For God’s Sake: Faith in Jesus will save you
A less tolerable description is one I heard from a store clerk, who said, “it’s hotter than hell outside!” I know he was speaking hyperbolically, first, because it is certain that he has never been to hell, and second, hell will be much hotter than the temperatures we’re dealing with today by anybody’s measuring system.
The doctrine of hell and judgment has become increasingly unfashionable in our day. Instead, people invent for themselves a god and an eternity shaped by their own value system, which guarantees that they, and those that they love, are in. Any notion of judgment rarely figures into their scenario, unless, of course, the person is “really bad.” The standards for that call are nebulous and subject to change.
Jesus spoke more about hell than he did about heaven. In Matthew’s gospel, he described hell as “a fiery furnace,” and in Mark’s gospel as a place, “where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” It is, he warns in Luke’s gospel, a place of eternal torment from which there is no reprieve. Just as the beauty of heaven is infinitely more than the magnificent environment – its most sublime beauty is the radiant glory of God himself – so too the greatest horror of hell is not the environment, but the unrelenting wrath of holy God poured out against unrepentant sinners for eternity.
That Jesus spoke more about hell than heaven should not surprise us – if you knew that a horrific danger lay ahead and that there was a way to avoid it, wouldn’t you continually sound the warning? It would be cruel to remain silent or to whitewash the danger with some invented story. Jesus warned that, “The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them in the fiery furnace.” The burning question, if you will excuse my pun, is whom does God deem “evil” and “righteous”?
Many will be surprised to learn that the Bible says that no one is righteous, not even one. God himself is the measure of righteousness. “But I try to keep the Ten Commandments,” someone might argue. God gave his laws to reveal our sin, not to make us righteous. Further, you would have had to keep God’s law perfectly your entire life and not be a descendant of Adam. How then can anyone be made righteous?
God has made his righteousness available to us through faith alone in Jesus Christ, whom God has set before us as the only Way to heaven, to be believed on by faith. Your creative inventions about heaven may make you feel better, faith in Jesus will save you. Repent and believe!