CHAPTER NINETEEN
HELL AND DEATH
If we are going to be equipped to help people avoid going to hell, we need to know exactly what hell is. Billy Graham tells us in his book, Peace With God, that "...Hell, essentially, is separation from God."
That short six-word definition encapsulates Billy Graham's attempt to "be wise as a serpent." Billy understands all the traps that Christians have fallen into down through the ages when they began to try to conceptualize what the word hell stands for. He smells the fire and brimstone of Dante's Inferno, he sees the images painted on the canvasses of Heironymus Bosch, he sees the illustrations on medieval Bibles and, when forced to define the word hell, he chooses to say nothing but "Hell, essentially, is separation from God."
The purpose of this book forces me to throw caution away and state as clearly as possible that hell is nothing other than a state of mind. The location of hell in space and time is in the mind of the individual who is separated from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The distinction between death and hell is this: death is also a state of mind wherein an individual experiences a sense of separation from the God revealed in the Bible, but people can be dead and still have a chance to be united with the God of the Bible; in hell there is no hope of union with God.
How did I arrive at these conclusions? I met Jesus Christ, and I studied the Bible. Scripture makes it very clear that death is not the end of being, not the cessation of consciousness. If Christians have not grasped this fact, they have not realized the moral of the story of the life and work of Jesus Christ. When Jesus died, consciousness did not cease. When Abraham died, consciousness did not cease. When people die and leave their body behind, they are still conscious.
The Bible also teaches that people can still be walking around in their bodies and yet be dead. Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:1-7, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature (KJV, flesh) and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus."
If we think that Paul is just using death here as a figure of speech, I think we miss the point he's trying to communicate. Paul is doing his best to tell us that the condition we were in before we realized our union with Jesus Christ is exactly the condition people who die outside of Christ are in. The only difference is we had the use of our bodies, those who had died lost the use of theirs. But they are still conscious, just as we were conscious when we were dead in our transgressions and sins. Before we realized that Jesus is alive and had died to make a way for us to come boldly into the presence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we were dead.
If there is still any doubt that Paul understood death to be a condition that operated whether people are in the body or have lost the use of their body, consider what Paul had learned one day on the road to Damascus. Regardless of what Paul had understood about death before that day, when Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul learned conclusively that people who had died are still conscious.
Paul never forgot what he learned that day. He took what he learned and sought to understand how such an event could have occurred. Can any Christian doubt that Paul investigated Jesus' story about Lazarus and the rich man?
In that story we have the Bible's paradigm about what happens when people die. Luke 16:19-31 tells us: "There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.
"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'
"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.
"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'
"No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, the will repent.'
"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
Paul could hardly have listened to this story without seeing its parallels with his own experience with Jesus on the road to Damascus. Surely Paul must have felt something like the rich man; Paul must have felt like he was looking at Jesus across a great chasm. When he heard the story, Paul would have understood that Jesus was not using figures of speech for allegorical purposes, but that Jesus was actually describing the conditions that exist when people die and lose the use of their bodies. Like Lazarus, like the rich man, they are still conscious, still able to communicate, the only difference is what is perceived from each individual's point of view after they die.
Lazarus, from his point of view, perceived himself to be located next to Abraham, protected, secure in the presence of Abraham and the God of Abraham. But the rich man's point of view perceived a totally different reality. The rich man was in torment because he was separated from Abraham and the God of Abraham by an unbridgeable chasm. The Bible calls that place of torment hell. The story illustrates precisely that hell is a state of mind that determines what one sees from one's point of view.
Paul grasped that reality and had that reality in view when he wrote the letter to the Ephesians. If we don't understand that, nothing Paul has to say will ever make much sense. Paul is telling us in Ephesians that we were dead in our transgressions and sins because we "followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air..." Had we followed Jesus instead, Paul would never have said we were dead, because Paul understood that death is the state of mind where union with Christ Jesus is not perceived. Even when Christians have lost the use of their body, Paul is reluctant to use the word "dead" in reference to those people. Given the limits of language, he normally uses the word dead to refer to what happens to the body, the flesh, when the spirit of the individual departs. The body dies, is dead. But nowhere can Paul be seen to utter a word that indicates he thinks death has anything to do with the cessation of consciousness. For this reason, he talks in I Cor. !5:51 like this: "Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."
In this world, in the flesh, death has the power to terrify because it is a fact that death means the body, the flesh, disintegrates. In the flesh we are terrified of this reality. We call that reality death. But Paul knew he was more than flesh and blood. Paul knew that he, like Lazarus, would be conscious when death overtook the flesh.
Life is awareness of the presence of God. Anything else is not life or living, from the Bible's point of view. Absence of awareness of the presence of God is death. One of the purposes of the Garden of Eden story is to acquaint us with what constitutes life and death. As long as Adam and Eve were in the Garden, they were in the presence of God; and as long as they were in the presence of God, they were alive. When they were cast out of the Garden, they were dead. Period. Why? Because they were no longer in the presence of God. Unlike the rich man, they were not separated from God by a great chasm, but by cherubim with flaming swords to prevent gaining access to the tree of life. But, no matter what the means of separation, the point is clearly that Adam and Eve were not alive any longer. They were separated from God, therefore they were dead.
Why were they cast out of the Garden? Adam's spirit and Eve's spirit had encountered two sets of thoughts: those planted by God's word and thoughts planted by Satan. They died when their individual spirits chose to entertain Satan's words rather than God's words. Once out of the garden the spirit of Adam and Eve was dead as a result of the choice their spirit had made. Even though their bodies continued to live in the flesh, in the spirit they were dead...and knew they were dead. That's hell, isn't it?
Not really. Actually, Adam and Eve were just dead. They were not in hell. Even though they could not return to the place where life was to be found--the Garden of Eden--they were not in hell because they had a seed of hope that such a reunion would someday occur. Had they had no hope for such a reunion, it could be truthfully said that they were in hell.
The hope came from a promise God gave to the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel."
Why would this curse on the serpent give hope to Adam and Eve? They both knew that they had gotten in trouble because the serpent had come along. They had found themselves incapable of resisting the temptation presented. The fact that they could look forward to the serpent's head being crushed gave them hope that the day could come when the tempter would no longer have the power to do what he did that fateful day in the garden.
The hope born in those promises has been all that separated many millions of people from hell even as they walked around in this world dead as a doornail. It is the job of the Body of Christ on earth to acquaint those people with the gospel of Jesus Christ so they can know what it's like to be alive from the dead.
People in hell are, by definition, are hopeless. One of the awesome paradoxes in Holy Scripture is seen when Jesus descended into hell and set the hopeless free from hopelessness. People going to hell--that's a different story entirely. They are not hopeless--yet. My point is that all that separates those people from eternal life is knowledge of the faith that saves us from death and hell: Jesus has already done everything necessary for them to come boldly into the presence of God and remain there forever, never to die in the spirit.
The reason the world is going to hell today is because nobody is getting through to those people with the message about what Jesus has done that has already brought life to those people if they would only believe it.
Why is the message not getting through? The message we are presently sending simply doesn't make sense to them. There could be two reasons for that: (1) they don't have sense enough to hear the truth; (2) there's something wrong with our message. I lean toward answer number two. Here's why.
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