John 3:16 - Part 4

To be honest, it wasn’t the kind of question I was expecting at the Going Bananas club, certainly not from an eleven-year-old. Amid the songs and games and colouring-in this young man accosted me in the corridor and said:

“So Paul - can people who don’t believe in hell get sent to hell?”

Luckily he had a second question about the big bang and evolution which – relatively speaking – was far easier to handle and I sent him off with one or two observations and questions to think about for himself.

But his first question is one that taps into a reservoir of unknowing and fear that many of us carry around with us. What does lie beyond the world that we know? Where will God’s judgment take us?

Well, an all age-service isn’t the place to begin a full blown exposition on heaven and hell, I feel. You can look forward to that some other day when I’m feeling especially courageous!

But the last line of the text we’ve been mulling over all summer, John 3:16, demands that we at least look in that direction today, because for many of us, when we hear the word ‘perish’ in this context, our thoughts turn towards the question of our eternal destiny. We’ll thin k about eternal life in a few weeks time. Today we’re thinking about what it might mean to perish.

Like all of us, I carry questions about these things with me all the time, and I’m reminded of Wittgenstien’s dictum: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

All of us, to a degree, are in the dark about what happens after death and we need to take care when we speak about such things. But what light we have to go by is found in the Scriptures, and I’ve been intrigued for some time by what the Scriptures have to say – or indeed haven’t said – about heaven and hell.

The first thing you discover when you start doing a bit of research is that while heaven is mentioned very frequently in the Old Testament, hell as we’ve come to think of it - with fire and torment - isn’t mentioned even once. Instead, the Old Testament speaks about the grave, or Sheol – the place of the dead. The grave is where we all end up, the good and the bad alike, and there’s very little suggestion of any kind of life after death.

Now when we get to the New Testament, you could be forgiven for thinking that it must be loaded with teaching about heaven and hell. Well again, you’d be wrong.

The word hell occurs just 14 times in the New Testament, 7 of those in the gospel of Matthew, and only 2 outside the gospels.

The Greek word we translate ‘hell’ is Gehenna and Gehenna was a real place – a rubbish dump in the valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem, where waste was taken to be burned, and things were left to rot and decay. It was somewhere people would have been familiar with. When Jesus spoke about the dangers of Gehenna, his hearers knew what that meant. Gehenna was a place, not of torture, but of destruction.

But here’s the really interesting thing. How much did Jesus have to say about hell? From listening to some preachers you’d think he talked about little else….

Well take a look at this.

This is what’s called a Wordle. You can have hours of fun with wordles! Wordle is a computer program on the internet that anyone can access and what it does is take text and turn it into pictures. And the more frequently a word appears in the text, the bigger it becomes in the wordle. The colours aren't significant other than to distinguish the words from one another.

And a wee while ago, I had a bright idea and I found a quick way of isolating Jesus’ words in the gospels, and making a wordle out of them, and what that does is give us a quick, visual way of getting to the core of what he talked about.

What you’re looking at is the essence of what Jesus had to say in John’s gospel.

The bigger the word, the more often he uses it. So in John, Jesus talks a lot about the Father, and the world, about life, about truth. He tells why he’s come and why he’s been sent. He wants us to know and to believe. These are the key themes.

Where’s heaven? It's in a small font just above 'Father'. And where’s hell? Well that word doesn’t occur in John’s gospel. Themes of judgment do – so often they can’t be ignored - but not using the language of hell.

But what about Matthew’s gospel? I’ve already said that it’s the one that mentions hell the most. How does it look?

Well in Matthew, Jesus speaks a lot about his Father, about the Kingdom which is often called the Kingdom of Heaven. Interestingly ‘tell’ scores highly because of the scores of times Jesus says ‘You have been told, but I tell you....."

Lots of ‘tell’ but not much of ‘hell’. Can you see it?!

Now it's vital that you don’t get me wrong at this point. I am not saying hell doesn’t exist and I’m not saying it’s not important. Nothing could be more important than understanding the consequences of our actions in this life. What I am saying is that in the context of the gospels, it doesn’t seem to feature largely in Jesus’ teaching, which I certainly found surprising.

The language of judgement is there all the time, but rarely in the language of hell or fire or flames. And given the vivid images we’ve inherited, I think that’s an interesting observation.

With that little excursus behind us, let’s get back to John 3:16.

Lest I get accused of soft-peddling judgment, I want you to listen again to what Jesus says here because it’s vital. He says whoever believes in him (and remember that means loves, trusts, obeys) SHALL NOT PERISH. That’s good news.

But held in that promise is the terrible possibility that some shall perish. Jesus is telling us here that to perish, eternally, is a real option.

The word perish, appollumi in the Greek, has a range of meanings from being destroyed to being marred, and it’s used it the New Testament in a variety of ways – from people perishing at sea, to food perishing over time. One of the most memorable uses is in Proverbs 29:18 which says “where there is no vision, the people perish”. And the events that have played out in London over the past week show the truth of that claim all too well.

But the sense of that word is always the same – perishing means loss, waste and destruction.

I’ve told you the story about the poet Heinrich Heine on his deathbed. The parish priest who was attending him tried to reassure him by telling him that God would forgive his sins, and Heine replied: “Of course God will forgive me. That’s his job!”.

John 3:16 would tend to suggest otherwise. Nowhere in the Bible do we find a cosy universalism which baptises our indifference. Instead, time and time again we find an urgent appeal to men and women to decide for God now, before time runs out and the opportunity passes us by.

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” says the Psalmist.

And those same words reach us across the centuries in exactly the same way. We each have a choice – to listen and respond, or to harden our hearts. But the choice is ours.

I always remember a speaker I went to hear saying that we need to pay more attention to the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of the Bible. He could easily have added the ‘whoever’s to that list as well. This promise of God is for WHOEVER believes. And he urges that response by the Holy Spirit in a thousand different ways that transcend race and culture and language. But we are always free to resist.

And what of those who hear but never make that choice? What does it look like to perish? Is this where fiery lakes and eternal torment come in?

Well it seems to me, and many others, that there’s not much in Scripture to support that view, however firmly it might be held. No less a leading evangelical than John Stott, who died recently, struggled to reconcile such a fate with the idea of a loving God.

For Stott, and many other leading Christian writers, a kinder end would be that those who have made no room for God in this life will find no room for themselves in the next.

With no Christ to cover them, they could not survive the fires of judgment. They would simply pass out of existence; and that fits well with the biblical narrative. Jesus tells parables where trees that produce no fruit are chopped down and destroyed in the furnace, and as we said earlier, Gehenna was known as a place of destruction, and not a place of torment.

All this is guesswork from the fragments that we have to work with in the gospels, and you can take it or leave it this morning. But what’s abundantly clear is that Jesus is teaching here that it’s possible to ultimately perish, though that’s a fate that God wills on no-one. Saint Peter reminds us that…

God is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

But if we choose to ignore God all our days, he will finally give us what we want. As CS Lewis said, "There will be two kinds of people in the end: Those that will say to God 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God will say 'Thy will be done.'

Which kind of person are you as you sit here today?

Which kind of person will you be at the end?

The choice is yours.