Life After Death (Part 5) – Hell: David Pawson (Transcript)

And your reaction to this word may vary tremendously.

To the British workmen the word ‘hell’ may simply be a swear word that you use when you hit the wrong nail with a hammer.

To people living in Texas the word ‘hell’ brings to their minds a small town, an oil town which is called hell and which tourists love to visit so that they may send a postcard with that postmark on it. Here we are in hell having a lovely time sort of thing.

In British Columbia there is a deep dark valley called Hell and there are people living in it and some of them have chosen to do so for the novelty.

To the Anglo-Saxons where the word hell originated, to the Anglo-Saxons perhaps 600, 700 years ago the word hell meant quite simply a hidden place. It was used for example of the hollow under a tailor’s bench where he threw all the scraps of material he didn’t need and it was simply a hidden place.

It was used by lovers of a secret trysting place where they could be unseen by others. And the word hell as it originated in the English language simply meant somewhere you can’t see, a hidden place or a dark place. You can begin to see how it became attached to certain other ideas.

But I suppose to the Western world generally the word hell signifies something much more serious than that. Because we have been heavily influenced by Dante’s poetry and Milton’s and by Doris’ paintings we have a picture of hell, part of that picture may well be true and part of it may not.

There have been certain embellishments by the human imagination and this morning I’m not concerned with some of the embellishments. I’m not concerned in this series with either the temperature of hell or the furniture of heaven. And I’m not concerned certainly with the kind of jokes about red hot ice cream and the rest of it which I’m quite sure you heard as I did both at school and at work.

I am concerned with the reality. Now the idea that in the afterlife there is a good place for good people and a bad place for bad people is something that had gripped the human mind long before the Bible or the New Testament was written.

Deep down in human nature there is an instinctive belief that after we die there is some kind of distinguishing between the good and the bad and that there are two places awaiting in the future. One of which is a place of unending bliss and the other a place of unending torment.

Now Plato for example describes these two places, he gives them two names: Elysium is the name he gives to the happy place and you’ve heard about the Elysian Fields. But to the other place he gave the word Tartarus and it’s rather interesting that that word is used in the New Testament, though it was originally coined by a pagan philosopher. And so the New Testament seems to give approval to an idea which began outside the Bible.

Well now I’m going to DEFINE HELL for the moment as a place of conscious torment where the wicked are punished forever. And I’m going to ask, is it possible –

IS IT RIGHT FOR CHRISTIANS TO HOLD SUCH A DREADFUL IDEA TODAY IN THE 20TH CENTURY?

I’m going to approach it from three angles. First of all an intellectual angle, dealing with some of the arguments that have been used on both sides. Then I’m going to approach it from a Biblical or Scriptural angle to ask what does the Bible actually say? And then thirdly I’m going to approach it from a practical angle. What difference does it make to your daily life whether you believe in this or not?

Take first then the INTELLECTUAL APPROACH. Now there is no doubt about it that the majority of people in the 20th century in our society have rejected belief in hell. There can be little doubt about this.

I have talked to many people about this subject and it seems quite clear that the majority of people in Britain no longer believe in the idea as I have defined it. There have been so many objections raised to the idea of hell and certain alternative ideas have been proposed in its place.

I picked up a book on a second hand bookstore some time ago called, Is There a Hell? You can see by the book how old it is. In fact it’s published in 1913 and it was produced by about a dozen Protestant and Roman Catholic ministers and out of that dozen there are only two in 1913 who believe in hell as I have defined it. The rest raise the objections and if that was true in 1913 it is far more true today.

In a recent gathering of ministers of the church we were discussing this, and I discovered very quickly that out of all the ministers present representing all denominations, only the Roman Catholic priest and myself still believed that there was any place that could be called hell.

Now if the ministers of the church have stopped believing this, I think it would be a fair guess that most of the people they teach have, and if most of the people they teach have, I think one could say almost certainly that the vast majority of people outside the church also have.

Now what are the reasons for this twentieth century run from the idea?

Well here they are and I give you one, two, three, four, five, six objections that have been raised which are very sincerely held and very plausible and very logical.

First of all, and this is not the logical one, there are those who object to the idea of hell on sentimental grounds. They don’t like the idea, full stop. Now I’m afraid I’m not going to treat this one terribly seriously because sentiment makes havoc of our belief. If we allow our feelings to control what we believe then frankly we shall finish up in a jungle or a desert and we shall change our beliefs constantly.

If I said I will not believe a thing because I don’t like the idea, then I will have to close my mind to a great deal of the facts of life. Many of the facts of this life are unpleasant and sentimentalists do not like to face them. That is then no objection but it is perhaps behind a lot of people’s refusal to study carefully the question of hell.

Now coming to a more serious one, the idea of hell has been objected to on psychological grounds. On the ground that it produces fear and that fear is an unhealthy motive and therefore it ought not to be used and therefore the idea of hell which of itself is bound to be to produce fear must be wrong. That’s the psychological objection.

It could be answered that in fact fear can be a very healthy thing if it becomes a phobia that paralyses action it is unhealthy. But fear of the traffic and fear of fire and fear of many things is quite healthy if it produces the right action. But if it becomes a phobia in which you cannot think of anything else and in which you are panicking and paralyzed with fear, then it is unhealthy. But this is the psychological objection and this objection more than any other has stopped preachers dealing with this subject for fear they’ll just send their congregation into neurotic or psychotic states as the result of preaching rather than bring them to the Saviour.

Thirdly there is a social objection to the idea of hell and this objection runs like this: we have departed in society from the idea of punishment for its own sake which we call retribution. We now only punish for either deterrent reasons or reformatory reasons, either to stop others doing this or to reform them and it’s quite obvious that hell could do neither.

And therefore on sociological grounds if we do not believe in punishment for its own sake in our society, how could God possibly be worse than we are?

A fourth objection I’m not going to deal with that one at the moment we’ll come back to these later; a fourth objection is a moral objection. Hell is not fair runs this objection; it is surely unjust if for a few sins in a short life a man is punished eternally that the punishment is therefore out of all proportion to the crime and is not just or fair. That’s the moral objection.

Fifthly, there is a philosophical objection and this objection is that if there is a hell, then God has failed, evil is eternal, and God — the Almighty God has failed to deal with and remove evil, and evil will be as everlasting as He is. That’s the philosophical objection.

And finally a theological objection which is this: if God is a God of love, how could He send anyone to hell? Surely it is a denial of love to do such a thing to a living human being. And that is an argument that is perhaps the one that has been used most within the church.

Without dealing at this stage with these attacks, these objections that have been made, let me just add an interesting observation that nearly every one of the cults and sects with which we have to try and cope which many of which originated in America in the last century and which have now spread over here, and which I have been dealing with on Thursday evening, it is very interesting that nearly every one of these cults and sects have attacked the idea of hell and dismissed it.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in hell; the Christian scientists do not; the Spiritualists do not, and I find it very interesting that these cults do not. And one of the reasons for their attraction has been that they have got rid of what Christians have believed for two thousand years.

I suppose among the churches today, the Catholics and the evangelicals are the two groups still holding to the traditional definition of hell, but probably most others in between have now disregarded it.

Now if hell is dismissed, what do you put in its place? If the world is to have justice in it there must be some some kind of alternative, otherwise the whole universe becomes terribly unjust as we’ll see tonight when we study Psalm 73.

Now there are three alternatives that I have come across, most others are adaptations of these.

Number one, is the one you’ll find the man in the street holds that hell is self imposed suffering in this life. In simple language you make your own hell here that you live in your own hell because you’ve made it; it has nothing to do with God at all. God doesn’t send anyone to hell; you put yourself there and you put yourself there in this life. There isn’t a hell after death to face; there isn’t a God to face who will send you there; it’s all here and of your own making and therefore it can be of your own unmaking too.

And so many people have told me quite frankly I believe in hell but it’s the hell you make for yourself here and it’s the hell you have to live in as the result of your own actions.

The one big snag with this view is this that there are many people who ought to be in that kind of a hell who are not, and there are many people who are in it who’ve done nothing to deserve that; it just doesn’t — it isn’t borne out by facts but this is the first alternative.

The second alternative which does accept life after death as the first one doesn’t is to say that ultimately in some distant future God will save everybody and this is perhaps the view most commonly taught in churches today where the traditional view has been rejected, that God will someday bring everybody to Himself; it’s called Universalism and the idea is that God will find a way if not in this life in the next to bring every single person to Himself.

My biggest difficulty here is frankly the free will of man. If man is free to accept or reject, then God has limited His own freedom to that degree that if He forces everybody to come to heaven, then He is not treating them as human beings. That’s my difficulty but this is the second alternative.

The third alternative which is just I think being canvassed fairly lately though it was mentioned a long time ago, but it is now becoming much more seriously thought about, is what is called conditional immortality or annihilation meaning that the wicked will be extinguished altogether; only the righteous will live forever. The wicked will go out of existence completely. And this is the belief that at some point after the judgment the good will live on but the wicked will absolutely and forever cease to be.

Now quite frankly this reduces very considerably the aspect of punishment. The most that a wicked person could fear would be a lecture from the judge before they disappear. And if this is so, then from my own personal experience I have discovered that extinction is no punishment at all and that most people would prefer extinction. Indeed I’ve even had someone go so far as to say to my face: I would prefer extinction to being in heaven. The idea of being with God and His people forever horrifies me.

Now extinction therefore would be no punishment if that is all there was.

Now that’s approached it from a kind of intellectual point of view, it’s looked at the objections, the alternative suggested, how do we begin to answer this?

The answer surely is that for the Christian, not for anybody else but for the Christian he wants to know what the Bible actually says. If this is the word of God, then God is in a better position to know and we must first of all ask: what has He said? But we must be very very careful to study the Bible properly.

The fact that we have had hellfire preachers in the past who embellished and exaggerated or to warn us against preaching or believing what the Bible does not say however lurid or in a kind of sadistic way attractive such embellishments are, on the other hand we must be careful to see all that the Bible does say.

Now let’s look at the SCRIPTURAL APPROACH for a moment. The first surprise that many will find is this: there is hardly anything about hell in the Old Testament. That is a surprise, because many people say the Old Testament is the severe part of the Bible; that’s the bit where God is painted as a God who really punishes and really lets you have it, that the Old Testament is about a God who punishes, the New Testament is about a God who forgives.

Well now quite frankly my doctrine of hell could not be built on the Old Testament because there’s hardly anything there. There’s a lot about Sheol or Hades, the world of departed spirits, the in between if you were here a fortnight ago or three weeks ago you know what I mean, but there’s hardly anything about hell in the whole of the Old Testament.

So when we ask what the Bible says, we’ve got to start more than halfway through.

When we come to the NEW TESTAMENT, we find another most surprising thing: we find that there is hardly anything about hell in the Epistles, and those who think that Paul was guilty of taking the nice religion of Jesus and adding a lot of Jewish strictness to it will be utterly confounded on this subject; those who think that Paul loved to dangle people over the pit in his preaching will discover that this is not so.

Well then where did we get our idea of hell? The answer is utterly simple: from the lips of Jesus. If you cut out the things that Jesus said, you would be hard put to it to build up a belief in hell.

Why should such a thing be? The answer I think is very simple: God wanted us to have it from His Son direct. It is as if this was too terrible, too deep a doctrine to trust to anyone else. It was as if He wanted to say I want the person whom you will be convinced is more loving, more kind, more merciful, than anyone else who’s ever lived, I want Him to tell you about hell because I doubt if you will believe it from anyone else.

Just imagine a Bible in which Jesus said nothing about hell and it all came from Jeremiah and Paul. I can guess what would happen, I can guess what would be said. People would say there you are; my religion is the religion of Jesus; these men have twisted it because of their narrow minds and their strict natures.

But in fact it was the loving kind merciful Savior who spoke about this subject and out of all the references I have looked up to prepare this address, the vast majority come from the first three gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

So I’m going to go through one or two of His sayings. The real issue which is decisive for Christians is this: not the philosophical, moral, psychological, and arguments of men; the decisive issue is this: was Jesus the truth? When He said if a thing were not so, I would have told you, do we believe that or not?

Is He the Lord of my mind? Somebody once said this to me when I questioned something in the gospels; they said this and I’ve never forgotten it. If Jesus is your Lord, then you accept what He says is true, whether your mind says it is or not. But if you only accept His sayings when your mind agrees with them you are lord, not Jesus.

If I only accept the things in this Bible that my mind agrees with, I’m lord of the Bible. And the real issue that I found when I studied this and I confess quite frankly that my own mind, my own temperament and my own nature could not accept hell. The reason why I preach it to you is true, is that Jesus must be Lord of my mind and I must believe that His mind is much more logical than mine and much more able to see the truth than mine is, call it mental suicide if you like, call it a submission if you like, then I believe the only way to truth is to submit to the one who said I am the truth.

Now what did He say?

I’m going to build what I have to say around just two or three texts of His – there are others that one could take but there isn’t time.

Here’s the first: ‘Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul, rather fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.’ (Matthew 10:28)

Now that’s utterly simple English; it comes from our Saviour; it comes from the Lord Jesus, and I want to work backwards through the text, take the last word, the word hell. The word that He used in fact was not that word which is an Anglo-Saxon word as you know; it was the word ‘Gehenna’.

Now if you’ve been to the Holy Land you’ve probably seen this place; I certainly have, I’ve walked through it. It is a deep valley — the valley of Hinnom that runs around two sides of the city of Jerusalem. It’s a deep dark valley and the bottom of it there is a point where the sun never reaches, always in shade.

Now this shady valley used to be a place for summer residences of the kings of Israel, then it became a place of culture and music groves were erected. Then it became a place of pagan worship and shrines were erected and black magic and occult activities took place, and it finally became so defiled a place that people were killing and burning their own children to pagan gods within sight of the city of God.

And a young boy king called Josiah who came to the throne at the age of 12 under God saw how wrong that was, and he defiled the valley and he commanded that no one should live in it, and he stopped the abominations taking place and he called it Tophet, the valley of spitting.

From that day onwards it became the rubbish dump, the garbage heap of Jerusalem and anything that was not wanted was tossed over the wall, fell into the valley and there two things happened to the rubbish: worms and maggots ate what was edible, and bonfires were kept going to destroy the rest. It was just what happened in every large city today.

By the time of our Lord, when a criminal was executed, his body was thrown into that valley, and our Lord’s own body would have been thrown there if Joseph of Arimathea had not intervened. Furthermore it was down in the depths of that valley that a man called Judas hanged himself and went to his own place.

Now when our Lord spoke of hell, He always used this name: Gehenna, a place for rubbish, a place of burning, a place of worms, a place associated with sin and with crime. It’s a vivid picture.

Now the next word working back: body and soul. And it’s quite clear that He is referring to something after the resurrection when body and soul have been reunited. He said somebody may kill your body, don’t be afraid if they do, that’s not the worst thing that can happen to a man. You would think the way some people talk that was the worst thing that could happen: somebody killing your body is not the worst thing that can happen. There is something even worse that can happen to body and soul together later. So our Lord is clearly talking about the ultimate future.

The word destroy needs looking at. At first sight it looks as if it means to make extinct to annihilate to rub out altogether. But I want to tell you that careful study has shown all scholars they’re all agreed on this, that the word does not necessarily mean that; it is used of something that is ruined, that is wasted, that has become useless or lost. It is used of the lost sheep in the Parable Of The Lost Sheep; it is used of the withered wineskin when new wine was put into it. It is used of the ointment the woman wasted according to Judas on Jesus.

And when you study the word destroy the word perish… it means in Scripture precisely this: to be rendered useless, to be wasted and to be ruined. That is exactly how we use the word perish today. If you talk about a hot water bottle that has perished, what do you mean that it has gone out of existence, that it has ceased to be? No, you mean that it has become wasted, ruined, and is now useless for the purpose for which it was made.

What do you do with it when you reach that stage? The answer is quite clear it goes in the dustbin. There is nothing else you can do with something that has perished; nothing at all. If something is broken, that’s all right you can mend it; but if something is perished it has become useless and you can only throw it away.

And the valley of Gehenna outside Jerusalem was simply full of perished stuff.

I believe that Jesus Christ has the power to mend broken lives but the thing that He talked about with the utmost horror was not lives that are broken but lives that are perishing. And the loveliest text in all the Scripture is that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not be wasted, ruined, become utterly useless to God and men, but have everlasting life. That’s the real alternative.

Now you notice the word Him in the text: fear Him who destroys body and soul in hell. Who is this HIM? Some people think it refers to the devil, but the devil is one of those who is to be destroyed; it is clearly God.

Hell is not something I make for myself; it’s something that God is going to do. The Scripture is utterly clear on this: God does it; not me.

And the next word working backwards is fear. If it is psychologically bad for us to fear hell why did Jesus tell us to? If you run dangers of running people into all kinds of psychological conditions by speaking of hell, why did Jesus do it? He said fear Him who is able to do this.

Now so far I have only spoken of one text, one statement of our Lord. If that were all there was, that would be quite enough from Him, but it is far from all.

I must go quickly through the others. He speaks about in Mark 9:48: those who are thrown into hell… ‘Where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.’ He is here saying in this valley on earth: the worms do die and the fire is quenched and it is quenched today though the day I walked through that valley, a man was burning rubbish in the bottom of it; I’ve got a slide of that but the worms did die and the fires did die down.

Jesus here says specifically the worm and the fire do not cease in the place of which He is speaking, and if people cease, then why do the worm and the fire go on? I find this an impossible thing to understand and I notice that He speaks of where their worm does not die and where their fire is not quenched, I don’t know what the worm and the fire literally are; treat the language metaphorically as you will, but the reality behind the metaphor is still there to deal with: people have spoken of the worm as the nagging worm of conscience and memory, they can speak how they will; this does not remove the horror of the reality.

The parable of the Sheep and the Goats is another story that is very very well known and will be read in many churches this Sunday at the beginning of Christian Aid Week. I think will be misunderstood by many as if by doing good deeds to others you save yourself from hell, that is not the message of the parable.

But the parable finishes with this statement about the goats: ‘depart from Me ye cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, and these shall go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.’

And the last time I heard that read in church the minister stopped reading just before that verse, but it’s part of the story. And those who say that eternal surely cannot mean endless, are up against the profound difficulty that almost every other time it is used in the New Testament it does mean endless, God is said to be eternal; Christ is eternal; His salvation is eternal, and in this very verse: heaven is eternal.

Now we can’t have it both ways: if hell is temporary, then heaven must be also. But when the identical word is used of both, it becomes very difficult not to give it the same meaning to both in the same sentence.

Other phrases Jesus used are phrases like weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; phrases like outer darkness. They tell me in the Arctic regions that during the winter the most unbearable thing is not the cold but the lack of light. And Jesus spoke of darkness.

And finally I quote one more Jesus said to His critics: ‘You shall see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom and yourselves thrust outside.’ (Luke 13:28) He clearly taught that from hell you could see heaven, but not vice versa. And in fact it is so physically true about the present valley of Gehenna that from the valley you can see the city, but tourists have been right around the city and have come back to England without ever seeing the valley of Hinnom and I’ve spoken to many who’ve been on Holy Land tours and they think they’ve seen everything and they have not seen the bottom of this valley and it was within half a mile of most of the sites they saw and this is the picture that Jesus gives to know that you’re outside it.

Well now that’s a pretty horrible picture, it is confirmed in the rest of the New Testament which I do not go into; I simply quote from Paul’s letters, he says: those who know not God or obey not the gospel shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction. (1 Thessalonians 1:9)

In the book of Revelation, they will be tormented day and night forever. The same book speaks of fire and brimstone.

Let’s look then at the alternatives that people have suggested in the light of Scripture. Self-imposed suffering — this has nothing whatever to do with what Jesus said was hell. Hell is in the next life, not this and it is God who prepares it, not us.

Universal restoration: I find it absolutely impossible to believe that all will somehow be forced into heaven one day in the light of the very clear teaching of our Lord in the sermon on the mount, in His parables and in His direct teaching that hell is not just a possibility or even a probability but a certainty. The devil and angels are going to be there anyway, and all men who have accepted their leadership will join them.

Conditional immortality: I’m going to be quite frank here and say that I think a case can be made out for most of the language of Scripture that ultimately after terrible suffering there could be annihilation but only after the sufferings of hell. But I’m afraid I must be honest and say that not all the language can be interpreted this way, and I am left with the position where much as I do not like it by nature or by fallen reason, I must accept that Jesus did teach the understanding of hell that Christians for two thousand years have believed.

Faced with this dreadful fact, we are faced with a simple choice: do I accept the psychologist, the philosopher, the moral ethical teacher, the sentimentalist, the theologian, on the one hand who all object to this, or do I accept Jesus believing that even though He knew the love of God better than any others, even though He exercised it in His own life that deep down He knew that this was also the truth? That is the choice.

There came a day in my life where I surrendered my reason to His and said Jesus, You are not only my Savior, You are my Lord and that means my thinking is under your direction as well as everything else and that is why I believe in it today, not because I like it and I’m sure you sense that, but because I believe it to be the truth.

I come then to the practical aspect of this. Is this just an academic issue, is it just a thing to write books about, is it just a belief that you can say oh well you believe it; I don’t, let’s get on with being a Christian.

The answer is if it is true, then the most profound results come, first of all, to the unbeliever. If you study the lives of preachers like Wesley and Spurgeon you will find that they did not hesitate to plead with people to come to Christ to save them from hell, because it was real and because they hated the thought of a single soul going there; they preached the more earnestly.

Now let us ask there are certain practical issues here. What is it that takes a man to hell? I find that most people believe that everybody’s good as soon as they die, the way they talk you would think so, and believe that the only people who will be in hell are Hitler and Nero and Dr Crippen and one or two others like this.

What is it then that takes a man to hell according to an English proverb good intentions? Good intentions – the road to hell is paved with that what kind of good intentions — this good intention: I will become a Christian someday; I will start going to church when I’ve got the house decorated; I will start reading my Bible when I have a bit more spare time; I will do this when that’s the kind of good intention that paves the road.

Dr AT Pearson a great minister in the States said that in his congregation was an American judge and his wife was a Christian but he was not; and one day that judge sitting in his pew felt a conviction of God on him and knew that he must decide, and knew that God was very near and that he could accept Christ there and then but the following week he was seeing a bill through the American government and the future career that he had depended on that bill going through and he knew in his heart it was a bill that a Christian could not support. And the judge was at the crossroads of life: either his career went ahead and this bill went through or he accepted Christ.

And you know what he decided that Sunday, he decided he’d become a Christian after the bill went through but he never did. And 20 years later he died still no nearer to Christ. He had the intention but when the crisis came he turned it down: the road to hell is paved with such good intentions, and if there’s anyone in the congregation I’m not trying to put you in the hands of a psychiatrist, I’m just telling you the truth. If ever God speaks to you and you know you should get on your knees somewhere privately and say Lord Jesus I know that I deserve hell and I know that I’m going there unless You do something for me and I ask you to save me.

Then I beg you to do it when the impulse comes. According to my Bible, here are some of the things that can drag a man down to hell: jealousy, envy, anger, drunkenness, filthy talking, hypocrisy, cowardice, covetousness, lying, fornicating. Here is a list of things every one of which according to the New Testament is enough to drag a man there, which is why Jesus said, if your hand offends you, cut it off; better to go to heaven with one hand than to live in hell with both; if your eye offends you, cut it out; if your foot offends you, cut it off.’ He’s not being literal because naturally if you cut one hand off you’ve still got another and if you take one eye out you’ve still got a second.

What He’s saying is this: if there is anything you are looking at, anything you are doing with your hands, anywhere your feet take you, that is leading you into this, then cut it right out. Better to live a narrow life and be called narrow without this than to go with it to hell.

Then my next word is how does a man escape from hell? The answer is very simple. It is at the cross that hell becomes most real. Those who don’t believe in hell I don’t think have ever studied the cross.

Two aspects of the cross tell me this: first, what awful necessity demanded that Jesus die before God could forgive me? What terrible thing was it that made the blood of Jesus Christ the only sufficient price to save me? The answer is hell was the awful necessity.

And the second question is what awful experience did Jesus go through for me? The answer is He went through hell. If you want to know what hell is, then listen to the Son of God crying, ‘My God, My God, where are you? Why is it so dark? Why have You left Me? Why is there nothing no sense of Your presence’ the first time He’d ever felt that in all eternity. That was hell and He was going through it to save us. The cross is the greatest proof of God’s love of the sinner and hatred of sin.

There is a hymn that I think sums it up perfectly, it’s by Charles Wesley and it’s this: Love moved Him to die, and on this we rely, He hath loved, he hath loved us, we cannot tell why. But this we can tell, He hath loved us so well as to lay down his life to redeem us from hell.

If you don’t believe in hell, then I ask you why did Jesus need to go through hell for you? If you don’t believe, there was this awful possibility why did He have to die? It’s impossible to find an answer.

My last word is very practical it is to Christians: if what I have said is true, then the priority of every Christian is to win others for Christ, and whatever else we do for other people this must be our main task. One of the most disturbing features of the last 20 years is the declining interest in saving souls and the abounding enthusiasm in feeding bodies.

I want to speak very carefully here, because this is Christian Aid Week and you’re being asked to give and to collect for starving bodies that is right and proper that you should, a Christian who can see someone hungry and not doing do something about it is not a Christian, but I want to say this last year giving to feed bodies from Christian Aid multiplied a hundred percent in 12 months but missionary societies are having great difficulty in getting money to save souls.

During the 19th century Christians in this country poured out men and money in increasing numbers to the world at large; it was the greatest export that Britain has ever made. Why did they do it? Because they believed they were helping to save people from hell.

This century that has seen the decline in belief in hell even among professing Christians has seen the great switch, it was not that the missionaries neglected the bodies or minds of people when they went out; they built their schools and their hospitals, but their aim in going was to save souls and they knew that even if you fed a man every day of his life in this world you have not helped him permanently until you’ve saved his soul.

And I just put in a plea that we balance our activity as Christians. The world will give to Christian Aid, the world will give to feed the starving. Only Christians seek to save souls; we are the only people to do this for a lost world, and our missionary interest will be directly related to our belief in the things that I’ve been speaking about this morning.

So while we do give to help those who suffer in body, and while we give to feed the minds, if we really believe this then the effect on Christians is to get their priorities right and to make evangelism their prime activity and missionary interest the first call on their purse. So it’s very practical, it’s very down to earth.

I’m afraid I have run right away with the time. I’m going to ask you to write those questions down. I’ll tackle them straight away another time. I want you to write them down, perhaps you can write them down in the little gap between this and the next part of the service. Sorry I’ve done that but this is such an important subject I wanted to deal with it thoroughly but I’d like you to write your questions down, I’ll collect them, I’ll promise not to look at them until I answer them so that you get a spontaneous answer and not somebody else’s that I’ve looked up and that you get a real answer.

For Further Reading:

Life After Death (Part 4) – Judgement: David Pawson (Transcript)

Life After Death (Part 3) – Resurrection: David Pawson (Transcript)

Life After Death (Part 2) – Between Death and Resurrection: David Pawson (Transcript)

Life After Death (Part 1) – Death: David Pawson (Transcript)

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