Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Now, if we began to think about what the Bible teaches about hell, it's not the most popular subject on earth, but it's something that we really need to think about because so many folks are deciding that it's not the sort of thing that perhaps is appropriate to talk about in church or in Christian books.

But when you think about it, if hell is really hell, then all of us ought to be talking about it in some measure if we really believe what the Bible says about the possibility of people that we know, our friends, our family, ourselves—the possibilities of us actually going to spend eternity there. It seems rather strange, then, doesn't it, that the fact of hell and the subject of hell isn't usually raised around the coffee table anymore?

Guest (Male): Now if we began to think about just what it means. And again, we're struggling with concepts. We're struggling with symbols. We're struggling with describing spiritual verities and realities, and that's very, very difficult to do. We talked a little bit about the objections to the whole concept of hell. The character of God: how could a good God even think up a place like hell or countenance anybody, man or devil, living there for all eternity? Doesn't this cast aspersions on the character of God?

Love wouldn't, we say. Love couldn't, we insist. Love shouldn't, we argue. But we learned that hell was not prepared for man at all, that hell was prepared for the devil and his angels because God considers what Satan did in managing to encourage the fall of man in the beginning of time such a diabolical thing that He needs to match it with a diabolical punishment. And a good God, a good God is good enough to warn us that we could end up there too.

So we thought a little bit about those sort of things. We underlined the fact that the authority of scripture affirms the fact of hell, that Christ recorded for us in the word of God warnings about it. He talked a lot about it. He certainly believed in it, believed in the person of the devil himself. Actually, the cross makes no sense at all if there is no hell. And the explanation of the cross in the epistles makes no sense at all if there is no hell.

So we have to face the fact that Satan, though he does not rule in hell, as we made a point of saying, that's the poets that gave us that idea—that Satan's dressed up in red tights and a little pitchfork and there he is with a little crown on his head welcoming us in the gates of hell—that is not so. The Bible teaches us that he will be tormented in hell forever. It's as if God has him on a long leash and is keeping hold of the end of that leash at this point in history.

But we do get some pretty vivid pictures not only of hell but of Satan and the reason for hell. Second Corinthians 4:4 says that he goes around blinding people. That's not a very nice thing to do, to put out people's spiritual eyes, that people are blinded to the fact of hell and of Satan and of eternal, important things. They're just blinded. He's blinded the eyes of those that believe not lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ would shine into people.

So he's busy putting out people's spiritual eyes. He's spoken of in Matthew 13 as a bird, as a vulture, as a dirty old raven who waits to see the sower throwing the seed and then swoops down and snatches it away before the seed can take root. And Jesus very specifically says in Matthew 13, he is the evil one. The evil one does that.

So whenever somebody says to somebody, "Did you know that there is a heaven and a hell and there's a possibility of going there unless you cry out to God for mercy and have your sins forgiven and ask for His salvation?" the devil swoops down on all of that talk and snatches it away from people's minds. He takes it out of their mind and presents them with all sorts of distractions so that they really will not get round to seriously considering the claims of the Bible and what Jesus said about heaven and hell.

So Satan goes around putting out people's spiritual eyes. He's like this vulture, this scavenger. He's also described as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Now, this is a picture. He's not really like a shaggy lion that we see in the zoo, but the lion gives us a picture of what? Ferocity. So it's a good picture for us of the nature of Satan.

Somebody has described that verse this way: it gives us a terrible picture of a ravenous being trying to satiate his hunger by eating personalities. That's the idea behind that verse. A ravenous being trying to satiate his hunger by eating personalities. So this is not the sort of being that I would like to spend eternity with, that's for sure.

Christ, on the other hand, always counters the bad news with the gospel, the good news. Gospel means good news. And if there is no hell, where's the good news? And Jesus says, "Listen, I came to give you life for your death and to give it to you more abundantly." So He tells us, and so does the apostle Paul, not to be ignorant of Satan's devices or his intent. Be aware that he will try to dull even the Christians' understanding of hell and the reality of separation from God.

I think the saddest thing and the most terrible thing to me is to realize that all the human race has to do to go to hell is nothing. All the human race has to do to go to hell is absolutely nothing. They just don't have to accept eternal life, and death will happen as it will happen to all of us, and they will have cooperated fully with the devil.

They don't have to do any awful things, just to do nothing about their spiritual state. This includes nice people who unfortunately are not nice enough for heaven because nice people can do nothing as well as nasty people can do nothing. And if you do nothing about your spiritual state, you will continue in the spiritual state you are now, separated from God. Death will come along, and you will find it's too late then.

The Bible says, and we'll get into this, "As it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that..." A second chance? No. After that, the judgment. No second chance, as we will see a little bit today in our study.

Jill Briscoe: So I want to take four words that the Bible talks about when it's using the concept or the idea of hell and look into them and try and figure out what they mean and what pictures they give us. We're going to talk about hell, we're going to talk about Hades, we're going to talk about Sheol, and we're going to talk about Gehenna. Because all those four words are used in the scriptures to describe this state of being called hell.

And let's take hell first of all, the word. It means to hide or to cover from the eyes of God. It means to spread out a covering over something so it cannot be seen. And it includes the ideas of exclusion and expulsion. That word, hell, begins then to speak very graphically of what hell is all about.

If we think first of all of this idea of covering, there's a little story that we can look at in Second Samuel 14, if you'd like to turn to that quickly. This will give you, funnily enough, a picture of what hell will be like, and it's pretty graphic. In Second Samuel chapter 13, David's son, Absalom, is banished by David for trying to take over his father's throne.

Now, that's a nice boy, isn't he? Didn't David do a good job raising this favored, favorite son of his, Absalom? As soon as Absalom got a little bit proud because he was very good-looking and he had a great head of hair on him—it tells you how much his hair weighed when he got round to cutting it—and he was handsome and he was fine and he was popular, and he stole the people's hearts away from King David, his father.

And he had his eye on the throne, and his little ruse was discovered, and David found out in time, and Absalom in Second Samuel 13 was banished. Well, in Second Samuel 14, Joab, who is beginning to turn away from David for different reasons, begs David to bring his son home to Jerusalem. And David listens to Joab, and he allows him to bring Absalom back again.

So Absalom in Second Samuel 14 comes back. But he's not very happy because the king tells him that he cannot see his face. He's not allowed to. He can live in Jerusalem, but he cannot see the king's face. And Absalom lives there for quite a while, but he's not very happy about it. Verse 28 says he lived two years in Jerusalem without seeing the king's face.

So Absalom sent for Joab in order to send him to the king and get this situation put right, but Joab refused to come in. So he sent a second time and he refused to come. So he sent little foxes into the barley with firebrands on their tails and set Joab's fields alight, and Joab came in a hurry. That was a good way to do it.

And Joab did go to Absalom's house and said to him, "Why have your servants set my field on fire?" And Absalom said to Joab, "Look, I sent word to you and said, 'Come here so I can send you to the king to ask why have I come from Geshur. It would be better if I was still there.' Now then, I want to see the king's face."

Exclusion. Exclusion. Born to be a son, but excluded because of his rebellion. There you have a picture of man: born to be a son, but rebelled against our Father and excluded. And in our hearts is this huge desire to see the king's face. But you're not allowed. The king won't allow it. The king won't allow it. That's hell.

I remember talking to a whole lot of junior high kids when I first came here. We used to meet in a house when our children were junior high age. And I remember one of them, a very difficult young boy, coming to the Lord. And he was so full of questions. He had been a pretty wild kid, and his conversion had caused quite a stir. He came to the Lord as a junior high kid.

And I was talking about heaven and hell to the kids once. I asked them what they wanted me to talk about, and they said, "We'd like you to talk about heaven and hell." And so I was doing that. And I said to the kids, "Give me some ideas. What do you think heaven's like?" And they threw out some ideas. And I said, "What do you think hell is like?" And these junior high kids put their minds to it and their imaginations.

And Brian put his hand up and he said, "I think hell is like taking one good look at the face of God and then being told you can never look again." Now, that was pretty good for a junior high kid's conception. And he got the idea. Exclusion. Taking one good look at the face of God when we die, and then rejection, expulsion, exclusion. Live in Jerusalem but never see my face.

To live in the consciousness that God is somewhere around and I am not allowed to see Him is hell. Covering. Something has covered the face of God. It happens to be our sin that has never been removed if we are unsaved. So here you have the idea.

Well, David, incidentally, just to finish the story, repents and he says, "Okay, Absalom, you can do this." Joab went to the king and told him all about this. The king summoned Absalom. He came in and bowed down with his face to the ground before the king, and the king kissed Absalom. Whereupon, Absalom took over the kingdom and tried to kill his father.

You see, if you go into eternity without having been reconciled to God and become His friend, you will not be able to live without Him, and you will not be able to live with Him. And there will be this insatiable desire that the Bible talks about in terms of fire burning you up with desire to see the face of God, but if God ever let you see His face, you won't be able to stand that either. You can't live with Him, and you can't live without Him. That's hell.

There's nowhere to go, but you're there. And God's presence and light and holiness and joy and person is covered from you. So it's a pretty good little picture of the idea of covering and the exclusion from life and from the presence of God.

Jesus talks of this in Matthew's gospel where he's talking about the five unwise virgins who couldn't figure out how to stay awake all night, and they couldn't be bothered to keep oil in their lamps. And while they were asleep, the bridegroom was doing his thing as custom had it. And then they heard the shout: "The bridegroom comes! The bridegroom comes!" And they woke up in a hurry because they had run out of oil, and they went to buy oil.

And of course, while they were away, he came around the corner, went into the house, and shut the door. And in that particular culture and that particular wedding custom, the door could never ever be opened again. Could never be opened. Once the people were there, they could go in with the bridegroom, but once the bridegroom was in the house, the door could never be opened, even if the mother or father of the bride and groom either had inadvertently been outside the house when the bridegroom went in. They would stay outside for the entire wedding ceremony.

And Jesus used that little custom to get over a very, very important point. Hell is exclusion. Hell means a door. Hell means you're one side and God is the other. So the word hell means to hide or to cover from God, and it means revulsion and expulsion. Expulsion. You say, "How could God expel people?" Well, He started in Genesis when man sinned. He expelled man from the Garden of Eden. Now, He made a way that man could be reconciled, but if man does nothing, just does nothing—plays church instead of getting God to do something about this terrific sin problem in his life—then expulsion, final expulsion will happen after death. Hell.

Now let's look at the next word: Sheol. This is the Greek of the Hebrew word. The two words are the same: Sheol and Hades. But let's take the Greek word, Sheol, first. This word means to be hollow. To be hollow. And another word that's used is "pit." Three times in Job 33:24, it talks about men dying and going down to the pit. The idea too is of the underworld. This has connotations of the underworld.

But the idea of hollowness, emptiness, the grave. And the idea of in the Old Testament, at any rate, of the dead being gathered in tribes and families to await the judgment is included in this word, Sheol or grave. The idea of the hollowness is very specific. It is a silent sort of place. When it says hollow, it means there is no sound filling the vacuum. The idea is of endless hollowness, an endless falling without ever arriving at the bottom. An emptiness and a silence.

No birds singing, no children laughing, no wind rustling through any trees—for there's no trees. No one talking to anyone at all. I started to look for a page that I knew was in this little book, C.S. Lewis's *The Great Divorce*. If you've never read this book, you should read it. Because if you're interested in his fantasy about heaven and hell, and you want to see heaven and particularly hell in a light you've never seen, you need to read this little book.

And I want to explain that it is a fantasy. Lewis always wrote for non-believers. And non-believers bought his books. For example, *The New York Times* said this about this book: "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way." Now, that's a pretty high accolade from *The New York Times* on a religious book, which of course has been an all-time bestseller, *The Great Divorce*.

And what it is, is a typical—if you know C.S. Lewis—incredible imaginative journey. It's a fantastic bus ride from hell to heaven, a round trip for some but not for others. And he imagines you dying and arriving in hell and finding yourself at a bus stop. And the people that he sees are all dead like he is, and they're all ghosts.

Actually, it's a dream. It ends up being a dream, obviously. It reads like one too, but it's more like a nightmare. But some of his ideas are incredible. And one of the ideas that I thought was really amazing was that he finds himself in this town, and all you have to do is think up a house and you have a house.

And that's very useful because nobody gets on with anybody. It's a silent town because if there is any noise, it's only of course of quarreling, because nobody can stand anybody else in hell. And so they keep thinking up a house on the edge of town to get away from everybody. And so the houses get further and further and further apart—light-years apart—because nobody can stand to be around anyone else.

And so he builds up, in his inimitable way, the idea of aloneness and solitariness, lack of communion, lack of voices, which we count so dear. And he builds a picture of terrible, terrible silence. Of course, to really punish a human race, you put him in solitary confinement, don't you? Hell is one long solitary confinement.

And the word Sheol adds that to the picture that we have. It also gives us the picture of shadows. It's a land of shadows. The Bible talks about a land of the shadow of death, shades of a night. These are expressions in our...