|
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.
|
