Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] In the book the Body Keeps the Score, the author writes this.
[00:00:22] He says after trauma, the world becomes. And he's talking about big T trauma, by the way. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time going into the nuances. We, I think we, we in an age where this word is thrown out a lot. But we're talking about what we would call big T trauma, okay? Sexual abuse, physical abuse, etc.
[00:00:40] Severe abuse. He says after trauma, according to the people who experience it, the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don't.
[00:00:52] People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted because they can't understand it.
[00:00:59] Sadly, this often includes spouses, children and co workers. So he's talking about this from the perspective of the one who's experienced the trauma. And the reason I read this to you this morning is because I think as we broach this conversation around hell, which is a very unpopular thing to talk about and believe these days, like maybe more than it ever has been, not just outside the church, but inside the church, most liberal scholars disregard completely the doctrine of hell, okay? It's why some people say they quote, unquote, leave the faith is because of the doctrine of hell.
[00:01:33] As we broach this topic, I think it's really important for us to do so mindful of the culture and context by which we live.
[00:01:42] In other words, if you and I today, and we have missionaries who have served here, okay, up until, like last week, lived in Congo, for instance, and imposing hostile forces, were coming against us and killing our people, then you would have a different view of judgment probably than you do today.
[00:02:08] Does that make sense?
[00:02:10] We're very fortunate to live in a free society, very fortunate and blessed to live in a society that we're able to do this, okay? But we have thousands, millions maybe of brothers and sisters around the world who don't have this luxury.
[00:02:27] They do see persecution and oppression on a daily basis.
[00:02:33] And so hell to them probably is not as big of a mental hurdle to get over as it is for you and I.
[00:02:41] The idea that God is just and that he's righteous and that he will execute punishment on not just sin, but on deserving sinners is good.
[00:02:56] And so my hope for us this morning is not just that we would acknowledge hell, the doctrine of hell, from a cognitive perspective, but that we would actually see the reality of hell as defined by Jesus as good.
[00:03:13] Because this is what Jesus does.
[00:03:19] Here's what the text says.
[00:03:22] For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the Truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
[00:03:50] Hard passage to study, to pray through, to preach on, to listen to, but important, and I hope that somehow, by the grace of God, by the end of it, our affections for Jesus are even higher than they were when we came.
[00:04:05] Okay, so here's what I want to do this morning. I want to answer three questions.
[00:04:10] The first question from the text, the first question is, who are those in danger that the author is referring to?
[00:04:19] That's important for us to understand.
[00:04:21] Who are those in danger that the author is referring to? So let's talk about that one first.
[00:04:26] Those in danger that the author is referring to are those who go on sinning deliberately.
[00:04:35] Okay, what does that mean, to sin deliberately? And this is a quote, is a conscious expression of an attitude that displays contempt for God.
[00:04:49] A conscious expression of an attitude that displays contempt for God.
[00:04:58] So numbers, chapter 15 gives this really interesting. It's not an illustration, it's an actual historical event that happened with the nation of Israel. But you had kind of two groups of people. You had sacrifices being offered by the priests, one for the unintentional sins of the people, and then another sacrifice for the deliberate sins of the people. In Numbers 15, verse 30, Moses says, But anyone who sins defiantly, whether native born or foreigner, blasphemes the Lord and must be cut off from the people of Israel.
[00:05:35] All right, so if to sin deliberately means a conscious expression of an attitude that displays contempt for God, what does that mean for you and I? So here's my pastoral moment, because I have a lot of these conversations, and I'm a human too, so I experience these things myself.
[00:05:54] Some of us, some of you are going to fall into the category this morning that fits with the author's description.
[00:06:02] And so you need to be warned.
[00:06:06] You need to be warned that hell is real, that God hates sin, that God is not passive.
[00:06:16] It's not just going to be okay because God is gracious.
[00:06:22] You need to hear the warning and hear the author, the Holy Spirit, through the author's plea for you.
[00:06:30] If you're breathing today, there's still hope for you.
[00:06:35] Some of you are going to fall into that category, and some of you, and I think this is probably the majority, are going to fall into the category of, you are a Christian, you are a follower of Jesus, you have been redeemed, you have been filled with the spirit, you still continue to struggle with indwelling sin as all of Us do. And you hear this and you think, oh, my gosh, I sin deliberately every day.
[00:06:57] Meaning that all throughout the day there are things you and I do that we know we're not supposed to do, and we do them anyways.
[00:07:04] Here's the good news. Paul would relate to you a lot.
[00:07:09] Romans, chapter seven. Paul says, hey, I don't do the things I want to do, but I do the very things I hate, wretched man that I am, who's going to deliver me from this body of death. I think Paul says that as a Christian.
[00:07:26] So how then are we to think about this idea of what it means to sin deliberately, to go on sinning deliberately? Well, the text helps us, okay? So I'm not going to necessarily go line by line.
[00:07:39] I'm just going to highlight various things from the text and answering these questions. So again, who are those in danger that the author is referring to? He says these people have received a knowledge of the truth.
[00:07:49] They've received a knowledge of the truth, meaning that they've heard the good news of Jesus and his life, death and resurrection and ascension, that he is the Messiah, that he is the Lord, that he is the Savior come to save people from their sins. They've heard this message. They've received a knowledge of the truth. He says that there are those who have. There are those like the Israelites, who have set apart or disregarded the law of Moses. But worse, they haven't just set apart and disregarded the law of Moses. He says that they've disregarded and set aside Jesus himself. They've trampled the Son of God underfoot.
[00:08:29] So they've heard the good news and then they've disregarded Jesus himself.
[00:08:37] There are those who have profaned his blood, or in other words, treated the cross with little value, which is the only means, by the way, that you and I can stand holy before God is through the cross. So they've taken that knowledge, they've taken that news of the cross and what Jesus did on the cross, and they've set it aside.
[00:09:01] They have outraged or insulted the spirit of grace, is what he says.
[00:09:09] They've blasphemed the spirit, as Jesus mentions in the Gospels.
[00:09:15] They are the same people, I believe, that the author warns us about in chapter six.
[00:09:21] And I think if you read chapter six, which is one of the most confusing passages in all of the Bible, I think. I think it's really a parallel of the parable of the soils from Matthew, chapter 13. So I'm not going to read the parable of the soils to you. But for further study, I think it'd be helpful to go back and look at this parable that Jesus teaches. Okay? Jesus tells a story in Matthew, chapter 13 of Four Kinds of Soil.
[00:09:46] Okay? The soil in the story is meant to represent different kinds of people and how they respond to the good news of the gospel. So the first soil are those who hear the good news of Jesus and immediately reject it.
[00:10:03] Okay? They hear the good news, they immediately reject it. Jesus says it's like Satan goes in and he snatches it away before it has time to even take root.
[00:10:11] The second soil are those who hear the good news of Jesus and they receive it with enthusiasm alone.
[00:10:19] Okay? So they receive it with joy.
[00:10:22] But he says as soon as difficulty, trial, tribulation, suffering comes, they fall away because there's no rootedness in them.
[00:10:31] Okay? Christianity is all about emotion. It's all about how you feel. And if I feel good, if Jesus is doing good things in my life, if he's making me healthy and wealthy and prosperous and my relationships are going well, and all of these things, I'll continue to follow him. But as soon as those things are taken away, I don't want anything to do with him anymore. That's the second soil. The third soil are those who hear the good news of Jesus and receive it. But their love and infatuation with the things of the world eventually chokes out their devotion to Jesus.
[00:11:06] Money, popularity, status, whatever.
[00:11:13] Maybe the cultural tide that you and I are living in, and just the insatiable desire to be accepted by those on the outside. And so we're going to adopt whatever philosophy and ideology we can to fit in with everybody else.
[00:11:28] You're in love with the things of the world, and so eventually that chokes out any devotion that you had toward Jesus. That's the third soil. And then the fourth soil. Praise God for good news. The fourth soil are those who, by God's grace, hear the message of God's grace in Jesus, and they receive it not by works of their own, but by faith. They recognize that they're a sinner, that they have no hope apart from God intervening and doing something on their behalf. And they relent all efforts on their behalf, and they rest the entirety of their hope in Jesus.
[00:12:10] That's the fourth soil. And I think when our author talks, when our author's warning this church and us about falling away, the danger of falling away, I think that there's a direct parallel in the parable of the soils that there were some in this church just like There are some in the church today who maybe, maybe you're here for a variety of reasons on enthusiasm alone, whatever, but you don't, you don't really have a relationship with Jesus.
[00:12:49] So these were people who at one time were professing faith in Jesus, they were part of the church and they eventually walked away. Which is really interesting in the context Taylor preached on this last week. But why do you think he's warning them or why do you think he's exhorting them to not neglect to meet together?
[00:13:05] Because here's how it works, friends, oftentimes, and we can say all we want about personal relationship with Jesus, we don't need the church and all these things. Yes, the church is broken, the church isn't perfect. But here's what happens more often than not in any situation I've seen in the past with people I've known who have walked away from the faith. It always begins with them walking away from the church first, every time.
[00:13:29] So why, why else would he warn them, don't neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some.
[00:13:37] Who are those people? The ones who go on sinning deliberately, who profane the cross of Jesus, who outraged the spirit of grace. How does it begin? It begins by them walking away from the fellowship, walking away from accountability, walking away from discipleship, walking away from the gathering.
[00:13:57] That's how it starts.
[00:14:00] That's why it's so important for us to be together.
[00:14:03] Because you can't do it alone. I can't do it alone.
[00:14:12] One of the guys who was most pivotal in teaching me the Bible walked away from Jesus. He was a pastor at a church and he came to his elders one day and he said, I don't believe in the resurrection anymore.
[00:14:23] He left the church and started a podcast, Brothers and Sisters Apostasy, which is a turning away from the faith. A turning away from Jesus is rarely a drastic one time event.
[00:14:47] This man, this former friend in college, didn't start out that way.
[00:14:54] It's not like when he became a pastor, his desire was to one day walk away and wreck his church.
[00:15:02] Didn't start out that way.
[00:15:06] Drift is very, very subtle.
[00:15:09] Nobody sets out a marriage to have an affair.
[00:15:12] It's not how it happens.
[00:15:18] Oftentimes apostasy, falling away, which I'll make a comment about losing your salvation in just a moment. But falling away happens subtly, not drastically, over a long period of time. And often the first step in that is leaving the church.
[00:15:39] You cannot lose your salvation, by the way, if you're a follower of Jesus, if By repentance of sin and faith in Jesus, you've put your trust in Jesus. You will never be lost. You can bank the entirety of your life on that reality. It's all throughout the Bible. You cannot. That's not what he's. That's not who he's talking to.
[00:15:58] He's talking to people who by profession of mouth only say that they love Jesus but have nothing going on in here.
[00:16:09] Those who go on sinning deliberately will fall into a fury of fire unless they repent. A fury of fire that consumes the adversaries.
[00:16:26] So question number two. That's who he's talking to. He's not talking to struggling Christians.
[00:16:33] He's talking to those who by name only say they're Christians but live a life void of love for Jesus.
[00:16:44] Question number two is, what is their consequence if they fail to repent?
[00:16:49] What's their consequence if they fail to repent? Here are some of the phrases that he uses in the text.
[00:16:55] A fearful expectation of judgment.
[00:16:59] A fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
[00:17:04] Punishment, vengeance, and short friends. Our author is referring to Hell.
[00:17:14] What's Hell?
[00:17:17] Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment for all who reject Jesus Christ.
[00:17:27] Hell is not a state of mind.
[00:17:33] Hell is not annihilationism, which is another popular belief that some theologians that I respect deeply held before they died, where when you die, you just cease to exist.
[00:17:46] Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment for all who reject Jesus.
[00:17:57] Or you could say it in accordance with our text. Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment for all who fail to repent of deliberate sin.
[00:18:10] As a church, we've said from the beginning of 2025 that our. Our kind of focus, our rallying cry, so to speak, is beholding Jesus. Which means that in all things we want to meditate on and experience a relationship with Jesus, that we might be transformed by his spirit to become more like him. So rather than spending time discussing what others have said about hell, and we could again spend a lot of time on that. I just want to take the words of Jesus himself to flesh out what. What hell is. Okay? Nobody in the Bible talked about hell more than Jesus himself.
[00:18:42] He talked about it more than anybody else in the Bible.
[00:18:45] Okay, so what. What did Jesus have to say about hell? I'm just going to read six verses to you.
[00:18:52] Five. Sorry, five verses. Mark 9. 43. Jesus says, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
[00:18:59] It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell to the unquenchable fire.
[00:19:08] The unquenchable fire.
[00:19:14] Mark 9:48. Jesus describes hell as a place where their worm does not die and the fire is never quenched.
[00:19:26] I don't even know what that means, where the worm does not die.
[00:19:31] But it sounds terrible.
[00:19:34] Where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Luke 16:22,24 his parable of the poor man and the rich man. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.
[00:20:10] Revelation 14:9, 11.
[00:20:13] And another angel, a third following them, said with a loud voice, if anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.
[00:20:39] And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. And listen. This is. Listen to this. They have no rest.
[00:20:48] They have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image. And whoever receives the mark on its name. And in the last one, Matthew 25:30, Jesus says, cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. Another parable. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
[00:21:11] So hell is not a figure of speech.
[00:21:15] We can wish it away all we want, but that does us no service.
[00:21:20] If there's even a slight probability that this is true and that this place actually exists and that real people made in the image of God are going there. Or maybe you today, if you're here this morning and you have not trusted in Jesus as your Savior and Lord, if there's even a probability of that, this ought to drastically change the way you and I see life.
[00:21:50] So what's our hope? Final question.
[00:21:54] What's our hope in light of the danger of hell?
[00:21:59] We have great hope in light of the danger of hell.
[00:22:04] And again, a message like this, thinking about things like this ought to be weighty. It ought to be exceptionally.
[00:22:14] I read Jonathan Edwards sermon this week called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and it made me sick to my stomach. Reading ought to do that. In you and I, that's an appropriate response to this reality.
[00:22:29] But here's another appropriate response. That as the weight of the reality of an eternal conscious hell exists, the cross of Jesus ought to become all the more glorious to you.
[00:22:47] So what's our hope in light of the danger of hell? Well, our hope lies. And I'm just going to read the last verse and then I want to. I want to kind of something with it that I think is a neat parallel from the Old Testament.
[00:23:00] Our hope lies in the merciful hands of the living God.
[00:23:07] Our hope lies.
[00:23:09] I'm not talking about like a feel good hope. I'm talking like a hope that could actually sustain you and I through the darkest moments of life.
[00:23:21] That our hope lies in the merciful hands of the living God.
[00:23:27] Here's how our author, here's the final verse for this morning. He says, it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And that's true.
[00:23:39] So for those in our life or for those in the room who are not yet Christians, you have to hear that it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Not because God's bad, but because God's good.
[00:23:54] Because he's a perfect, holy, beautiful, righteous judge. And you are a sinner.
[00:24:02] And so it is a fearful thing.
[00:24:06] If you don't feel fear now, you will later.
[00:24:10] It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But as I was thinking about this, I was struck with a story in the Old Testament that I've always found fascinating. And it's found in 1 Chronicles, 1 Chronicles 21. You can flip there if you want to, but I'm going to summarize it for you and then read one verse out of 1 Chronicles 21. Braden referenced Psalm 51 and David's sin with Bathsheba. It's one of two just recorded sins of David's life.
[00:24:41] That where he just blew it. Just massively blew it. Okay? Was one with Bathsheba and two was in 1st Chronicles 21. In 1st Chronicles 21, David counts. He takes a census. I've always found this fascinating thinking, like, man, why did God get so angry about the census? But God has called David to a particular job. He's called David to trust him. And instead of trusting God, David decides I'm going to count all of the people in our army to make sure that we have enough people to win the battle. Basically what it is. And it angers God, okay? Like, because God is. God is good. And God's desire for David is that he be free from trusting in himself and in his own might, that he be free to trust him to win the battle that he's told him he's going to win. And so instead of trusting God with that, David says, now I'm going to take matters into my own hands and I'm going to count all the people of Israel so that we can see how big our army is. And in so doing, it angers God and God in grace. Instead of just wiping David and the Israelites out, God says, I'm going to give you three choices.
[00:25:46] Here's the first one.
[00:25:49] God tells him, you have three years of famine, okay? God's giving choices because he's gracious and because he's righteous.
[00:25:58] And both of those realities of who God is have to work simultaneously, hand in hand, all the time. You can have three years of famine.
[00:26:05] Option number two, you can have three months of falling prey to your enemies. I'm going to hand you over to your enemies, and for three months they're going to have their way with you.
[00:26:15] Option number three, three days of severe plague by the hand of God.
[00:26:23] And you want to know what David says? It's a fascinating parallel. Here's what he says. Verse 13.
[00:26:30] I am in great distress.
[00:26:33] Let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is very great.
[00:26:40] But do not let me fall into the hands of men.
[00:26:46] It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For who?
[00:26:50] For those who reject him.
[00:26:53] If you want to know what the fear of the Lord is, and I heard Michael Reif say this, and it was very helpful when the New Testament talks about the fear of the Lord as being a good and beautiful thing, as being a thing that leads to delight, that the fear of the Lord would be our delight. There's a type of fear. Fear just means trembling, by the way. There's a type of trembling that you would imagine if you were watching a war movie and the soldier was, like, behind a bunker and bullets were flying over his head, and he's trembling in fear, right? That's one kind of trembling. And then there's another kind of trembling. And I know this because I experienced this in my own wedding, and I've done a lot of weddings. There's a kind of trembling that a husband has when his wife walks down the aisle for the first time in which he's just utterly enraptured by her beauty.
[00:27:39] That's the fear of the Lord.
[00:27:44] God is great in mercy.
[00:27:49] Your sin and failure and folly and brokenness, all of those things do not do not disqualify you from coming to Him. They are the qualifying force by which you should come to Him.
[00:28:08] You come to Jesus because you're desperate. You come to him because you're broken. You come because you're a sinner.
[00:28:17] That's why you come.
[00:28:19] And the Bible says, blessed are those who take refuge in Him.
[00:28:24] Why?
[00:28:25] Because God in mercy and in compassion, both in his righteousness and holiness and in his mercy, took the wrath that you and I deserve upon Himself once for all, all of the wrath that you and I deserve. Romans 6:23 says, for the wages of sin is death. That doesn't just mean physical death. That means spiritual alienation and separation from God forever. That's what you and I have worked for. That's what we've earned by our sin.
[00:29:00] But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.
[00:29:11] Nobody in the room. Nobody in the room has to go to hell by the grace of God.
[00:29:19] Anybody in the room who has yet to do so can recognize they're a sinner, turn from their sin, and believe upon Jesus for salvation and eternal life.
[00:29:31] So this will be the last thing I'll say. And again, Pastor uncle told me this a long time ago. I've never forgotten. It's been very helpful for me.
[00:29:38] If you're not a Christian in the room and you hear this message about the reality of hell and how your sin has earned you hell forever, but that God has provided the full sufficient means for you not to go to hell and be restored in relationship with him and forgiven of your sin and experience heaven as your destination. If you hear that message and you still choose to reject it, then you need to go out and you need to enjoy God's common grace in life as much as you can. Because this earth will be the closest thing to heaven you'll ever experience.
[00:30:19] The food, the relationships, the laughter, the joy, the sunset, all of these things that God's given us to enjoy will be friend, the closest thing to heaven you'll ever experience. If you choose to continue deliberately profaning the Son of God and not believing upon his sacrifice for you.
[00:30:38] But for the Christian in the room, for those who by God's grace have trusted in Jesus as their Savior and Lord, you can leave this place and whatever suffering, whatever trial, whatever tribulation experience from now until the day that you die, you can rest assured that this earth and the things of this earth are the closest thing to hell that you'll ever experience.
[00:31:01] That for you and for me, by the grace of God, it only gets better and better and better as we look toward and long for the day that as bad as hell is, heaven will be all the better.
[00:31:13] So we can put all of our hope in, in that reality. If you are a Christian through faith in Jesus, and if you're not and you're still breathing today, put your faith and trust in Jesus.
[00:31:24] Let's pray.
