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August 18/19, 2018
Jason Meyer | Mark 9:42-50
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”—Mark 9:42–50
Introduction
The last time we were together in the Gospel of Mark, we all were confronted with Jesus’ teaching about hell. It was a bracing, breathtaking warning. It has the effect of re-sensitizing us to sin and the eternal dangers and consequences that come from sin. The warning about the fire of hell came because the disciples had been shrinking the circle in terms of who really belongs to Jesus, who really belongs in the Kingdom. Jesus’ words about being at peace with one another could not be stated with more gravity and importance. Jesus is stopping the disciples in their tracks and shouting: Pay attention, this really, really, eternally matters. There should be no cliquishness in the church that would look down on others and question whether they really belong—because that rejection would crush the fragile faith of a weak believer. And Jesus says, if we do that there is hell to pay.
So last time we preached the main point of the passage. That is what expository preaching is: The point of the passage is the point of the message applied to the life of the congregation. But today we are going back to the passage to let the message sink in a little deeper and answer any objections that might lessen its force. I think that is important in our day because hell is something we all instinctively take a step back from. We flinch and move away from it—like when you touch a hot stove, you don’t want your hand to linger there. And so we pull our attention away and never take time to muse and meditate on what Jesus has for us in this teaching. Jesus’ words come to us with a forceful jolt. Like a power surge, the circuit breaker kicks in and we don’t bother to flip the switch back on. Therefore, what Jesus has for us never fully reaches us or makes an impact on us in the way that it should. I am here to say this: Let’s go where Jesus is taking us. Let’s go all the way with what Jesus is saying, and we may find an incredible gift that we can’t get anywhere else.
Modern America and the Doctrine of Hell
In 2003, a research group discovered 64 percent of Americans expect to go to heaven when they die, but less than 1 percent think they might go to hell.
Put this into perspective. A vast majority of people believe in heaven and a sizeable majority of Americans think that they will go there. Very few people believe in a literal hell and almost no one believes that they will actually go there.
Most people believe in heaven and think they are going there. Most people don’t believe in hell and even those who do, don’t believe they will actually go there. In other words, most Americans would wonder why we are even talking about hell— it seems like such an unreal, far-fetched topic and not worth seriously entertaining as even a remote possibility.
Does Jesus agree with Americans? Remember last time that the doctrine of hell was not made up by some fire and brimstone preachers who wanted to scare people into heaven. Jesus talked about hell more than all biblical authors combined. And Jesus does not agree with what Americans think about hell. He taught that few will make it to heaven and that many will go to hell. I am not making that up.
“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. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”—Matthew 7:13–14
Many people find this doctrine to be so horrible at an emotional level that they find it intolerable at a conceptual level. But Christians are called to hold to the truth of the Bible. And we are to communicate it in ways that answer objections fairly and wisely. The aim of communicating the truths of the Bible is to make them more understandable, not more palatable or tolerable.
In order to dig deeper into the doctrine of hell, let’s go back to verses 43–48 and build upon what we already found there. The last sermon from Mark 9 made three points about the nature of hell from these verses, namely, the suffering of hell is unending, incomparable, and real.
That is our outline. We will re-examine each point, and along the way we will apply them and answer potential objections.
Where do we see this point? Two times in these verses Jesus adds a further description about the nature of hell.
Verse 43: “go to hell, to the unquenchable fire”
Verses 47–48: to be thrown into hell (v. 47), ”where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (v. 48).
Some people are so troubled by the eternality or everlasting nature of hell that they soften the doctrine of hell by saying that those who reject Jesus are annihilated or devoured by the fire, they are simply burned out of existence. Their suffering is only short-lived and then they cease to exist.
This softened version of hell has severe problems. First, it does embrace the explicit language of this text. Jesus calls it “unquenchable fire” in verse 43. He says their worm does not die (the maggots in the corpses of those who rejected Christ), and the fire is not quenched. One would have to do exegetical gymnastics to avoid the plain meaning of these verses. Hell at a minimum is a flame that is “not quenched” (v. 48) and filled with things in the flame that “don’t die” (v. 48).
Second, this softened version of hell does not do justice to the rest of the Bible either. Take a few examples from the first book of the New Testament to the last book. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks elsewhere of "eternal fire and punishment" as the final place of torment for fallen angels and humans who have rejected God (Matthew 25:41, 46).
Revelation 14:10–11 sends the same message.
He also will 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 of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.
Notice the expressions: God’s wrath poured out in full strength; being tormented in the presence of the holy angels and the Lamb; and the smoke of the tormented going up forever and ever, with no rest, day or night.
Revelation 20:10 expresses the same eternal fate for the devil, the beast, and the false prophet:
And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
Does anyone really believe that the devil and his demons will be annihilated and not face eternal torment, “day and night forever and ever”? This same fate befalls anyone whose name is not found in the Lamb’s book of life—that is, those who do not belong to Jesus.
It makes no sense to talk about “eternal life” if there is no counterpart of eternal death. The counterpart is called the “second death” in Scripture. This eternal torment is called the second death in Revelation 20:14–15.
This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
In other words, there is an earthly death, and it happens in an instant. Something far worse than an earthly death is an eternal death. Hebrews 9:27 tells us that it is appointed for a person to die once and after this comes the judgment—eternal life or eternal death.
Third, we ought not to act as though the church has not spoken about these realities. We are not the first Christians to read these Scriptures. If many people over the course of many centuries affirm the same thing, then those that would object to it must meet a higher burden of proof. The church through the ages has always affirmed the eternality of hell. Attempts to avoid this affirmation always sound like clever hermeneutical gymnastics, not sound, straightforward, biblical interpretation.
At the heart of these verses there is a comparison between something on the one hand, and hell on the other hand. The first thing is portrayed as far better than hell. The word “better” occurs four times in rapid succession in these verses.
Jesus chooses to utilize a comparison that shows that the horrors of hell are worse than anything one could face on earth. Why would it be better to face earthly torment (like being chained with a heavy weight and be drowned in the sea) than cause a believer to stumble? Because earthly torment is temporary, and temporary torment is always better than eternal torment. Why would it be better to suffer physical dismemberment and face a physical disability (tearing out an eye, cutting off a hand, cutting off a foot)? Being physically maimed or disabled and eternally alive is better than having a whole body burn in the everlasting fire of eternal death.
Let me make something clear about the meaning here. No one believes that we are literally supposed to gouge out our eye. You would still have an eye or a hand or another foot to use for sinful purposes. There was once a boy who was reading the Matthew 5 version of this and he was so convicted by his struggle with lust that his parents had to take him to the emergency room because he tried to tear out his eye. The problem was is that he still had another eye to use for lustful purposes. Even if he tore out both eyes, he still had images stored up in his mind from before that continued to cause him to struggle.
What is Jesus saying through these comparisons? Jesus is communicating how seriously we need to fight sin. We fight sin all the way. He is stressing the lengths we need to be willing to go to keep from making peace with sin.
Many people find these things intolerable because they clash with our current cultural value system. Modern America has a hard time with the concept of sin and the idea of fighting it in any way. Rather than fight it, our culture today often wants to flaunt its rebellion against what they regard as antiquated moral code. I once saw an advertisement for a Sunday night cable show that was “guaranteed to break more of the 10 Commandments than any other show.” And that was marketing why people would want to watch it.
Did you catch another cultural clash in these verses? So many people think the good life involves earthly blessings like being fit and beautiful and physically whole. Beauty in the eye of the American beholder is enamored with the pursuit of physical perfection. Imperfections are airbrushed away in our culture.
If imperfections are unwelcome and airbrushed away, then it is no wonder that so many Americans either stare or turn away when they see people with disabilities. Such ones run counter to their value system. Disabled people do not often feel affection or love from people, but pity. They almost can’t comprehend that someone with a disability can have a full life with loads of joy and be such a blessing to those around him or her. It does not fit what they value and what they think is worthwhile.
But the real problem is that they fail to pity the people on the magazine covers and beauty pageants who don’t know Jesus, and thus are children of wrath. Can you look at their life and pity them?
Psalm 73 talks about how the Psalmist was envious of the prosperity of the wicked. Then he said this …
But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God;
then I discerned their end.
Truly you set them in slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!—Psalm 73:16–19
Bethlehem, I ask you: Do you have an eternal perspective on the prosperity of the famous and the beautiful in our world? Do you envy them or pity them? Do you join them in pitying the people who are not powerful and beautiful in their eyes? Or do you take the perspective of the people of God seen from the sanctuary where you discern their end where they are swept away by the terror of hell? It was said of Jonathan Edwards that he had eternity stamped on his eyeballs. O that we would not let temporary realities blind us to eternal ones!
I have in mind here people who say that hell is “just a metaphor.” One of the most prominent objections against hell is that Jesus uses metaphorical language, so many people wonder if it is a real place with real suffering. We know that Jesus is using metaphorical language and images, but the images involve the body. Jesus talks about the whole person burning in hell (vv. 43, 45, 47).
But the fact that Jesus uses a metaphor does not mean that hell is imaginary and not literal. It involves both the spiritual and the physical. Certainly the souls of those who rejected Jesus are in hell now, but Jesus says that the final punishment of hell will also include our bodies. In Matthew 10:28, Jesus says, “Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Clearly, for Jesus, hell was a real place, since he said that after Judgment Day people would experience it in their bodies.
This idea of people being tormented forever—real torment not metaphorical pain—really troubles people today; there is a gag reflex against it. Let’s address what I regard as the two most common objections to this idea of real and everlasting torment.
Some say that it is not fair to punish a momentary crime with an eternal punishment. Listen to Lee Strobel struggle with the seeming injustice of eternal torment (The Case for Faith, p. 237):
As a spiritual seeker, I found my sense of justice outraged by the Christian teaching about hell. …The doctrine seemed like cosmic overkill to me, an automatic and un-appealable sentence to an eternity of torture and torment. Its mandatory sentence taken to the extreme: Everyone gets the same consequences, regardless of their circumstances. Step out of line with God—even a little bit, even inadvertently—and you’re slapped with and endless prison sentence in a place that makes Leavenworth look like Disneyland.
Lee Strobel said it seemed like cosmic overkill to punish a momentary crime with eternal torment. Here is the problem with that objection: Punishment for a crime does not depend upon the length of time it took to commit the crime. Theologian J.P. Moreland says this better than I could: “The degree to which a person warrants punishment is not a function of the length of time it took to commit the crime.” (Quoted in Lee Strobel’s, The Case for Faith, p. 251.)
You all instinctively know this to be true. A person who opens fire with automatic weapons and kills 30 people in a matter of minutes has a more severe punishment than someone who takes an hour to steal a few car stereos out of a parking lot.
That example illustrates another principle at work here. The nature of the crime, not the length of it, determines the severity of the punishment. The value of the object abused also is a factor in the severity of the punishment. If you swat a fly, it is no big deal. It would be more serious to slap your sister, but it was unthinkable to slap and dishonor the Roman emperor. Imagine going up to an infinite level of honor—the Creater and Ruler of the Universe. Dishonoring the supremely valuable would be a supreme offense. Therefore, it is heinous to refuse to love and thank the One who has given us life and breath and everything else.
And it is not true that everyone will get the same punishment regardless of the circumstances. Just like there are different levels of rewards in heaven, there are different levels of punishment in hell. Listen to the principles Jesus lays out in Matthew 11:23–24.
And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.”
The greater the revelation, the greater the rejection; the greater the rejection, the greater the punishment.
I think some people run into trouble with the idea of endless punishment and have questions about the fairness of hell because they assume that the people in hell are remorseful and repentant and sorry for their rebellion against God. Some people who believe in annihilationism do so because they think this is how God should respond to guilty and yet remorseful people. They somehow see how wrong they have been and they are sorry. God responds by mercifully putting an end to their suffering because they are sorry. But the Bible says people in hell do not change. They don’t repent. They continue in rebellion.
Revelation 9 describes an experience where God directly sends a series of plagues upon the earth to judge sinners, but those who survive these plagues do not repent.
The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.—Revelation 9:20–21
The same thing happens later in Revelation 16. The angels and saints all affirm the fairness of God’s judgment. Angels cry out, “it is what they deserve” (16:6); and the saints say, “Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments” (16:7). But when the judgment falls, the people curse the name of God and do not repent and give God glory (Revelation 16:9, 11, 21).
The rich man in the story of the rich man and Lazarus does not change in hell. In fact, he thinks he can still call the shots from hell and can tell father Abraham to send Lazarus to warn the rich man’s family so that they won’t enter this same place of torment.
There can be no forgiveness in hell because there is no repentance there. C.S. Lewis says that this view really conflates two ideas: condoning and forgiving (The Problem of Pain, p. 124).
The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.
Those who are tormented in hell have reached the pinnacle of their rebellion—they have no excuse for their rebellion but they continue in it—rebels to the end without end. They never yield and worship God or give him thanks.
I have one other objection that I often hear in our modern world that prizes tolerance. Many people have a gag reflex when it comes to this doctrine because they regard it as bigoted hate speech. Is hell a hateful doctrine? Are Christians intolerant compared to everyone else?
A conversation with those who hear our views and object to them as intolerant—who hear about how we say that only those who receive Jesus go to heaven and that other religions cannot save—often looks like this …
Conversation, Part 1:
“It is intolerant for you to say only followers of Jesus go to heaven.”
I respond by saying something like, “I see that you think I am wrong. Why doesn’t that make you intolerant too?”
Conversation, Part 2: “OK, maybe we are both intolerant at some level, but your intolerance is worse. I just think you are wrong, but you think that I am not only wrong, but that I am going to hell.
My response is to make the case that we are both being consistent with our intolerance. Here is what I mean: If someone does not believe in a personal God of judgment to whom we are all accountable, then I am not answerable to his wrath in your view. All I have to face is your wrath over me being wrong. But we believe in a personal God of judgment. Those who reject him have to face his wrath. This is not hate speech because we have no wrath toward anyone. God is judge—not us.
Atheist Penn Jillette (from the magic show Penn & Teller) gives a better response. Rather than seeing this as a hateful doctrine, he says this:
I’ve always said that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward [with] atheists who think people shouldn’t proselytize and who say, “Just leave me alone and keep your religion to yourself”—how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?”
Conclusion
That is my plea to you today if you are not a believer. You might steadfastly tell me that I am wrong and you are right. But I wonder if you would pause for a moment and ponder, “What if I am wrong?” What is at stake if you are wrong?! You might say to me that if I am wrong, I am going to go to the grave and cease to exist, just like you. But if I am right, then I am going directly into the presence of God and pleasures forevermore, and you are going to a place of unspeakable torment with unquenchable fire.
Believer, do you see what is at stake in the doctrine of hell? This doctrine cannot stand on its own. It is part of the revelation of God himself. You cannot divide the attributes of God. They are all there and they are always there together at the same time. God is not love at one time and then righteous and holy at another time.
That is the tragedy of the last century in American history. A new attitude arose about Scripture. People decided they were wiser than the Book when it came to knowing the character of God. They decided to say that God is love and nothing else. They decided to do away with the embarrassing doctrine of eternal punishment. They said that a loving God cannot be like that. He cannot send people to hell.
Even though the Bible says that God will be no means clear the guilty—they did away with that revelation. How? They said that that was the God of the Old Testament. The God of the New Testament is different. But I ask you today, how can someone look at the descriptions of battle and bloodshed in the Old Testament and then read the account of Revelation where the blood rises up to the bridle of the horse as God treads the winepress of the wrath of God—how can you read that and not see that the revelation of God’s justice has been ratcheted up several notches?
God is One. Therefore, all of his attributes belong together. He does not just clear the guilty by having them simply say that they are sorry, and then God says, “that’s ok.” He is holy and righteous. Therefore, his forgiveness comes to us in a righteous way. God does not sweep sin under the rug of the universe or choose to forget about it any more than an earthly judge could say that a murderer can go free simply because he now feels bad about it. No. It is a lie about God that belittles the character and glory of God.
Every sin will be punished. Either you will pay for your sin in hell forever or Jesus will pay for your sin as your Substitute on the cross. He took our place and he swallowed up the wrath of God that was against us. He drank the full cup of God’s wrath toward us. Once we receive Christ and all that he did, suddenly justice switches sides. Now the Bible says that he is faithful and just (righteous) to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He would now be unjust to punish us for our sins if they have already been paid by Christ. The blood of Christ cries out: All is paid—paid in full—their sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross and they bear it no more!
The doctrine of hell is the black velvet backdrop against which the diamonds of gospel grace shine brighter than ever. Don’t push this doctrine away and lose the absolutely stunning, sparkling wonder of salvation. Saved from infinite wrath. Saved for infinite joy. What could be better? The bitterness of hell makes heaven sweeter by far.