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THE HOTLINE TO HELL #4
CAN ONE DROP OF WATER HELP YOU IN HELL?
Whether you're Catholic or Protestant or completely secular, people everywhere
love to tell those stories about the Pope and Billy Graham and Bill Gates
all going to heaven together. Can we learn important Christian theology,
formulate our doctrines, out of such anecdotes?
There's a cute cartoon in a recent issue of Leadership
magazine, sent in by Mary Chambers. She shows Lazarus coming out of the
tomb after Jesus has just raised him to life. And the newly resurrected
man, shaking hands and signing autographs all around, says to everyone:
"Four days? Boy, time sure flies when you're dead!"
Now, let me make very clear that this isn't the Lazarus we've been studying
about all week. This very real Lazarus was the brother of Mary and Martha,
and Jesus took great delight in raising him to life after his corpse had
been rotting in the grave for 96 hours. However, the raising of THIS Lazarus
does help to nail down a truth Christ proclaimed in His story about the
rich man and the OTHER Lazarus. Right at the end, the "Father Abraham"
character tells the rich man down in hell, "No, I'm not going to
send someone from the grave to warn your five brothers. If they won't
pay attention to the Bibles sitting right on their nightstands, they won't
listen to someone coming out of the tomb." And sure enough . . .
Jesus raises up Lazarus from the dead here in John chapter 11, and all
the religious leaders refused to pay heed to that reality. They weren't
impressed enough by Lazarus' resurrection to follow Jesus as their Lord.
But that Leadership cartoon, where Lazarus says, in a daze, "Boy,
time goes by real fast when you're dead," helps make another point.
Friend, we ought not to get our Christian theology from jokes and stories.
I myself have told "St. Peter-at-the-gate" anecdotes from the
pulpit, and so have many of my fellow pastors in our Adventist denomination,
but that doesn't mean for a moment that Peter is guarding the front door
of heaven, and that you have to show him a long, legalistic list of your
good deeds in order to get in. People get into Paradise because of Calvary,
not because they survive Peter's inquisition at the turnstile out front.
Ironically, I think there might well be some truth in Mary Chambers' "time
flies when you're dead" cartoon, because Lazarus was dead four days.
And when Jesus brought him back to life, Lazarus didn't report that he
had been to heaven or to paradise or to the bosom of Abraham or anyplace
nice like that. Over in Matthew 9, where Jesus raised the daughter of
Jairus to life, and in Luke 7 where He brought the only son of a widow
back from the dead, neither of those two kids had any kind of travelogue
descriptions of heaven that they could share. In fact, even Jesus Himself,
on Sunday morning after He was resurrected, said explicitly to Mary Magdalene
— this is in John 20 — "Don't touch Me; I HAVE NOT YET been back
to My Father in heaven." The excellent theologian, William V. Crockett,
participant in our featured resource book for you this week, Four Views
on Hell, comments:
"When it comes to the afterlife, only the dead know for sure."
It's worth noting that in these four cases — and
we could add a young man named Eutychus who fell out of a widow while
Paul preached and was brought back to life, the little boy raised up by
Elijah, a lady named Dorcas brought back to the living by Peter, and all
the resurrected saints mentioned in Matthew chapter 27 — not one of them
takes advantage of their unique dead-and-now-alive status to inform the
rest of us that they escaped immediately at death to be in the bosom of
Abraham.
Having said that, let me say as strongly as I can: friend, we need to
study our Bibles with real diligence and then get our doctrines, our truth,
from the straightforward teachings we find there. For sure not from the
humor we like to share on Sabbath or Sunday morning, and perhaps not even
from all of the details of this story — maybe a parable and maybe not
— that Jesus tells in Luke chapter 16. We already mentioned that most
of Christ's parables were designed to teach just one central truth, and
that all of the peripheral details might not have eternal, doctrinal significance.
And that Jesus is simply teaching here the Bible principle of "no
second chance after death. Choose ye THIS day."
The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary poses an appropriate question,
though. Here it is:
"‘Why would Jesus introduce into a parable figurative illustrations
that do not accurately represent truth as clearly set forth elsewhere
in the Scriptures, and particularly in His own literal statements?' The
answer is that He was meeting people on their own ground. Many in the
audience — without the least Old Testament Scriptural reason for doing
so — had come to believe in the doctrine of a conscious state of existence
between death and the resurrection. This erroneous belief, which does
not appear in the Old Testament, pervades post-exilic Jewish literature
in general, and like many other traditional beliefs, had become a part
of Judaism by the time of Jesus. In this parable Jesus simply made use
of a popular belief in order thereby to make forcibly clear an important
lesson He sought to plant in the minds of His hearers."
Interestingly, earlier in this same Luke 16, Jesus
tells a story about a guy who's about to be fired for fraud. He's been
ripping off his own boss, cooking the books. And Mr. Big catches him and
threatens to give him the boot.
"Give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer
steward," is the delightfully quaint way it reads in the King James.
Well, the slippery employee gets on the Internet and e-mails all the people
who are in hock to Ebenezer Scrooge. "Quick! How much do you owe
my boss?" "A hundred barrels of olive oil." "Okay.
Well, let's make it fifty." "Cool!" And he does that with
the whole client list.
Now friend, that is cheating pure and simple! That is wicked! It's a violation
of the eighth commandment. And yet, as Jesus tells the story, when the
boss finds out what this sneaky guy does, he actually commends him. "Man,
that's pretty sharp," he says admiringly. "Pretty clever of
you to look out for yourself that way." THEN he fires him . . . probably!
And we have to ask here: is Jesus, in this parable, encouraging us to
cheat and rip other people off? No, that's not the point. The point here
was to plan for your future NOW, to take care of your eternity today,
now, while you still are with the company. That's all; that's the point.
And friend, I believe that the story of the rich man and Lazarus — yes,
I do believe it's a parable — is telling us exactly the same thing: get
right with God now. Today. Before your own heaven-or-hell crossroads even
come along.
In his study book, An Evangelist Answers 101 Most Asked Questions, Henry
Feyerabend had a dialogue with a prominent attorney in Anapolis, Brazil,
who was absolutely convinced that this story of the Rich Man and Lazarus
was completely literal. "That is NOT a parable!" he insisted.
"This story really happened, and this is what heaven and hell are
like." And Feyerabend carefully took him through it. "All right,"
he said. "So all of the righteous people who die through the ages
and centuries can reside together, all of them at once, in Abraham's bosom."
"Well, no," the man said. "That part's a metaphor. Abraham's
bosom is symbolic of heaven."
So they went on. "Now, you believe that only a person's soul goes
to heaven, right?" Feyeraband wanted to know. "But this rich
man in hell seems to have a tongue. Lazarus in heaven has fingers and
hands and body parts. What about that?" He reminded his friend that
Genesis two plainly says that when we die our bodies return to the dust.
Well, that part was metaphor too, they decided. And Henry asked him: "Is
it your belief that the flames of hell are so mild, so tame, that a drop
of water — just one drop of water on a person's tongue — would actually
bring relief? Is that part of the story real?" And there was a bit
of a pause before his fellow scholar admitted that this part was probably
just an element in a parable too.
Still, they continued. "Now, friend, do you really believe that in
hell a lost sinner can actually call out and talk to a friend or acquaintance
in heaven? And people in heaven can respond and dialogue back and forth
with someone they love who is down in hell? Heaven and hell are that close
in proximity? Within speaking distance?" And the man said, "I
guess that part is probably just figurative too." And Henry pointed
out to him that every single detail of the story thus far had been explained
for what it really was: props in a teaching story. And the story was designed
to make the one point: get your heavenly business done before probation
closes. If you're going to meet St. Peter at the gate, you have to have
your resumé in hand when you get there. You can't say to him, "Wait
a minute! I don't really have enough college credits here; let me go back
to earth and take a few more semesters' worth of obedience. I'll be back
in the year 2006." The International Critical Commentary has this
to say:
"The general principle is maintained that
bliss and misery after death are determined by conduct previous to death;
but the details of the picture are taken from Jewish beliefs as to the
condition of souls in Sheol and must not be understood as confirming those
beliefs."
Friend, the bottom-line question is this: Have
we chosen heaven? And the blood which gets us there? The proximity of
heaven and hell — in parables or for real — isn't that vital to determine
today, as long as we're standing in the safe shadow of the cross.
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