I Hate Hell

published with permission from Tim Challies

God has put eternity into man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The knowledge that there is more to this world than what we see seems to be innate in human nature. it seems God has so wired us that we know there is life beyond the here and now. Every religion acknowledges something beyond, something outside of ourselves. There is something to come. But far more people acknowledge heaven than hell. Though the majority of people believe there is a heaven, very few believe in hell. Even fewer believe they will ever be in hell.

Yet our hearts continue to tell us that there is life and death beyond the grave. Life offers us many hints of what is to come. John Blanchard says, “The judgments of God fall often enough in this world to let us know that God judges, but seldom enough to let us know that there must be a judgment to come.” We see God’s judgments in this world often enough to know that God does judge sin and that he is provoked against evil. Yet the scarcity of judgment shows us that there must be more. If God is a judge he must judge all sin, not just some sin. And so we know that more judgment is coming. It must come. And really, we want it to come—we just don’t want it to come against us. None of us want Hitler to escape some sort of greater judgment, some kind of greater consequence for what he did before taking his own life. Surely a man cannot do all that Hitler did and then escape judgment. What kind of world would that be?

In the aftermath of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins there has been a lot of discussion about hell. I believe in hell—a hell of judgment and torment. But through all of this discussion I have been convicted that I do not believe in this hell strongly enough. It seems unavoidable to me that if I truly believe in this hell, it will have a greater impact on my life and faith. A hell of conscious eternal torment is not the kind of doctrine I can believe in and then just go on my way unaffected. Either I genuinely believe it and it will deeply affect my life, or I pay lip service to it and allow it to make very little difference to me. I don’t see how I can believe it deeply and not have it radically impact my life.

I have been helped in understanding life after death by reading Edward Donnelly’s aptly-titled book Biblical Teaching on the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell. The first half of the book discusses hell in all its horror; the second part turns to heaven with all its glory. The first half is difficult to read and weighs heavily on the soul; the second is like a sip of cool water on a hot day. The first terrifies; the second elevates. Donnelly is not given to hyperbole or imagination. He does not present a fictionalized vision of hell that owes more to horror movies or medieval art and imaginings than to the Bible. Rather, he simply relates what the Bible tells us, both explicitly and implicitly, about this awful place. He does so under four alliterated headings: Absolute Poverty, Agonizing Pain, Angry Presence and Appalling Prospect.

The absolute poverty of hell is in its separation from God. All that people love and appreciate and enjoy in this life will be stripped away, not for a time, but forever. All that makes you who you are will be destroyed. “You, as a being, will become ever more degraded, more contemptible, more lonely… Everything good in you will be taken away, and everything bad in you let loose. All your evil passions will burn, increasing and consuming you until you become utterly foul… Nothing good, nothing worthwhile, a horrible monotonous dreariness, unenlivened by a single ray of light as you fester and stew in your loathsomeness. This is what will happen to you.” This is complete, absolute poverty.

The agonizing pain of hell is the utter agony that will be in that place. “The undying worm is something foul, endlessly gnawing at hell’s inhabitants, eating at them continually, giving them no rest. This probably refers to conscience.” Imagine an eternity of a violated but re-sensitized conscience continually attacking, accusing and destroying. There will be weeping—an eternity of pouring out intense grief and anguish and intolerable misery. And there will be gnashing of teeth, perhaps a rage or insanity that will beset those in hell, and for good reason. And, of course, there will be unimaginable physical pain such that people will no doubt cry out for the comparable relief of the worst pain they knew in this life.

The angry presence is the presence not of Satan or of his minions, but of God. Many have been deluded into thinking that Satan will own and control hell, but the reality is that God is as present in hell as much as he is in heaven. People in hell will spend an eternity in the presence of God, but in the presence of his just wrath against sin. “Here is the ultimate horror of hell; not the absolute poverty, not even the agonizing pain but the angry presence of God.” This ought to invoke a kind of terror, a primal fear.

And the appalling prospect is that all of this will never end. We all know the words of “Amazing Grace” where we sing “When we’ve been there ten thousand years / bright shining as the sun / we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise / than when we’ve first begun.” Just as those in heaven will be no further from the end when ten thousand years have elapsed, the same is true of people in hell. We cannot fully imagine eternity and thus cannot fully imagine what it would be like to suffer forever and ever and ever, age after endless age. Our minds cannot conceive, and I’m grateful for that limitation. I do not want to conceive because I think it would destroy me.

It is little wonder that I find the subject almost unbearably weighty. Just thinking seriously about it presses on my soul and presses upon my heart. I would far rather think about heaven and about the reward that awaits there for those who know and love the Lord. But it is good and healthy to think about hell. It would not be healthy to think about it too much or to have a long and deep-seating fascination with it. But because God has revealed to us that there is such a place and because he has seen fit to give us a glimpse of it, we must pay attention. We cannot ignore it just because we do not like it.

I hate hell. I hate that it exists and hate that it needs to exist. I’m amazed to realize that, when we are heaven, we will praise God for it and that we will glorify him for creating such a place and for condemning the unsaved to it. But for now I am too filled with pride, too filled with sin to even begin to justly and rightly rejoice in the existence of such a place of torment. I cannot rejoice in such a place; not yet. It is just too awful, too weighty. And I know that I deserve to be there.

Rob rings Bell for Universalism

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:48 — 8.7MB)

“He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36).

LIVE from the Psalm 119 Conference, St. Louis Park, MN

Guests:
Todd Friel, host, Wretched Radio and TV
Phil Johnson, executive director, Grace to You
James White, apologist, Alpha and Omega Ministries
Milton Vincent, author, The Gospel Primer

If you want to be wildly popular with secular culture, academia, media, and even within many parts of the Christian community, just put forth the unbiblical, heretical notion that God would never send anyone to hell for eternity because eventually His “love wins”.

“Love Wins” is precisely the name of the new book by the young, edgy Emerging Church pastor Rob Bell from Grand Rapids, MI.  In fact, his book has become so popular that it has made it all the way to No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Christian Worldview will be broadcasting LIVE from the Psalm 119 Conference this Saturday morning in St. Louis Park, MN.  Four of the speakers from the conference — Todd Friel, Phil Johnson, James White, and Milton Vincent — will all be on the program to discuss universalism and other topics.

If you’re in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, come on out to watch the broadcast and take in the conference!

Rinse Not the Prose: Christopher Hitchens on the King James Version

Why would an ardent atheist care about translations of the Bible, and why would Christians be concerned with what an atheist would think? These are rather obvious questions, especially when the atheist is Christopher Hitchens, one of the most influential of the New Atheists.

Nevertheless, Hitchens devoted his column in the May 2011 edition of Vanity Fair to the King James Version of the Bible, which celebrates its 400th anniversary this year.

As always, Hitchens is interesting and provocative. He places the history of the Authorized Version (by which the British normally refer to the King James Version) in its political context in the early years of the Stuart dynasty and rightly explains that the interest of King James ! in the project was to “bind the majesty of the King to his devout people.” He then offers anecdotal observations of the KJV text, correctly attributing its tone and tenor to the earlier work of William Tyndale, as well as to the unusually gifted committee of translation.

Hitchens is a man of letters, and as such he takes matters of language with urgent seriousness. He points to the King James Version as a crucial repository of our common civilizational knowledge. As he sees it, “A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one.” It is very hard to argue with that warning.

Hitchens is also an avowed enemy of banality, which means that he has little literary respect for modern translations that lack literary and linguistic taste and thus pander to mere popular taste. The King James Version translates 1 Corinthians 13:7 to read: “[Love] Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.? But the Good News Bible translates it as: “Love never gives up; and its faith, hope, and patience never fail.”

As Hitchens states:

This doesn’t read at all like the outcome of a struggle to discern the essential meaning of what is perhaps our most numinous word. It more resembles a smiley-face Dale Carnegie reassurance. And, as with everything else that’s designed to be instant, modern, and “accessible,” it goes out of date (and out of time) faster than Wisconsin cheddar.

He also has little use for attempts to render the text as gender-neutral. He asserts that “to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose.”

Along the way, Hitchens takes legitimate shots at modern marketing efforts to commercialize the Bible and see some translation or edition to virtually every niche market. Of course, as an atheist, he expresses less sympathy with the Reformation conviction that the Bible should be available to everyone in the vernacular of the language. He does offer some interesting insights into the King James Version and the larger issue of Bible translation.

His admonition that translations should not “rinse out the prose” is well stated and profoundly appropriate. Even an atheist can offer good advice on literary matters, and Hitchens is a writer of great ability.

Since the article’s publication, several observers have noted Hitchens’ comments on faulty modern translations and gender-neutral approaches. His points are well worth noting.

But the more interesting aspect of this article to note is this: Christopher Hitchens, one of the world’s most ardent and outspoken atheists, and a man in the fight for his life against cancer, is reading the Bible. This is at least the second article on the Bible that he has written of late. I note this with a sense of hope.

I know you will join me in praying that, in reading the Bible, Mr. Hitchens will find more than he might be looking for. Rinse not the prose of its message.

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I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

Christopher Hitchens, “When the King Saved God,” Vanity Fair, May 2011

Why is the New Iranian Video About the Soon Coming of the Messiah Significant?

published with permission from Joel Rosenberg

NEW: The Joshua Fund posts video blog analyzing new Iranian video that says the Twelfth Imam is coming soon

Last night, I returned from a week in Europe where I had the opportunity to brief several dozen Iranian, Arab, Israeli, European and American pastors and Christian ministry leaders about the new feature-length documentary film produced by the Iranian government and its religious allies called, The Coming Is Near. As I will explain in more detail below, I believe now is the time for pastors and ministry leaders around the world to use the occasion of the release of this film to accelerate and intensify their own teaching about the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and to answer the questions being asked by millions of people throughout the Middle East and elsewhere about who the Messiah is and when/how/why He will return.

The film, The Coming Is Near, was brought to the attention of the West by Reza Khalili, a former Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps member who became a double agent for the CIA working against Iran in the 1980s. It explains how the current wars and revolutions in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere throughout the Middle East and North Africa are signs consistent with Shia Islamic End Times teaching that the Twelfth Imam (or Mahdi) and Jesus will soon appear on earth to usher in the destruction of Israel, the establishment of an Islamic caliphate (kingdom), and the end of days. As I write about in The Twelfth Imam and Inside The Revolution, Shia Muslims are convinced that Jesus will come as a deputy to the Mahdi and force all Jews and Christians to either convert to Islam or die.

Why is this new film significant? I see several reasons:

1. The film has attracted international attention through reports by the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Drudge Report, and other media outlets — this is good because it is further helping people around the world to understand what the current Iranian regime believes and why it is so dangerous.
2. The film has been screened and approved at the highest levels of Iranian government, providing further confirmation that the Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad believe their eschatology is being vindicated and thus emboldening them to continue pursuing nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles.
3. The film is being screened throughout Iran for military officers and soldiers as well as for paramilitary units, suggesting that Iran’s leaders are trying to prepare their forces for a rapidly approaching genocidal war against Israel, the U.S. and the West and to encourage them not to fear because Shia Muslims are on the winning side of history.
4. The film is being translated from Farsi (the language of Iran) to Arabic, suggesting that it will soon be shown and distributed throughout the broader Middle East and North Africa to prepare other Muslims — Sunni and Shia – for a genocidal war with Israel and the West.
5. The film is full of false teaching (the Twelfth Imam is not the true Messiah, cannot save mankind and will not set up a global Islamic kingdom), delivered by false teachers (Iranian clerics), who follow a false religion (Islam), but it is useful in that it is further evidence that our Lord Jesus Christ was absolutely correct when He warned His disciples in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 that “false messiahs” and “false prophets” will come in the last days before Christ’s own return. Indeed, while we can’t know for certain that a false Islamic messiah known as the Twelfth Imam is actually coming soon, we must recognize that this is possible, would be a fulfillment of Bible prophecy, would create much deception in the world, and would need to be countered with great courage and wisdom by faithful followers of Jesus Christ.
6. The film is full of evil, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-Christian teaching, but it is serving one particularly good function: it is beginning to accelerate and intensify an on-going conversation among Muslims and Jews throughout the world who are asking, “Who is the Messiah? When will He come? What signs will precede His coming? How shall we recognize Him when He comes? And how shall we live differently in light of His soon arrival?”
7. The film, in my view, should immediately lead to Christian ministries producing films and TV programs explaining what the Bible says about the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and how to both prepare for His return and live lives of holiness, prayer, evangelism, discipleship and church planting in view of Christ Jesus’ coming. Followers of Jesus Christ should be ready and willing to answer people’s questions from the Scriptures, and teach other believers how to answer these questions from the Bible, as well. One of the ministry leaders I spoke to who is responsible for broadcasting and webcasting programs that are seen by hundreds of thousands of Iranian and Arab Muslims and Christians throughout North Africa and the Middle East has already committed to having his staff make the Second Coming of Jesus Christ a new and important theme of their programming in the weeks and months ahead.

Please pray that many Christian leaders around the world will see this as an important moment to teach Bible truths in love and with great courage, that Jesus of Nazareth is the only true Messiah and the Savior of the world, and that He is coming back soon. As Jesus Himself said in John 14:1-3 and 6, ”Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also….I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”

Also worth noting: Reza Khalili notes that Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, President Ahmadinejad’s top adviser and chief of staff was directly involved with this project. Khalili quotes Mashaei as saying:

Therefore let us shout out loud that The Coming is soon and that evil should be fearful. We live with these thoughts every day and our lives are filled with The Coming of the last imam. That human will reappear and fill the world with justice and establish his promised governance on earth. The very world has witnessed too much bloodshed of the innocent for others to build their palaces. The very world is filled with shouts for justice. The innocent and the oppressed are losing their lives to world powers. It is in this very world where the oppressors rule and this world that Allah will command the last imam to appear and forever put an end to injustice. At that time the world will belong to the righteous.

• CBN report about the Iranian film, “The Coming Is Soon”
• 28-minute excerpts of Iranian film, with English subtitles
• Reza Khalili’s translation of the Iranian film, “The Coming Is Soon
• Iran Film: Iran Plans to Conquer Israel, World

Faith + Works = A True Christian

Podcast: Download (Duration: 50:48 — 8.7MB)

“For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).

“Wait a second,” the American churchgoer says, “I thought you just gotta have faith in Jesus to be a Christian.”

This may be cultural Christianity’s gospel but it is not the true biblical gospel.  The Bible says there is something more beyond faith to being a genuine Christian.  And what is that?  Works.

So how do we reconcile what James says, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) with what Paul says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9)?

We’ll discuss how works integrates with faith this weekend on the radio program and introduce you to a brand new aspect of The Christian Worldview called the “FaithWorks Initiative” where you will have the opportunity to put your FAITH to WORK by helping and encouraging our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ around the world.  Exciting program … don’t miss it!

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