The Biblical doctrine of Hell develops from the Old Testament’s limited understanding of Sheol to the New Testament’s clear teaching of eternal punishment. While many attempt to soften this teaching to cater for modern sensibilities, the strongest warnings about Hell’s eternal nature come from Scripture’s most loving figures – Jesus, Paul, and John. Their love for humanity compelled them to speak truthfully about Hell’s reality rather than offer comfortable compromises. The Holy Spirit continues to awaken people to this reality, not to terrorise them, but to lead them to salvation in Christ.

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[00:00:00] In the book of Job, he reveals his awareness of the darkness, of where people go when they get sick and die. And the storyline of Job is his fear of the unraveling of life with his disease and his problems, and then the possibility of death. Before I go, and I shall not return to the land of darkness and deep shadow, the land of gloom like thick darkness, like deep shadow without any order, where light is as thick darkness, if the best of visible light is like darkness. He was describing what was the ancient, very powerful but yet undefined understanding or concept of hell. He wasn’t really the fully developed Christian doctrine of hell back then. He was just an awareness that there was another existence beyond the grave. And indeed, the term in the Hebrew, sheol, could mean, as Job was describing it, the terrible place one goes to where being buried and put in a grave is but the step toward that place. Or it could be used as a metaphor for people just dying and they’re buried. And the word sheol came to mean, in a very general sense, the place of the dead. There is in the British, when you go to London and you go to see all the various things, you need to not miss out on their library of all sorts of paintings.

[00:01:56] And there’s a picture in the British library which has the title, The Jaws of Hell. But the actual wording in the Bible that it comes from is this same word, sheol, which has a more general understanding of the abode of the dead. Now, some people use the Old Testament lack of definition of the wording to mean that when Jesus talked about hell, he was only referring to a general condition. But the truth of the matter is that the New Testament brings refinement to a lot of the doctrines that were commenced in the Old Testament. That’s the very nature of the Old Covenant being supplanted by a New Covenant, which wasn’t making false the Old Covenant, but taking it a further step forward in what we call God’s progressive revelation. You won’t understand the things of the Lord unless you give him the privilege of being someone who progressively reveals to you his purpose. And so through the Scriptures, we gradually have an update all the time of our concepts that we know more accurately from the New Testament than simply going back to the Old. Well, this place of outer darkness, this place which is where the dead go. Jesus did have the story of the rich man, and Lazarus, Lazarus was a fellow who didn’t have much money and had terrible sores when he got his tucker from where the dogs were also getting it, from where people cast. You know, back in the olden days, they didn’t have big trucks that came down your street and took away and emptied your bin very nicely for you.

[00:03:55] In the olden days, the only way you got rid of the rubbish was that you marched it down the little pathway from your front door. And generally speaking, people who have sufficient money to make it safe would be sure that the pathway down from the front door was guarded by fences and things so that they were safe to take the rubbish down, because out there on the streets was a different world of all sorts of difficulties, including animals. And back then when Jesus told his story of Lazarus and the rich man, Lazarus was the fellow who was very poor, and he used to eat out beyond the safety of the fences, beyond the gates, where the servants of the house had put all the rubbish. And he had to fight the hounds, the dogs, who bit and scrapped with each other as well as Lazarus over any little piece of tucker or food that they found in the rubbish. That’s how poor he was, and Jesus told the story of how Lazarus died, and he went down to the place of the dead, but also the rich man died, and he did the same, but they didn’t go to the same part of that place of the dead. But rather they went down to the rich man to the place of suffering, and Lazarus went down to where Abraham was. And we get our song, Rock My Soul in the bosom of Abraham, and I always had the silly picture of big Lazarus with all of his swords in Abraham’s arms, getting a rock, you know. But what it was really is a metaphor for the care and comfort of being in the better part of Hades.

[00:05:49] All of which is very good information for us to understand that when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, he completed that suffering before he died, though his death was a part of the punishment for sin, physical death. But the spiritual death was in the hours of darkness when he bore the punishment, the wrath of the Father, on our sins in him. And then when that was over, he said, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. And so in the accuracy of how Jesus bore our sins, it wasn’t that he went to Hades because he went to the better part of Hades. How do I know such? Because Jesus gave the promise to the repentant thief on the cross, this day, note the time, this day you will be with me in paradise. In paradise, that Persian word meant a place of comfort, it was wherever one was in good keeping with God. The Garden of Eden was called a paradise until sin came. But Jesus on the cross went down to paradise because his suffering for our sins was finished, which is why he was able to say, it is finished. Which is why he was able to pray, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. I’ve been repeating again just now something that’s very important for people to come to understand if they’re ever going to have a good understanding of what happens when people die and go to hell.

[00:07:16] And it is the fact that it’s not just a simple matter of there being a place where we don’t know too much about and it’s called Sheol, it’s not the Old Testament level of revelation, it is understanding the New Testament teaching about hell. Now one of the things the New Testament does is that it brings in other words to play and not just Sheol. One of the words that it brings into play comes from the history of the Jewish people in Jerusalem particularly where they used to have a history of how they handled their rubbish. And how they handled their rubbish was a bit more advanced than what I was recording to you about what had previously been the case. But their rubbish was taken to a certain place outside the city wall. They actually had a rubbish dump. The only thing about their rubbish dump was that it wasn’t like ours, which has all sorts of people attending to what happens to the rubbish, and we have a far more sophisticated system in Australia. Today we are one of the richest nations as measured by how we handle our rubbish. If you go to some overseas countries, it’s one of the things, the very first things you notice is that the rubbish is still being dumped out in the street, and if you go walking

[00:08:38] in the morning you may have to kick a dog or two, snapping at your heels, because they want to get at the rubbish first, the dogs. Anyway, that was like Lazarus. But in Australia we get our rubbish handled so very well, and it’s not the same as what happened back in Jerusalem, for although it was an advance upon the previous order, nonetheless, once the rubbish got to the outside the city wall on the certain side of Jerusalem, it was just left there to rot and smell and flies and all the rest. And so they had introduced how they handled their rubbish was to burn it, so it was a constant fire that was going in the rubbish dump, and the word they used for it was Gehenna. And that is one of the words that came to be used as a metaphor for hell. Who are the people who use the word Gehenna? Who’s the main one? Jesus. One other person? Jesus’ brother, James. The only ones

[00:09:48] in the New Testament who use the word Gehenna for hell, but it is a place of constant burning a place where the flame never goes out, a place where the smoke continues to rise, where things that are rotten get more rotten except that they’re burned with a burning. In fact, there was 100 years or so, depending on who you read in the history of Jerusalem, how much you believe it. It’s not like scriptures. I believe the scriptures for everything it says, but I don’t believe the historical records outside the scriptures necessarily so keenly. But I want to tell you that nonetheless those records of Jerusalem says it was a hundred years where that fire did not go out and it gave a bit of content to the use of Gehenna as a metaphor for hell. Because one of the things that Jesus said about hell was that the fire doesn’t go out. The lake of fire, where it prepared for the devil and his angels,

[00:10:45] but where those persons whose names are not written in the book of life were eventually thrown into the lake of fire. And the thing about this New Testament revelation of hell is that there is no ending to the suffering of it. It is an eternal hell. There’s a word for eternal. It’s used about the life that a person gets when they come to Christ. If you’ve had a moment in your life where you did business with Jesus, where you came to him as the saviour of the world, where you came to him for the forgiveness of sins and you let him be your Lord and saviour, I wanna tell you that you were given eternal life. And this John’s Gospel explains in its first three chapters of how Jesus came into the world and he is the one that brings the possibility

[00:11:31] of the us being born again into the kingdom of God and us having eternal life. That eternal life is never-ending and the little word, eternal they make it up a bit of a metaphor of the ages and ages and ages. They talk about the unending ages. The ages unto ages. That’s how they understand the idea of eternal, they don’t have any concept or background to somehow get to the very meaning of eternal.

[00:11:56] But that descriptor of the ages going on, the ages of the ages of the ages, that’s what eternal is. But in the book of Revelation when it speaks about those who come into the next world, that there are some who have eternal life. And every single one of us here this morning is a person who either has eternal life now, you got it when you came to Jesus. For God so loved the world

[00:12:25] and whoever believes in him should not perish, but should have eternal life and the beginning of that eternal life is in the here and now, even though your body might be getting old and you might not be able to run down on the Saturday mornings, I’m intending to go again but it’s been 10 years. But anyway, you may find that even though our bodies are not necessarily up to what we were when we were 16, 17 and can do long distance runs, I want to tell you that when

[00:12:57] you receive Christ, spiritually, you already had passed from death to life. Eternal life is in Jesus, and when you know Him as your own Saviour, that’s you having eternal life, and the Bible contrasts us to those who die without coming to Jesus, and they go to what the Bible describes as eternal death. The same adjective if for eternal is describing the death as it is describing the life, for death spiritually is not the cessation of the body, like you’re used to thinking of death when something happens and you get run over. Or let’s not talk about it too much, but when the den comes, whether it’s disease or old age or whether it’s something that happens to you, nonetheless that’s physical death. Physical death is a separation of our selves and persons from the physicality of life that we have. But

[00:13:58] spiritual death is to be the absence of spiritual life. And though we be physically alive, we’re spiritually dead. The Bible says we’re dead in trespasses and sins. And when you come to the end of your life and you haven’t found eternal life, you go into the expectation, hear the exact wording, you go into the expectation of judgment. And the decision of that judgment is eternal damnation. And the same adjective for eternal that we’ve come used to about eternal life is the adjective describing the death. The Bible calls it the second death. The first death is when you kick the bucket or however we want to talk about it. The second death is the eternality, the never ending given over to damnation that’s described as an eternal damnation. It’s the most horrible and terrible thought because of how horrible it is many people prefer to not believe in it. Now I wanted to make the case this morning and why this is a drastic sermon is because

[00:15:26] sometimes people look at and this came to my attention in the holding of our apologetics night and in the varied ways that people come to that understanding all differently. It’s what you might expect when you call such a night. People have differing ideas. But some people think that the idea of apologetics is so when you get opposed in your Christian beliefs then you water them down a little bit or make them a little bit more flavourable and you somehow give an apology for the church having heavy attitudes about being premarital sex or whether you find a way to agree with the people out there about the church being such a bad thing. And always have ready for an apologetic and I say you don’t criticize the hospital when you go there because there’s sick people inside and I don’t criticize the church because there’s sick sinners inside. That’s what the church is for, because we need the medicine of Jesus.

[00:16:39] It’s not a failure of the church to entertain sick people. We’re all a part of it. At one level or another, and sanctification of the Bible speaks about being the ongoing fruit of our salvation. You come to Christ and get forgiven, but that’s just the beginning of salvation. And then you are led by the Spirit to gradually have a change. That’s the work of the hospital, giving you all the medicines. They’re not physical medicines. What’s the medicine but this? The Scriptures. The Word of Life. The Word of Life. The more you take your medicines, the more the sanctification happens. The Bible tells us that we are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. That verse was used on me by a very well-meaning group in South Australia. I’d just been a student at high school and was known to be going to university, Flinders University. So there was this Christian group, I won’t

[00:17:44] give you the name, they were doing lots of good things, who called on and they had it at our house. A meeting for people about to go to university and they wanted me to participate and to read a book and it was a book way above my intellectual usual level of reading and to give a bit of paper. Why they picked on me, I don’t know. But anyway, at that particular meeting they were quoting, this is my memory at least, I apologise if I only picked up one person’s opinion and thought the group all thought of it. They were quoting this verse, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling and they gave me the idea that when you get to university you are going to have to struggle hard to work out what this salvation is all about. I want to tell you that I didn’t need to do any struggling to work out salvation because from the age of 9 I knew Jesus and I knew that I knew him!

[00:18:36] I didn’t need anybody to work it out, he was just there. And real Christian salvation is something that comes to you at a spiritual level and of course, depending on your age whatever you have lots of things to understand, but you don’t have to work it out to make it true. That verse that says work out your salvation with fear and trembling is telling you that there is a process that you’re meant to participate in to let the salvation that you have begin to influence your behaviour and your living and the change of your thinking, to let the salvation that started progress in your sanctification. That’s what the command is about. go to university and have an intellectual trip where you sort of water down what you

[00:19:22] meant to believe so that less people criticize you. One of the problems of the whole apologetics movement is that some people think what it is is their opportunity to tell of how they have a less difficult faith to hold in the face of all the strong learning they get at the university. In actual fact, this verse that we’ve got on the screen, oh no, I’ve moved on from it, but the verse that Angeline had put up for us, that verse is about to honor Christ in your hearts. There it is, honor Christ. The Lord is holy.

[00:20:06] The start of what you’re meant to do is to, first of all, honor Christ. There is a moment when you get led of God to raise the flag, is how I used to word it, to raise the flag as to who you are in Jesus. And whether you’re at a high school, for me it was a time of coming out in the open. I always got some people new because my dad was involved in a Bible college and there was a chaplain at the school

[00:20:39] who was the chairman of my dad’s committee and this chaplain also was the teacher in charge of the cricket team that I was the captain of. And so the other kids all get to know your connections and so I had already a difficulty of being known as a Christian. But there had to come a moment when I had to stand up for it. I had to honor Christ, the Lord as holy. And because the chaplain was my cricket coach,

[00:21:13] I couldn’t escape. What’s more, his son was my best friend and this poor chap used to get ribbed by the other students because he was the chaplain’s son and he was trying hard just, he used to swear as much as he could to convince him he was like them. Well, maybe I’m saying that too harshly for him. He did eventually come to Christ at a Billy Graham crusade later on over in Canada.

[00:21:37] Amazing how God chases people down. But anyway, I wanna tell you in that school that there was the first task that I had to do was to honor Christ, the Lord as holy. And when you raise the flag, you belong to him. I actually needed a bit of a shove to do it. I know some of you have heard me story before but others of you are new and I want you to hear this. But the church that I went to did a rather difficult thing on me.

[00:22:09] They posted on the young people’s notice board a whole group of teams and the young people were all put in teams. We didn’t get asked. It was just there in the notice board and I was in a team. A group of young people would be going to do something at some time or other in terms of Christian outreach. And so I watched the notice board to see where my team was gonna go. Of all the places for them to pick, they picked my school because there were borders in the

[00:22:37] school. They were the toughest at the borders, of all things they had to be, in many respects. These borders had a service on the Sunday and the chaplain used to take it. If you went to one of those occasions, it was a bit like when we had a thing where public happening for the school and they wanted a choir, well the choir would have to sing the songs. But when they had the hymn, the only voices you heard was the chaplain and me, because singing out loud when the rest of the school refused to, that’s at least how it appeared to me, I’m sure there were a few exceptions. That was the start of me learning how to honour Christ as holy.

[00:23:30] And then that chaplain, and he was an English man, you know how, sorry English people here, they can stand on their digs or they can go right ahead and do whatever they’re planning to do, he was sort of like that. And he had talked in the school committee to build this beautiful big chapel and the classrooms all around like this are semi, not a complete square, but three sides of it, then there was this blank spot where he had them build a beautiful chapel where the sun came shining in and there was all these white steps, your marble steps up into the chapel. It was a glorious building. And when it was opened, he announced there would be a communion service at lunchtime

[00:24:19] at one o’clock. I knew I was going to have to go. I also knew I would probably be the only person there, but the chaplain, well, that was wrong. There was a bloke who was in sea scouts who wanted to pray for his yacht race to win. But aside from him, it was me and that bloke and the chaplain. The chaplain picked the time. It’s one o’clock. You’re eating your lunch, you weren’t allowed to go down the oval till you finished eating your lunch and when the bell went in the middle of a lunch, out one o’clock, you could shoot off down the oval and play sports or whatever. Well, one o’clock, he announced the bell will go and you come up into the communion service. And you couldn’t pick a worse time for making at the most public act that you did, because before anybody’s scooted, they’re going to see you walking up those steps. The sun would be shining down and you’d be the most public

[00:25:19] figure going to communion. Now, in a church, it was a churchy school, right? The Congregationalists and the Baptists owned it, but the boys always were trying to shrug off that they fitted into being a churchy person, and I knew I’d be the only one walking up those steps. Except as I walked down across the cement towards the beginning of the steps, there was another lad. He came from overseas, Hong Kong. His parents, his dad used to send all of his children overseas with money, many of them boys that had different mothers. I don’t want to say too much, except that this lad was a fellow who had lots of money, and he’d found himself a place. His father would give him money for all his expenses, and so he paid for his lodging somewhere, and he found a home that took him in. It was a Christian home, and they had led him to Christ, but he hadn’t told anybody. He was actually an expert in all sorts of things,

[00:26:28] including fighting, and he used to have mechanisms to harden his fists, these pieces of wood with straw on them, and he punched them so many hours’ worth, and he had the toughest of fists. All he had to do to keep people from molesting him, he was only short, was one day he put a hole straight through the gymnasium door with one punch. It was a very thick door, and all the boys, but they saw just how strong he was, and so he didn’t worry about being given any problems as a Christian, though he’d become one. He kept it secret. That morning, when he saw me walking out, he got challenged in his heart that he had to be prepared to make a defence to anyone who asked you the reason for the hope that is in you, in other words, to give a reasoned defence of your being a Christian and why you’re sticking to it. So rather than apologetics being you getting used to watering down the claim so other people think you’re pretty intellectual, rather it’s

[00:27:43] opposite. You are prepared to get a defence for you believing all the way in Jesus, and one of the things you believe all the way in Jesus as to you don’t try and get doctrines that Jesus didn’t have. You don’t try and demer, that means the things that Jesus taught. And I’ll tell you some of the major things that Jesus taught that that calls on us to believe, and one of the biggest ones is that you believe in the inspiration of the scriptures, you believe in his words, and there are spots where Jesus calls the scriptures, the Word of God. There’s other spots where he calls up Moses’ writings in the Old Testament, so Jesus knew that it’s both the Word of God and the word of man, but you don’t have the opportunity to say because there’s human involvement, therefore you can’t really trust in the, you know, doctrines that

[00:28:37] teachers. I believe in the resurrection of the dead because Jesus did. I don’t need another belief. I believe it not only that Jesus taught it but Jesus did it. And the resurrection of Christ, never to go back to the grave again, proves the deepest, the most central part of the Christian doctrine. And that’s why the Gospel is not only that Jesus Christ came into the world and took on humanity that he was a God-man. That’s the first part. The next part is that Jesus lived under the law and he kept it, and Jesus was sinless. And in his sinlessness he qualified to be a person who would go to the cross and bear our sins under the wrath of God, because Jesus knew that God is wrathful. God the Father poured his Roth on Jesus, which is why he cried out, a fulfilment of a psalm nonetheless, but why

[00:29:35] he cried out, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Because he bore your sins, and he died in your place. But then he was raised from the dead again, and he was taken back to heaven where his name Jesus, given in his humanity as the baby born of Bethlehem, the name Jesus is now the name which is above every name in authority and power. The name Jesus has the authority of all of heaven. I want to tell you, I’ve had some sad times doing crusades in different places. Sad not because the gospel didn’t work, but sad because the church, where I was invited to come and do some help to get young people to be Christians, but they backed away from earning the truths that I wanted to present. I remember one church, it just happened to be a women’s meeting, I’m not against women’s meetings, but it just happened to be that the people in charge of the women’s meeting wanted to give a few of their requisites

[00:30:55] if we hold a meeting and they invited their friends, and they said, we don’t want anybody praying at the start. And I inquire, why don’t you want someone to pray? They didn’t want anybody doing one of those religious prayers. And I said, well, I’m not talking unless we open in prayer in Jesus’ name. The pastor had a bit of a problem for a bit, but he backed me. But they wanted to back off being a meeting that prays in Jesus’ name. This passage is telling the reverse, you don’t back off honouring Christ the Lord as holy. You’re always prepared to make a defence and that word defence, apologia, means to speak back a second time. Someone would reply, oh, defence is when someone else has said bad things then you give. No, that’s wrong. This is the truth, apologia means to speak back against something that was a criticism. Always being prepared to make a defence to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you,

[00:32:01] Yet, do it with gentleness and respect, you need to have that there as well. It’s not that we hit the people over the head with how we do it, but we do it with gentleness and respect. Now, that’s what apologetics is, and learning all the rationale that is there, to show that it is the truth in which we stand. Now I’m not getting too far with my sermon, it’s meant to be about hell. And so far all we’ve done is explain the fact that the wording for hell in the Old Testament sheol is a word that didn’t have much knowledge except that it recognised there is a place for where the dead go. The sheol is the abode of the dead and what this word means, it’s literally in its way

[00:32:53] the word is set up, sheol, means a hollow. That gives a bit of a hint that they don’t know too much about how sheol is, is a hollow. And I’ve already told you it’s sometimes just used as a metaphor for someone gets put in the grave, they died. But in terms of it being a hollow, in Job chapter 10 and verses 21 and 22, this is the verse we looked at before, before I go and I shall not return. So the first thing you know about the, of hell is that it’s a one way trip. I shall not return. To land of darkness and deep shadow, the land of gloom like thick darkness, like deep shadow without any order, where light is as thick darkness.

[00:33:45] That’s the best of the Old Testament. Job being the example person understood what actually is called hell. And though our later painting in the British Library has taken what is the New Testament, picture of hell is far more than just a place of thick darkness. And so it has the title, The Jaws of Hell. How you get into hell is talking about the jaws of hell. Now what can we learn more from the New Testament about hell is something very interesting and one of the ways that I picked this up from a Scottish evangelist who was the one I’ve told you in previous Sunday mornings, my latest thing is to talk about the term awakening in the Friday night home group as we went through Jesus’ discussion in John’s Gospel

[00:34:40] about him being glad that he’s going away because if he didn’t go, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, would not come. But when he comes, he shall convince or convict the world of sin. And that action of the Holy Spirit bringing people into an awareness that they’re in dire danger because of being sinners is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And Jesus wanted to go to heaven and with the Father he sent the Holy Spirit to bring about a new era where there is the possibility of an awakening that can come on a person or come on a district in which people become alerted by the Holy Spirit that they are in danger of being sinners who are heading towards hell. And an awakening happens in the ministry of the young man.

[00:35:33] He died in his late twenties. He only had six, seven years, I don’t know how many it was, he’s only his twenties to be a preacher, but he preached on the need for the Holy Spirit to bring us to an awakening whereby we recognize how truly we are sinners and how a dangerous position we’re in that we’re going to be suffering into a hell that has no end. And the teaching of the New Testament with regard to hell is that it is something that never finishes and yet that’s the teaching. Now, some people will get around the teaching of the New Testament like so and they say in the Old Testament they weren’t quite so certain what hell is going to be like as I’ve already been outlining to you, but in the New Testaments, surely it is a case that many

[00:36:23] of the teachers and preachers like Paul or Jesus himself are always talking in terms of love. And how can you have love if you’re actually going to be depicting people as going to an eternal? And so there has come about as an apologetic reaction within the Christian church to frame our understanding of hell as something that is just instant destruction and then you don’t suffer anymore. It’d be a lot kinder if people who went to hell could be put out of their misery quickly. But it’s just not what the Bible says. And I thought as an exercise, and I guess I got the idea from that Scottish revivalist, but if we looked at the people who are the ones in the scriptures who most talk about hell, let’s look and see who they are. And immediately you discover that you’ve got David in the Old Testament just using wording of us. I’ve already described you for She-Holder. It doesn’t make it too

[00:37:31] tight. But also in the New Testaments you have people who are very big on wanting to communicate to their listeners their love for them, one of whom is Paul. And Paul’s interesting. Let’s turn to Acts 26 and verse 29. Acts 26 and verse 29. The scene is him having been put on trial because he’s preaching the gospel and the Jewish leaders are campaigning against him and a gripper as the king that has to make the decision. So Paul takes the opportunity to preach the gospel even though he’s being put on trial where if he just could tone it down a bit they’d let him out the door. But he doesn’t. And a gripper objects to Paul’s persuasion. And so in Acts 26 and 29 Paul said, a gripper complains, he says, well I haven’t quoted to you yet, but a gripper says, do you so quickly try and get me to be persuaded? Or do you so quickly try and get me to become a Christian? And Paul says,

[00:38:44] whether short or long I would to guard that not only you, but also all who hear me this day might become such as I am, except for these chains. I want you to be as a believer as I do and be as I am a Christian. And he doesn’t back down from the fact that he’s out there to persuade. Now there’s lots of Christian organisations in our Australian society these days who go and change how they word their brochures, who adjust the public image of what they’re about as something very nice to help the community. But what they don’t dare do is say we’re in the business of persuading people to come to Christ and get saved. And we back down from what is the actual central purpose of the church. The great commission. Go therefore into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. We back down too quick. And we call it apologetics. But Paul did not. I wish to God that you,

[00:40:00] that’s King of Gripper, but also all who listen to me this day might become such as I am. He was getting rid of any opportunity of them just letting him out the front door. But Paul is someone who spoke about the gospel as having no opportunity for someone to have a simpler version or a lesser costly one. That’s what he said. As a matter of fact, when you read Paul, you read of someone who was always aware of his listeners and wanting to help them. And he’s a person who calls his listeners the people he’s got love for. What about John? We have at our apologetics group nicknames. We call people different names. And it’s a bit of a feature. I didn’t cause this. I maybe might have given one person a name, but it’s generally something that happened in the fellowship. But you know the disciples of Jesus, they all had nicknames. They didn’t use the word nickname back then. But John is known as the beloved disciple. They called him

[00:41:22] that because it was obvious Jesus looked after him. He was the youngest, young teenager still. And the Bible tells us Jesus loved him as a young person. He looked after him. So he was known as the beloved disciple. You can actually go around. It’s not obvious for all of them, but you can pick up numbers of them. And John is somebody who’s particularly understood has got an emotional part to him of closeness to Christ. But John is one of the people who spoke so accurately and harshly about hell. This fellow, he could write in his letters beloved little children, but then go on and talk seven times over of hell being a bottomless pit. And the concept of hell being a bottomless pit is that when you get thrown there, you have this sense of falling. But you never hit the bottom. It’s a bottomless pit. You keep falling deeper and deeper and deeper into hell. A bottomless pit seven times, John uses that term. In the book of Revelation, which was written by

[00:42:47] John, how he describes the moment of the judgment of God as the great wine press of the wrath of God, with the idea of the wines flowing out, being trampled out of the grapes, or God’s wrath being a wine press of the wrath of God. That’s John. Or he describes a visual of that future hell as being a lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels. And with the descriptors in the New Testament about the fire of hell being a flame that never goes out, that’s Jesus. Jesus, the one who was giving forgiveness to the woman called and adultery. Or Jesus, the one who sought to help the people he found, like Barticmers who were in trouble with their health. Or Jesus, the one who went to the fellow who was a paralytic, lying down wasting his years of life next to a lake because every now and then an angel disturbed it and someone got healed. Jesus, the one full of love, that’s not wrong to picture Jesus as the person with the most love that

[00:44:03] you could imagine. This Jesus, full of love, he’s the one that describes the lake of fire where the worm never dies and the fire never goes out and the descriptor of hell being something that you can’t replace with just the idea of a sudden destruction and get it all over and done with to be kind to the people. Well, if you go through the people who most talk about hell, I think you’ll find they’re the ones who tell you the truth that it is not something that’s going to be a little punishment and that’s that. It is an unending separation from what is the very source of life. That’s what hell is. And Jesus warned people, let me quote you his words to the leaders of the nation of Israel and I quote you from, if I can find it, in the Gospels where Jesus is talking about how much he loved them and his love for them being so strong when he addressed them and says, how often would I have gathered you together

[00:45:31] under my wings like a hen gathers her chickens but you would not? Can you not hear the pathos in Jesus’ voice but you would not? The one who loves us most, the ones, plural, who love us most in the scriptures in the New Testament are the ones who speak about the unending nature of hell and the fire that doesn’t go out and the worm that won’t be satisfied and about the pit that you keep on falling and falling and falling. Why do they do it if they’re the ones that love us? Well, I’ve got two or three reasons. The biggest one is because it is true. The very heart of Christianity has to do with Jesus and his connection to truth. Jesus said I am the truth. Truth is the essence of who he is and there is truth in our world because Jesus is the creator and he’s the person that sees that there is such a thing as truth. And because he’s truth, he cannot lie. Jesus cannot lie, because not that he is forbidden to or because he’s

[00:46:55] got ropes on him to stop him lying, but because Jesus is the very source of what is truth, and it’s not his nature ever to go against what he is and he tells the truth, and the truth of the Bible is the Gospel. This Gospel if you don’t listen to it I want to warn you that you’re headed for a lost eternal death in in hell and a lot of people would listen in to me preaching today all that old hell speaking preacher is a big terrible thing to be doing. I want to tell you it’s the truth. The Holy Spirit has been said by the Father and Jesus to come into the world after Jesus ascended that he might convict us of the truth. My prayer is for you if you do not yet know Christ that you will have a personal awakening that the Spirit brings of the dire danger you are of what hell is, the lake of fire. It’s called the second death. The first death is when your body goes

[00:48:04] kaput. But the second death is an unending death for all eternity and one of the things I guess that people will think in hell will be when they had the opportunity to come to Christ, those Jewish leaders, some of them in the depths of their hearts sort of knowing that he was true and right. But their politics wanted to push him in the opposite direction and they’re going to in the lake of fire remember how Jesus said those words, eternal peace within your reach, you turned it down and now it is too late. That’s a modern translation where Jesus said you did not know the time of your visitation, his coming to the earth to make it possible for them to be saved. You did not know the time of your visitation when God had his Son come. And if, because we’re largely Christian here, there might only be one or two people for whom this is actually the case and you become aware as the Holy Spirit convicts you that you don’t

[00:49:27] really know Christ yet and that you should. And if you keep on putting it off, then one of the things you will remember in that time of falling into the pit and the bottomless pit the falling and the falling is that you’re going to remember this service where these passages were made clear to you. I pray to God that he might give us an awakening not only in our church and in our society and amongst our friends, but I pray to God for this nation of ours that so foolishly turns its back on a Christian heritage. They had so many rich things in it in order to be caught up in all the other things like Wokism, the difficulties that people get into because they don’t believe the Bible and that there should be an awakening in Australia where the Holy Spirit brings people to the place of calling on Jesus so they might be saved. If I’m talking to someone this morning, when you get home, I’m not going to let you off

[00:50:49] the hook just with this service call. When you get home, you’ll remember that you have the call of Jesus. You have the conviction of the Holy Spirit to come to him as Saviour and let him forgive your sin, make him the Lord of your life, honour Christ as holy and accept what he did when he came and died for you and miss all of this talk about the lack of fire. Let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you in Jesus’ name. We thank you for the power of the Scriptures and Lord. I’m amazed. I’m not really amazed now. I understand that the people who most spoke about hell are the ones that talk about its infinitude, its going on, never stopping. They do it because they’re being honest, but they do it because they couldn’t do less in the face of such a coming reality, not to warn people. May the Holy Spirit join in that effort and there be an awakening in us to this message we pray in his Jesus’ name. Amen.