How To Talk to A Non-Christian about Hell

QUESTION:  I recently had a conversation with my brother who is not a Christian, he has a very liberal "Christ Consciousness" view of Jesus and does not believe in hell. He asked me why he would go to hell and not me. I felt very uncomfortable and unprepared to respond to the question. Can you please help?

RESPONSE:  Thanks for your question, and I can appreciate the difficulty of this topic – especially when it gets out of the theoretical and into the personal.  It’s gets touchy.  In fact, just recently, Bernie Sanders, questioning a Christian nominee seemed to imply that just holding to the idea of heaven and hell is hateful!

But actually, it’s best that the topic does turn personal, not by starting with his personal eternal destiny, but rather with yours.  Before you talk about heaven, talk about this thing all Christians believe about themselves:  you yourself are qualified for hell.

You should be adamant about your conviction on this. See, you know you; you know your heart; you know your posture towards a holy God.  You are an authority on your own inner world.  And you know in your quiet heart, you’re among the people whose pride and depravity make you fit for hell.  Say it as baldly as that.  It might not immediately reduce the offense your brother is feeling about hell, but to put yourself in the cross-hairs of it, takes all the presumed arrogance and hate out of the equation.

See, the first thing you’re trying to fix is the misconception that Christians believe hell is the destiny for the especially bad people.  And conversely, that Christians believe we're the especially good people.  Add to this the safe bet that irreligious people think our confident goodness is bound up in certain political positions - positions he undoubtedly thinks are in some cases downright wicked!  Needless to say, this whole picture is offensive to outsiders to Christ.  They feel morally better than many others, including many Christians, whose sins and hypocrisies they take great pleasure in pointing out.

Well, no well-instructed Christian believes this moralistic view.  How can we?, when we read of Jesus pointing to tax collectors and prostitutes and tells the good people of his day, "they are entering the Kingdom of God ahead of you."  (Matt 21:31)?  Clearly we believe something more subtle is going on than simply “good people go to heaven”.

But don't move too quickly to say, it's only those who "believe in Jesus" who go to heaven.  This is premature and offensive.  Why?  Because your brother might wonder, what is efficacious about an affirmation of belief?  What is meritorious about making a simple belief statement - especially when he perhaps questions whether Jesus even existed?  But even assuming Jesus belief is warranted, what kind of God makes eternal salvation contingent on true beliefs?  Is God also sending people to hell for not believing in Copernicus?  Are flat-earthers condemned?

Well, of course we must define what "believing in Jesus means".  When we say that those who "believe in Jesus are saved" and those that are not are condemned, what we are not saying is that they are condemned for not believing something.  No, according to Jesus himself, people's condemnation is warranted PRIOR to any beliefs we may or may not have about Jesus.  Read:

John 3:19 And the judgment is based on this fact: God's light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil.

And:

John 5:45: Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. Your accuser is Moses

Jesus was adamant that people have the light of moral goodness set before them, in Conscience and in the Moral Law, and that we have denied the light and broken the law (that's what his reference to Moses is about).  That is the assessment of Jesus.  That is really where this conversation has to start.  Does your brother feel that he is a law breaker before God?

He will likely say something like, "I'm not perfect, but I'm definitely a good person".  A good question is to then ask, how do you know that?  Ironically, a lot of non-Christians think Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is their guiding ethical code, and their pride in living by that code is what gives them confidence before God.  "I just love, like Jesus said, I think that's good enough, that's all God wants."

But this comes from not really reading the Sermon carefully.  Essentially Jesus puts the achievement of true goodness out of the reach of EVERYONE in that talk.  For it's in the Sermon that Jesus spiritualizes the Law.  Adultery is more than not sleeping in the wrong bed, it’s a heart thing too.  A simple curse (heart murder!) puts a person in danger of hell. (Matt 5:22)

This is the discussion you need to have FIRST, before you talk about "believing in Jesus", whatever that means.  EVERYONE is in danger of hell, because according to Jesus the standard is impossibly high.  Jesus says in that sermon, “be perfect.”  That rules me out.  This implies that hell is a default destiny - separation from God is not tied to your response to Christ, it PRECEDES your response to Christ.

So believing in Christ must begin with believing His assessment of our default posture before God.  Second, to believe in the mission of Jesus which he one time stated as, “I have not come for the well, but the sick.”  (Matt 9:12)  He said those words in response to some very high moral performers looking down on the sad company of losers and sinners he was hanging with.  So he's clearly talking about coming as a spiritual doctor for the morally ill.  

Is your brother one of the "sick" Jesus came for?  Or is he one of the "well"? The whole question of hell hinges on his answer to that question.  When I've asked that question of a seeker before, I got a troubled silence.  He didn't want to say he was "sick" because he believed everyone is inherently good.  But he also didn't want to say he was "well" for clearly Jesus considered the "well" outside the scope of his mission and he likes to think he's more on "team Jesus" than Christians are.  How should he answer?

Let your brother chew on this question for a bit, and it might be helpful to ask if he thinks his moral performance outshines people like Mother Teresa or Gandhi.  If he balks at being compared to two known "saints" simply point out that both Teresa and Gandhi were deeply convinced they were among the "sick".  While Gandhi never became a Christian, he was tormented by his own inner darkness.  The man your brother might say could not possibly be hell-bound wrote in his autobiography:  

"It is a constant torture to me that I am still so far from Him whom I know to be my very life and being.  I know it is my own wretchedness and wickedness that keeps me from Him."    - Gandhi

Until your brother is as convinced as Gandhi or Teresa were of their own fallenness, the very idea of hell will remain offensive.  He'll likely have host of questions about the justice of hell:

• why eternal punishment for temporal offenses?, 
• how could anyone enjoy heaven while hell goes on?, 
• isn't retributive punishment inherently unjust?, 
• why the frightful intensity of the pain? 

CS Lewis gives excellent replies to these and other objections in his chapter on Hell in Problem of Pain.  

But once he comes to the conviction that he is morally ill, and feels spiritually separated from God, these objections will fade and hell ceases to be a barbaric doctrine and becomes more an inevitable consequence of God's goodness.  Bringing him there, however, is not your job, as Jesus made clear:

John 16:8: "When [the Holy Spirit] comes, He will convict the world about sin"

At the moment when one experiences this conviction, not from false humiliation or human shaming but from God, the game changes.  A person so convicted gets humble, and desperate.  And this desperation begins to show what it means to "believe in Jesus".

Believing includes many ideas, the most elementary of which is to believe in the bare historical facts about him.  But the more significant ideas of "belief" include

• CONFESSION: Coming to see yourself as Jesus sees you.  Wholly unable to save yourself, wholly self condemned.  
• REPENTANCE, a repudiation of a life lived loving our own way, seeking our own godhood.  This would include acts of evil done for selfish pleasure, as well as acts of moral righteousness done for selfish pride.  
• TRUST, the total casting of oneself onto the mercy of God through Jesus work on the cross to receive his absolution for sin.

Why then would you go to heaven and your brother would not?  Not because you’re better than him.  In one sense, because of the opposite - because you clearly feel yourself to be worse off before God than he does.  You believe you have a mortal ailment, he feels he is one of the "well".  So you grasped, by confession and repentance and trust, the healing that was offered to you by God through Jesus Christ.

By Works and by Grace? - is the Bible contradictory About Salvation?

QUESTION:  A friend of mine has said that the Bible is contradictory about salvation – saying in one passage it’s by works and in another it’s by grace.  He pits Jesus and James against Paul and points out these specific passages:  Matthew 19:17, Luke 10:26-28, Romans 3:28, Galatians 2:16, and James 2:24.

RESPONSE: This is not a contradiction when you look into it – as the overarching message of Scripture is that people are saved not by good works, but by grace through faith.  The passages your friend lists as affirming salvation by works (Matthew 19, Luke10) are curious because in both cases, no one actually gets salvation by this means.  In fact, the rich young ruler in Luke 10 specifically loses out on salvation as we are to understand by him leaving Jesus in tears!

So before we’re into it even two steps, we have good reasons to pause and not interpret this in a simplistic binary way.  First, Jesus did not come to "abolish the law" (Matt 5:17) so it’s not altogether unexpected that He would say in Matthew 19 “if you want to enter life, obey the commandment” or to the Rich man in Luke 10, “do this and you will live”.  This is consistent with everything in the O.T. law:  “obey me and live”, being the repeated refrain of mosaic law (Lev 18:5 etc).  In one sense we might say, OF COURSE there is salvation by works – provided you do ALL the works!  This is what Paul affirmed in Galatians 5:3:  If you are trying to find favor with God by being circumcised, you must obey all of the regulations in the whole law of Moses. NLT  Paul even seems to think God will honor with eternal life those who don’t even have the law of Moses, when he says: Rom 2:6-9:  “He will repay each one according to his works: eternal life to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality… and also to the Greek.”  Of course in context of his whole argument, this offer is provided with a massive caveat.

A great big IF.  If one can obey all God’s commandments.  Then by definition, you are morally perfect like God.  That means you have earned your salvation, and God owes you heaven as a simple matter of fairness.  There would be no grace needed.  

Because of this, I will sometimes coyly tell people, the bible says there’s only TWO ways to heaven.  (People, used to Christians talking about one way to heaven, always perk up at that!)  And then I mention that the first way, the most obvious way, and the plan everyone seems to be working on is, the DO plan.  That is, ‘do enough’ to earn God’s acceptance.  Then, before I outline the OTHER way, I quote Dr Phil:  “how’s that working for you?”  The problem is not in the law, it’s in us – as Jesus points out in the "works" passage in Matthew:  “NO ONE is good, expect God alone.”  That is, no one obeys perfectly.

This is the entire point Jesus is making with the rich young ruler – he’s NOT perfect, though he thinks he is.  “One thing you lack”, Jesus tells him.  Also, in the Luke passage notice in 10:29 the interesting comment:  the lawyer is eager to “justify himself”.  So in both cases neither of our star moral performers is anywhere near as good as they think they are.  Jesus is actually using the law to point out the flaw in both men.  Or perhaps more accurately we should say Jesus is using his own instruction (“sell your possessions”; “love your neighbor”) to show how both men are not obeying the law as they think they are.

Let me paraphrase the conversations to underscore what Jesus is doing: 

The Matt 19 Passage:

Man: Hi Jesus, I’d like to get to heaven.

Jesus: Well, you have to be perfect, what is the standard of perfection?

Man: The law.

Jesus: Right!  So how are you doing on that?

Man: Really, really good, I think – I’ve been a faithful rule follower my whole life!

Jesus: Really?  Actually you’re not quite there yet.  If you’re so great with the commandments, then you won’t mind selling all your possessions to follow me.

Man: What!!  I’m good, but I’m not THAT good! (walks away)

The Luke 10 Passage:

Man: Hi Jesus I want to get to heaven.

Jesus: Well, what’s in the law, what’s God expect from you?

Man: Only two things:  love God, and love my neighbor.

Jesus: Alright, good answer!  So do it.

Man: Umm, uh, well, I have a question about that: Exactly WHO is my neighbor?  Because there’s lots of people I don’t love, but I’m guessing (hoping) they’re not my neighbor.

Jesus: Well, let me tell you a story (the Good Samaritan) that will define neighbor for you, in a way that will show, you do NOT, in fact, love your neighbor as God demands.

To miss how Jesus is using the law is to miss the entire point of BOTH stories.  He is not using the law to outline a way of salvation.  He is using it to expose these “good” men as law breakers.  For the rich young ruler in Matthew 19, Jesus is exposing something very specific.  The man claims to have obeyed all the law, “since his youth”.  Really?  The arrogance is astounding.  He's never lied? So Jesus tells him to sell everything.  Why?  To give ANOTHER law by which he can be sure he’s earned salvation?  No, to expose him.  To expose the fact that he is a lawbreaker like everyone else. 

How so?  Well, this demand (and his unwillingness to receive it) exposed the fact that he was consistently breaking the very 1st commandment, “no other gods before me”, with his addiction to wealth and power.  To apply Jesus demand would have broken him, and brought him to a faith-filled dependence on God’s mercy alone.  If he applies the call of Jesus, he will have to die – to pride and self sufficiency – and only THEN will he live.  That death to self Jesus is calling him to undergo (which he refuses) for the sake of the Kingdom is synonymous with salvation by grace alone through faith alone.  How is it different?

You see, faith is not merely ‘belief’, it’s a full-hearted turning to God, in repentance and trust in his mercy alone to save. 

In fact, defining the word ‘faith’ shows how the James passage ALSO affirms salvation by grace and not by works, even though James does say, “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.”  James is defining faith simplistically – as mere belief:  Mental assent to truth.  We know he’s working on a different definition than Paul because he says, this “faith” is what demons have (2:19)!  Well clearly this kind of “faith” (which amounts to doctrinal accuracy) doesn’t save anyone.

So when James says we’re not saved by “faith”, he is not contradicting Paul or Jesus, because he’s not talking about the same kind of faith!  To posit a true contradiction we have to be working with the same definitions.  The faith that simply “believes in certain dogmas” is not the kind of faith Paul promotes in his letters.  Read Romans 6:1-5 and see Paul calling the commitment of faith a kind of dying to sin as we invite the newness of the Christlife in.  James and Paul are here in perfect agreement.  Real faith is a whole person brokenness, it always includes repentance, and always produces good fruit.  Thus, without the fruit of repentance, we can presume there is no faith, thus no salvation.

Whenever I want to talk about salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, ironically, the Gospel passages I come back to most are the very passages that your friend says contradict salvation by grace alone!!  They affirm so clearly the central view of scripture, of Jesus, and of ALL his apostles, that we are “saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus,” Acts 15:11.

A final note about the Luke passage in particular:  If you think Luke 10:28 is teaching salvation by works, one should remember a couple chapters later, the same Jesus, recorded by the same author, is very clearly hammering the message of salvation by grace (Luke 15).  The problem with saying that Jesus affirmed salvation by works is not that this makes him contradict Paul, but that this makes Him contradict Himself!!  Clearly, unless Jesus is completely confused, he is up to something.  And I think his strategy is clear.  It goes something like this:  grace to the humble, law to the proud.

Jesus ALWAYS threw the law in the faces of proud people (again in Luke 11:42).  When he does so, it may APPEAR he is setting up a system of salvation by works, but what you see is always that the law winds up being used as a lever of conviction.  It starts as the “way to life”, but winds up becoming the crushing weight of perfection that opens eyes and shows how far we fall short.

So, when you see Jesus’ OVERALL strategy in this way (law to the proud, grace to the humble), you see how perfectly consistent Paul is with his Master when he declares: 

Romans 3:20 “for no one can ever be made right in God’s sight by doing what his law commands.  For the more we know God’s law, the clearer it becomes that we aren’t obeying it.” NLT

The only way out of this predicament, is to abandon the law (good works) as a means to be saved, and instead to repent, throw ourselves on the mercy of God and receive by faith God’s forgiving love.  And this is Jesus message of grace, consistently seen all over Luke’s gospel.  (Study Luke 5:20; Luke 7:47; Luke 15; Luke 18:13-14)

Did Jesus Really Tell Us We Had to Hate Our Parents? (Luke 14:25-33)

QUESTION:  Hey Rick!  Picked up the book by Francis Chan, Multiply. He mentioned a verse that has always been a hard one and I was hoping you might help! Luke 14:25-33.  It just seems to really contradict a lot of scripture and even commandments (honor your parents). It just seems so OFF so maybe there is something I'm not getting.

RESPONSE: While it maybe seems “off”, this passage is certainly not abnormal in the N.T. or the teachings of Jesus… but it feels somehow different from “salvation by grace” right?  Let me quote it here for those unfamiliar with it:

Luke 14:26-33 "If you want to be my disciple, you must hate everyone else by comparison—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple. 27 And if you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple. 

28 "But don't begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it? 29 Otherwise, you might complete only the foundation before running out of money, and then everyone would laugh at you. 30 They would say, 'There's the person who started that building and couldn't afford to finish it!'

31 "Or what king would go to war against another king without first sitting down with his counselors to discuss whether his army of 10,000 could defeat the 20,000 soldiers marching against him? 32 And if he can't, he will send a delegation to discuss terms of peace while the enemy is still far away. 33 So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own." NLT

While a little strange sounding to our grace-trained ears, this teaching fits perfectly with Pauline doctrine.  It shows that while the Bible is completely unanimous that salvation cannot be earned, it is also completely unanimous that salvation is CONNECTED to obedience in important ways.

In Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, if you look at the beatitudes, you can see this clearly.  It begins with the blessing on the poor in heart, and the blessing on the mournful.  These are people who come to God with NOTHING but their shame and sin, and they mourn over it.  This means Jesus is clearly teaching that one does not come to the Kingdom unless they first confess, and repent and have faith in God’s mercy and goodness – only these are promised heaven and earth.  (This agrees with Paul who teaches, Romans 3:28-29, “For we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.” HBV.  So we don’t earn it.)

However, if we come to Jesus with this kind of brokenhearted humility, we will also HUNGER for righteousness.  Therefore, the grace that calls us in, also calls us to a passion for more of the God who saved us and gives us mercy.

That is why Jesus says in Luke 14, that when you come to him, you A) revoke all other primary loves and consider them as hatred compared to your love for Christ, and B) you count the cost of followership, BEFORE you enter the kingdom, and everything is submitted to his leadership, all relationships and money etc. 

Jesus never divorced salvation and discipleship. Unfortunately, we have in the church too often.  If we understand both Jesus and Paul correctly, we will refuse to do this.  Those who come to Jesus humble, confessing AND repentant do not carry on in an ongoing pattern of sin.  They cannot, for God’s seed is now in them (1 John 3:10).  Do Christians still sin?  Sure.  Do they only slowly change over time?  Yes.  Do they sometimes go backward in devotion?  Yes.  But while we are saved by grace and not works, God’s grace …works!  That is, it works to effect the changes in us that the LAW never could.  It makes us new kinds of people, IF we come repentant, and let the gospel do its work.

So much of the problem of "backsliding believers" and "carnal Christians" and "nominal Christians" would be solved if we taught the invitation to the kingdom exactly the way Jesus did.  Like this:  come one and all and take your place with the prostitutes and tax collectors who are poor in spirit, they have nothing to bring God, no pretense that they could earn anything from him.  (This matches the Pauline message, you are saved by Grace not works, Eph 2:8,9). 

But, come like they came: so desperate that they are willing to lay down ALL for the treasure of God’s forgiving love.  (Recall the treasure-hidden-in-the field parable?)  They don’t come proud, demanding forgiveness, yet wanting to keep walking in the way that first made them bankrupt before God!  That makes no sense (again, Paul in Romans 6:1,2).  No, they come counting the cost, gladly making all their affections take a back seat to the Jesus who saves them from sin.  ALL my other relationships are second place.  ALL my priorities are rearranged by my love for him who had mercy on me.

So that explains that tricky part about “hating your parents”.  That is not contradicting the 5th commandment… remember Jesus used hyperbole a lot.  (Example: the “cut off your hand” thing!)  So “hate” is not saying you dishonor your parents, it’s saying “you must be willing to put your devotion to them below devotion to Me.” Compared to that, love for them will look like hate.

Remember too, in the Ancient Near East, it would be unheard of if a man belonged to a religion let’s say, and his whole family didn’t also.  So strong were the ties of family in their honor bound culture, that you followed the patriarch no matter what; blood ties ruled everything, family first uber alles.  So speaking into that cultural expectation, Jesus is introducing a different sort sequence. 

Of course, in our day this is commonly understood.  A teen let’s say, will have some epiphany where they leave their mom’s “ways” and strike out on their own, at the risk of offending them.  This is almost expected in our context, Hollywood has kicked out a gaggle of movies with this premise!  But that very idea, so noble in our day, would have been considered the height of insubordination and offensiveness in Jesus’ culture.  So it was JESUS who first gave us this idea that there’s a higher loyalty than mom or dad… of course for him it wasn’t a permission to be rebellious and go smoke pot, it was his permission to be rebellious and go follow Messiah – himself!