By
Paul Tatham
Do
you believe in Heaven?
Do
you believe in Hell?
Virtually
all born-again Christians would answer the first question in the affirmative
and without hesitation.
A
sizeable number would also answer the second question in the affirmative,
although that number would likely be lower. And a trained pollster may detect a
degree of tentativeness in their answer—a kind of “give me a second to think
about it” answer.
That’s
because Heaven is a soothing prospect, while Hell makes us fidget. Telling
someone that he can relish an eternity of joyous bliss in Paradise, if he
merely opens his heart to the Savior, is an easy gig compared to telling
someone that he will wind up in Hell if he doesn’t.
Enlightening
someone that he is Hell-bound, rather than Heaven-bound, is not the kind of
news we like to broach when trying to win friends and influence people. So many
Christians simply avoid talking about it altogether, as if Hell were a fanciful
abode drawn from literature of the Middle Ages rather than God’s Word.
And it’s
not just parishioners. Even pastors get lock-jaw and avoid the H-word unless
absolutely necessary. They don’t want to alienate those seated before them,
especially visitors who may be darkening the door of a church for the first
time in ten years. That’s understandable. We don’t want to “turn people off”
unnecessarily.
But
avoiding the topic of Hell completely
is something altogether different. And yet that’s just what many pastors do. They
never do get around to preaching on Hell. No Hell-fire sermons, no altar calls,
no singing Just As I Am. It’s much
less hassle to sidestep a topic that is so negative.
To
deliver a sermon akin to Sinner’s in the
Hands of an Angry God, that the colonial revivalist preacher Jonathan
Edwards unabashedly preached in 1741, would almost be unthinkable today. Pastors
today don’t want to be labelled fear-mongers who harshly dangle their
congregants over the pit of Hell every so often.
I
could be wrong, but it strikes me that many evangelicals today have a
watered-down view of Hell and seemingly ignore passages such as Mark 9 that
describe Hell as a place of never-ending torment. It probably won’t be all that
bad, they reason, and it probably won’t last for eternity. They view Hell as a
kind of Protestant Purgatory, a kind of Hell-Lite.
But
Hell is a very real place, and there won’t be anything “lite” about it. So should
our fear of offending someone override the command of Jesus to take the gospel,
including the part about Hell, far and wide?
‘
Seriously,
isn’t it more important to run the risk of offending someone, but rescue him
from the flames of eternal torment, than to never try at all?
