Is Hell Real and Who Chooses to Go There? | Dr. John Ewart

Hey everybody, this is Pastor John Ewart from Inglewood

Baptist Church in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina.

Thank you so much for tuning into our podcast.

You're going to hear from God today as we share from his word

about important issues facing your life that can guide you

according to the Bible. Well, thanks for joining me here

physically. And for those again listening

online, thank you so much for joining in.

We are continuing our series called Is Hell or Heaven, Hell

and the Hereafter. And tonight we're talking about,

unfortunately, the subject matter of hell itself and, and

who chooses to go there. And I want you to notice the

very specific choice of verbs there 'cause that is the way

this works. Whether people agree with that

or not, not everybody will like everything that's going to be

shared probably in this study tonight.

But I promise you that these are very biblical thoughts as I've

tried to work really hard. We talked a few sessions ago

about heaven and what and how wonderful it is.

We do need to talk about the alternative as well.

So so let's dive into this a little bit.

The reality of hell is something that gets debated.

Frankly, it's always been interesting in the United States

of America that a much larger percentage of believes in heaven

than hell. That doesn't surprise me.

We'll talk more about maybe why later, but some of that's

wishful thinking. I think the reality is, is that

everybody is going to experience life after death.

And the question is just whether you're going to spend it in

heaven or hell. Where are you going to spend it

is the issue. And part of our part of our

reasoning for still existing on this planet after we trust in

Jesus Christ is to try to help influence that decision in the

lives of others. So obviously, those who trust in

Christ will spend eternity with him in heaven.

Those who reject him will spend eternity apart from God.

We're going to talk a whole lot more about what it means to be

apart from God because I'm not sure people always understand

the seriousness of that, but they're going to do that in this

place of great suffering. And it's called hell.

There are other names for it. Again, some deny it.

You know, Gallup that does these poles, it's only about 50 or so

percent of the United States population.

Sometimes it's varies, It's gone less than that, rarely goes much

higher than that of the US population that actually

believes in hell. So it's a, it's a very, it's a

very convenient selective thought process, isn't it?

To where I don't have to think about the bad stuff.

I can just think about the good stuff.

And that often ties into their view of God, which we've talked

about in previous sessions, that they have room for God as love.

They don't have room for God as holy.

They don't have room for God as judge.

And so, and unfortunately in our our culture today, many use the

word and concept rather flippantly.

And the concept of hell is anything but flippant.

There's a very serious, very serious matter.

Jesus spoke of hell often. Frankly, the Bible talks about

hell quite often, and so if you don't believe it exists, you're

cutting out a significant portion of the Word of God.

It's just hard to ignore it and we're going to breakdown some of

the words being used for it. But Jesus spoke of it one of the

most, one of those direct places, Matthew 812.

While the sons of the Kingdom will be thrown into the outer

darkness, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of

teeth. Jesus will use in more than one

occasion, and we'll see these occasions in this session.

He uses some of the strongest possible Greek language you

could muster up to describe the horrors of what this eternal

judgement and death looks like. In fact, he warns them in

Matthew at 10:28. And do not fear those who kill

the body but cannot kill the soul.

Rather for him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

And we're going to talk about what that word means, that word

destroy means because some people use that to teach a

heresy called annihilationism that we've talked talked about

before. We're going to talk about again

later. But if there is no hell, Jesus

lied, because these certainly aren't the only two verses where

he mentions it. So you're calling Jesus if you

don't believe there's a hell, you're calling Jesus a liar.

And so you've got to work through your theology on that

level at some point if that's where you are.

And then obviously many would say that a loving God would

never send anyone to hell, or that's not my God.

My God would never send anybody to hell.

And that's a misunderstanding of a lot of things that we'll talk

about. The Scripture is very clear.

Luke wrote Luke 12-5. But I I warn you whom to fear?

Fear him. Who after he has killed, has

authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.

Now, what's interesting about that verse is many people would

think he's talking about the devil.

We, we've created this false thought process that somehow

Hell's like a really bad hotel and, and the devil's running it

down there with his demons. You see TV commercials, you see

cartoons like that. You got a, a pointy deer guy

with a pitchfork and he's, he's, you know, and else it comes from

Dante's concept of the, of, of hell and, and the fact that the

demons are down there running the, the really bad Motel 6 down

there. But but that's not the way it

works at all. In fact, this verse is not

talking about Satan. This verse is talking about God.

And so the one we should fear is God himself.

He is the one who can, who has the authority.

So Satan, Satan has no power to determine the destiny of a human

soul. There's a sentence.

Satan can't do that. Now, we might think he can.

He certainly influences, but we often give Satan more power than

he deserves. In fact, down the road, before

we're done with this series, I want to do a whole session on

angels and demons so that we have a real complete

understanding of what they are and what they're not.

Because unfortunately, again, with Hollywood and with much of

the media and different things around us, we've elevated Satan

to almost a minor God. And that's not what he is.

He can't destroy a human soul. He tempts us and seeks to trick

us and we fall prey to his ambush.

But many, many just don't get it.

And, and the the bigger issue here is again, the holiness of

God and, and just how the fact that we really don't understand

sin. We don't understand how evil sin

is. We don't understand how how

atrocious our sin is to a supremely holy perfect God.

And so often people will argue the punishment doesn't fit the

crime. But that's because they don't

understand the crime. They don't understand what the

degree of sin is and what the price of sin is, even though the

Bible is ultra clear about warning you what the wages of

sin is. So sin is much worse than anyone

can imagine. Danny Akin had a line that he

would say more than once, he said when you know, sin is

slapping the slapping the God of the universe in the face and we

just don't, we don't often think of it that way.

We, we, we rate sin, we grade sin, some sins really not that

big a deal, Some sins a lot worse.

You know, we don't like certain sins a whole lot more than we

don't like other sin and things like that sometimes in our human

nature. But that's not what sin is.

And so sin is this eternal separation from God and it can

only be pardoned by the supreme sacrifice.

And that that wage of sin is death.

And so somebody had to die. And so the death of of God the

Son on the cross is the only thing that could pay for that.

You can't pay for your own sin and you can't get out of it.

We're going to see that a whole lot more clearly as we walk

through this. So Jesus specifically states

that non believers can't escape this condemnation.

Matthew 23, again, he's talking to religious people when he says

this. He says you serpents, you brood

of Vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?

This, these are Jewish religious leaders because the only way out

of this is by trusting in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

So scripture assures us that hell is a real place, but we

also often really mess this up. And this goes back to whether

Satan's run in hell or not. We we don't understand what hell

was created for in the 1st place.

Hell has a very specific created purpose.

The Bible tells us what it is. He says in Matthew 2541.

Then he will say to those on his left, depart from me, you curse,

you cursed. Got to throw that curse said in

there into the eternal fire. Prepared for who it's prepared

for the devil's the devil, excuse me and his angels.

So it was prepared for Satan and his demons.

And so the the idea of hell wasn't necessarily originally

designed for humanity, even though God knew humanity would

end up there because God knows everything.

But it was actually designed as the eternal place for to

accommodate the banishment of Satan and his fallen angels who

rebelled and and seek to take over against God.

And so those who reject or rebelled against Christ are the

same, and they're going to end up in the same place.

We follow whoever our Lord is into eternity.

And so whoever your boss is, whoever your Lord is, that's who

you'll spend eternity with. And so the wicked will be raised

at the end of time and judged at the great White Throne judgment.

Then they're going to be cast into the Lake of Fire, which is

their permanent place of suffering throughout all

eternity. And I'll talk more about that

permanence in a moment too. Whereas Christians who have

died, now we've talked about this before, are spiritually

fully conscious and fully aware in the presence of God, having a

great time. And one day they're going to

receive their final new resurrected bodies and enjoy

their this eternal paradise that we described when we talked

about heaven. So loss, sinners who have died

or now, as we've talked before, in the presence of suffering

already in this temporary holding place, this temporary

place called Hades or Sheol. And they're waiting their final

state with their bodies for eternal punishment.

And so there's an in between time again, we talked a few

sessions ago about because of the way time doesn't work in

eternity, does it actually seem like time when that happens?

Or is it immediate as far as they're concerned?

Whereas it's a time lag for us, You know what I'm saying?

Don't blow your brains out over that.

But anyway, what we see is is that these are described.

Psalm 30 verse 9 talks about the pit.

Psalms 30:9

What profit is there in my death if I go down to the pit?

Will the dust praise you? Will the tell of your

faithfulness and that pit is this idea of Hades Archie old

the abode of the dead, so to speak.

We talked in a previous session, so we won't take time to do it

again about Luke 16, the story of the rich man and Lazarus.

The fact that there was a glimpse of what this torture

looks like, there's agony and fire even in Hades.

And the rich man had a choice on earth and that story and

suffered the consequences of his decision to live for himself

instead of living for God. And in his rebellion, he earns

his wage, and that wage is death.

So the reality of hell is is there, and we're going to

continue to see that reinforced. I want to spend a little more

time, I think, on the description of hell because it

really is interesting to get into some original language with

you a little bit because there's some keywords that are used in

the New Testament to refer to hell.

And a lot of them have kind of interesting backstories to them.

And so one of the Greek words, perhaps the most common one that

Jesus would use is Gehenna. And so this word Gehenna was

actually something that the readers would have related to

because they're actually related to a physical place they knew

about as well. And so in Matthew chapter 10,

Matthew 10:28

verse 28, again, it says, and do not fear those who kill the body

but cannot kill the soul, rather fear him who can destroy both

soul and body and Gehenna. And so this idea of Gehenna,

this was a valley originally. Historically there was a valley

just outside the city where atrocities were carried out in

previous days of Israel and the days of Pagan and horrible

kings, even some in the day of of Solomon in the valley of Ben

Ben Hinnam and Ben Hinnam. It was a place where human child

sacrifice was made. You can read in the Old

Testament, in Second Chronicles and in Jeremiah.

They sacrificed children to the false Moabite God of Moloch

there. And so there were incredible

atrocities there. Worship, Baal worship centers

and Ashtaroths were set up to Pagan gods along the way as

well. Jeremiah called this the Valley

of Slaughter in Jeremiah Chapter 7.

Jeremiah 7 · chapter mention

It was so horrible, such an atrocious place.

So by the time the New Testament rose around, this place is

considered extremely unclean because of its history.

So this became the trash dump of Jerusalem.

So this is where all the garbage was put.

And so they they would dump all the garbage, all the filth of

Jerusalem poured into this valley.

But it wouldn't just be what we would normally think of body of

garbage. It wasn't your neatly wrapped

trash bag and either your recycling bin or your normal

bin. It was loose refuse, but it

would also be dead animals as well as the bodies of criminals

would just be thrown into Gehenna.

And so there was a constant fire taking place in Gehenna.

They were constantly burning everything in Gehenna to offset

the smell and the spread of disease and things like that.

So there were these quote UN quote, eternal fires that never

went out. There were people whose job, if

you can imagine this job, one of the worst jobs I ever knew about

was in eastern Oklahoma. And some of you may have done

this job because they have them around here too.

Was it what was called a chicken chaser?

I don't know if you know what a chicken chaser in a chicken

house is and what a huge long chicken houses that you'll see.

A chicken chaser is a person who goes in that and goes in there

to clean out all the dead chickens.

Because if you don't clean out the dead chickens, the other

chickens are actually chickens are cannibals.

I don't know if you know that or not.

If a chicken starts to bleed, they'll pick it to death.

They'll attack. They're like little piranhas,

and so you got to get all the dead ones out or they'll make

everybody sick. So a chicken chaser's job was to

go in, in the midst of that ammonia smell in the middle of

120 degree heat and clean out the dead chickens and throw them

in the composter. I thought, well, there's a job.

Have I ever said thank you for letting me be your pastor?

Might not be quick enough to be a chicken, chicken chaser, but

think about it. They burned them.

They threw them in a heap in this valley and they were just

burning all the time because it never stopped.

You know, there's always more garbage, always another body,

always more death coming in there.

And so these fires were burning all the time.

And Jesus actually used the word gehenna at least 11 times to

describe eternal suffering, to describe hell because it was the

closest thing they would know it.

It's kind of like this. You could almost point to it.

He says it's kind of like that they would all know a valley had

been hidden. And so that would be a something

that could visualize and know. But another word that's used for

hell is a word Tartarus. Peter uses this in second Peter

24 and this is a fascinating verse.

I've alluded to this some before and I'll talk about this again

in the future session when we do angels and demons.

Second, Peter 24 says, For if God did not spare angels when

they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to

chains of gloomy darkness, to be kept until the judgement and the

word there for hell is Tartarus. And this is a place where

certain fallen angels or demons are confined and, and as far as

I know, they're still there right now.

And, and so most of the fallen angels were free to roam the

earth and do their destructive damage along with their leader,

Lucifer or Satan. But these imprisoned fallen

angels are not free to roam. And apparently these are the

worst of the worst. These are especially heinous

little demons who their sin against God in the past was so

bad he locked them up and keeps them locked up.

And this is this again, this image of what hell is going to

be like. It's going to be a place of

horror and a place of of great suffering.

A lot of different adjectives and descriptions concerning hell

and scripture. Fire, fire, fiery furnace,

furnace and quenchable fire. The lake of burning sulfur, the

lake of fire, everlasting contempt, perdition, place of

weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, darkness,

the wrath to come, exclusion, torments, damnation,

condemnation, retribution, the second death.

But let's look at a couple of these descriptions a little more

closely. I'm in the Book of Revelation in

my personal study right now still, and there are passages.

In fact, I was not far off this passage coming up, but some of

the passages are are are difficult to process, to be

honest with you. I mean, I know the various

opinions about what they are, I think, but but it's just

interesting to read. So Revelation 1920 talking about

the beast and the beast was captured and with it the false

prophet who in its presence had done the signs by which he

deceived those who'd received the mark of the beast and those

who worshipped its image. So we're talking about the end

of time Antichrist type stories. These two are thrown alive into

the lake of fire that burns with sulfur.

Or again Revelation 20. This is the great white throne

judgement scene. Then I saw a great white throne

and him who was seated on it, and from his presence earth and

sky fled away, and no place was found for them.

And I saw the dead great and small standing before the throne

and the books were opened. Then another book was opened,

which is the Book of Life, and the dead were judged by what was

written in the books. Notice the plural according to

what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who

were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead

who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them,

according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown

into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the

lake of fire. If you keep hearing the Lake of

Fire, you just wait. And if anyone's name was not

found in the Book of Life he was thrown into, guess what?

The lake of fire trying to make a point.

This is the great white throne judgement.

The reason it's white is this idea of holiness and purity.

God is pure, God is holy. And we we keep missing.

I don't, we you all don't. You're here wonderful people who

follow Jesus, I hope, but humanity misses this point.

God is perfect, and in His perfection He cannot allow

imperfection to be in His presence.

If he does that, he is no longer God.

It is his nature. It is who he is.

It is what he is. And so he has to remove the

blemish. Which is why when you think of

Old Testament sacrifices, they had to be lambs without blemish.

They had to be spotless. He needed a perfect lamb to die,

which the only one who could qualify was Jesus.

And so in this great white throne judgement, this is the

the image of holiness, this image of purity.

And what you're going to see is the created at the end of time.

And one day, those of us who trust in Jesus will be very

aware of this. Those who don't trust in Jesus

will be too, but they'll see it from a very different

perspective. The created universe as we know

it is going to be uncreated. It's going to disappear.

The Bible says that parts of it are going to burn up with fire,

and then what's going to happen is this earth that we know is

going to end, and unbelievers will be judged by their own

righteousness. And that's huge according to

what they had done. Did you see that over and over

again there? So if you don't trust in Jesus,

you're going to be judged by your own personal righteousness,

your own perfection or imperfection and, and not the

imputed righteousness of Christ, not the the righteousness that

Christ put to our account and we get covered by because we've

trusted in him. Either I get judged by God the

Father looking through the filter of Christ's blood

atonement covering me, or I get judged on my own standing and my

own imperfection. And because I am imperfect and

so is, so are you, by the way, you stand no chance.

You have to be perfect. So you have to have perfect

covering or you're going to be judged by your own.

But according to what they had done, so, so there's nobody

escapes. These resurrected bodies are

designed for eternity. God's keeping the books.

You're not getting away with anything, ever, ever.

Not anything you say, not anything you think, not anything

that you do. Any one of those things that is

contrary to God's word and will is sin.

You don't get away with it. And there'll be different levels

of judgement and punishment according to what they had done,

but the each degree of torment will be horrible because God is

God is not there in eternal punishment in any way that you

can perceive. And I don't know that we

understand what that just what that means.

In other words, the absence of God.

And you might be here and you claim to be an atheist tonight

and you said there's no God. You have no idea what you have

experienced in a blessing already indirectly.

God blesses you every day of your life whether you believe

that or not. You can't exist without him.

You can't have breath without him.

Your heart would not beat without him.

The little electrons circling around in your body wouldn't,

wouldn't work the way they do. Nothing works the way they do

without Him holding it together. Read Colossians one sometime.

Jesus is what holds life together.

He's the creator and holds life together.

And so you, you have no idea what it means to completely live

without the presence of God. You have no concept of that.

And so you might think that your life's bad.

Well, buddy, wait. Because because there's no grace

there in hell, there's no grace. There's no presence of God in

that same way. And, and you only get to live

here on earth because of that grace.

You only get to exist because of that grace.

You have grace just because you're allowed to be.

You're allowed to exist. I don't think we understand what

the gift of existence is and how much we ought to appreciate it.

We're here for a reason and we're here by his grace.

And when he takes his hand off, I've seen him see him do the

same thing in a in a similar, but not the same way with

churches. That my fear is not that God's

going to punish us. My fear is that God will take

his hand off of us. And for us to have the absence

of God's presence is detrum. It's it's horrible.

And so God blesses us every day. But in hell they experience what

it's like to not have the presence of God around them in

that way. It's that separation from Him

that's the torment as much as anything else.

And so this lake of fire creates a permanent separation from God.

No way out, ever, forever and ever.

Just listen to what Matthew 18 says.

Woe to the world for temptation to sin.

For it is necessary that temptations come.

But woe to the one by whom the temptations come.

And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off

and throw it away. It's better for you to enter

life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be

thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to

send, tear it out and throw it away.

It's better for you to enter life with one eye than with two

eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire.

See that you do not despise one of these little ones.

For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face

of my Father who is in heaven. So we see this idea of eternal

fire, and we're going to talk more about that word in a

minute. Matthew 2541 talks about

falling. Man's going to join the devil

and his angels there. You're going to spend eternity

with your Lord. Then he will say to those on his

left apart from me. There's not a not a not a

scarier phrase you can imagine than that right there.

Depart from me. You cursed into the eternal

fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

Matthew 7 talks about destruction.

Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is

easy that leads to destruction. And those who enter by it are

many. I'm going to talk about that

word destruction again in a minute.

And then Matthew 13, it talks about this furnace of fire with

weeping and gnashing of teeth and throw them into the fiery

furnace. In that place there will be

weeping and gnashing of teeth. You know, it's interesting

because Doctor Aiken will also say about this.

He'll say that people in hell do not love Jesus.

Suddenly they recognize him, but they don't love him, which is

part of the problem. John Blanchard wrote a wrote a

piece called What Happened to Hell?

Just listen for a minute. The wicked will be angry at the

things which gave them pleasure on earth but now give them pain

in hell, angry at the sins that wrecked their lives, angry at

themselves for being who they are, angry at Satan and his

helpers for producing the temptations which led them into

the into sin, and even while compelled to acknowledge his

glory, angry at God. Now a quick question before we

get to a major topic, a quick question.

Are people predestined to go to hell?

There's actually a heavy theological term for this.

More than one, Frankly, depending upon which angle

you're looking at and to what degree you're trying to describe

it, the most common one would be double predestination.

Or here's your word for the week, super lapsarianism.

So use that in a conversation tomorrow when you're ordering

your Dunkin coffee. Say that was super Lapsaria

stick. Now many people blame John

Calvin for this. John Calvin gets blamed for a

lot of things. It's really funny though when

you actually study Calvin versus the followers of Calvin.

Sometimes advocacy does not always represent the source

well. Now, I'm not saying that there

wouldn't be things that John Calvin said you might disagree

with. That's fair, but John Calvin

isn't really the one who came up with this idea.

It was championed by a guy and I, I can't tell you that how

many times in life I've said the the name Theodore Beza or why I

would ever say it out loud, but there you are.

But super lapsarianism came from him.

And the idea is this is our people doomed before birth?

Are people doomed to go to hell? Some people are.

Some people are the elect and they're going to be saved.

Some people are doomed and they're going to go to hell and

they don't have a choice. They're born that way.

They're it's already predetermined before they exist

on this planet. That's part of the idea and

God's sovereignty. So Millard Erickson, who's a

theological systematic theologian, a conservative,

wonderful evangelical conservative guy, listen to what

he says. He says further.

He believed that. And this is talking about Bezza.

Further, he believed that despite the absence of any

specific biblical statements, don't miss that line.

There's nothing in the Bible that supports this view.

In other words, the logical order of God's decree can be

determined. He believed that the decree to

save some and damn others is logically prior to the decision

to create. And so the idea is that God

creates some to save and some to curse.

And if you'll notice, even the way Ericsson comments on this

theological position there, there isn't biblical evidence

for this. This is a logical theological

conclusion because if God's completely sovereign, he already

is in charge of everything. So he's already done all this.

So we blame God for it in the first place, before God even

created humanity. See, it's, it's, it's more

almost mathematics. There's it's I refer to as

theological algebra. So instead, in the Bible, Paul

talks about mysteries and we've talked before, and I'll

reiterate it just for a second. Again, there's a huge difference

between gods for knowledge and and free will.

And that difference is very, very important.

We operate within this, this the system of time.

God does not, and that changes everything.

So does God already know who will be saved and who will not

be saved? Sure, he knows that, but does

that mean that those people have no option or no choice in the

process of their life? Absolutely not.

They have free will. They're making this decision.

And so it's hard for us to always wrap our heads around

that. And Theodore didn't do a good

job of it. Sometimes I wonder, well, I'll

be careful. And double, double

predestination is a really easy excuse not to have to share the

gospel with anybody or not to do missions.

But let's talk about a really significant issue here.

And this is something that gets debated often.

In fact, I've had folks within churches I pastored that I had

to have this conversation with people who taught small groups

that I've had to have this conversation with.

And that's what we call the eternality of punishment.

I wrote a significant paper about this.

The the Bible clearly teaches that punishment is eternal.

Sin has this massive, great price.

God gave his life on a cross to pay for it.

You got to recognize how precious that is.

That's a big deal. And so he paid a huge price for

this. And so we need to respect that

and we need to recognize what a significant price that was.

So what do those who reject him deserve?

He's offered this incredible free gift he's given his whole

life. What else could he give?

He sacrificed himself, so to speak.

And So what do those people who reject that in a sense slap him

in the face over it or disbelieving?

What do they actually deserve? So they've rejected him, giving

them life and then his life for them.

No greater price could be paid, thus no higher price could be

rejected. So the free gift is turned down.

Therefore they have to pay themselves.

The wage will be paid, the collector will come, and the

debt will be satisfied. And that's just the fact of it

all. We misunderstand sin and it's

and it's horrible price that we must pay.

So people don't want hell to exist or they they might think

it's too harsh. Now listen.

And since they've lifted themselves up often as the

definer and distributor of truth, they want to make it the

way they want. It reminds me of my

grandchildren. But we missed the mark.

And we don't understand that truth is absolutely objective

and not up to our own definition, no matter what

postmodernism wants to try to shove down your throat.

And so the truth is that hell is real, and hell lasts forever.

Annihilationism is not biblical. Now, we've talked about

annihilationism before when I talked about false paths to

eternity in a previous session. Let me just review here three

different views of annihilationism.

And there are people who will come knocking on your door who

are annihilationist. By the way, one version is, is

that man was created immortal, that people who continue to sin

and reject Christ are deprived of the gift of immortality and

are ultimately destroyed. So you had it and you lost it.

It's really actually the the reverse of of what the Bible

teaches, where we start off with a sin nature and we actually are

able to receive the gift of eternal life.

The second view is that immortality is a gift only to

those who believe, and those who do not are annihilated and lose

consciousness. That's a very common view of

annihilationism. And add that usually combined

with #3 there's a limited time of suffering for the wicked

after death. Again, there's just this

emotional aspect of it to where there's no way that my sin

deserves eternal punishment. There's no way that my sins that

bad. And again, we don't understand

sin. So Matthew 2546, this, this is

what the Bible teaches. I can't make it not teach this.

Matthew 2546 says, and these will go away into eternal

punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

And so this clearly teaches that punishment will be eternal, not

just in your English translation, but in the original

language. So the word ionois, hard to say,

is translated as eternal, and what it means is everlasting

without end. And what you've got to

understand is the eternality of God's punishment or hell of the

wicked equals the eternality of eternal life given to the

righteous. You can't have one without the

other. It's the same word, it's the

same description. 1 is just as long as the other.

So if hell is not eternal, neither is heaven.

You can't have it. Any of that's linguistically, it

doesn't work any other way. It's very clear you can't.

You can't claim one and ignore the other.

It just doesn't. It doesn't stand up

linguistically, it doesn't stand up theologically, it doesn't

stand up biblically. So.

So again, let's listen to Revelation for a minute.

And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of

fire. And so for where the beast and

false prophet were. And they will be tormented day

and night forever and ever. And that Greek forever and ever

is just the same as Revelation 1/6 And it says and made us

Kingdom, made us a Kingdom priest to his God and father, to

him be glory and dominion, forever and ever.

Amen. Exact same wording used or in

Revelation 4. And whenever the living

creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated

on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the 24 elders fell

down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him who

lives forever and ever. And they cast their crowns

before the throne, saying worthy of you, O Lord our God, to

receive glory and honor and power.

And you created all things, and by your will they existed and

were created. And in chapters 5 and in

chapters 10 and chapters 11, the exact same wording is used over

and over and over again in the worship of God, the endless life

of God, the Kingdom of Christ. You can't make this mean

something else. Annihilationism has 0 biblical

legs to stand on, so we can't claim one from scripture and

deny the other. The fires of hell will last

forever. And it's interesting because in

Mark 9, for example, it says this is a different version of a

verse we were looking at in a different gospel.

And if your hand causes you to send, cut it off, better for you

to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell to the

unquenchable fire. Or verse 48 where the worm does

not die and the fire is not quenched.

There's never a moment that the fire is out or Revelation 14.

And I'm telling you earlier today, and I don't want to go

down this road too much. It may be too dramatic, but I I

broke down earlier this morning when I was finishing this.

And this bothers. I have relatives here.

I have friends here who weren't saved, major influences in my

life not saved before they died. Revelation 14 where it talks

about being tormented forever. And another Angel 1/3 followed

them, saying with a loud voice, If anyone worships the beast in

its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he

will also drink. Let me turn the page, I'm stuck,

sorry. He will also drink the wine of

God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his

anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur In the

presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb and

the smoke, the look of their torment goes up forever and

ever, and they have no rest, day or night.

These worshippers of the beast in its image and whoever

receives the mark of its name, terrific.

It ought to have impact on us. We're told about this, so it'll

have impact on us. This is a warning.

This is a challenge to us. Paul writes to the church at

Thessalonica. He says in flaming fire,

inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those

who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.

They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from

the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His might.

The penalty is eternal destruction away from the

presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.

I need to camp here for a few minutes because this idea of

eternal destruction, sometimes whenever you see that word

destroy or destruction, annihilation, also say, see,

look, you're being destroyed. You don't exist anymore.

You're done away with because they read English, but you got

to understand the literal original language in the Greek

language for that word. Destruction means a sudden ruin

or a loss of all that gives worth to existence.

It's a destruction of what is considered worthy to you.

It's not a district. It's not a destruction of you.

It's a destruction of all that you would consider precious.

In other words, everything that you thought was important here,

everything that you clung to instead of Christ, everything

that you turn to instead of God, it's all stripped away.

Everything this earth can offer you is gone.

Nothing is left other than what you do for eternity for Christ.

So it's not annihilation, but it is.

And you read that passage in Thessalonians.

This is that complete separation from God where we don't have his

presence anymore. In the same way, we don't

understand we, we are away from the presence and the Lord and

from the glory of his power. And again, you might know

people. Maybe you are people, some of

your people, who don't believe in God.

And you don't think God's ever done a thing for you?

You really need to go back and read Romans one and recognize

that He dispenses grace upon all of us.

It's part of being created in the image of God.

We get the benefit of part of His grace by being alive, by

being able to exist, by giving, by being given the chance to

choose Him. So in his nature of love, he

creates us and gives us this opportunity to know him and his

nature of holiness. It demands a price and both of

those natures must be satisfied. And So what we see is, is that

it's it's endless destruction and worthlessness.

Idea of worthlessness would probably be better.

Billy Graham once said the Bible teaches whether we are saved or

lost, there is an everlasting existence of the soul.

So we never die, we're never gone, we're never not part of

it. And again Erickson writes this.

However we regard the doctrine of everlasting punishment, it is

clearly taught in Scripture. Whatever one is at the end of

life will continue for all eternity.

There is no basis for expecting change for the better.

Not only is the future judgement of unbelievers irreversible, but

their punishment is eternal. We do not reject merely the idea

that all will be saved. We also reject the contention

that none will be eternally punished.

So both universalism and annihilationism are false

doctrines. And so we recognize what this

means for us now here, while we're still able to choose.

First of all, you ought to thank God for the ability to choose.

That's a gift, that's grace, and this can be avoided.

So the greatest pain, again suffered by people who are

eternally punished is that they are forever excluded from the

presence of God. Sometimes it bothers me how

lightly we take the presence of God.

If if ecstatic joy can be found in the presence of God and utter

dismay would be found in His absence, and to be shut out from

Him is a much greater price than most of us know.

When Jesus in Matthew 25 says depart from me, these are

horrible words. Think about the horrible words

to hear from the King of kings and the Lord of Lords.

To think about being completely shut out, not knowing or ever

being able to know, but then knowing.

That's part of the catch, right? Because remember what Paul said

And the time will come when every knee will bow and every

tongue will confess that you so you'll know, but it'll be too

late to believe. So it's not only the fact that

I'm not going to be in his presence anymore.

It's not only the fact that I'm suffering this punishment.

It's also the fact that I know. I know what I should have done.

I know what I could have done. Go back to the rich man Lazarus

story. Remember, he was aware.

Oh, if you'll just go back and warn my family.

Go back and warn my family, you know, send him back, send him

back. Let him go warn my family.

It's too late. And so part of hell is also

knowing that Jesus died on the cross for you, that he paid the

price for you. All you had to do is believe in

him. All you had to do is trust in

Him. All you had to do is receive

this gift. But you didn't.

And people say, well, that's mean.

No, actually, out of his nature of love, He gave you free will

and you chose. You chose.

He didn't choose, you chose, and you chose to reject Him, and

you're going to pay the price. And so this conscious eternal

punishment, the horrifying, as bad as this is, this is an

extremely biblical, orthodox, evangelical view.

Hell is real. So what it ought to do then is

it ought to motivate us. See, we sit in pastors meetings

week after week and we've gotten concerned about some things,

which is why on our prayer list, we're now re reminding you of

the UPUUPG. On many Wednesday nights, we're

going to show the video of the UUPG again, because my, our

concern was, is that every Sunday morning at Englewood, if

you don't come to Englewood on Sundays, we take time in our

Sunday morning worship service and we show a video our most

Sundays of an unreached, unengaged people group and we

pray for them. And then the thought is, is that

we're supposed to pray for them during the week.

Well, the pastors honestly got together and we said, how many

of you can remember the name of the people group by about

Tuesday? And I don't blame anybody for

that. It's a fleeting moment.

There's a lot of them. Some of them have really hard

names that Gene and Charles have to try to produce sometimes.

You know, he got off easy this week.

Swahili, if you notice. I don't ever do it.

But do you actually remember who these people are?

So we were hoping midweek would remind you a little bit.

One of the things that's happening also is our shut

insurance. Many of our shut insurance are

getting these lists and they're praying throughout the week.

So I then they really do. I talk to them when I go out

every week to visit shut insurance and we talk about it

and they're actually seeing and admit some of our other members

are doing it too. But do you actually remember to

pray for some folks? Now, this week's a little

unfair. It was senior Sunday, so we were

a little different on Sunday. Here's why I bring that up.

Those people are lost and going to hell.

When you when you say UUPG, it means that they not only are

lost, they don't even have a way to be saved.

They're unengaged. They don't have a church, they

don't have a Bible. They don't have, they don't have

the opportunity unless somebody shares the gospel with them.

And So what we see is, is we see this opportunity to not only

pray for those people over there, but then every now and

then this will this will be interesting to you.

And if you're in the room, I wish you'd come up and meet me

instead of sending me an anonymous notes.

And if you're listening to this online, I really mean that

because that's a sin, by the way, anonymous notes are a sin.

There's nothing biblical about an anonymous note.

I used to have a whole sermon on the sin of the anonymous note.

I tell anybody who gets anonymous note who works at this

church is supposed to just throw it away.

That's a sin. You.

There's nothing in Matthew 18 or Matthew 5 that's anonymous.

So it's interesting because I get these these notes and one of

them at least puts his name on there.

It's pretty cute. And he's gotten mad at us.

I think he's a visitor. If you're actually here and

you're a member, I really would like to meet you.

But he chews us out for where we go on mission trips.

And so why are you going over there when we have lost people

right here? And I try to help them

understand. Well, we do that too, you know,

I mean, lost is lost. But at some point, how seriously

are we taking that? If your family member or your

neighbor or your friend at work or whoever else is lost, this is

what they face. And at some point, we got to

decide whether we're more afraid to talk to them about Jesus

right now, or are we more afraid of what they're going to face in

eternity. I know some of you do,

especially those who are here tonight.

But these people really are going to die and go to hell.

And there's a massive percentage of them.

I'm talking thousands of people around us right now

statistically who are lost. We have thousands more of them

moving in who are lost. Millions and millions and

millions and millions and millions and millions.

I could use the B word, but I like saying millions around the

world. the United States of America is the is now some would

say 4th. It's it's actually third.

I think we've beaten Indonesia outside of China and India.

We are the third largest unsaved nation on the planet.

And it's getting worse. But it's, it's it that's kind of

that's kind of big, isn't it? To kind of wrap your head around

billions or millions or third largest.

But what that means is is that's your friend.

That's the guy across the street, that's the guy you work

with. You're too scared to talk to.

You're afraid you might offend him, afraid you might bother

him, afraid you might push him further away.

Well, you can't get further away in hell.

And so at some point we got to make a decision where's where's

the balance of significance and priority, right, to share with

somebody. And as I've shared with you

before, and I swear my testimony got criticized more than

anything I've done at Inglewood. It's been a fascinating

experience, My story of my own life.

I was told by multiple people how I should have told my story,

which I really find fascinating. It's just funny what people

think they ought to do and come up and say to me when I'm just

being descriptive about my real story.

But Teresa and I will both so the day we die, scream to the

fact that if individual people did not care enough about us to

come and share the gospel with us, we would be dying.

We would die and go to hell. We wouldn't.

We weren't. We weren't that.

We wouldn't be in a room like this.

We would have never come to a church.

She even tried going to a church as a vacation Bible school as a

kid, but they never once shared the gospel.

Now, I'm saying all this to try to drive home a point.

And if it seems pointed, good, because one of the things that

we're not doing a good job of at Inglewood is personal

evangelism. Now we're seeing people save.

So shouldn't I be happy we're going to baptize again, Coming

up with it seems that lots of people save.

Not enough, not nearly enough. So I hope this motivates us to

reach out with the gospel with a tremendous passion sense of

urgency because we need to really understand that people

are going to face eternity. So do you know if you're

listening to me either here or online, do you know which Lord

you serve and who you're going to follow into eternity?

This is biblical fact because you can know you can know for

sure. And I pray you will.

A humorous tombstone marking 100 year old tombstone reads like

this. Pause, stranger, when you pass

by. As you are now, so once was.

I am. I am now, so you will be.

So prepare for death and follow me.

And if somebody came along and scratched underneath that,

saying the words to follow you, I'm not content until I know

which way you went. I'm so thankful for the free

gift of salvation. I'm thankful for the promise of

eternal life with Him. Sometimes I fear that we grow

too attached to this very temporary place.

We're here for a reason. We're here for a season, we're

here to perform a function, we're here to fulfill a mission,

and then we get to go home. So let's work hard together to

bring Him great glory and to help Him redeem the nation's

Father. We thank you so much for your

love and your grace. Father, I was a little

overwhelmed today, frankly, with this.

It's very heavy and it it can be very personalized.

Father, because I, I saw faces, I saw people as I was finishing

this today, people, Father, I know who did not ever believe in

you People I know who there's no way biblically they would be

saved. And father, I'm not the judge of

many and I don't judge many. I know these people intimately.

So, Father, I pray, Lord, that you'll help us to not let one

more pass that door. Father, forgive us when we take

this too lightly. Forgive us, Father, when we take

sin too lightly. Forgive us when we take you too

lightly. And motivate us, Father, with a

sense of urgency to share with others about who you are and

what you've done and how they can avoid all of this.

Father, I pray, Lord, that you'll put people on our

pathway, That, Father, you'll give us names and faces and our

hearts and our minds. Lord and Father, as I pray for

students in evangelism classes at the seminary, I pray, Father,

that you won't let us sleep at night.

You'll haunt us with those people's faces and names.

You'll burden us, Father, with them.

And Lord, we will pray, but we'll do more than pray.

We will actually talk to them about you.

We got to back it up with a life, Father.

We got to show them, too. We can't say one thing and live

another. And so, Father, help us

consistently. There are so many people right

around us right here in Rocky Mount and Nashville and Red Oak

and the surrounding area. So many people who don't know

you, so many people have nothing to do with your body, the

church. And I pray, Father, that you'll

help us, Lord, to recognize what we need to do for him.

So, Father, help us as we begin to go out together and share

with others about you. We thank you in Christ's name,

Amen. Thank you so much for listening

today. And I also hope that you'll go

to [email protected]

as well as our app and find many other resources that will bless

you and your families. Thank you once again.