“Headed in the Other Direction?”
Text: Luke 16:19-31
I. Welcome
II. Introduction
As Jesus wrote to the church at Laodicea, we notice there is no in-between for Christians – we are either cold or hot. We’re either Christians or we’re not. We’re either saved or we’re lost. We’re either faithful or unfaithful. We’re either headed for heaven as we studied two Sundays ago or we’re on our way to hell. It’s interesting how some of us are motivated by the positive. We listen to what heaven is going to be like and we want to go there. However, some of us are negatively motivated. One close-up view of a jail cell when I was a teenager has motivated me all these years to obey the law. We need to hear about the horrors of hell and those, in turn, should motivate us to do all within our power to avoid it. So this morning’s sermon is addressed to any and all who are not headed for heaven. It’s entitled: “Headed in the Other Direction?” For the next few minutes, I want us to talk about the alternative to heaven and what it is like. Hopefully, it will make you resolve to make it to heaven. And, if you are indeed headed toward the other eternal destination, we pray you will take the necessary steps this morning to change your direction. As always, we want you to be like the Bereans in Acts 17:11 and search your Bibles daily to make sure I’ve preached the truth from God’s word.
III. Lesson
Some of our concepts of heaven and hell are taken from this story Jesus told – yet neither one of these words is mentioned here. Since Lazarus was carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom when he died, we assume this is heaven. Actually, he is in the intermediate state of the dead – the Hadean world – Sheol in the Old Testament. In fact, two different places await the dead in Hades. The first is Paradise – the waiting place of the righteous. It was the temporary abode of Jesus between His death and His resurrection – a reward given by our Savior upon the cross to one of the thieves – Luke 23:43. Yet Peter cited Psalm 16 in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost and then made this statement about the resurrection of Christ in Acts 2:31 – “that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption.” The other compartment of the Hadean world became the abode of the rich man in Luke 16:23 – he was in torments in Hades. The correct term for this place in Greek mythology as well as scripture was Tartarus. Turn with me to 2 Peter 2:4 and let’s read this verse together: For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell (Greek: tar-tar-oh´-oh) and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; This passage clearly states that angels who sinned were cast down to Tartarus to await the judgment. As we can see, the translators into English chose to call Tartarus “hell” in this verse – its only appearance in scripture. However, if you are using the NKJV, you will find the word “hell” twelve more times in the New Testament – backed by an entirely different Greek word which we’ll look at in just a moment. Do you remember two weeks ago how we talked about heaven being described with valuables our finite minds can understand like gold and jewels? And yet these materials cannot possibly do justice to the eternal home of our Creator. Similarly, the intermediate abode of the lost as well as their eternal home must be described with words our finite minds understand. And, yet, they can’t possibly capture the reality of this place of punishment. The rich man was being tormented by fire and yet, in this last verse, it was described as a place of darkness. Most of us as parents have had to teach our children not to be afraid of the dark when they go to bed. Total darkness on the other hand is to be feared. It worked well as the ninth plague on the land of Egypt – a darkness that could be felt. Anyone who has taken a tour into a cave where they turn out the lights so you can experience total darkness is thankful to see light again. Notice how this darkness is further described in Matthew 8:12 after Jesus had healed the centurion’s servant: “But the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus uses this phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth” three more times – all in Matthew’s gospel – to describe a place for the wicked. Now consider the rich man once again in Luke 16. Do you think he could possibly carry on a rational conversation in an eternal fire? I say that to remind us that this is told like a parable and we must be careful not to view this as what Paradise and Tartarus are exactly like. Earlier we looked at a verse that talked about Tartarus as hell – 2 Peter 2:4. And then I remarked that the word hell appears 12 more times in the New Testament in the NKJV. With one exception, only Jesus uses this Greek word translated hell. The exception is by His half-brother in James 3:6 where he writes about the tongue being set on fire by hell. But the Greek word behind “hell” here and in the eleven other uses by Jesus is gayenna or, as we have transliterated it into a proper noun “Gehenna”. Let’s look at four or five uses by Jesus of this word and then we’ll talk about its meaning. First of all, turn with me to Matthew 5:29 – an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount – “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell (gayenna).” Jesus uses the word again in the next verse as He switches from the eye to the hand for illustration.
Next, let’s look at Matthew 10:28 – “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (gayenna).” Now, let’s notice Matthew 18:9 – a verse similar to the one we looked at from the Sermon on the Mount – with a notable difference: “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell (gayenna) fire.” Now fire is associated with Gehenna or hell. And, finally, let’s look at a parallel passage to this last one from Matthew 18:9 – in Mark 9:47-48 – “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell (gayenna) fire – where
‘Their worm does not die
And the fire is not quenched.’”
If you are looking at these verses in your Bibles, you will notice the thrice-repeated quote from Isaiah 66:24 in verses 42-48. That particular prophecy is about the fate of those who have sinned against God – the maggots will continually feed on their corpses and the fire will never die out. Jesus is saying that the fires of punishment are eternal and even maggots won’t perish in this fire. But where did this Gehenna come from? On the southwest side of old Jerusalem, there was a deep ravine separating Mount Zion from what later became known as the Hill of Evil Counsel. It was known in the Hebrew tongue as the Valley of Hinnom or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom and gayenna is its Greek transliteration. In the Old Testament, it was known as the place where children were sacrificed to the pagan deity Molech. Notice 2 Chronicles 28:3 and what is said about King Ahaz – He burned incense in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, and burned his children in the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. His grandson Manasseh carried on this tradition as we read in 2 Chronicles 33:6 – Also he caused his sons to pass through the fire in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom; he practiced soothsaying, used witchcraft and sorcery, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger. His grandson Josiah tried to stop this practice as we learn in 2 Kings 23:10 – And he defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Molech. I want us to read two prophecies from Jeremiah that further confirm this wicked practice. First is Jeremiah 7:31-33 – “And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into My heart.”
“Therefore behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “when it will no more be called Tophet, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter; for they will bury in Tophet until there is no room. The corpses of this people will be food for the birds of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth. And no one will frighten them away.” When God brings judgment on Judah, the Valley of Hinnom will be known as the Valley of Slaughter because of so many corpses left by the Babylonians. Now notice Jeremiah 19:2-6 for a similar prophecy: “And go out to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the Potsherd Gate; and proclaim there the words that I will tell you, and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will bring such a catastrophe on this place, that whoever hears of it, his ears will tingle.”
“Because they have forsaken Me and made this an alien place, because they have burned incense in it to other gods whom neither they, their fathers, nor the kings of Judah have known, and have filled this place with the blood of the innocents (they have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come into My mind), therefore behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that this place shall no more be called Tophet or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.” After returning home from Babylonian captivity, the Jews were pretty much cured of their idolatry. Perhaps to blot out this place and its sordid history, the Valley of Hinnom became Jerusalem’s garbage dump – for sewage, trash, dead animals and other refuse. It was a constantly smoldering, foul-smelling place full of rotting, maggot-filled decaying and burning waste – the fire never died. But Jesus uses the term 11 times in the synoptic gospels for an eternal place of fiery judgment. I want to jump over to Revelation 20:12-15 and read about the judgment: And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their works, by the things which were written in the books. The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire. And Revelation 21:8 – “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.” This is definitely the eternal abode of the condemned but sounds very similar to where the rich man was. After talking a little about the intermediate place of the dead in Hades – Paradise and Tartarus – where Lazarus and the rich man were awaiting the end of time and the judgment, we read from 2 Peter 2:4 where angels who sinned were cast down to Tartarus to be held in chains of darkness until the judgment. Now I want us to close by looking at the judgment scene in Matthew 25:31-46. This is a very familiar scene to most everyone including our children. We talked a little about it two weeks ago with regard to heaven but today I want to look at it in case anyone is headed in the other direction. As the shepherd divides the sheep from the goats, He pronounces judgment on the goats – those on His left – twice – initially in verse 41 and then after He explains it to them in detail – in verse 46. First, I want us to read verse 41: “Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ ”: And, verse 46: “And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Like His descriptions of heaven, Jesus used terms the people would be familiar with to describe Tartarus and the eternal destination of the condemned – both are places of unquenchable fire, darkness and weeping and gnashing of teeth.
IV. Conclusion/Invitation
I think we’ve seen that we don’t want to share the fate of the rich man or the devil and his angels or the goats on the left. Let’s be honest with ourselves and God this morning: are we headed for heaven or are we headed in the other direction? Folks, I’m not the judge but chances are there are some here this morning in the latter category. Why not turn your life around before it is everlastingly too late? Our father wants you to accept His Son as your Savior by being baptized into His death, burial and resurrection. Or, if you’ve wandered away, He wants you to come back to Him. Jesus died for you – why not accept Him today as we stand and sing?
