never once heard the reality of hell preached in such terrible terms as this, and it makes me wonder if we shouldn't do it more. To the suggestion that it is excessive, the answer surely has to be that it's right there, in the Bible. And anyway, anyone who's read Lord of the Rings or played a Playstation video game would be able to connect to this imagery immediately.

(This coincidence relates to my blog post over on The Sola Panel.)

Preaching hell to depressed teens

On the Sola Panel blog.

Fired up about hell

I seem to have gotten a bit carried away with this topic. Blog readers who've joined up in the last little while could be forgiven for thinking that it's a regular subject. But it's really only featured in posts during the last two weeks or so. Who knows what the future holds? But for the moment, if you want to review some of the ground covered, you can go to the following:

1. Politeness and hell

2. Taxidrivers and hell

3. Preaching hell

4. Preaching judgement

5. Do we preach hell too much?

6. Hell: a help for depression

7. Did Jesus preach judgement to all Israel?

8. Broughton Knox on judgement and contextualization

9. Who gets comforted by judgement and wrath?

Broughton Knox on judgement and contextualization

The message of the New Testament:

The New Testament message is a message about the judgement of God on every individual and over every human institution.

-"World evangelism", in D. Broughton Knox, Selected Works Vol II, p 225.

The message of God's judgement is the message which Christians are commissioned to proclaim. It is a very practical and a very pressing message, but within this message there is a word of grace and hope, for the judge is also the saviour...

The message of God's judgement is a very relevant message. It is the point of contact with the hearer, for whatever the culture barrier between the messenger and hearer, both have this common ground; they know the guilt of sin. This is a universal human experience, and it is at this point that the gospel message becomes relevant. For within the message of judgement there is also the message of the victory that Christ has won over sin, so that all who call upon his name as their Lord receive remission of sin and are no longer under judgement but have passed out of death into life. They are accepted by God as his sons and daughters, and stand before him in his favour.

-ibid. p. 226

Broughton says more about judgement and contextualization in other places:

A gospel which contains judgement as a prominent strand as does the New Testament gospel, is relevant to men and women everywhere and in every age and culture. It does not need indigenization [that is, contextualization], so popular a catchword today, but requires only clarity of language and faithfulness in proclamation. The sense of right and wrong is universal in the human race and so is the knowledge that we fall below our own standards of what is right, and that this entails death.

Thus the gospel that contains judgement, and salvation from judgement, is a gospel that is always relevant to the hearer, no matter to what stage of civilization he may have attained. Such a gospel does not need to be assimilated to the culture of the people who are hearing it.

A theology that proclaims the God who saves from judgement by forgiveness through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ does not need to be adapted for Australian audiences, or to be turned into a black theology for the blacks of North America. Asian Christians and Western Christians need the same gospel and the same theology which is based on it, and all are able to understand it, no matter how different the cultural backgrounds of the hearers and preachers may be, so long as the proclamation is true to the New Testament gospel of judgement and salvation from judgement.

-Broughton Knox, "The Everlasting God" in Selected Works Volume I, p. 60

Australian, African—American, Asian, Western. We may as well add young, old, teenagers, men, and women. Or with Paul: 'Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female' (Gal 3:28)

Did Jesus preach judgement to all Israel?

Well, he preached a lot more than that! His was a message of grace and salvation; so much so that he (or John, it is a little bit hard to work it out) could say "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:17)

Not that judgement and grace are ever separated in Jesus' message. The very next verse of John's account makes that plain: "Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God." (John 3:18)

Now all of this is by way of getting back to this post, where I suggested that Jesus preached judgement in the clearest and starkest possible terms. And that he did this not only to the smug religious people but to the whole of Israel, as he instructed 72 of his disciples to take such a message right through the towns and villages of the nation. Speaking to his disciples, he set matters out without any hint of ambiguity:

I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.

-Luke 10:12.

Lurid as this warning was, we might ask ourselves whether the 72 disciples, when they went out, were as harsh as Jesus himself when they actually spoke to the people of Israel?

After all, Jesus' words about Sodom were not addressed to the villages themselves, but could almost be read as an aside to the disciples.

We don't have any direct evidence on this question, since the actual preaching of the 72 on this mission is not recorded.

But we do have one reliable judge regarding what was preached, and that is the Lord Jesus himself.

With this in mind, we note that whatever asides Jesus may have made to his disciples about Sodom, the very next words he speaks are addressed not to the disciples but to the villages that they will be visiting

though they still form part of his briefing session for the 72, and so are meant to be heard by them.

They likewise are words of judgement:

13Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. 14 But it will be more bearable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 15 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades.

and they continue the thought that Jesus has begun by his mention of Sodom

and indeed, by his mention of what the disciples ought to do if the message they preach is not received.

Not only this, but Jesus' response on their return

"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven", Luke 10:18

indicates satisfaction over the way they've fulfilled their commission, showing that they passed on the message exactly as they heard it. We don't have any reason at all to think that the disciples as they preached their way through Israel watered down their message, or the horrifying terms in which it was stated by their Lord.

Not that we need to doubt that the disciples themselves were fired up to deliver a message of judgement on their master's behalf. Immediately before this mission, James and John, foaming at the mouth over Samaria's rejection of Jesus, have asked Jesus:“Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). No wonder Jesus called them Sons of Thunder!

Jesus on that occasion tones them down; the people of the towns of Israel, however, receive no such postponement of his judgement message. As far as Jesus himself is concerned, the news he brings is

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

judgement,

and more judgement

every step of the way from the North of Israel, on his journey south towards Jerusalem. Until finally when we see him arriving at Jerusalem, what does he then preach to all his Israelite hearers? Sure enough, judgement.

This is only a selection of some from the central section of Luke's gospel (Luke 9:51-19:27). Many, equally harsh words are addressed to the religious insiders (for example here, here, here, and here, not to mention here.

Yet in agreeing that Jesus pressed home this message of judgement particularly amongst righteous religious hypocrites, we don't lose sight of the reality that Jesus' message for all the crowds he spoke to was exactly the same: You must repent, or face the wrath of God for all eternity. Jesus himself preached this. He required his disciples to preach accordingly.

Small wonder then, that the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed who heard this message of judgement flocked to Jesus, and found in him grace, peace, mercy, and the lifting of their burdens.

Unless we consider ourselves and our audience, for some bizarre reason, to be more righteous than the Israel that heard Jesus' preaching for themselves, then we ought to preach this same terrible judgement of God to our own burdened, depressed, weary and hopeless hearers. We ought to preach it with the full intensity and ferocity and tears that true love demands. As we do, we should pray that somehow they (and we) might not harden our hearts, but instead find mercy in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Hell: A help for depression.

I find that I've been checking the Pyromaniacs blog quite a lot lately and being greatly helped by what I read. So I started reading this post and was struck by a quote from Spurgeon, a regular guest on the Team Pyro blog spot.

I am the subject of depressions of spirit so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to, but I always get back again by this—I know I trust Christ. I have no reliance but in him, and if he falls I shall fall with him, but if he does not, I shall not. Because he lives, I shall live also, and I spring to my legs again and fight with my depressions of spirit and my down castings, and get the victory through it; and so may you do, and so you must, for there is no other way of escaping from it. In your most depressed seasons you are to get joy and peace through believing.

When I went to the quote in context I found a really terrific sermon that just kept exhorting the hearer to find their joy and peace in Christ by constantly returning to him. Now Spurgeon wasn't going to ignore medical advice:

I believe there are some persons who are beyond the reach of the preacher and who must be dealt with, if treated at all successfully, by the ordinary physician. Their case has gone beyond the limits of argument. Their mind has got into a disordered condition and the body, also, and therefore both body and mind must be set right by some other means before it is likely that spiritual reasons will prevail upon them. Provided you are sane people in some measure of health, and that you are sincere persons, we think that with God’s blessing we may be the means of comfort to you this morning.

and being a serious depressive himself, you have to believe that he didn't offer the qualification, or hold out hope, lightly.

If like me you are someone who struggles with depression, then go to the sermon by clicking on the link—I think you will be helped by what Spurgeon says, and I pray that you are.

But what jumped out at me, and what I hadn't expected, was how bold Spurgeon was in directly addressing his hearers with the reminder of God's terrible wrath and the very fires of hell—yes, even as he spoke of dealing with the depths of depression. He says for example:

Can you see the Son of God agonizing in the garden? Your Maker lies on the ground. Can you see Him taken before Herod and Pilate, and there mocked and scourged and spit upon? Can your eyes endure to see that spectacle of grief when the plowers made deep furrows on His blessed back? Can you believe that He is very God of very God, and yet is suffering thus? Can you see Jehovah grind Him to powder between the upper and the nether millstone of His wrath?
Can you hear Him say, “It is finished”? Can you mark the fearful shriek of “Eloi! Eloi! Lama Sabacthani?”

Can you believe that this is the Son of God—standing for sinners and suffering all this weight of wrath and punishment for us—and yet think that He is not worthy of being trusted to do that for which He died?

or again, he says:

But being what I am, unworthy, undeserving, and Hell-deserving, I trust Christ to save me—and if He does not save me, He is not as good as His word!

Spurgeon urges his hearers to trust in Jesus alone, and to expect joy and peace as a consequence. But if they don't, what then?

But if I wait for joy and peace, and afterwards trust, I go the wrong way to work, and put the cart before the horse. Then I have begun to expect a harvest before I sow the wheat—to expect the flower before I cultivate the stem—and I shall be mistaken and go down to the pit with a curse because I would not obey the command, “Believe and live.”

[bold mine]

As Spurgeon drives to his conclusion, he imagines the state of mind of the depressed person (or perhaps he simply reports!):

Now, I will finish with this declaration. If you can get into such a state that all the sins that were ever committed should swear that they will block your pathway to peace. If all the suggestions of Hell that ever came up from the infernal pit should surround you at one time. If, in his own proper person, the very Prince of Hell should stand across the way and swear to spill your soul’s blood...

Yet, yet in that fearful extremity, if you can believe, you are saved!

Spurgeon uses the power and horror of hell to bring comfort to his own soul, and to those of his hearers.

His text?

“Joy and peace in believing.” (Romans 15:13)

The horror of hell highlights the triumph and goodness of the grace of God in Christ, and brings joy and peace in believing for the depressed heart.

By the way, how wonderful for those preachers among us incapable of improvisation to see that Spurgeon chose to preach from a full text! His hard labour in this matter means that we all share in the blessing of he wrote.

Do you think Spurgeon would have been a blogger?

Do we preach hell too much?

Not in my experience. Whether for good or ill, the churches I've been involved in—all Bible-believing, theologically orthodox churches—for the last 33 years, have not had a huge amount to say about hell. Nor, for that matter, has the preaching of hell been a large feature of the evangelism I've been involved in or witnessed on tertiary campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane over the same period. Nor do most of the Bible-believing church attenders I've asked at various times report anything different. Claims to the contrary are, as far as my experience goes, a slightly puzzling furphy.

I remember a lady years ago, a regular church attender who sang in the choir, offhandedly dismissing Billy Graham as a fire and brimstone preacher. As I lived across the road from her for nearly 10 years, attended the same church for a time, and sang in the same choir, I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that she never heard Billy Graham preach. I don't doubt that Billy could have preached up a fire and brimstone storm if he'd wanted to, but it didn't happen when I went along to hear him speak at the crusade in 1979, and John Pollock's biography doesn't at all speak of his preaching in these terms. Billy Graham's description of hell on his website is straightforward, unembellished and biblically based, sparing a lot of detail and pointing to Christ.

So, maybe my friend from across the road was telling the truth as she saw it, but I really think her description was wrong to the point of being untrue.

And I wonder if a similar distortion occurs in the portrayal of Bible-believing teachers and preachers within Sydney Anglicanism. If so, it's a problem.

Preaching judgement

I'm occasionally told that Jesus only preached the full horror of judgement to self-righteous, smug, religious people who were felt assured of their place at the heavenly banquet. The sick, the sad, the sincere and the sorry (on this view) were exempted from such harsh language.

But that's sentimental nonsense, as Jesus' public mission to Israel shows. In Luke 10, Jesus gives 72 disciples their instructions for the mission throughout Israel:

10 But whenever you enter a town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say, 11 ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’ 12 I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.

Jesus' public message, publicly stated, and publicly delivered through Israel was that all the towns that turned against their Lord would be subject to a judgement worse than the one that befell Sodom. All Israel was to know of the consequences of disobedience to her Lord, and was to know in the most graphic of pictures, a picture that had become a byword for the LORD's anger.

Very much a 'turn or burn' message, delivered in terms that even the thickest Israelite could not fail to understand.

Preaching Hell

Excerpted from the book Why we're not emergent (by two guys who should be):

Granted, there is no place for giddiness concerning God's wrath, but isn't there a place for passionate, blood-earnest warning? Isn't it biblical to move past agnosticism about hell and implore people on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20)? Could it be that our evangelism languishes, our preaching loses authority, and our congregations lose focus because we don't have the doctrine of hell to set our face like a flint toward Jerusalem?

Other quotes too, from the Pyromaniacs blog here.

These two guys are right to pick this up. I don't actually know that many hellfire preachers. In fact, I'm not sure I know any. It seems to me that claims of such preaching abounding are grossly overexaggerated (which could be tautological, but isn't in this case). Perhaps it would actually be a good thing if there was a bit more of it, seeing that the Bible itself is so full of the message of judgement. If no judgement, then the grace of the cross makes no sense.

Taxidrivers and hell

Had to catch a taxi from the city to work. I talked to the driver about death and judgement, and warned him that every one of us would have to stand before God and give account for our lives before him. I also told him that our good works would not be sufficient to gain us entry into heaven.

Not being a teenager, he just laughed it off.

Politeness and hell

Here's a sharp and pointy statement from Charles Spurgeon about politeness and hell, two subjects that I've been thinking about lately:

Men are perishing, and if it be unpolite to tell them so, it can only be so where the devil is the master of the ceremonies.

Out upon your soul-destroying politeness; the Lord give us a little honest love to souls, and this superficial gentility will soon vanish. I could with considerable refreshment to myself pour sarcasm after sarcasm upon religious cowardice. I would cheerfully sharpen my knife and dash it into the heart of this mean vice. There is nothing to be said in its favor.

It is not even humble; it is only pride of too beggarly a sort to own itself.

Well said, brother Spurgeon. The quote is from the Pyromaniacs blog, who in turn got it from an article titled "The War-Horse," published in the May 1866 issue of The Sword and the Trowel.

Too often both the content of our speaking and the manner of our speaking are conditioned by what people would like to hear, or what we believe they should hear on the basis of our personal observation; rather than what they need to hear based on what the Bible reveals.

The ideas of hell and judgement are the ones that are particularly likely to suffer when we forget to return to the Bible to shape and form the content of what we say.

Similarly, when we move away from Scripture's example, the manner in which we teach will invariably tend in the direction of a sort of florid blandness. Plain speaking always gets us into trouble, yet that's exactly what the Bible pushes us towards.

Teaching Hell

I've had a big conversation about it here.

UPDATE: The link no longer works, but the original article is in the Briefing #267 (February 2001), entitled Shooting Fish in a Barrel.

Here's an extract:

This [the teenage years] is a time of acute sensitivity to emotional pressures. It is a cliché to say so. It would be too easy in preaching from the Bible to tap those despairing feelings, to confirm that self-hatred that is always just below the surface. The teenager’s imagination needs no help in picturing a hell-fire of savage physical torments. Nor does he need much convincing
that that must be his destiny.

As someone who works daily in ministry to teenagers, I am always extremely careful not to overstate the consequences and impact of God’s judgement of sin. I try to speak of it in the context of the goodness of God’s creation and his passionate love for human beings displayed in Christ. I do not dwell on the future pain and suffering of the lost—neither do the scriptures.

Of course, I do not conceal the truth, or hold out some powder-puff gospel; rather I try to appeal to what teenagers already know: that the world around them is a long way short of what it could be, and that the world inside them is very similar.

They don’t need convincing that God is mad with them. Aren’t all adults? That he loves them is a lot harder to believe. That there is no hope is obvious. Their music tells them that. That there is hope in Christ is not all easy to see.

In our anxiety not to water down the gospel, we may over-correct and offer a bleak message. For the young, the bleakness may outweigh any positive news we have. The self-loathing youngster may find no respite in our words if we are too glib. The girl with eating disorder already thinks she is unlovely. Why reinforce it? The boy regularly smoking marijuana is already prone to a low self-worth. Why confirm his negativity? When we focus on the loathsomeness of the individual like this we badly misrepresent the good news of Christ. Don’t we?

It seems to me that this is not a helpful approach. It is biblically unsubstantiated, and based on selective observations of what some human beings are like, some of the time. It is dangerous, because it leads us to fashion our teaching on the basis of something other than Scripture. (One of) my responses to the article is here.