Hell (Pt. 1): Hell & Heaven with John Gerstner

dear friends since we are speaking in this little series on the two greatest places in the universe namely heaven and hell it behooves us to address the God of heaven and hell as well as this world shall we pray O God we thank thee that we may call the Our Father we know we were born the children of the devil and are adopted into thy family only by Grace and as in this series we address the future world theme that awesome place called hell and that awesomely wonderful place called heaven we invoke the presence of thy spirit who has given us thy word concerning the destiny which awaits us at death and pray that he may dwell in the hearts of each of us and hover over the company of all of us that we may not only learn from thy word about these future abodes but by his presence and power feel something of the reality of them this is our prayer in Jesus name Amen the first of our three brief lectures will be concerning Hell and the concluding three concerning heaven and you'll probably notice as we pursue the themes that there is a kind of balance between aspects in Hell and aspects in heaven of an absolutely opposite kind but corresponding nevertheless all of you have copies of the outline we will be following in the presentation as I elaborate it and I note at the outset that these comments with which I agree are drawn from Jonathan Edwards writing and preaching specifically from the last book I wrote about him and titled Jonathan Edwards a mini theology Jonathan Edwards in anybody's book is one of the great Christian theologians of all time and probably as far as describing in sermonic power and with theological precision and detail it's probably the greatest Christian theologian of the future that awaits all of mankind he's noted of course as the preacher of sinners in the hands of an angry god and his sermons on Hell are indeed awesome but he probably preached more about heaven and just as eloquently and what is more important as biblically I put this little phrase with which I agree not that I've mentioned myself in the same breath with Edwards but just to let you know that though we are focusing on his teaching I do believe them myself and I I don't think there's a single sentence here which isn't true to Edwards and which also reflects my own viewpoint much of my own thinking having been arrived at long before I began any serious study of Jonathan Edwards but the refinement of it and the penetration of it owing greatly to his profound influence in his writing on my life and thought for the last the years I always have the question when I deal with these two themes which to take first heaven or hell and as a tendency of course to take heaven first and we usually when we're talking about this double destiny mention heaven and hell the reason I've chosen to speak on Hell first is because really we all are born into this world in hell not in heaven we were created in our first parents in heaven as it were but because of the fall we are born dead in trespasses and sin we are DOA dead on arrival as the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians we are dead in trespasses and sin by Nature we actually are there really only three basic differences between hell in this world and hell in the world to come one of them is that in this world God for bears to pour out his full wrath upon us if anyone in this audience here or whoever later see the videotape is an unconverted person let him know from the Word of God the wrath of God is now upon him Edwards would say brimstone is scattered all over his life and everything he does the only difference is that in hell it's poured out with unmitigated fury whereas now as Paul says in Romans 2 for the forbearance of God from the full visitation of deserve wrath gives us an opportunity to be saved another difference between the hell into which we are born as fallen creatures and a hell which we will certainly go if we die in penitent is the fact that in this world we have diversion we can think about something else we can enjoy a good meal we can like athletics so you can read books we can have innumerable forms of pleasure even though the wrath of God is upon us and hell awaits us at any moment and these constitute diversions so effective that most people never think about hell they're so preoccupied with living with the diversions in this temporary hell in which they now are the third and perhaps the most significant difference between the hell in which everyone is born in this world and to hell to which he or she goes if he dies without faith is the fact that now is the day of salvation the opportunity to believe and be saved is before everyone here everyone in the world as soon as death comes and hell takes us as its possession no possible escape ever we talk about maximum prisons we try to incarcerate some of our hardest criminals in jails from which they can never escape and are never completely successful but in this prison there will be no escape once a person goes to hell its wrath and nothing but wrath there is nothing one moment that will divert your attention from it and escape totally and eternally impossible the first point I want to make about Hell that we're talking about here is that in a attempt that's something of a definition and as I remind you I'm following basically the Edwardian thought with which I concur myself hell is a spiritual and material furnace of fire where its victims are eternally tortured in their minds and in their bodies by God The Devil's and Damned humans including themselves in a certain sense they're even tortured by the spirits in heaven not directly but as we'll notice as we go through this study as they contemplate the blessedness of the redeemed that of course makes them suffer by comparison all the greater anguish so that you can say in a sense hell is a place where people are tortured eternally by every rational being in the universe by every denison of Hell by every devil by the angels in heaven by the saints in heaven by God himself and what is perhaps most poignant ly sad even by themselves their memories and consciences as well as their raging unsatisfied lusts torture them as I mentioned a moment ago they do Hurons in this world don't forget my friends any unconverted person is fundamentally a miserable individual he's an unhappy person but he is able to take his mind off it by the various anesthesia's of this life which we call diversion or fun the interesting thing to mention that in Orlando one of the centers of our entertainment and diversion and one's thinks of literally thousands and thousands of people who unfortunately allow a perfectly legitimate diversion to take their mind off primary business namely the escape from the wrath of God and the eternal torment which certainly awaits them but the realization of that in the world to come that opportunity past those sins committed that conscience violated contributes the inner burning of the person himself to his recollections of the past that every evidence that the desires which we now have continued in the world to come and are actually augmented because we will exist in a state superior to our present state whether it be in hell or heaven capable of enjoying for example the delights of this world in the world to come where there's nothing but actual misery and the torture all the keener because our sensitivities all the brighter conscience is never extinguished for example conscience which sometimes stops the person in his or her tracks of sin in this present world works overtime in hell there's no diminution of its inner torment if every evidence that it would be more activated than ever in a world where nothing but sin and it's frustrations prevail one of the this thing happened on the way down today I learned something about evangelism I'd never thought of but when I was on my plane from Philadelphia to Orlando at one time I was reading this outline thinking about my own comments to you right now and of course the black boy sitting alongside of me couldn't help seeing it I wasn't rubbing it in his nose exactly and I wasn't putting it in his face but for me to see it he had to see it since he wasn't reading anything else at all he found himself reading this and said nothing for about 10 or 15 minutes and then he said to me that number 2 he says their memories and consciences as well as their raging unsatisfied lust torture them he asked me to explain that somewhat to him and I did there with quite a dozen other people listening in carefully so you're not exactly the first audience for this I may say this incidentally I propose a evangelical evangelistic aspect of it I may suggest holding up something like this and a plane as an extremely fellow UI nod like this as if you've been doing this for the last 20 years and so I've been at 73 I've just smartened up a little bit too a way of communicating a message without saying anything far more effective than anything I could say but the Nutella did go on to say to me that he was a Christian and at the same time he said I haven't got my act together and he was alluding to some problems in his life and I was able to press on a little bit that incidentally turn over to hell and heaven so they saw I wasn't just deliberately holding this up for his benefit and he could believe me when I told him that I had six lectures to give tonight in Orlando and such things as that but when he started to talk about not having his life put together quite I sense that that was something of an understatement of the real predicament and I was able to say to him my friend it isn't enough to consider yourself a Christian he considered himself a Christian your life has to be put together you'll never achieve perfect perfection in this light but I'm more I said to him if you happen to be a Hindu or a Muslim or a Sikh or something like that you would know you're not a Christian but sometimes people think they're Christians when they are Christians at all I tried to give a little mini evangelistic witness to him at that time to which he listened very politely we had a very cordial relationship and I tried to tell him to seek the Lord while he could be found number three in hell a place of death God's saving grace mercy and pity are gone forever never for a moment to return the rather odd thing that in the history of this particular doctrine in the early church a theory developed that once I forget the number of years but something like once out of every hundred thousand years or something the denizens of Hell were allowed to be freed from their torture that's absolute fiction but nevertheless it's odd that people as it were just can't live with the idea of the relentless ceasing 'less nature of this torment without a moment's rest ever in all of eternity but that is actually the picture that the Bible gives one of the hardest things for people to understand is the fact that God says I will even laugh at your calamity I will mock when your dread comes when your dread comes like a storm and your calamity comes on like a whirlwind when distress and anguish come on you then they will call on me but I will not answer they will seek me diligently but they shall not find me in Proverbs the first chapter goes on to explain why God is so merciless at this time and actually mocks them out in their misery and laughs at their calamity this is God's Word which says this because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord it's an interesting thing about this fourth point here figuratively speaking the wrath of God is a consuming fire says Edwards of course that's an expression in the Bible you remember about God dive ease or the rich man in torment spiritually even before the resurrection of his body was described as existing in fire begging to have Lazarus wet his tongue to relieve the pain Luke 16:24 I think what that means is that even though the hearers of Jesus when he told that story of dive ease and Lazarus must have thought of the rich man who had died and gone to hell in a disembodied State and Lazarus who had died and gone to heaven in a disembodied state so that it would seem strange in a sense that dive ease and his misery is asking to have water put on his tongue to relieve his seemingly physical anguish before while his body's in the grave and before the resurrection has taken place this is Gerstner now I'm not edwards but my he doesn't say this but I think the reason is that that torment even in the soul is so thorough and so complete that it actually would express itself in feeling or maybe Christ is just simply referring to the ultimate hell where after the resurrection when the bodies are actually united with the souls but nevertheless whatever it is the thoroughness of the torment is plenty utley and painfully indicated there the member 5 the metaphor points to the all-over prevalence of the anguish and it's intolerable severity the vine wrath will be far more terrible than its symbol consuming fire in other words as what we would today call a massive understatement but the symbol is also very probably says Edwards literal actually the furnaces figurative so far as the soul is concerned literal as it pertains to the body now there's nothing at all impossible about its being literal and Christ's words in Matthew 10:28 require it Matthew 10:28 actually says don't be afraid of him who can kill the body fear him who can destroy body and soul in Hell john calvin commenting on Matthew 10:28 says that text makes your hair stand on end is a frightening beyond words indication no matter what kind of torture you could be subjected to in this life it ought not to bear a moment's comparison to the reality of judgment in hell for those who for fear of suffering in this world deny Christ and deny conscience number seven it takes real fire to burn the heavens and earth in the great conflagration which is hell I'll focus on that a little bit later but there is to be this great conflagration and certainly fire is the main symbol indicating the Hell which is to come and what Edwards is saying here however terrible it may be as far as the soul is concerned it is equally and literally so with respect to the body you may not realize this about Edwards or even about heaven and hell but Edwards would stress the fact and it's absolutely a Verity that's suffering in the soul is far more terrible than anything in the body there's a real sense in which the only way you suffer is in the soul even when it's through the body many people seem to be really if you tell them they're not going to be any literal fire no actual furnace or something only spiritual misery but that spiritual misery would be even more terrible and in a certain sense the consuming fiery furnace which destroys the resurrection body forever would be almost a kind of relief from the misery to which the soul in its eternal snake pit is actually subjected number eight God will be the hell of one and the heaven of the other but here I'm calling your attention especially to this the most horrible thing about Hell in the thinking of Jonathan Edwards John cursor in a Bible it seems to me clearly is not the absence of God but the presence of God those of you who read much contemporary theology are probably aware of the fact that the theologians turned themselves inside out to escape this idea and try to make Hell exclusively the absence of God as if that were some kind of blessing and it is a blessing in comparison to the presence of God I don't know what Bob Ingraham was saying to you earlier but the greatest authority on Jonathan Edwards I once asked up at Yale Banach elibrary Tom I said for Jonathan Edwards what's the greatest horror of hell and you know what he said the absence of God that is the best scholar Jonathan Edwards has ever had I said when we go back to buy Nicky I want to show you a few passages from some unpublished manuscripts of Edwards he looked at them and he said you're right for Jonathan Edwards hell's most frightful horror is the presence of God we'll see later that it's a presence of God that makes heavens greatest delight number nine it is because God is the fire which burns in hell that words can never convey much less exaggerate the terrors of the Damned who can know the power of his anger ask the psalmist Edwards took this to be a rhetorical question the law and the gospel both he insisted agree that God intends an extraordinary manifestation of his terribleness something beyond anything we can ever imagine so let me go on to read this last point before I develop that a little bit more if this be so that no one can know the power of God's anger if he actually rises up in his might to display it if this be so it was inevitable that Edwards would assuredly advise let not the sinner imagine that these things are bugbears future punishment is contrary neither to scripture nor reason in fact it is most reasonable to suppose it it gives five arguments to prove that ministers have not set it out beyond what it really is he then concludes confidently if I therefore have described this misery beyond the truth then the Scriptures have done the same now that might seem to you like a very arrogant statement even though Edwards is the greatest theologian America has ever had incidentally I may say perhaps the best book I've ever read on Edwards has just come out in 1988 by a man named Robert Jensen teaches theology at Gettysburg Lutheran seminar in Pennsylvania and it's entitled most appropriately America's theologian and he shows in two hundred pages what I've given up trying to show in two thousand pages and Edwards is really the father of the American church the American theologian if there's anything for which he's criticized because anything which the people at Yale are by they're editing publishing as many of this works as they can hesitant about it's because of his reputation as a hell fire preacher here he is saying it's impossible for him or anyone else to exaggerate hell he fell on his face trying to explain it he probably had more success than anybody I know of in the history of the Christian Church but he was infinitely far short in the Verity and when he goes on to make this statement if he is exaggerated at scripture has exaggerated I rise to his defense again it may sound an arrogant statement for a person Edwards or anybody else to identify his interpretation with the infallible words of Holy Scripture but on the other hand if scripture does make this plain and if God who is a supreme teacher intends not to hide but to reveal himself to make himself known then manifestly he can do so and if he can and will do so persons of ordinary mind not to mention the greatest genius America has ever had can see that and I think in the light of the evidence which is overpowering and irresistible even if you haven't read Jonathan Edwards and I just about to fly anybody to read the corpus of Edwards his work and have any doubt about it all he is doing is telling you what Scripture is saying very clearly and with the infallible inspired authority of Almighty God I don't think Edwards has begun to tell you and I know I can't begin to tell you how terrible hell actually is you

Channel: John Gerstner

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Keywords: Hell, heaven, heaven and hell, eternity, ouranology, uranology, hades, John H Gerstner, John Henry Gerstner, John Gerstner, Gerstner, theology

Id: XLJzIHFlgIw

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2019