Albert Mohler | Apologetics Series: "Heaven and Hell Are Real"

if you were to be in a time capsule and somehow dropped out of oh I don't know 200 or 300 years ago and European or American civilization and you were to be dropped into the present of all the shocking realizations that would come to you would be not only the presence of many things we now take for granted but the absence of many things we no longer miss we meaning very modern people living in this hyper modern age the things we would see as president would of course be the most obvious perhaps to us the technology the transportation changes in the landscape size of the cities all the artifacts of modernity all of that would be very present to us and in terms of of social life we would notice some immediate things that are present to us what would be absent well interestingly one historian said the thing that would be most absent would be horses and thought about that until this historian drew attention to it well it would be most absent from the picture of the horses horses would be everywhere in the previous pictures because horses were the engines of transportation and the horses would be absent and their absence of II noted visually and in other ways as well cities are different than they were when they were horse powered but in terms of the worldview landscape many things would be present but shockingly absent would be heaven in hell shockingly absent heaven and hell absent from the cultural horizon heaven and hell absent from the the normal personal familial conversation absent from the cultural horizon in terms of entertainment in that conversation but also absent increasingly from the pulpit at least the last place you would think heaven and hell would be present when I was a teenager in South Florida I was trained in personal evangelism by a Presbyterian pastor named D James Kennedy Jim Kennedy had gone down to Planet Church in Broward County Florida and filled with evangelistic fervor he sought to reach the community down there and and the Lord blessed his ministry tremendously it became one of the most evangelistic congregations in America but largely because he began to teach laypersons in the church how to share their faith he did so with a program he eventually called evangelism explosion and explosion was a big word in the 1970s there were big explosions going on and and some of these explosions got translated into programs the youth ministry of my home church we had a Wednesday night get-together it was a it was a Wednesday night youth service guess what it was called joy explosion yeah then the 70s all kinds of things were exploding we exploded joy on Wednesday night and we exploded evangelism on Friday night and in evangelism explosion Jim Kennedy had indicated that the first step towards learning how to share your faith was learning how to employ what he called the two diagnostic questions see in evangelism explosion you also had a medical application you had a diagnosis up front and the diagnostic questions came down to this and I'm just gonna paraphrase them but if you were to die tonight are you certain that you would go to heaven that's question number one diagnostic question number one diagnostic question number two if you were to die tonight and you were to face God and he were to ask you why should I let you into heaven how would you answer those are actually two brilliant diagnostic questions those are those are two questions that at the time really served well to help us to understand the worldview the understanding of the gospel or the absence of the under the gospel it with the person with whom we're having conversation are you certain that if you were to die tonight you go to heaven a lack of certainty is certainly a very key diagnostic piece of information in order to know and then let's say they say yes well does that mean they're a Christian we'll let's find out then that second diagnostic question if you were to face God and he were to say why should I let you into heaven what would be your answer and and typically at least at that time when I was as a 17 18 year old learning personal evangelism in that way I found that the diagnostic question number one helped a lot but the diagnostic question number two was even more helpful because that's when you found out what people really believed when they said this is what I'd say to God if I were to die and he said why should I let you in to heaven so I find myself regularly sitting next to people I don't know my opportunities for personal evangelism come down a great deal of the time to travel because I'm traveling all the time it's just part and parcel of what I have to do and travel affords me kind of as it did in the ancient world it affords me the opportunity to be with someone that I'm likely to be able to engage in a conversation now as you know in this situation I'm really talking about being tied down in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet tied down next to someone who can't leave which is an enormous conversational opportunity you know I didn't say that that means they have to talk I have learned how to read all of the defense mechanisms against conversation that can take place defense mechanism number one is stare in the other direction defensive that happens and defense mechanism number two is pick up something whether you want to read it or not and appear to be absolutely engrossed in in in reading and defense mechanism number three is at all costs never let your eyes meet because once your eyes meet being human creatures then you got engaged in some kind of conversation and that can lead to something which is my goal and often their defense but in terms of the diagnostic questions those two questions if you were to die tonight are you certain you would go to heaven and or that second diagnostic question if you were to die why would you tell God he should let you in the hood I noticed over the course of the last couple of decades those questions have waning utility they aren't nearly as useful as they were in the past and I realized at least a part of that is because heaven and hell were essential furniture to the conversation and the thinking even of Americans living in an increasingly secular age until fairly recently but what I can tell you is that over the course of the last well two or three decades I've noticed that fewer and fewer people connect to those questions I just did a video for the North American Mission Board on personal evangelism in which I indicated that I had to come up with a new set of questions so I have my own now very familiar diagnostic questions I use with people in such a situation I no longer ask them the two questions about heaven I asked them these two questions number one what are you living for I've never met someone who didn't answer that question and then my second diagnostic question is this how's that working out for you because what I've discovered is that most people in that second question will in one way or another make clear it's not working out so well now in one sense that's kind of presuppositional apologetics applied so I'm asking them to do consider considering what you were living for and how that's working but in any event my recalibration of the questions is occasioned by the fact that most of the people that I engage in conversation are not worried about either heaven or hell it's not a part of their daily thinking it's not a part of the landscape of their minds it's not they're worried now let me go back a little bit in time again in my own experience some of you've heard me tell this before it's one of those crystallizing moments that comes in one's life after completing my PhD I had the opportunity to participate in some academic meetings that followed over the next several years and and it was for knew basically for new doctoral graduates and theology and church history and historical theology and so we got to meet with people that that we really wanted to get to know and one year our guest was one of the greatest Reformation historians his name was heiko uberman and heiko Oberman had had come to the United States and was then living in Arizona on a very very a well established chair that the university had established in order to draw a major European scholar and he had just recently written his biography of luther man between God and the devil he was a scholar of luther end of calvin of the reformation and so so we were newly minted young scholars meeting with heiko over mon what could go wrong well what could go wrong is that European professors have a shorter fuse than American professors they're a little less indulgent of stupidity than American professors and and what was the stupidity I don't even know those of us who were the the audience never figured out what we had done wrong but whatever it was it came down to failing to understand Luther which is a problem and how we failed to understand Luther was this heiko over brawn kind of lost his temper and he stared at us and he said you young men will never understand Martin Luther well that's that's a downer that's that's not good that was not what we wanted to hear he said you young men will never under and loser because he said you are too healthy you're too healthy you're too vigorous and he said and you don't worry about hell every moment of your lives he said to understand Martin Luther you have to understand that he was a typical medieval man in the middle of medieval Christianity and he'll was such a live threat and death was so imminently close at any moment all it took was just a little II didn't know about germs but all it took was just a little disease and someone could be healthy in the morning and in a box at night and then there was the reality that given so many of the illnesses and other complications people would go to bed and as they say not wake up wake up dead you can just die in your sleep and he said you young men in this medical age in this age of health you have you have had vaccinations and you have had antibiotics and you don't worry that tonight you might die and face God and go to either heaven or hell Luke they're worried about that every single day of his life until he finally found the gospel but he said remember heaven and hell never left Luther's horizon there in every one of his sermons there in every page of everything he ever wrote no that was a pretty pretty strong word it I guess by the fact I can remember it right now it's one of those things where you can remember this is where I was sitting in the room when that happened when heiko overland said I'd never understand Luther because I'm too healthy and vigorous okay but the point is that somewhere between the sixteenth century and the 20th century hell had really receded into the horizon but somewhere between the end of the 20th century and now it's almost as if what was just a faint whisper at the end of the last century is not even audible any longer heaven in hell if simply disappeared David Lodge one of the most famous British novelists he's uh he's known for novels of manners in higher academia he's he's a very interesting figure he has been writing now for about 40 years major novels and he said in one of his novels and I quote at some point in the 1960s he'll disappeared now he went on at some length in order to describe this but he says it was sometime in the 1960s and looking back as he begins this novel he says looking back in the 60s at some point he's writing about Britain he says he'll just disappeared and and and why is that important to his novel because he very clearly says as a secular man of letters he says he'll disappeared as a necessary prerequisite for everyone jumping in bed he said if you look at the sexual revolution as a novelist just as a novelist not as a moralist not as a priest not as a pastor not as a theologian if you look at the sexual revolution just as a novelist you've got to explain how that could have happened and as he said a necessary precondition was that he'll had to disappear and then miraculously he'll did disappear in the 1960s do we really believe what we believe we believe about heaven and hell even as I asked this question I want to remind us that the evacuation of heaven and hell is problematic in the society it's far more problematic in the church it's mostly problematic of greatest concern in the pulpit where heaven and hell have disappeared and you know you can kind of think about this for a moment you can say well I understand in a secular society why hell would become such a stumbling block why hell would get such a bad press why talking about Hell Kamri all kinds of criticism and the assumption of the fact that that you're preaching such an outmoded theology about such an abhorrent deity that you would talk about hell so hell disappears but why heaven how do you explain the the disappearance of heaven just as the most important frame of reference I want us to turn to Scripture and the scriptural text to which I want to turn is revelation the book of Revelation we're gonna look at chapter 20 in just a few verses of chapter 21 and you'll recognize that this begins with the great white throne judgment beginning in verse 11 of Revelation chapter 20 we read then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it 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 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 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 and if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life he was thrown into the lake of fire then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more and I saw the holy city New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying behold the dwelling place of God is with men he will dwell with them and they will be his people and God Himself will be with them as their God he will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away Jesus would speak of the the sheep and the goats Jesus would speak of the fact that narrow is the way that leads to salvation and wide is the way that leads to destruction and many are they who take that way Jesus as we know would speak far more often of Hell than of heaven who would make clear his in his teaching both one is promised and one is threatened and in terms of threat Jesus himself made the threat very clear fear not the one who can destroy the body but fear the one and can destroy both body and soul in hell we understand that a bit of language specificity is necessary the difference between Hades and Gehenna between the realm of the Dead and the the realm of eternal punishment there is a lake of fire that is indicated here like a fire that is clearly what we would refer to as as hell we have here in this great white throne judgment a dual destiny we have God's perfectly just and righteous judgment that is executed and the distinction is between those who will be the inhabitants of the new heaven and the new earth and those who will be the the prisoners in the lake of fire and the distinction is that those whose names are found in the book of life shall live with God in heaven in this new jerusalem that comes down out of the heavens and those whose names are not in the book of life those who are not in Christ they are destined as this passage makes clear for the lake of fire if in the 1960s at least in the english-speaking world hell disappeared then we've got to ask the question why or the question how how what what had to happen in order for hell in particular as we shall see first to disappear the first thing they had to change was the concept of God there had to be a new conception of God and that indeed took place in english-speaking theology in a big way by the mid point of the 19th century to the mid point of the 20th century and interestingly enough if you look at first at British theology and then also an American theology it's it's a symbiosis of sorts not only did a doctrine of God get reconceptualized and then hell minimized but in an explicit desire or ambition to minimize hell the doctrine of God had to be reconsidered and for instance in his history of Protestant liberal theology says that in the United States hell in terms of the history of American theology was the first of what he calls the odium theological the first odious doctrine the first doctrine that became a great stumbling block and it that came very early in the American theological experience so early that by the time you get to the the early years of Harvard College you you already have this denial of Hell you already have a form of universalism you already have a denial of the clear teachings of Scripture and the clear affirmations of the Christian tradition of faithful Christians concerning hell and Great Britain this change in the conception of God came with a very Victorian emphasis upon what was characterized as divine benevolence the the language came of a a of a benevolent God not the God we know through Christ is not only a benevolent cut the God we know through Christ is God of grace and mercy saving grace and saving mercy the problem was pointed out in the in the decades following by someone like Gere hardest voss who pointed out that the problem with the modern conception of God was a separation of gods revealed attributes and so you normally had the the attributes defined in different ways in terms of theological category categorization just in order to to keep track but rather there were divisions between the attributes we like and will keep and we will affirm and the attributes we can do without and we will now deny or we will at least be silent about and so held up in this Victorian understanding of a benevolent God was God's mercy and God's grace all the attributes of his benevolence but what was denied either explicitly or by silence were the attributes of God's justice and His Holiness and His righteousness your hardest of all said that whenever you have a separation or an imbalance in the attributes of God and their affirmation and how they function in our theology and in our worship he said Christianity loses its equilibrium that's a good word Christianity loses its equilibrium if it does not hold to a biblical balance of these attributes that God himself has revealed but if you think about that in terms of the late 19th century and into the 20th century then fast-forward to our own time and understand that now you do not even have people so often as they're thinking about God and the popular cultural conception of God in our time they're not even rejecting attributes that the 19th century folk would have rejected now they no longer even remember them the God who's the object is so much cultural conversation in this country is not even remembered as ever having been just or holy or righteous the whole user-friendly superficial the the the theism if it indeed deserves to be called theism a popular culture is a God who couldn't possibly have anything major against us it would have to be an indulgent God and and by the way the who track such things in the culture will point out that this indulgent deity was necessary in order to allow parents to be indulgent so indulgent parents but which and the modeling the the metaphor of the of the parent even as we call God by his revealed name as father and pray as Jesus taught his disciples to pray our Father who is in heaven we come to understand how important parents are parents became far more indulgent the doctrine of God and the practice of parenting tended to kind of go hand in hand by the time you get to the late 20th century this very light deity this dehydrated desiccated repackaged rebranded deity called God well he was all benevolence no holiness and then hell becomes a great embarrassment and help clearly has been a great embarrassment for many people not only in the society but those who claim to be in the church for a long time the first thing that had to change was the doctrine of God the second thing they had to change was the concept of justice justice so I can still remember when I had a professor tell me that you couldn't find retributive justice affirmed in the Bible and that puzzled me because I had read it and and so I thought I'll go back and read it again and it's clear that retribution is a key it is not the solitary issue it is a key central unavoidable issue that is revealed in terms of God's own justice and the justice he expects of his covenant people Israel and retributive justice became a tremendous stumbling block once again in the 18th but especially in the 19th century in the english-speaking world with the rise of what is known as utilitarianism and and and this led to changes that you see on signs but might not recognize in terms of what they mean so philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham argued that retribution retributive justice was a wrong and immoral form of justice and thus had to be dispensed with and so their concern was not so much what will be preached from the pulpits they would leave that to the preachers their concern is what would happen in the courtroom and what would happen with convicted criminals and so in this in this wave of utilitarianism they redefined justice and it came down to this and so I don't know what they call where people are sent when they're convicted of crimes in your state but that language is not an accident language isn't an accident in in England the the language changed from prison to penitentiary wasn't just a change on the sign the utilitarian said the only rightful goal of justice is reform it's restorative justice it is to make right what was wrong and there was a rican ception of humanity such that no one can be really really understood to be incorrigibly evil and so what is needed is for scientist for society to get out of the business of punishing criminals and get into the business of reforming them and the language that was available was a theological lang penitentiary is a place where you send people until they achieve penance until they repent of their of their wrongdoing and are morally transformed by the way the reason why there aren't too many institutions named penitentiary now and why some which had been named penitentiary are now called detention centers is because Penitentiary's failed pretty clearly at their central object of bringing about penance it turned out that they did not become regarded as places where penance was likely as a matter of fact one of the earliest second-guesses of the utilitarians was okay so here's the problem let's huddle for a minute we don't believe in such a thing as really evil people we just believe in people who do evil things we don't really believe that justice should be about punishment and retribution we think it should be about restoration and Reformation so here's what we did maybe this was a mistake you put all the prisoners together in one place turns out that really doesn't lead to penance it leads to picking up new skills and it turns out that independent in a penitentiary the people who were released did not demonstrate that they had achieved penance but rather that they had a whole new set of skills no we can explain that in terms of the biblical worldview but you have to understand that most people who think themselves right minded in our society are still walking utilitarians when it comes to justice especially when it comes to justice as an abstract issue they say look we don't really believe in bad people we just believe in people who do bad things and with the right education with the right economic leverage with the right mentoring with the right conditions most people today still want to believe that anyone can be reached by reform and can be brought to well penance of course even the society though has to do with the fact that there are people who proved themselves to be incorrigibly evil but this society really doesn't have any any good definition for them so first of all a change in the concept of God and then a change in the concept of Justice so retributive justice justice punishment is out then there had to be a change in the moral worldview and that that change in the moral worldview came earlier than people think away from an objective morality which of course if it's an objective morality you can only ground it in two ways if it and so you compare an objective morality to moral relativism if you're gonna argue for an objective morality you can only anchor it in two possible ways either in theology or in ontology which is to say you're gonna either argue from revealed morality as in Scripture or from natural law from from morality that is evident in the observation of of the things that are of being now by the way the Bible makes clear that not only do we affirm general revelation the natural law is as much there as the natural law theorists claim that it's there and not only that it informs all of us and not only that according to Romans 1 it's enough to indict us all to send us to hell but the reality is that if a revealed morality is denied a scriptural morality then a natural law morality doesn't survive any longer than Scripture just in the case of the last say several big moral debates in this country whether it's abortion or marriage you had a lot of people come and argue you know just be quiet about the Bible because that's gonna be an embarrassment to us it's gonna be a political impediment to us so just don't argue about the Bible don't say that same-sex marriage is wrong because God said it's wrong or because God said what marriage is instead we're simply gonna argue from a natural law argument which by the way was brilliant all their arguments were brilliant marriage is found everywhere monogamous marriage is privileged in every society it's necessary for I don't know reproduction and so you make all these arguments but you'll notice that the natural law arguments didn't have any more traction before the US Supreme Court than the now shalt nots of scriptural morality but moral relativism took hold and and this big change in the moral worldview took place there had to be forth a change in the understanding of salvation and and by this I mean a Christian understanding a salvation which means that the the rise of of universalism or of some form of universalism as we saw in the last message the form of inclusive ism or or some form of a post mortem opportunity of salvation or or or something like Karl Rahner synonymous Christian even before you use the term there were those who had similar ideas some form of universalism changes everything because the great dividing line is not between those who have heard the gospel and those who have not between those who have heard the gospel and believed and those who have not that basic distinction is simply removed but you'll notice as we were looking at Revelation chapter 20 in the great white throne judgment that distinction becomes abundantly clear inescapably clarified there are those whose names are written in the book of life and there are those whose names are not dual destiny to different places to different judgments all according to the righteousness of God and and you look at that and you say well that that's just unthinkable by most people in our society and it includes many people who at least call themselves Christians churches that identify themselves at least historically as Christian churches fit there had to be a change in theological authority and this becomes really really important because if the Bible is going to rule then hell is going to remain and heaven if the Bible is going to rule then hell is going to remain because there really isn't any question about the fact that the Bible affirms Hell one of the awkward embarrassments to the theological liberals is that the Jesus of history they want to separate as we said in an earlier message in an invalid way from the Christ of history they are one in the same or we are lost but even what they identified is the Jesus of history keeps showing up talking about Hell far more than even he talked about heaven so you've got to have a shift in theological Authority that means a shift away from the Bible and there are different ways as we have seen to shift away from the Bible you can shift away from the Bible by saying we're shifting away from the Bible this is the honest way to do it but you can also shift away from the Bible by just minimizing its presence or its importance or or using a different way of biblical argument as we shall see but in any event the theological liberals found hell to be abhorrent they were allergic to it it was a huge embarrassment so first of all in the in the circles of academic theology and you see this again very early on in a place like the theology faculty at Harvard but you also see in at Oxford in Cambridge you see it in the english-speaking world and we're talking about the english-speaking world because actually on this doctrine hell shifted in the english-speaking world before it did even in most of the rest of Europe again part of that's because some of these strains of thought were particularly British like utilitarianism but when you're thinking about this shift in biblical authority so every single doctrine had to be reformulated that was the entire ambition of theological liberalism so they would take a doctrine and they would simply reformulate it they would they would reformulate Christology they'd reformulate the Trinity they would reformulate of course the understanding of humanity reformulate everything the supernatural is out so miracles are out hell of course is out but sometimes they said okay let's just keep hell let's just make sure there's no one who's in it and and and so a lot of these theological liberals they said well you know it's not that hell isn't real it's just that God would actually never send any went there and and so the strains of liberal theology by the way especially in the english-speaking world they made inroads they made inroads in in ways that even among some who would call themselves evangelical hell disappeared I like the way one Roman Catholic wit put it he said that in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries it appeared that theologians were determined to air-condition health and and that they just reformulated hell they reconsidered the way they did every other major doctrine now one of the ways that hell was air-conditioned and that is that it was it was redefined and and and in a way that's closer to us as evangelicals and and many of us might might understand was the the suggestion of annihilationism the idea that hell does exist and it certainly has a purpose in the divine plan but hell is the place of the destruction or the annihilation of sinners outside of Christ not of conscious eternal torment the argument that was made by the annihilation estándares another way of putting this arguing this which is conditional immortality but let us call it anihilation ism because that's easier the argument made by the annihilation this is of course we can't get rid of hell Jesus talked about Hell Hell found in the bible we're evangelical so we can't we can't just dispense with hell that that violates scripture but we need to go back and ask if we've really read the bible correctly what did jesus say jesus said fear not the one who can destroy the body but fear the one who can destroy but body and soul in hell well that's good news for us because that means that in the judgment hell is actually a place of the destruction the annihilation of the person so there's no one who is eternally in hell even as there are people who eternally in heaven these are not analogs they're not both dual eternal destinies rather hell is the declaration of the fact that those who are not in christ are utterly annihilated because their names are not written in the book of life what is denied here and what is it is condemned as immoral and by the way this language is used in just that way it is immoral to believe in a hell of conscious eternal torment and it is immoral or would be an immoral god who would ever send someone to conscious eternal torment now just consider their argument they went on to say that that idea really doesn't come to the Bible it comes from Dante it comes from medieval literary speculation it's a it's Dante with his different levels of hell and all the rest and and let's let's face it the medieval world had all kinds of speculative understandings about Hell they translated into art and literature and many other things but here's the thing it all actually was premised upon something that's irreducibly biblical which is the fact that there is a presentation entity to threat of what it means to be destroyed in hell that isn't about annihilation or conditional immortality the mere destruction of the impenitent Center it's about eternal conscious punishment it's about the worm that never burns never destroys it is about the rich man and Lazarus in Luke chapter 16 when Jesus himself speaks of this distinction between the rich man who is in torment in Hades and speaks of the fact that he is in agony in this flame and he begs father Abraham to send Lazarus just to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool his tongue for he is an agony in this flame now let's just state the obvious if that weren't true Jesus wouldn't have told us if that were not an objectively real and for that matter gospel premise understanding of health the Jesus wouldn't have told us this this is the same Jesus who did say if you're not the one who can destroy the body but fear the one who can destroy what body and soul in hell this is what it looks like but what also had to change was just a way of reading the scripture which again the annihilation escaped up with it was a hermeneutical shift but yet figures such as John Wenham and John Stott who held we know one of the central figures of the evangelical Renaissance in Britain in the 20th century nonetheless in an interview that I read when I was first in London myself in the 1980s in an interview famously said of hell as conscious eternal torment he said this emotionally I find the concept intolerable well I want to admit to you I find the concept intolerable as well I albert Mohler I find the concept intolerable but true undeniably true my emotional response is not alien from myself but my emotional response is not the barometer of theological truth I am repelled and repulsed by the idea of Hell and I believe that is God's point we should fear it we should hate it we should love it ffs Bruce similarly famous evangelical New Testament scholar held two annihilationism and actually said that any God who would do such a thing is not a God worthy of worship you know it's interesting some of these things were were rather well known there's this stream of annihilationism that ran through especially Anglican evangelicalism in the in the 20th century I especially appreciated another Anglican evangelical responding to it and J I Packer responded to it brilliantly another Anglican evangelical when he said that the problem with the statement and the problem with annihilationism is that it assumes a superior morality to Jesus there's a big theological warning if if Jesus preached it then you dare not call it immoral or dare to claim a superior hummel ethical or theological morality to that of Jesus then of course in 2011 came Rob Bell and John Piper's famous tweet farewell Rob Bell in his book Love Wins he made this argument and I I want to quote it so I get it exactly right he said this a staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful joyous place called heaven while the rest of humanity spins forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better it's been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is in essence to reject Jesus his final words most famous words of the book this misguided and toxic and this is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus's message of love peace forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear so in other words hell is the obstacle we have to be rid of so that people can hear about Jesus this is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus's love peace forgiveness and joy so the contagious spread of Jesus is love peace forgiveness and joy is impeded mostly said rob bell by the fact that we also preach hell which Jesus also preached well there you see the logic of it makes perfect sense which is one of the reasons why we have to remember that when we're looking at the theological liberalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it doesn't disappear it just comes back again and again and again but all that helps to explain the disappearance of Hell why the disappearance of heaven we're a society that wants to divide things between the good news and the bad news and certainly we want to keep on to a hold of the good news of heaven anyway let's get rid of Hell but let's keep heaven but heaven also has disappeared heavens disappeared from evangelical church's hell's disappeared from the evangelical imagination hell's disappeared from the evangelical pulpit why I think it's because we're all Joel Osteen now we really think we have our best life now we're comfortable we've got antibiotics we've got nice furniture we've got the Internet we've got video games we've got doctors and surgery we've got retirement accounts 401ks we've got health insurance we're entertained we go to bed full then healthy not only do we not fear hell we don't yearn for heaven do you recognise how much of the Bible is about yearning for heaven have you ever thought about the fact that most of the Bible is written for people who are sick and suffering and powerless and poor the the Bible is written in the main to people who know they are not having their best life now the Bible is written in the assumption that wherever human beings are found until the coming of the kingdom of Christ and fullness until the appearance of this new heaven and new earth we can't possibly be having our best life now but heaven has been eclipsed because we no longer yearn for it because in our materialism and in our entertainment and in our busyness and in our comfort in our full bellies and in our safe beds we no longer yearn for heaven but of course just think of the sadness and the emptiness and the imbecility of that if this is our best life now this can't possibly be what we were made for it can't possibly be what we were made for the Bible is very clear about heaven even as it's clear about hell it's clear about heaven first of all is the abode of God this is where God lives it's where his reign is is unmitigated it's where he reigns from his throne with the Blessed ones who are his own and it becomes very clear as jesus said to his disciples in the Gospel of John that even as he was going to the Father who's going to prepare a place for us it's described in its glory and in the mansions in the houses that he's building an abode for his people and heaven of course is something that a lot of people don't want because we have these unbiblical notions of heaven in which it's less than what we know now we're afraid that this is our best life now and that that we're going to be going to heaven where we're destined to have a lesser life in the future and it's because of this desiccated ridiculously unbiblical notion of heaven that's been held out and put on plaques and preached so superficially and put into so many ridiculous simcha and hymns I started to say gospel songs but if they're wrong that can't be gospel songs but you have all this about heaven in the sweet by and by when we're evidently going to be doing nothing but singing in the sweet by and by but that's not the biblical notion of heaven that's not how we are taught to read scripture in terms of a biblical theology that's not how we understand that in heaven we are promised not the fact that we have readmission to Eden but rather we have admission to the kingdom of Christ which is a greater than Eden ever was and so in the in the fulfillment of biblical theology everything that was with it was promised and and and not only that assigned to us and the Dominion given to us in the first chapter of Genesis is what we live out perfectly in a world where rust never threatens and and the insects will never eat and the termites will never destroy and and flame can never assail where everything we do will be to God's glory and will be fully deployed fully employed everything all that you see this even in biblical theology I'm at our church preaching verse by verse teaching through Exodus I just went through all the instructions for the various parts of the tabernacle and all the arts that were that were called forth there although that's going to be present and it's never going to get lost and it's never gonna fade it is never gonna fray and all that everything that we enjoy will be superseded in heaven and by the way if you are young and healthy and I'm thankful you are I just want to offer you the promise that you will not stay that way and that regardless of what you are promised in the advertisements you're going to get old and it's gonna hurt and you're gonna die and this can't be all there is it was never intended to be all there is we were promised that it's not all there is very quickly in thinking about heaven I've been greatly helped by two developments in the 1730's just interest me I don't know why they're within five years of each other they both have helped me a lot one of them was a sermon that Jonathan Edwards preached is called the Christian pilgrim it's very similar to what you find in John Bunyan but in this case it's Jonathan Edwards and in this sermon he writes about the Christian pilgrimage a pilgrimage for the Christian towards heaven and he writes this that we ought not to rest in the world and its enjoyments but should desire heaven we should seek first the kingdom of God we ought above all things to desire a heavenly happiness to be with God and to dwell with Jesus Christ though surrounded with outward enjoyments and settled in families with desirable friends and relations though we have companions whose society is delightful and children and whom we see many promising qualifications though we live by good neighbors and are generally beloved we're known we ought not take our rest in these things as our portion we should be so far from resting in them that we should desire to leave them all in God's due time we ought to possess enjoy and use them with no other view but readily to quit them whenever we are called to it and to change them willingly and cheerfully for heaven our this world is not our abiding place our continuance here is but very short man's days on the earth are as a shadow it was never designed by God that this world should be our home I love this Jonathan Edwards said if we spend our lives in the pursuit of a temporal happiness as riches or sensual pleasures credit and esteem for men delight in our children and the prospect of seeing them well brought up and well settled etcetera all these things will be of little significance to us here's the line death we'll blow up all our hopes and we'll put an end to these enjoyments Jonathan Edwards death will blow up all our hopes there's joy explosion I didn't know that Jonathan Edwards knew anything about blowing up but here he says that death will blow up all our hopes 17:33 such clear biblical language and it tells us something that as Jonathan Edwards is known for preaching on health centers in the hands of an angry god Jonathan Edwards felt the need to preach on heaven even to people in the 18th century who were far less comfortable than we the other help I have received comes from 1738 just just five years later and it comes from Charles Wesley and Charles Wesley was at one of the theological low points of his life in 1738 he was struggling with doubts about his salvation and doubts about the gospel he was he was struggling with whether or not the gospel was for him and he was ministered to by some saints some people who just came and ministered to him quietly and their confidence in the gospel began to give him hope he went back to the scripture and again he's asking the question how can I be saved really his car Christ promises for me he went back and read the scripture and he wrote a hymn it's one of my favorite hymns oh four thousand tongues to sing we know about five verses he originally wrote eighteen verses so one of my goals musicians Joe is that soon we will sing all eighteen verses of Oh for a thousand tongues to sing they're magnificent all eighteen of them the first verse doesn't begin as we remember it the first verses Charles Wesley wrote it is this glory to God and prays in love be ever ever given by Saints below and Saints above the church in Earth in heaven Wesley came to understand that the church is right now found in two places it's on earth and in heaven and when we sing hymns our goal should be to sing the same things that are being sung in heaven and to get ourselves ready for heaven by singing the right songs in terms of his own salvation he said I felt my Lord's atoning blood close to my soul applied me me he loved the Son of God for me for me he died I found and owned his promised true ascertained of my part my pardon passed in heaven i news was declared it's heaven it's it's done it's decreed in heaven at the throne of God it's done my pardon passed in heaven I know when written on my heart he breaks the power of canceled sin he sets the prisoner free his blood can make the thoughtless clean his blood availed for me the eighteenth verse with me your chief even shall know shall feel your sins forgiven anticipate your heaven below and own that love is heaven what is he saying he's saying that the Christians aim should be to live faithfully on this earth in the gospel and to anticipate heaven that a part of our necessary worship is to anticipate heaven we are those who rightly fear hell and believe in it we are those who believe in the righteousness of a God who on this great white throne judgment and in that judgment will render perfect justice perfect to the extent that all who observe it will know it to be righteous and just and those who are in the book of life for them the promise finally with Christ and in heaven the promise of every eye dry and every tear wiped away our best life the life that we were made for then let's pray our Father we are so thankful for all you've given us in Scripture we thank you for the fact that in Scripture we find the truth the truth about both heaven and hell father we thank you for the promise of heaven Jesus Christ our Lord we thank you that we know it and preach it and affirm it and sing it we pray this in Christ's name Amen you

Channel: Southern Seminary

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Keywords: SBTS, SBTS Chapel, SBTS Live, Chapel Live, Southern Live, Southern Seminary Live, Southern Seminary, Chapel, Seminary Chapel Live, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Albert Mohler, Al Mohler, R. Albert Mohler, Apologetics, Apologetics Series, Apologetics Live, Christian Apologetics, Philosophy, Worldview, Theology, Heaven, Hell

Id: U3cEO8M_nwc

Length: 57min 0sec (3420 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2017