I once preached to a congregation of dogs,
mostly Labrador breed, and they gave me incredible attention. Believe me? It was a guest
service and each of the dogs had brought a guest who was blind. Ah, now you believe me. You should
believe me the first time. It was the annual torch trust rally for the blind and a lot of them had
brought their guide dogs and blind people usually listen to you with their head on one side like
that, but the dogs listened like this and they watched this man waving his arms about. When I
looked at the congregation all I could see were these dogs’ eyes looking at me. That morning I’d
said to the Lord, what should I preach to these blind people about? He said, “Preach about hell.”
I thought, “I can’t do that—they’re handicapped, they’ve suffered, they need a word of comfort and
encouragement,” but the Lord said, “Preach about hell.” So I talked about a verse from the Sermon
on the Mount, “It is better to lose your sight and enter into life than to keep your eyes and go
to hell.” I said, “Do you blind people ever pray for those of us who are sighted?” Because most
of our temptations come through our eyes. It’s called the lust of the eyes. I said, “You pray
for us.” And there was an elderly lady there, eighty-four I believe she was, and she’d been
blind from birth and never been able to see and she was very resentful and bitter about this.
But for the first time in her whole life she felt pity for me because I could see and all
the bitterness left her heart and she opened her heart to the Lord; and on the bus back to
Harrogate that day she sang hymns all the way. And she died the following Thursday - the first
person she ever saw was Jesus. It wasn’t the first time I’ve preached on hell but I haven’t done it
frequently. Have you noticed that very few are doing these days? It seems to have dropped right
out. In fact if you want to hear the word again, go and work among unbelievers and you’ll hear
it all the time. It’s being treated simply as an expletive now, but blasphemy is one way to take
the edge off it and take the fear away, to use the word so frequently that it loses its meaning.
Have you ever heard about Charlie ‘Dry Hole’ Woods? I’m sure you haven’t, but Charlie Woods
got the nickname ‘Dry Hole’ because he was always drilling for oil in his backyard and never
found any. But he actually found the biggest gusher in California and it yielded something
like eighteen thousand barrels a day. Well, at its peak it got up to eighty-five thousand
barrels and nobody teased Charlie ‘Dry Hole’ Woods anymore. But when he got the first
gusher which came pouring out this black stuff he was being interviewed by a reporter,
and this is what he said to the reporter, ‘It’s hell, literally hell. It roars like hell.
It mounts, surges, and sweeps like hell. It is as uncomfortable as hell and uncontrollable
hell. It’s black and hot as hell,’ which is rather overdoing the word, don’t you think?
But you see when you use the word as freely as that, it loses its fear. It no longer means
what it originally meant. That’s one way that the world is laughing it off. The second way
in which the world laughs off the idea of hell is to make it a subject of comedy. It’s quite a
tribute to the communication of the church that most people outside know what the word hell means
and it’s quite amazing how many jokes comedians make about hell - about its temperature,
about the company there, about all kinds of things. That’s another way in which the edge
has been taken off it and people no longer fear it. Then hell has also been reinterpreted in
an existential way. I mean by that people say, ‘You make your own hell on earth.’ Have you heard
that phrase? Well of course, that does two things. First of all, it brings hell this side of death
so it’s not to be feared beyond death. It also means that no longer does God make the decision or
the Lord Jesus make the decision to send someone to hell, you do it for yourself so if you go
there it’s your decision not his. And again in a very subtle way the edge has been taken off
it. Well now, that’s how the people outside are talking about hell. What is amazing is that the
church inside has stopped talking about it. It seems to have disappeared. We’re going to see in a
moment that the serious side of that is that many preachers, even evangelical preachers, no longer
believe in it even though Jesus apparently did. So we’ve got quite a serious subject before us.
People have an aversion to the doctrine of hell. I’m not surprised. It’s the most offensive and
disturbing doctrine in the Christian faith. I wish I didn’t have to include it but I’m talking about
those things in the future which are absolutely certain, and this is one of those four things
about which we can be absolutely sure. Hell is real. If it’s not, then Jesus was a liar and I’m
not prepared to say that. Arguments have been used against hell even within the church. I’m talking
about the church now and believers. Arguments are being used by scholars and theologians to
argue hell out of existence. They usually do it be taking one attribute of God and making that
the whole of God and then arguing from that, that hell cannot possibly coexist with it.
You heard earlier that the glory of God is the sum of all his attributes and it’s very dangerous
to take any one of those attributes and make that the foundation of your thinking. Let me explain
what I mean. Some people take the love of God, which is one of his attributes, and they
make it the whole and therefore they say, ‘How could a God of love send anyone
to hell?’ As much as to argue, if I loved people I couldn’t do that to them. How
can God love people and do that to them. Or else, some others have argued from God’s power and they
say, ‘If God is all powerful then he cannot fail in what he sets his mind to.’ Therefore if he
sets his mind to get everyone to heaven he can achieve that. His power is able to do it.
And therefore if anyone finishes up in hell then God has failed. He is weak and his
power… he’s not omnipotent. His power is inadequate to save everybody. Then there
are those who take his justice and say, ‘Is it just to punish for all eternity a
few years of vice or crime? Is it fair that people like Saddam Hussein and my nice next door
neighbor finish up in the same place?’ So they take God’s justice and argue from that against
hell. Now all these are doing exactly the same thing. They’re taking part of God’s character and
making it the whole. But each of his attributes qualifies the others and they all blend together.
In other words, God is not just love he is holy love. That makes a big difference. His holiness
qualifies his love and however much he loves us his holiness cannot allow sin to go on forever
so that his love is qualified by his holiness. His power is qualified by his love. He will not
force anyone to go to heaven. He doesn’t want people in heaven who are there involuntarily. He
wants people freely to choose to be in his family and that qualifies his power. He could make us
all be good but he has chosen not to because he wants sons and not robots in glory. So all these
are arguing from part of God instead of from the whole of God. And that’s a mistake many Christians
make. They see the nice side and they don’t like the other side but the New Testament says,
“Behold then the goodness and the severity of God.” They belong together and to get a big view
of God you need the whole counsel of God and the whole truth. So these theologians and scholars
who are arguing against hell as incompatible with at least part of God’s character, what do
they propose to put in its place? What are the alternatives that are being preached today?
There are two main ones. We could go through a whole lot but there are two big ones that are
being widely preached today. One alternative to hell is being preached by those we call liberals
who do not accept the total inspiration and authority of scripture. Alas the other alternative
is now being preached by those who do accept the inspiration and authority of scripture believe
it or not. So what are the two alternatives? Now, I’m sorry to give you two rather big words now
and they both end in ‘ism.’ Always beware of words that end with the three letters I-S-M
because most of the words that end ‘ism’ have a demonic power to become an obsession
with people even when they’re religious-isms. Anglicanism, Methodism, there are only two ism’s
that I’m happy with. One is baptism and the other is evangelism, but apart from those beware of
every ism because they have this capacity to obsess someone. But here are the two ism’s that
are being proposed in place of hell. Number one, universalism. Now this is the liberal alternative
to hell and universalism believes that someday somehow everybody will land up in heaven. It
involves believing that after death there will be a second chance and a third and a fourth
and a fifth - indeed indefinite number of opportunities to be saved so that people may
decide later to go to heaven even if they didn’t decide before they died. And of course
there is the added incentive that if you find yourself in hell you’ve got a real incentive
to choose heaven. So that’s universalism. Actually, it has two forms - sorry to get
complicated - but universalism has two forms. One of which says, ‘One day everybody will be saved,’
but there’s a modern version of it that says, ‘Everybody is already saved, that since Jesus
died for the world everybody is saved and all we need to do is tell them that they are saved.’
The present pope has committed himself to this view that all people have been redeemed by Christ
whether they believe or not. They’re all redeemed. They’re all on their way to heaven. The task of
the church is to tell them they’re going there, to tell them they’re saved. That’s the good news.
Well now, both forms of universalism of course have no room for hell at all. Either we’re all
going to be saved or we already all have been saved - either way everybody’s heading for heaven.
That’s the universal bit of the universalism. Now Evangelicals who believe in the inspiration
and authority of the Bible cannot of course accept that because the Bible makes it quite
clear that there will be a division on the Day of Judgment between the saved and the lost,
between the guilty and the acquitted. There is a black and white division in scripture and
between those on the broad way that leads to destruction and those on the narrow way
that leads to life. You can’t get round this division of the human race in scripture.
So what is the alternative to hell being preached now by leading Evangelicals in this country? The
answer is annihilationism. Sorry about the ism again but I’m sure you understand the word. This
believes that sinners simply cease to be. They go into oblivion. They don’t suffer in hell. They
become nothing. Again, there are two versions of this. One believes that sinners become nothing
at the moment of death, the other believes that sinners become nothing after the Day of Judgment.
And appeal is made to some parts of scripture, for example that hell is fire, that fire destroys.
You can’t survive in fire, that eternal punishment doesn’t refer to the eternal suffering but
the eternal effect of being annihilated. Well I would have thought it was pretty eternal to
be annihilated but that is how they get round the phrase, ‘Eternal punishment,’ that it’s eternal
in its effect but not in its experience. Now all that is the kind of argument that is now a hot
debate. You have seen it in magazines. You’d have seen in one national Christian magazine a
lady writing a letter who just said, ‘I could not love a God who would send anyone to hell.’
That’s where she stood. That’s what she says. Well frankly, it’s saying that Jesus didn’t
know what he was talking about because we know everything we know about hell from the
lips of Jesus. Did you know that? God didn’t trust anybody else to tell us such a terrible
truth. We don’t know about it from John or Paul or Peter. There’s not a word about hell in the
Old Testament. Everything we know comes from the lips of Jesus himself and yet if there was anyone
who knew God well it was surely his Son. He knew all about God’s love and God’s power and God’s
justice and yet still he taught hell. And so we turn to the teaching of Jesus and before I look
at it in detail I want to explain something. I want to give you a framework of thinking, which
you need before you can understand the rest of what I’m going to say. This is the framework.
Human existence is in three phases, three stages, not two. It’s a very common idea even inside
church that you die and you go to heaven or hell. That is based on a framework of two phases
but from what I’ve already said about the Day of Judgment you know that there are three phases
of human existence. Phase number one is the one that we’re all in right now. That’s this world
in which I am an embodied spirit. At death, my spirit and body are separated and I’m finished
with my body. It’s only an overcoat that I’ve worn. And my second phase of existence will be
that of a disembodied spirit. Now I’ve never been that so it’s going to be a new experience and like
Paul, I’m not quite sure about it at this stage; and yet equally I’m with Paul sure that it
will be far better than this life with a body. But Paul did say, I’d rather go straight from
phase one to phase three, from my old body to my new body, but even so, if I have to be unclothed
as he put it, I’d rather be absent from the body and present with the Lord which is far better.
So phase two is where you are absent from the body. If you know the Lord, you’re present
with the Lord. It’s almost irrelevant to ask where that will be because without a body you
don’t ask where. You don’t need to be located as it were. Spirits are not subject to the same
dimensional existence as bodies are so it’s really quite irrelevant to ask where will that be.
The important thing is who will you be with? You’ll be with the Lord, fully conscious able
to communicate but without a body. Phase three comes later when we altogether get a new body
and become again embodied spirits and full human beings in the total sense. Now you realize, do
you, that Jesus went through all these three phases himself in less than a week? On the day
he died his body and his spirit separated and he gave up his spirit to God who gave it.
For the next three days and nights he was fully conscious and fully active and communicating
with others. We know that from Simon Peter who has told us in his letter. I imagine that Jesus told
Peter this when he met him on the first Easter Sunday. We don’t know where they met or what was
said. We just know that he appeared to Peter. I imagine Peter said to him, Jesus where
on earth have you been? And Jesus said, I haven’t been on earth I’ve been in Hades the
world of the departed. And Peter would say, But what on earth have you been doing, sorry what
in Hades have you been doing for three days? And Jesus said, I’ve been preaching. Preaching? Who
to? He said, I’ve been preaching to those who were drowned in the days of Noah’s flood. Now what
an extraordinary tidbit of information, it seems to me proof that nobody invented the Bible. Who
would have thought that up? So Jesus was fully conscious and fully communicating; more than
that the people who had drowned in Noah’s flood were fully conscious and able to communicate.
And two minutes after you’re dead you’ll be fully conscious. You’ll know who you are. You’ll
be able to communicate. If you’re with the Lord, how exciting will that be. Somebody asked
me after I said that, ‘What about one minute after you’re dead?’ Okay one minute after you’re
dead, one second after you’re dead you will be fully conscious. You don’t go into oblivion.
Jesus didn’t. We won’t, but we go into that disembodied spirit phase. Heaven and hell belong
to the third phase. And that’s what I want to get across now. They are both places for people
with bodies. That’s very important. I don’t use the phrase ‘go to heaven’. I’ll tell you
more in the last talk. But this talking about going to heaven or hell when you die is quite
misleading. Nobody’s in hell yet, not even Satan. It’s an uninhabited place. Interesting that Jesus
spoke of both heaven and hell with the same word. He said, both are being prepared. “I go to prepare
a place for you”; and “depart from me you cursed into the everlasting punishment prepared for
the devil and his angels.” Both heaven and hell are at the moment in a state of preparation.
They’re not yet inhabited. So I prefer to say somebody’s who died in faith has gone to be
with the Lord which is how the New Testament talks - not where they are but who they’re with
that is the important thing in that middle phase. So have you got this framework, this threefold
phase? The Bible tells us very little about the middle phase. It concentrates our thinking on
the final phase beyond the resurrection and the judgment. And that’s the hell I’m talking about,
I’m not talking about anything in between. I’m talking about that beyond the resurrection.
Well now that’s what Jesus talked about and I want to look at how he described it first.
Now I suppose we all have a mental picture of hell. Usually we’ve picked it up from some
experience we’ve had, a bad experience, and I can think of two.Whenever I hear the word
‘hell’, two fairly recent experiences come back to my mind. The first was about five years
ago. I was in Hong Kong with a lady called Jackie Pullinger. I’m sure many of you have heard
of her experiences in the walled city of Hong Kong. Well, she took me into the walled city.
The first surprise was there was no wall. I imagined this big stone wall but it was torn down
by the Japanese during the war and thrown into the harbour to make the runway for the aircraft. When
you land in a jumbo you’re landing on the wall of the walled city but the walled city itself is
still there and it’s a pile of shanty houses fifteen or twenty storeys high just piled on top
of each other. It’s a tiny bit of Hong Kong that is not owned by the British. It is not owned by
anybody. Therefore in that tiny city which can’t be much more than about ten times the size of this
room there is no law. There are no police. You can do anything you like in that city. And you
can imagine that crime and vice flourish. It’s where the triads have their headquarters. It’s
where the pimps and prostitutes live. It’s where the drug dealers live. It can’t be touched.
I see it’s got to be pulled down before Hong Kong is handed back to China. And you go in
a little sort of opening and the place is so dark inside. If you’re visiting someone on the
top floor you climb up through everybody else’s room to get there and the filth, the sewage, the
rats - indescribable. The only bright room in it was right in the middle on the ground floor,
the room where Jackie Pullinger prays for drug addicts. She’s an amazing lady. When I came out
into the sunlight after being in that horrid, dark, dismal, depressing place full of vice
and crime instinctively I said, ‘I’ve just been to hell.’ That was about five years ago
but about two years ago I had something worse. I was in Poland and I went to a place
called Oswiecim which you probably know as Auschwitz - that was the German name that
was given to Oswiecim, the Polish name. And there I went and stood in a bare chamber much
smaller than this room. It had no windows. It had two doors one at one end, one at the other.
There were what looked like shower heads in the ceiling but through those shower heads came the
deadly Zyklon B gas that put hundreds and hundreds to death. They used to force men, women, and
children into that room two hundred and fifty at a time. They could hardly move. They were told
they were going to have a shower so they left their clothes outside and then they were gassed.
Then they cut their hair off to stuff cushions, pulled the gold out of their teeth with pliers.
If they had tattoos on their skin, they carefully took them off to make lampshades. They melted
their fat down to make soap then they burned the bodies to ashes and sold it off as fertilizer.
From coming into the camp to being sold off as fertilizer took one and a half hours. And I
stood alone in that chamber. I felt I was in hell. Interesting, I opened my paper last week
and Princess Anne had been to Auschwitz and that was her title as well Princess in Hell. Well
we’ve all got our pictures, our experiences, and yet none of them really is like the picture
Jesus gave us. Let’s go to Jesus. How did he think of hell? The answer is really quite
simple. He thought of hell as a rubbish dump, a garbage dump. He always called it Gehenna and
that’s Hebrew for the Valley of Hinnom and that’s a real valley. It’s just outside the city of
Jerusalem. But tourists never see it. One reason is it’s too deep and when you’re in the city, the
old city of Jerusalem, you’re just not aware of the valley. You have to go out of the south gate
and look down to see it. It’s there right down so deep and so dark that the sun doesn’t touch
one part of the bottom of that valley. When I first went to Israel in 1961 that valley was still
being used for the same purpose as in Jesus’ day. The smoke was rising out of it and I looked down
and here was all the rubbish from the city being incinerated and down there - I went down into
the valley - the rotten food was there and the maggots were there. The picture was there and
Jesus said, “Where the fire never goes out and the worms never die.” So Gehenna, that valley
- you can’t see it now it’s been landscaped; it’s now a public park in a beautiful valley but
you can still go and walk through it. It’s just outside the city. And the gate on the south wall
is significantly called the Dung Gate and you can guess why. It’s where they took all the sewage and
tipped it in the valley. All the rubbish went down there and it was just kept burning to try and
keep it low. That’s what it always has been. But way, way back in the Old Testament period,
that valley had some very sinister associations. It was down in the bottom of that valley that
God’s own people Israel worshipped a horrible pagan god who didn’t exist called Moloch and the
god Moloch demanded human sacrifice and there down in the bottom of that valley they burned alive
their own babies to Moloch. If you read Jeremiah, Jeremiah said, “This valley will be called
a valley of desolation.” And from then on, it became the rubbish dump of the city,
a horrible place. Now it has some other associations too. A crucified criminal was
never buried. His body was taken off the cross and thrown into the valley of Gehenna for
the maggots to eat and the birds to pick at. That might have happened to our Lord Jesus had
Joseph of Arimathea not come forward and said, ‘Have my tomb.’ Jesus might have finished up
in Gehenna but for Joseph. One of the twelve disciples did finish up there. Judas hanged
himself and he put a rope over a tree at the top of the cliff overlooking the Valley of
Hinnom and he threw himself off and the rope broke and his body tumbled down and it says in
crude language, “His bowels gushed out” when he hit the bottom. It became known as the Field of
Blood and if you ask the Israeli guide he’ll show you the field of blood at the bottom of that
valley. That’s the valley we’re talking about. It’s the valley where all the rubbish is
thrown, where everything useless is thrown, where everything dirty is thrown to get rid of it.
Jesus said, If you want a picture of hell just go and go out of the south gate and look down. That’s
my idea of hell. It brings to vivid light the word “perish” because the word “perish” doesn’t
mean to cease to be. It means to cease to be useful. If you’ve got a hot water bottle that’s
perished or a car inner tube that’s perished, has it ceased to be? No, it still looks like
a hot water bottle. The only trouble is you can’t use it as a hot water bottle because it’s
perished - and that’s the literal meaning of the word perish in scripture. It doesn’t mean
to be annihilated. It means to be ruined. When a woman poured ointment all over
Jesus, Judas Iscariot said, that ointment is perished. It’s useless now. It’s been wasted.
It is said of the prodigal son that he was wasted, that he was perished that he was ruined, lost,
that’s the word for lost. And here is the greatest tragedy that can ever happen to a human
being - that a person made in the image of God, made to serve God’s purposes, has so perished that
God says, ‘I can’t use that person anymore. They are rubbish in my universe.’ And the phrase ‘go to
hell’ is not in scripture. The phrase that Jesus always used was, “Thrown into hell,” because
that’s precisely what you do with rubbish, isn’t it? You always throw it away. That’s
the verb that is always used “thrown” into. And Jesus was very careful to say that your body
and soul would be ruined in hell - not just your soul but your body. That’s why I said, ‘Hell
is a place for people with bodies,’ therefore it is not a place you go to when you die,
but a place you go to after resurrection. So that’s what Jesus’ picture was - a picture
of a rubbish dump for people who are wasted. Just to slip in a little good news, God is in the
recycling business. That is what salvation means. Too many people think saved means safe.
It doesn’t. I’ll show you that in the next talk. But it means salvaged and salvaged is the
nearest English equivalent to salvation and it means to take rubbish and recycle it and make it
useful again. Now there’s an intriguing little letter in the New Testament written to a man
called Philemon about a slave called Onesimus. Do you know what Onesimus means? Onesimus
means useful, isn’t that amazing? That slave called useful run away from home, found his
way to Rome where he thought he could hide, made the biggest mistake of his life, he met up
with Paul, gets converted. Paul says, you’ve got to go back to your master. Oh, but he’ll kill
me. I ran away from him. No, I know him; he’s a Christian; I will write a letter to cover you.
Paul wrote that lovely letter and said, if he took any of your money I’ll pay it back. But listen, he
really has become useful again. He’s recycled. You found him useless, says Paul, but you’ll find him
Onesimus now. A lovely pun in that little letter - and it’s a picture of redemption. It’s precisely
what Jesus has done with all of us. He’s sending us back to God and saying, ‘He’s useful again God.
She’s useful again. She was no use to you, she was running away from you, he was running away
from you, but I’ve recycled them.’ That’s what salvation is; it’s to be recycled so that rubbish
doesn’t finish up in the rubbish dump but becomes useful to God again. What a picture that is.
Well Jesus not only described hell but he also gave us a very clear understanding of
what it would be like to experience it. And I just want to finish this talk by telling
you five things he said hell would be like to experience. First he said, it will be a place
of intense physical discomfort. For one thing, there will be no natural light there - total
darkness. You may have your eyes but you won’t see anything because there’ll be no light there
at all. He kept calling it outer darkness. He said it’ll be a very thirsty place where you’ll beg
for a drop of water; that’s because it’ll be a very hot place, extreme heat - which is one
of the most unpleasant experiences we have. He also said it’d be a very smelly place.
Sulfur is an element in most of the worst smells there are. Decaying, putrefaction is one of
the worst smells on earth. Hell will be a smelly place. Physical discomfort, a place of mental
depression. It’s strange, Jesus said there’ll be weeping and gnashing of teeth but those seem to be
contradictory. Weeping is sorrow and gnashing of teeth is anger. How can you have sorrow and anger
at the same time? The answer is very simple. They both come together in frustration and when you
know the chances you did have and the chances you missed and that you can never have them back
again there is a mixture of self-pity and sorrow and anger with yourself and anger with God. It is
this strange weeping and gnashing of teeth which Jesus kept repeating which points to this mental
depression. It’s a place of moral depravity. Can you imagine having to live forever
with people who are totally depraved, who have lost all image of God, who are behaving
like animals - a place where every vice and crime is practised, a place where you have to live
with it all, a place of utter moral depravity? No goodness there at all. No patience, no kindness,
no love. I wonder if people realize that when you choose to live without God, you choose to live
without goodness at the same time because all the good things that human beings are capable of comes
from God. It’s part of his image still left in us and when that image is totally perished, that’s
the bit that goes. Therefore it will be a place of social deprivation. You can be in the middle
of a huge crowd and be totally lonely, right? Now why are you lonely in a crowd? It’s when
you feel that nobody takes any interest in you, nobody cares for you, nobody loves you; and you
can be surrounded by thousands of people but if nobody cares for you or loves you, you can feel
desperately alone. I believe everybody in hell will feel that social deprivation because once
again, it’s only God that’s made love possible, family love, friendship - it won’t be
there. Therefore finally it will be a place of utter spiritual desolation. There’ll
be no prayer there. What’s the point of praying when there’s no God to hear you? There’ll
be no worship there. What’s the point of worshipping when there’s nobody to worship?
You see the worst thing about hell is that you have to live without God. Now people say
well, that’s not so bad I’m living without him now. No you’re not. In this world nobody is living
without God. His spirit is still touching people, still pleading with them, still restraining them
from being as bad as they really are. But listen, when God takes the brakes off we don’t go uphill
we go downhill. When God takes his hands off, Romans 1 that we looked at last time.
In Romans 1 it says men gave God up so what did God do? It says, God gave men up and
the results were pretty horrifying. You see, if God gave you up totally, you would not be
a better person. You’d be a very much worse person than you are. None of us knows how much
restraint there has been in our life through the influence of parents or friends that have
held us back from doing what we might have done. Sometimes you discover your real self when the
restraints come off and when you’re away from home and nobody knows where you are. That’s when
you find out who you really are. That’s what hell will be like, spiritual deadness. Nobody will ever
have a thought about spiritual things. Well that’s what we choose if we choose to live without God.
We can’t get right away from God here but God can get right away from us in that third phase of
our existence. Well there are other things to say about hell but that’s enough for this time
and we’ll come together again to talk later.
