Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The Rich Man and Lazarus, Part 22 of 28

TEXT: Luke 16:19-31

IDEA: While the parable of the rich man and Lazarus may not be taken literally, it does teach us about hell.

PURPOSE: To have listeners understand that hell is eternal separation from God.

Listen to a parable that Jesus told. It is both sobering and fascinating. It is the only parable that Jesus gave us that has its major action on the other side of the grave. As you listen to the parable, what can you learn from it about life after death—especially for those who die apart from God. What do you learn about hell?

[Max McLean reads this story from Luke 16:19-25.]

There are sections of the Bible that I love to talk about. For example, I enjoy preaching on the parable of the prodigal son. It is the story of God’s kindness and grace to people who don’t deserve it. In that sense, it is my story. Sometimes when I tell men and women about God’s grace—or think about it—I am moved to tears of joy. I revel in the good news of the gospel. If I could I would preach on God’s grace all the time.

But, I want to be a faithful messenger of God’s truth. As best I can, I want to teach what the Bible teaches. That means I must try to teach all that the Bible teaches. I don’t always do a good job of it, and I don’t understand all that God is saying in the Scriptures. But I want to speak the truth as best I can, and I want to do it in love. A messenger can’t pick and choose the messages he wants to deliver. He has to tell all the news, the good news and also bad news. In that way, a messenger is like a physician. I’m sure a doctor enjoys telling patients that they will get well or informing parents that they are finally going to have a baby. At other tunes, however, she must tell patients bad news. The patient probably won’t get well. The cancer is too far along. The couple will not have a baby. I imagine a physician doesn’t enjoy doing that. I don’t enjoy teaching about hell. I don’t like to think that some friends of mine are headed there based on the choices they make every day of their lives.

This parable about the rich man and Lazarus certainly contains bad news. Jesus talks about life after death, and he talks about hell. Jesus often talked about hell.

Actually, he talked far more about hell than about heaven. It is strange that Paul never wrote about hell. Most of what we know about hell, therefore, comes from the lips of Jesus. This parable gives us a glimpse into what hell is like.

Many people are offended by this parable. They recoil from this description of the afterlife, especially at the thought of hell, with its flames and its torments. They feel that this can’t possibly be what Jesus taught. They insist that it must have been added to the record sometime after the first century. But there is absolutely no basis for that. As much as we would like to ignore what Jesus says, we have no reason, except our uneasiness, for doing so. A crude sign in a little grocery store in Georgia makes the point in a rough, crude way, “Just because you don’t believe in hell ain’t no sign you ain’t going there.”

In saying that, however, I think we have to be careful how we read this account. This is a parable. A parable teaches important truths by wrapping them up in a story. Some parables are allegories that are used to convey a deeper or different meaning from what appears on the surface. The parable of the sower and the seed is an allegory. Other stories convey feelings by associating experiences in one part of life with another part of life. The story of the prodigal son tells us how a father feels whose son has left home to have his fling in a distant city and the joy he has when the young man returns home again. If you understand that then you get a glimpse of how God responds to folks who have lost their way in life. The parable isn’t a handbook on parenting. The parable of the Good Samaritan may or may not have taken place. Jesus wants a concrete example of what it means to be a neighbor. The story isn’t intended to warn about the dangers of travel in the first century. Parables are not meant to be read like history. Jesus was a splendid story teller who chose his characters and sketched his stories with great freedom in order to teach lessons.

Actually Jesus didn’t give the parable of the rich man and Lazarus to describe life after death. He did want to stress the danger of being captive to money. That’s clearly the context for the story. This parable seems to pick up on conventional Jewish ideas about the afterlife prevalent in the first century. For instance, Jesus says that Lazarus was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. There is no other reference to heaven like that any place else in the New Testament. Yet, that image was quite common in the rabbinical writings of Jesus’ day. Scholars have discovered a story very similar to this one that appears to have originated in Egypt. It was very popular among Jews in Palestine in the first century. Jesus may have been using that common folk tale to teach a lesson of his own here. It’s a bit like saying to someone, “If you got to the gates of heaven and St. Peter asked you why he should admit you, what would you say?” St. Peter really doesn’t guard the gates to heaven, and heaven probably doesn’t really have gates. But that would be taking a common way of thinking about heaven to raise an important question.

Whether you accept that or not, clearly there are symbols in the parable. “Abraham’s bosom” is one of them. We cannot take that literally as a description of what we will experience in heaven. All the righteous dead cannot rest on Abraham’s literal bosom. There’s simply not room for them all there. The phrase does indicate that Lazarus is where the “Father of the faithful” is. Because they are people of faith true believers are children of Abraham, then this is a way of describing where they will be.

That is probably true with the other figures in this parable. The flames, the water, the great chasm. They are metaphors. In other places in the Gospels Jesus pictures hell as people in “outer darkness” or folks shut out from a banquet or a wedding feast. Revelation pictures hell as a bottomless pit. Jesus is trying to tell us about life in another realm. That’s a hard assignment since we have never been there. It’s like telling someone who lives at the equator about the North Pole. We have to admit that there’s a high degree of probability that some of Jesus' parable is symbolic, and we had better not read it as a literal description of what heaven or hell is like.

But having said that, the symbols must mean something. Why would Jesus cast his teaching in this form if he didn’t intend to endorse in outline at least what is true about human destiny? Actually, the parable means nothing at all if this is not a reflection of life beyond the grave. While Jesus may not intend to draw an exact blueprint of heaven and hell, certainly he wants to warn us that hell exists.

What can we learn about heaven and hell from this parable? What light does Jesus throw upon realms unseen? First, he certainly warns us that heaven and hell exist. While we may not able to understand the glories of heaven or the horrors of hell, they do exist. Jesus is also teaching that death does not end our lives. Life is serious business and the grave is not the goal. After death our personalities survive in a conscious state.

Jesus also warns us that there will be a division at death. While God will sustain our personalities after death, we will exist in two very different states. Some of us will be in a state of joy and delight, something like celebrating a banquet. We will enjoy the company of men and women of faith represented by Abraham, the father of the people of faith. On the other hand, others will exist in a state of isolation and torment depicted by that lonely rich man in hell. It seems to me that if these things are not true in outline then the whole point of Jesus parable is lost.

Hell is loneliness. Ted Turner addressed the National Press club awhile ago. He said he wasn’t interested in going to heaven. “Who wants to go to a place that is perfectly boring?” He would rather go to hell. When he and his journalist friends get to hell he said, “We’ll get a chance to make things better because hell is supposed to be a mess.”

Ted Turner isn’t much of a theologian. There are no relationships in hell. There is no community. No sense of fellowship. Hell will be filled with men and women filled with self-reproach but with no repentance. Everyone will live in solitary suffering. Like the rich man who lived only for himself on earth, men and women will live by themselves in hell. There will be company in hell, but those there will not enjoy it.

What does a person do to end up in conscious torment? The ultimate crime is to reject Jesus Christ and what he has done to keep you from hell! Robert G. Lee put the matter clearly, “If there is no hell then the almighty God made the greatest mistake in the history of humanity. He allowed his only begotten son to be crucified on a cruel cross—for what? For nothing? Not on your life! If there were no hell from which to save you and me, then God made his own son the biggest fool of the ages as he hung upon that cross.”

To know what Jesus Christ has done to bring you to God and to change you and reject it is cosmic treason. You bump into a sermon, a Christian radio program, a missionary, a Sunday School teacher, a piece of literature that tells you that God loves you, that Christ died for you, that you can be rerouted to eternal life in heaven. But there is something in you that says, "Not me, not now. I don’t need that. I’m not going to bow. I don’t need Jesus." That is cosmic rebellion.

But when you do the right thing, when you cast yourself upon Jesus Christ and ask his forgiveness for committing cosmic treason, you will be as sure of heaven as though you were already there. Jesus Christ will redirect your life and he will redirect your eternity as well.

You and I make our choices in life and they turn around and make us. If you choose to live separate from God in this life, then you will separate from God in the life to come. You can be flip about it, but you have no idea how awful it is. I beg you to choose to trust Jesus Christ to forgive you for your rebellion and to join you to the timeless life of God.

As I said when I began, I don’t find it easy to talk about hell, but I want to be faithful to Jesus. As a Christian I have to be committed to what he clearly believed and taught. C. S. Lewis put it succinctly, “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than hell if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”