Luke 16

Luke 16:19-31

HELL—IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR ITS ?Luke 16:19-31. ALL men are more or less interested in the hereafter. When Tennyson, in his “In Memoriam”, makes Martha and Mary to ask of the risen Lazarus, “Where wert thou, brother, these four days?” they are attempting to penetrate that which is beyond the veil, and to get information about the other world. This attempt is not always in vain! Multitudes of the near-dead have made remarkable reports of what they saw on the border land, and there is sufficient agreement between the testimony of Christian believers to make clear both the certainty and felicity of the farther shore. But there is not enough to satisfy the natural and universal curiosity of man regarding the matter.To those who are followers of Jesus, however, it is a comforting fact that what we have about the other world is largely from His lips. Believing, as we do, that He came out of Eternity into Time, and out of Heaven into the Earth, we readily accept His every word as utterly dependable; and even when He speaks of Hades—the under-world—we conclude that His infinite wisdom made no mistake in that matter.This story of Dives and Lazarus is one of the notable instances in which He drew aside the veil and let men look beyond, and up into Heaven; and while the rift remained, they looked down and had just a glimpse of hell.Christ was accustomed to give truth in the concrete, and so, in order to make men know what Hades meant, he revealed it in the personal experience of a remarkably successful man whose very name impersonates riches, and the story will be properly interpreted if we think first of all of The Undoing of Dives, then of The Doom of Dives, and consider finally, The Possible Redemption of Dives.THE UNDOING OF DIVES. Truly, as one has remarked, Dives is not here described as a roue; he is not a drunkard; he is not a gambler; profanity is not laid up to him; lechery is not his life; in fact, Dives, in Minneapolis today, is one of our most respected citizens, one of those “solid business men” of whom newspapers and popular orators and commercial agents like to speak. Personally, I have no doubt that Dives was a member of Israel, and held official station in that Old Testament type of the New Testament church. This is plainly suggested by verses fourteen and fifteen:“And the Pharisees also, who were covetous, heard all these things: and they derided him. “And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:14-15). It is a church official, therefore, that is depicted under this name, and on that account, we should be the more interested to see what, in the Divine judgment, undoes a man. And now we read the record:“There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: “And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, “And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. “And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried: “And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. “And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue: for I am tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:19-24). Therein are three plain suggestions: First, his riches resulted in his utter irreligion. “There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19). True religion does not express itself in purple and fine linen; spirituality is not involved in sumptuous feasts, often repeated; prosperity and pomp are not the chief characteristics of God’s true servants; in fact, it is everywhere known and understood that they are rather opponents of the same.Jesus tried to make this clear in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, for“He spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: “Two men went up into the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank Thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. “I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. “And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes, unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased: and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” (Luke 18:9-14). That part of this parable to which I call your attention at the present relates itself to the statement: “I give tithes of all that I possess”, a clear indication of riches coupled with spiritual pride. A man may be the most punctilious church-member, always on hand, at least at the morning service; a man may deliberately choose the chief seat in the synagogue so as to make his interest clear to all the people who attend; a man may keep an open purse for every appeal the pastor makes; a man may pride himself upon the fact that he is not guilty of extortion and that he has not indulged in injustice, that he has never degraded himself by adultery, and that he even fasts twice a week, lest his physical life triumph over the mental and spiritual, and still there may be nothing Christian about the whole performance. It is a profound pity that Winston Churchill had to detract from his excellent work in painting the pompous, punctilious, liberal, yet inhumane Eldon Parr, by dragging in an unbiblical theology and making a plea for free love, for Eldon Parr illustrates the undoing of every Dives! His very religion was irreligious, as was that of Dives.The pride of Dives made humility impossible. The rich man, like the eminently educated man, is always in danger of regarding himself more highly than he ought. God speaking by the Psalmist, says, “He that hath a high look and a proud heart will I not suffer” (Psalms 101:5). Solomon framed one of his proverbs after this manner, “A high look and a proud heart is sin”.There is many a man whose spiritual estate might be described in the exact language of John’s Epistle to the Laodiceans:“Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing: and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear” (Revelation 3:17-18). This is all in illustration of that Old Testament truth, “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart”. There is many a man whose tax-list is large, but whose spiritual estate is poverty; there is many a man who is clothed in fine linen and purple, but with him it is not a symbol of righteousness. The purple may suggest rather the blood of others in which he has dyed his garments. There is many a man faring sumptuously every day, whose soul is actually dying of a slow but certain starvation. This is a great truth that Jesus was attempting to impress as He contrasted the prosperity of Dives’ estate with the poverty of Dives’ spirit.But a third remark occurring here illustrates the undoing of Dives as almost nothing else.His compassion did not equal that of the dogs. Very delicately has Jesus stated this, and yet, very clearly.

Poor Lazarus was “desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. We are not even told whether he got them, but the significant phrase follows: “The dogs came and licked his sores”.

Madam DeStael said, “The more I see of men, the more I think of dogs.” She should have said, “The more I see of some men.” The more I see of such men as know no compassion, as feel no pity, as exercise no affection, the more I feel as she did. One reason why I have always loved a dog is that the dog seems to be possessed of these graces; he is pitiful, he is compassionate, he is affectionate, and these are graces not to be despised; and no matter how degraded the man and how low he is, the dog always feels his superiority and always recognizes him as a being of a higher order; in fact, he is the dog’s god, and the lowest man, in the dog’s judgment, lives on a high level.On the contrary, Dives despised the level on which Lazarus lived. The whole parable goes to convince one that as he walked his way, if he looked at him at all, it was with disdain. The social sentiment exercised by Dives created a gulf between him and Lazarus. Dr. Dawson, in a sermon on Dives and Lazarus, says: “The sin of Dives was that he had never passed that gate to speak a human word of kindness to the beggar, and had never once perceived the Divine and essential fact of human brotherhood, which overtops all artificial distinctions of wealth or place or condition.” And then he illustrates: “In one of the striking apologues of Tolstoi there is this story: A beggar sits in the bitter Russian cold stretching out his swollen and disfigured hand for alms.

Tolstoi feels in his pocket for a coin, is troubled and ashamed to find he has none, and says at last to the silent, waiting beggar, ‘Brother, I have nothing, but I take your hand, and I love you.’ For an instant the swollen hand of the mendicant is grasped in his; then the beggar looks up with moist eyes, and says, ‘Thank you, brother, that also is a gift.’ It was; it was the greatest of all gifts, for the divinest alms is love. But that was an act of which Dives could not so much as have dreamed.

To call Lazarus brother was a thing beyond him. To feel toward him as Tolstoi felt toward that immortal mendicant beside the Kremlin was a thing impossible to the proud Pharisee, the son of Abraham who could pass the beggar at the gate for years and suppose that he had discharged every moral liability toward him when he sent him a dish of orts and fragments from his sumptuous table.”Victor Hugo in “Les Miserables” speaks of the different names the Bible gives to God, saying: “Solomon names Thee Compassion, and that is the most beautiful of all Thy names.” That compassion is a great characteristic of the Divine nature no man will dispute; and that mortal who has no compassion for his unfortunate fellows, is stirred by no pity at their estate; is incited to no sacrifice to save them from suffering; is indeed indifferent to the whole question of whether they are in health or in sickness, whether they are in joy or in sorrow, whether they are in life or dying, reveals that he has no touch of the Divine nature about him; his character is poles apart from the character of God and from the Divine standpoint, yea, even from the standpoint that is truly humane, his whole nature is awry and he is undone. That is Dives.The further study of this parable brings us toTHE DOOM OF DIVES. Death was his doom. As long as he lived he was prosperous; death brought him to utter bankruptcy.Death despoiled him of every treasure. That which he had accumulated, he could not take with him. Of treasures he had sent none ahead. In Heaven he had nothing “laid up”. That is the pathos of death to many a rich man.

Job, who was a rich man, was still a sensible man, and he knew that prosperity was no passport to the other world; that his possessions here gave no promise for riches there; he expresses that truth: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither.”A few years ago Minneapolis boasted an unusual millionaire, a millionaire who poured out his money like water. His house was to exceed anything in proportions that the city had ever seen; his gardens were to be Edens for the gods; his fountains were to realize those of myths and legends. How much does he own now? Death has done its work; six feet of ground in one direction and three in the other is all that he claims; and that may yet be contested and dug up or despoiled. Every full-grown man of the potter’s field has just as much ground and just as rich ground. If you tell me, “He has no such monument as will be erected over this man,” I answer, “What is a monument worth to a dead man?” If you say, “He has a name known from sea to sea,” I say, “What is a name worth to a man unless it is a good name?” Monuments may tell the story of only a fallen pride; names may be only accompanied with sumptuous living.

Dives is immortalized, but his estate was in no manner helped by that fact. No wonder Jesus said,“Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; “But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:19-20). No wonder!It is a terrible thing to know that any minute every treasure that you have gleaned in a whole long life may be snatched forever from your hand by the touch of the bony finger of the last enemy— Death!Again, Death revealed to him his irremedial error. This life has its disappointments; this life has its tragedies; this life would teach us, if we were disposed to learn from it, and tell us to put confidence in nothing except in truth. The life of the man who trusts in true riches is destined to riches; and the man who trusts in false values is appointed to poverty.Oh, how many people there are who have put their money in mining, oil, and other schemes, and then afterwards have regretted it; but regret never brings gold. Multitudes have invested in rubber plantations, and found the only thing about these that would stretch were the stories of a profiting promotion. Men sometimes invest in inflated real estate and find out about the inflation by their own failure. I have heard a man, whose fortune was a great one, sobbing and saying in his sob, “It is all gone; every penny of it is gone,” and yet, that man recovered his peace of mind; that man became content, like Paul, to live in poverty; that man went down to his grave knowing full well that though he was a pauper here, he had riches yonder “laid up”.But what is to be the sentiment of the man who finds out at last that he has invested his whole life in the wrong direction, and that the life is gone and cannot be recovered?

There is a pitiful day coming for you, young people, who are refusing to take an education in your youth. It is a day when ignorance will settle down like a cloud and refuse to lift or be lifted.

There is a sad day coming for you men who refuse to turn from tippling; there is a day coming when drunkenness will be your estate and the curse of intemperance will refuse to go at your bidding, or even at your will. There is a dark day coming for some girls who think that a single sin can be covered if they yield to the temptations of the hour and that they can finally recover themselves; freedom will never be their portion. But the darkest of all days is the portion of them upon whom death has done his work, and who in that hour and article recognize that all life has been wrong, and that now, since it is all gone, none of it can ever be righted. Oh, the horror of it! In a single sentence of the text, “Son, remember!” there is hell.Death precipitates Dives into the condition of torment. It was largely the result of memory; it was largely in consequence of the “might have beens”.

Memory is the thing that walks with us now, and will stalk with us for eternity. They tell a story that a man who was set to watch a revolving railroad bridge across a river was warned by a telegram that the Express was coming, to keep the bridge closed; but a captain of a passing boat told him to open it, promising to get through in good time.

The moment the bridge swung around parallel with the river, that moment the train whistle was heard and one moment later, the great, rushing train had hurled itself into the river below, and while the engine was struggling, steaming, and dying, men and women and children by the scores, penned up in cars like so many rats, were struggling more desperately still, and upon the last one of them the smothering cover of death settled. When he saw his mistake, reason reeled from its throne, and for years afterward, he walked a mad house, wringing his hands and crying, “If I only had! If I only had!” His memory remained, and in his memory he had his doom, and that is hell.I do not believe that hell is a “lake of fire”. I do not believe that hell is a living, gnawing “worm”. I do not believe that hell is a rushing, foaming sea. These are all Biblical figures of a greater and more terrible fact, and that fact is summed up in one word in this text—the torment of “memory”. Oh, it is sad enough to miss the way for Time; who can tell the sadness when missed for Eternity!THE OF DIVES. There is one question that no man can escape. Is there hope for the lost? Was Dante right when he inscribed over the door of hell: “All ye who enter here leave Hope behind.” Good men, and great men differ in the answer here.Dr. Dawson has two sermons on the subject and Dr. Dawson is an Andover theologian—he believes in a second chance. He insists that Dives would yet be restored. He argues it from two grounds.First, Dives was still possessed of human sentiment. He loved his own brothers and he begged Abraham to send Lazarus to warn them lest they come to that place of torment.

To me that argument is not conclusive. On the other hand, it hints to me a more awful truth, that in it we have revealed that selfishness, and selfishness only, was the estate of Dives even in the other world. It is a matter of history that there never was a Jew but identified his life with the lives of his kith and kin; his interests and theirs were one; and outside of that one interest, it is impossible almost to enlist him. The Gentile to him was a dog, to be trafficed in if profit could be turned out of him; to be treated with contempt on all other occasions; and the fact that this man Dives remembered his five brothers and never had a concern for another, hints that character continues unchanged beyond the grave. We all have heard of the traditional prayer, “God bless me and my wife, and my son, John, and his wife; us four and no more,” and we have never imagined that such a prayer could be heard, that God could conceivably answer it in grace! We ask you whether this prayer is not akin to it?

Oh, the multitude of men who are interested in their own family circle, who are interested in the social set in which they belong, in the men of their business world; but what care they for the great throng outside? It was told to our national statesman that the people did not consent to his opinion.

His answer was, “The people be damned!” Poor Dives had no more interest in the sick and poor, and dying of the earth outside his own family than he had while he was on it. He did not care for the hell-bound about him. His sympathies were not enlarged; his nature was not changed; his essential makeup was unmolested, even by the torment of his estate.Again, Mr. Dawson hopes for him because of certain statements of Scripture. He takes the statement of Peter that Christ, after His death on Calvary, went and “preached unto the spirits that are in prison”, namely, those who disobeyed in the days of Noah. But he disregards the context.

I believe it means that He preached to them before they were in prison and by the lips of Noah.Then he refers to the passage in the same Epistle, “For this cause was the Gospel preached also to them that are dead”. They were living when it “was preached” to them; they are dead now;.

This is the more evident meaning.And yet I confess to you frankly there is no man living who would not rather be a Universalist. My whole heart yearns for it, but the Scriptures do not teach it. The plain interpretation of this text is that a gulf is “fixed and impassable”. I do not doubt at all that God could bridge it if He wanted to; but I distinctly differ from that statement which says that hell is one of the realms over which God rules. Hell was prepared for the devil and his angels; it is the place in which Satan’s supremacy is undisputed; it is the portion of the universe turned over to him and his following that they might make the most of it, or the worst. It is that place from which God tried to save them; but all His attempts have been in vain.

That, it seems to me, is the plain teaching of the Scripture.If, when I go into the other world, I find out that the revelation was not full enough for me to understand, or that God had portions of grace which He never dared to voice in His Gospel lest men abuse them, and that He has bridged this gulf and will bring the last man out, I will lend my voice with that of men and angels in shouting His praises; I will give to the last hell-stained, but finally saved soul, my hand and heart in happy reunion. But I say to you that the man who persists in rejecting Jesus Christ, who resists the Spirit, who fights against God the Father, who finishes his course in unbelief, goes out without any promise from God of a future restoration and a final redemption.

Who can afford to take such a risk?Henry Van Dyke is a great man and a good preacher of the Gospel. In his “Sermons to Young Men”, he says this: “You are conscious that you belong to another world. And yet it may be that there are some of you who forget it, and live as if there were no God, no soul, no future life. Your ambitions are fixed upon the wealth that corrodes, the fame that fades; your desires are towards the pleasures that pall upon the senses; you are bartering immortal treasure for the things which perish in the using. The time is coming when you must lie down like the dumb beast and crumble into dust. Nay, not like the beast, for to you shall come in that hour the still, small voice, saying, ‘This night shall thy soul be required of thee.’ Thy soul—why not think of it now?

The one thing needful for you is to know and love and serve Him who is the Father of your spirit. Come then to Christ, who alone can save you from the sin which defiles and destroys you.

Come then to Christ, that you may have fellowship on earth with the Son of Man, and dwell with the Son of God forever, and behold His glory.”