Jesus on Hell #1

Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in The Truth Pulpit. What I want to do this evening is to enter into the sober topic and to expand on that idea that God has a hell and that it is real and that it is something that we need to contemplate here. And friends, you understand that it is very difficult in times of prosperity to get people to think seriously about spiritual matters.

When people are content, when they are well fed, when their jobs and health seem secure to them and prosperity is abounding and blooming all around us, people are focused on this world. And it is therefore a gracious thing from God to remove those things and to make those things unsettled in order to clear the decks, so to speak, so that people will contemplate spiritual reality. And the reality of eternal judgment, of eternal hell, is something that, while it may initially seem to be unpleasant, is something that we increasingly need to press home on the minds of anyone who would hear us. In addition to that, for us as believing people, it is a sobering reminder to us of the stakes that are at hand in the teaching of Scripture and what we believe in the gospel that we proclaim. All of these things create a sense of urgency for us to go back to God's Word and to see what it has to say about these matters, because I would have you see it yourself from God's Word.

I would not want to be someone who is independently alarmist about this, apart from Scripture, and I certainly don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to be able to see it from God's Word for yourself, exactly how this is woven throughout not only the general pages of Scripture, but found rooted deeply in the words of our Lord Jesus Christ himself. And so tonight we're going to consider what Jesus said about hell, the title for tonight's message, Jesus on Hell. And what we want to see is that Scripture declares this theme of judgment in unmistakable terms. In the book of Acts chapter 17, verses 30 and 31, it says this, it says, having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead. God has fixed a day for judgment. There will be a day when Jesus Christ will gather nations before himself and gather all men of all time and in some supernatural miraculous way will evaluate their lives in perfect righteousness and they will give an account to him of their lives and they will be held accountable for their rebellion against him. This is a matter of great sobriety and it's a matter of great consequence and great emphasis in the Scriptures.

And so what we want to do tonight is to build on these sobering things, the events of our world today, beloved. What is happening around us now is a foreshadowing of that greater judgment that is yet to come. And because the greater judgment, the final judgment has not yet arrived, there is time for you to repent.

There is time for you to take these things seriously, to take them to heart and to ask God for mercy on your guilty soul before the final judgment comes and you're cast away and it's too late. You see, there's a warning here and the warning gives you opportunity to seek Christ and to ask him for mercy. And that is an act of grace from God that there is this window of time in which he is showing that for a time he's not willing for men to perish but that men would come to repentance. And that's what we want to see and why this is so urgent, to not take this time of gracious warning for granted in light of the time of wrathful judgment that is coming as we'll see from God's Word. So what we're going to do is we're going to focus primarily on the Gospel of Matthew here this evening, looking at what Jesus Christ himself said about hell. And for our starting text tonight, let's go back to what I opened up with reading from Matthew chapter 7, beginning in verse 21.

And as we've done for the sake of emphasis in past messages, I want to read through that text again so that it is set well in your mind and becomes the foundation upon which we look for God's teaching through his Spirit here tonight. Matthew chapter 7, verse 21. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?

And in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles. And then I will declare to them, I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house, and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.

The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house, and it fell, and great was its fall. Friends, what I would have you see in the very general overview that we're going to take at this text for just a couple of moments here, is that Jesus is making a contrast between a wise man and a fool. And he compares the wise man to someone who built his house on a firm foundation of rock, and the foolish man being the one who built his house on the sand. We don't need a degree in construction engineering to understand that anything built on sand is unstable and is subject to destruction at any time when the forces of nature come upon it.

By contrast, a house built on a solid foundation has the capacity to withstand the forces of nature because it's properly constructed according to the principles of good engineering practice. That's the basic simplicity of the metaphor, I guess. What we need to see is that Jesus is taking those pictures from the physical realm and applying them to the spiritual realm. And the basis of distinction is not the physical foundation upon which a house is built, but rather the spiritual foundation upon which your life is built, upon which your hope is built, upon which your focus is built. And he says that the wise man is the one who responds to his word. The foolish man hears it, avoids it, ignores it, neglects it, and goes on and pays a most heavy price. You see, the wise man hears the words of warning of Jesus in the Scripture and comes to him humbly in a repentant faith and asking Christ for mercy because of his sin. The foolish man hears the same words of judgment, hears the same message of salvation, and yet ignores it or denies it or mocks it or angrily denounces it as something that is incompatible with the general tolerance of man or whatever else might be in their sinful minds. Well, what Jesus is showing us is that there will come a time of testing. Just as hasty construction faces a time of testing from the later forces of nature, what we see here in this Scripture is that our response to Christ and to his words faces a future time of testing, and what we have based our life and hope on will be tested, not by a strong storm of nature, but by the even stronger storm of the judgment of Christ when he evaluates our lives. And so, Christ is looking forward to that day of judgment in the passage that I just read. He is saying that men will stand before him, and at that future time, he will declare to them their eternal destiny. The matters of heaven and hell are directly in issue in this passage that we are looking at. And what he says is so sobering. It's a familiar passage.

I've taught on it many times, even here at Truth Community Church. But what it says is so sobering, my friends, because what stands out is this group of people who are shocked, who are stunned, who are astonished to realize that they are not entering into the kingdom of heaven, but rather they are being cast away into eternal judgment. And Jesus says to them, I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. Now look, that is sobering. That is a matter of utmost serious consequence. And there is no way to laugh this off. There is no way to righteously ignore it.

There is no excuse for doing that. Jesus has graciously, in the first century, he graciously gave a warning about the nature of spiritual life and what future judgment would look like. He gave a preview of coming attractions, and it's such a sobering picture. It's just so important to realize that Jesus says that these that are turned away, there will be many of them.

This is not an isolated case. This is not something that is going to be a rare exception to expectations on that day. Rather, there are going to be many, many, many people who, expecting to go to heaven, find themselves instead sent away by Jesus Christ. My friends, as you're watching this, I want you to understand that this is a matter that we are to take seriously. We are to hear the words of Christ and act upon them, to turn our hearts to them in humility, recognizing that in so doing we can join the wise who are responding rather than the fools who ignore it and pay such an unspeakably enormous price at the end of the age. And so my plea with God and my plea with you is that he might bless this time in his Word and bless it to your hearing that if you are slumbering in a false conversion that God would graciously wake you up, that if you are hardened that the Spirit of God would soften you as you see the great consequences of the things that we are discussing here today. And so there will be many for whom judgment will not go as they had expected, and Christ is telling the visible church, those who consider themselves Christians, to pay heed, to pay attention during this time. He is warning them of a danger that is ahead, and it behooves us all to take it to heart. And it reminds us of a most simple reality, that not everyone who calls themselves a Christian truly is saved. Not everyone who believes that they have been saved actually is. There's a disconnect. There is a self-delusion that operates in the hearts of men that we're vulnerable to and that is dangerous, eternally dangerous, my friends. And so I plead with you to hear and to not lightly dismiss the things that are taking place.

Let me call a little bit of a time out here and just say this. Over the 25 years or so that I've had one involvement or another in pastoral ministry, I've baptized dozens and dozens of people. And as I look back over my records and the subsequent course of some of those lives, it's just evident that those people were baptized on the basis of a mistaken view of their conversion. They leave the church. They abandon Christ. They have no interest in righteousness.

They go back to their former way of life. You know, there's no way to judge those things in the moment. There's no way you baptize people based on, you know, the testimony, the credible testimony of their lips. But sometimes it shows up in later lives that these people didn't understand their true situation because those who are truly converted continue in the faith.

Well, it's just a sobering reminder. It's another picture that's given to us that when these things happen, we're seeing the reality that not everyone that claims to be a Christian in the moment actually is. And far more important than the way that this is borne out in the life of, you know, of a pastor's ministry is what the consequences of that are for the final day of judgment and what it means for people later on. Christ shows us plainly that simply claiming to be a Christian does not make you one.

Being born into a Christian family does not make you a Christian. And I just want you to see the stakes could not be more high, and they could not be more high for you to take these things into your heart and to receive what Jesus says and to ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom and discernment about your own soul. We are forgetting about what's happening in the world around us today.

We're forgetting about everybody else that's looking at us or sitting next to us. And Scripture is speaking directly to you today. And my prayer is that God would bless this word to your heart for the eternal well-being of your eternal soul. So, Christ has given a warning. He says that not everybody who calls me Lord will actually enter into heaven. Well, he goes on and he shows that there are also those that he will turn away because they're not those who do his will. People call him Lord, but it's an empty faith.

People claim to do works in his name, but they were empty works. Lord, we prophesied in your name. We cast out demons in your name.

We did many miracles in your name. Lord, how could you send us away after all that we have done? Doesn't that just sound like charismatic ministry today? It grieves me to contemplate the consequences of Jesus' words for that whole realm of so-called evangelicalism. But what we need to see here is that it is possible Jesus says there will be many who will have done works and have done them in his name, and yet he'll send them away. And the reality, the explanation for that is this, is that those works were not flowing from a new birth that had taken place in their hearts. They were not works that were done in response to the saving work of God in a life. They were works that were done in human pride or for the sake of projecting human merit before God, and Christ rejects it all and shows us that this possibility, this reality that will take place is that there will be those with empty words before them, Lord, Lord, empty. Faith without works is dead. Also, the possibility of people coming, showing their works before them, and he says, no, it's empty because it wasn't premised on a repentant faith in me to generate the motivations for it all.

And what we see here is this, and it's very sobering. You know, people, I think, tend to take Jesus too lightly, and people forget that Jesus Christ rules over eternal judgment, that Christ has the authority and all judgment has been handed over to him, and your eternal destiny is going to be determined by what Jesus Christ does with you, and there is no way around that. All of us are being funneled toward one destination, one common outcome of our lives, one common meeting point where we gather before the throne of Christ, and he either admits us into his kingdom or he sends us away, and so it's very sobering to realize, and Jesus claimed this authority for himself.

He asserted this authority about himself. In the book of Revelation, chapter 1, verse 18, I have one book in particular that I would want to call your attention to. Jesus said, I have the keys of death and hate. The entrance to heaven comes through him alone. It does not come through Peter. It certainly does not come through Mary. It doesn't come through any other human agency or any institution like the Roman Catholic Church. Eternal life is found in Christ alone.

He said, no one comes to the Father except through me. I've been there, my friend, and the book, Trusting God in Trying Times, speaks to that spiritual experience in the life of a believer. You can find all of my books at thetruthpulpit.com. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Just click on the link there.

You'll find links to different books, and you will find that they take you to an easy place to purchase them for your reading and joining. Thank you once again for joining us on The Truth Pulpit. We'll see you next time as we continue to study God's Word together.

Having not taken the words of Christ to heart. Well, my friends, what God has given us here on this Thursday evening, April 9, 2020, God has given us another opportunity. God has given you another opportunity to take the words of Christ to heart.

And, you know, I think about the young people in our church that are often sitting over to my right, sometimes off back to the left, and maybe you're gathered around a screen watching this with your parents or something. How important it is for you as you enter closer and closer to adulthood and your understanding of these things is growing, how important it is for you to humble yourself before the Word of Christ and to not take anything for granted about the condition of your soul and to heed the words of Christ and what's being said here tonight. And so Jesus Christ turns away those with empty words. He turns away those with empty works who do not do his will. Those people are going to be shown to be imposters, false converts, those who never knew Christ in the first place. And the 19th century commentator J.C. Ryle said this, he said, and I quote in light of these words of Christ, he said this, he said, Do we truly repent, truly believe on Christ and live holy and humble lives? If not, in spite of all our privileges and profession, we shall miss heaven at last and be forever cast away. We shall hear those awful words. I never knew you. Depart from me. That's how serious that's how serious this is. And I'm going to to quote from Bishop Ryle a few more times before the night is over. Friends, let's just be clear. No one is saved by their works.

That's not what we're talking about here. We're saved through faith alone in Christ alone. But scripture equally teaches that true faith, real genuine saving faith, produces a changed life that is manifested in genuinely good works as scripture defines them. Our social relationships are changed. Our doctrinal beliefs are changed.

Our moral behavior is changed, as the letter to First John teaches us. And so there is a genuine transformation that takes place because in true salvation, God has taken a man, taken a woman, taken a boy, taken a girl, taken them out of death and transformed them into into life. He has imparted a new nature to them. He has made them a new creation.

A new life principle animates everything about their being. And because there is a new life within, there is an outward change that takes place in actions and in words. And there is an internal change that takes place in true salvation of a love for God's word, both written and incarnate.

You love scripture and you love the Savior, and your life reflects that in what you do. And so there is this genuine change that takes place without which a profession of faith is empty. Faith without works is dead, James 2, verse 17 says. And so we contemplate these things from Christ and we realize that in the end, Jesus Christ is going to turn away from entrance into his kingdom everyone who does not genuinely love him, that is not genuinely submitted to him, that is not genuinely entrusted their souls to him, that is not repentantly come to him asking for mercy and for salvation. You see, this excludes everyone who is casual, this excludes everyone who is indifferent, and this excludes so many people who have heard the Word of God who can easily say that, you know, Christ died for me without the reality of a genuine change inside their lives. And it's people like that that these words of Christ are directed to. And so Christ turns people away because these people do not love him.

And think with me here, they do not really love him. Some of you watching, you don't really love Christ. You just go along for the ride, you think about things in just outward morality terms or things like that, but a true heart, love, affection for the Lord Jesus Christ, yeah, that's foreign to your soul. You're in danger if you do not love Christ. The scriptures say if anyone does not love the Lord Jesus, let him be accursed. 1 Corinthians 16, I believe it is. And yet, if you do not love the king, why should the king let you into his kingdom? On what grounds would Christ share his kingdom with those that are hostile to him?

That makes no sense. And yet, this is one of the basic ways that people go into error in their minds and delude themselves about the reality of their salvation. And yet, despite all of these things and despite this text that we have seen in Matthew 7, men and women will still, will still reject the warning.

They will still dismiss the threat of judgment. And they callously and superficially and foolishly have it in their minds that somehow in the end, Jesus is all love and peace, and therefore all will be well in the end. In their minds, there is no place for a literal hell, for literal sinners to be sent for literally all of eternity. They just don't contemplate that because they think it doesn't fit with their view of the world and their view of Jesus.

And for some, it's so horrible to contemplate that they just push it out of their minds and don't even think about it. They deny it without even seeing what Scripture actually says about it. Well, it's our responsibility here this evening. It's my privilege here this evening to show you what the Bible actually says and what Jesus himself actually said about these important matters. And so we're going to see three things here tonight about hell and about Jesus and what he taught about hell. And the first one is this, and is simply stated, hell is real. Hell is real.

There is a literal place of future punishment that exists where many, many people will be cast and spend their eternity in this awful place of judgment. Hell is real. It is not a fiction. It is not a fable.

It is not the creation of fundamentalist preachers. It is the clear teaching of the Word of God, by which I mean the 66 books of the Bible. And it is the clear teaching of the Word of God, by which I mean the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ himself. Jesus teaches repeatedly, my friends. Over and over again, Jesus assumes the reality of a literal hell in the things that he teaches. I want to show you this primarily from the Gospel of Matthew. Turn to Matthew chapter 5 with me. A little earlier in the Sermon on the Mount that we were looking at from Matthew chapter 7.

Now we want to look at Matthew chapter 5 verse 22, and the course of tonight's message will start to accelerate now after all that introduction. Matthew chapter 5 verse 21, Jesus said, You have heard that the ancients were told, You shall not commit murder, and whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court, and whoever says to his brother, You good for nothing shall be guilty before the Supreme Court.

Here it is. And whoever says, You fool shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell. The fiery hell. Jesus' warning here would be meaningless if hell was not an actual place, if it was only a metaphor of some kind.

His teaching would be meaningless. Jesus is showing us that hell is a literal place, and that's what gives such weight to his warnings against the sin of anger, to realize that a man with an angry spirit is someone who is guilty enough to be cast into hell. Now, later in that chapter, we see that a man with a lustful heart is also guilty enough to go to a literal hell. Look at verse 27. Jesus goes on and says, You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you, for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you, for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. Jesus here is showing that even internal sins create guilt before God of such consequence and such degree that men are guilty and liable to eternal judgment. And he's warning them that there is a place in hell for angry people and for lustful people, even if they are outwardly moral.

That has nothing to do with it. Jesus looks on the heart and says, If your heart is like this, you are guilty enough to go to hell. And so serious is the warning that he uses a sense of hyperbole that says, If there is something in your life, if there is a sin in your life, it is so important for you to repent that it would be like it would be better for you to cut off a body part and go without your right hand during this brief earthly life rather than to carry that sin, carry that body part into eternal hell.

And friends, here's what you have to see. This is what you must understand. No matter what you've been taught to the contrary in the past, we are seeing the clear words of Jesus Christ on the pages of Scripture here tonight, aren't we?

This is undeniable. Jesus talks about being sent into the fiery hell. Here's what you need to understand, my friend. Jesus Christ means what he says. It is impossible for God to lie. Jesus Christ, when he speaks about the fiery hell, he's not bluffing. He's not trying to scare you only to remove the reality of the threat at a later time. No, the threat is real and the threat will be executed in future eternal judgment on everyone who rejects Christ. And so Christ isn't bluffing.

He means what he says here. And we need to get past our natural inclination to marginalize his words and to take him at his word and to understand that when he speaks of a literal hell for literal sinners, for literal sins in their lives, he means it. And there are actually going to be countless numbers of people cast into hell.

Why? Because hell is real. It is a real place where people are really in danger of really going. I don't know how many different ways I can say it, but as I say it, there's a mental prayer in my mind that the Spirit of God would be merciful to you and would convict you of the reality of these things, that you might flee to Christ for mercy as a sinner who is in danger and needs deliverance from a very real threat to your eternal well-being. Well, my friend, there is no substitute for reading the Word of God for yourself and spending the time day by day going through the Bible in a systematic way so that you have a full exposure to everything that the Word of God says. It's remarkable the way the Spirit of God works through the Word to minister to our hearts in that way. And to help you do that, we have a couple of different Bible reading plans available on our website, thetruthpulpit.com. If you would go to thetruthpulpit.com, click on the link that says About, you'll find a sublink there that takes you to two different Bible reading plans that you can choose from.

It's free. It's there available to help you in your reading of God's Word. And I know that the Spirit of God will use that in your life if you're not used to reading God's Word on a regular, systematic basis.

Make this the day that you start something new and move in that direction. And join us again next time here on The Truth Pulpit as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.